Important perspective by @michaelzlin on the new Merck pill that works by mutagenizing SARS-CoV-2:
"The FDA and Merck have essentially engaged the public in a gamble.. They are betting.. there won’t be even one case of a lucky hit that creates a more capable or evasive virus."
I have not heard a single scientist friend or colleague say they have good feelings about this Merck pill.
I also worry that it will be given to people for whom there may be adverse effects, e.g., women who don't know they're pregnant, couples who are conceiving.
In short, these scientists speculated that what we see in SARS-CoV-2 is not how a scientist would logically engineer a novel S1/S2 FCS into a SARSr-CoV and they contended that there is no evidence of research at the WIV that artificially inserted complete FCSs into coronaviruses.
Hi @richardhorton1@TheLancet the live virus recombinant SARSrCoV work was done at BSL2 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
"they defended what they believed were rigorous administrative and supervisory systems in China's high-level biosafety settings" thelancet.com/journals/lance…
@richardhorton1@TheLancet If you believe performing infection experiments with live novel, recombinant SARS-like viruses at BSL2 equates to rigorous, high-level biosafety settings, please see this lab leak of SARS2 from a BSL3, infecting a fully vaccinated worker in her 20s. taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4372853
"Were those who believed that evidence was growing in favour of a lab leak now winning the argument? Was this really the end of the story? Of course not."
An addendum to the Proximal Origin letter published in @NatureMedicine is long overdue. I still see people citing this paper with little awareness of how this letter came to be and problems with both its origin and content. nature.com/articles/s4159…
The addendum should clearly explain and address the following 3 issues:
1. Proximal Origin was the product of a private meeting in Feb 2020 among Western leaders in research/funding. Phone call Feb 1. First draft of Proximal Origin Feb 4.
Experts who provided (redacted) feedback on the manuscript were not acknowledged in the @NatureMedicine letter. The only expert thanked for contributing to discussions is M. Farzan.
To expand on a point in my recent @StatedClearly interview:
"Science cannot be embodied by one person or even a group of people... It’s not something where a pandemic happens and only virologists can have the answer."
@StatedClearly That SARS-CoV-2 spreads through the air is perhaps one of the top 3 most important facts that needed & still needs to be acknowledged to limit covid spread.
It would've saved potentially millions of lives if this simple fact had been clearly explained to the world in early 2020.
Yet, it took until August 2021, more than a year and a half post-covid for a review on this topic to be published in a prominent scientific journal.
Of the 7 authors, only 1 is a virologist. The majority are aerosol or bioengineering experts. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
A strawman argument from natural #OriginOfCovid proponents is that scientists would've engineered a textbook cleavage site into novel SARS-like viruses in the lab.
But, if you read their research proposal, the scientists said they would engineer in rare, novel cleavage sites.
The scientists had a pipeline in early 2018 for detecting never-seen-before cleavage sites in rare SARSrCoVs & engineering these into SARSrCoVs in the lab.
There's no reason why novel cleavage sites should look like the ones in our textbooks.