Virus

MNE wrote:

MNE wrote:

5.74
5.82
5.24
5
4.78
5.5
4.68

5.25% prosjek, pad za 2%

4.41
3.77
4.77
3.64
5.25
5.03
5.1

4.56% prosjek

A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.
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The idea of a lab leak first came to NSC officials not from hawkish Trumpists but from Chinese social media users, who began sharing their suspicions as early as January 2020. Then, in February, a research paper coauthored by two Chinese scientists, based at separate Wuhan universities, appeared online as a preprint. It tackled a fundamental question: How did a novel bat coronavirus get to a major metropolis of 11 million people in central China, in the dead of winter when most bats were hibernating, and turn a market where bats weren’t sold into the epicenter of an outbreak?

The paper offered an answer: “We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus.” The first was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which sat just 280 meters from the Huanan market and had been known to collect hundreds of bat samples. The second, the researchers wrote, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The paper came to a staggeringly blunt conclusion about COVID-19: “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.... Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.” Almost as soon as the paper appeared on the internet, it disappeared, but not before U.S. government officials took note.
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In April 2021, in an editorial in the journal Infectious Diseases & Immunity, Shi resorted to a familiar tactic to contain the cloud of suspicion enveloping her: She invoked scientific consensus, just as the Lancet statement had. “The scientific community strongly dismisses these unproven and misleading speculations and generally accepts that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin and was selected either in an animal host before zoonotic transfer, or in humans following zoonotic transfer,” she wrote.

But Shi’s editorial had no muzzling effect. On May 14, in a statement published in Science Magazine, 18 prominent scientists called for a “transparent, objective” investigation into COVID-19’s origins, noting, “We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data.”

Among the signers was Ralph Baric. Fifteen months earlier, he had worked behind the scenes to help Peter Daszak stage-manage the Lancet statement. The scientific consensus had been smashed to smithereens.
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By spring of 2021, the debate over COVID-19’s origins had become so noxious that death threats were flying in both directions.

In a CNN interview on March 26, Dr. Redfield, the former CDC director under Trump, made a candid admission: “I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped.” Redfield added that he believed the release was an accident, not an intentional act. In his view, nothing that happened since his first calls with Dr. Gao changed a simple fact: The WIV needed to be ruled out as a source, and it hadn’t been.

After the interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”

Peter Daszak was getting death threats too, some from QAnon conspirators.

Inside the U.S. government, meanwhile, the lab-leak hypothesis had survived the transition from Trump to Biden. On April 15, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the House Intelligence Committee that two “plausible theories” were being weighed: a lab accident or natural emergence.

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The ground began to shift on May 2, when Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times science writer known in part for writing a controversial book about how genes shape the social behavior of different races, published a lengthy essay on Medium. In it, he analyzed the scientific clues both for and against a lab leak, and excoriated the media for its failure to report on the dueling hypotheses. Wade devoted a full section to the “furin cleavage site,” a distinctive segment of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to efficiently enter human cells.

Within the scientific community, one thing leapt off the page. Wade quoted one of the world’s most famous microbiologists, Dr. David Baltimore, saying that he believed the furin cleavage site “was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.” Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate and pioneer in molecular biology, was about as far from Steve Bannon and the conspiracy theorists as it was possible to get. His judgment, that the furin cleavage site raised the prospect of gene manipulation, had to be taken seriously.

With questions growing, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins released a statement on May 19 asserting that “neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.”

On May 24, the WHO’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly, kicked off a virtual edition of its annual conference. In the weeks leading up to it, a parade of high-profile stories broke, including two front-page reports in The Wall Street Journal and a long Medium post from a second former New York Times science reporter. Not surprisingly, China’s government fired back during the conference, saying that it would not participate in further inquiries within its borders.
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China obviously bears responsibility for stonewalling investigators. Whether it did so out of sheer authoritarian habit or because it had a lab leak to hide is, and may always be, unknown.

The United States deserves a healthy share of blame as well. Thanks to their unprecedented track record of mendacity and race-baiting, Trump and his allies had less than zero credibility. And the practice of funding risky research via cutouts like EcoHealth Alliance enmeshed leading virologists in conflicts of interest at the exact moment their expertise was most desperately needed.

Another example of how long variants arise in long lasting infections.

36 yo woman in South Africa with HIV carried Covid for 216 dd, during which #Covid19 viruses accumulated 32 mutations - 13 to the spike protein.https://t.co/qcjIU57Jcb

— Science above the clouds (@pillolescienza) June 5, 2021

In this online pre-print, we present a case of persistent SARS-CoV-2 infection with accelerated intra-host evolution in a patient with advanced HIV and antiretroviral treatment failure in South Africa.

Paper deposited at medRxiv &available at: https://t.co/9wzAwtXxLT @sigallab

— Tulio de Oliveira (@Tuliodna) June 3, 2021

Over 30 mutations accumulated over time, many of them changing aminoacids that are common of variants of concern. pic.twitter.com/WX4hR2AMOR

— Tulio de Oliveira (@Tuliodna) June 3, 2021

Most other cases of persistent infection have been described in people with haematological malignancies or people receiving immunosuppressive therapies for solid organ transplants or other chronic medical conditions

— Tulio de Oliveira (@Tuliodna) June 3, 2021

MNE wrote:Soo Trump was right again.

rumbeando wrote:

Another example of how long variants arise in long lasting infections.

36 yo woman in South Africa with HIV carried Covid for 216 dd, during which #Covid19 viruses accumulated 32 mutations - 13 to the spike protein.https://t.co/qcjIU57Jcb

— Science above the clouds (@pillolescienza) June 5, 2021

In this online pre-print, we present a case of persistent SARS-CoV-2 infection with accelerated intra-host evolution in a patient with advanced HIV and antiretroviral treatment failure in South Africa.

Paper deposited at medRxiv &available at: https://t.co/9wzAwtXxLT @sigallab

— Tulio de Oliveira (@Tuliodna) June 3, 2021

Over 30 mutations accumulated over time, many of them changing aminoacids that are common of variants of concern. pic.twitter.com/WX4hR2AMOR

— Tulio de Oliveira (@Tuliodna) June 3, 2021

Most other cases of persistent infection have been described in people with haematological malignancies or people receiving immunosuppressive therapies for solid organ transplants or other chronic medical conditions

— Tulio de Oliveira (@Tuliodna) June 3, 2021

U Hrvatskoj detektiran indijski soj virusa: 'Otkrili smo ga prije par dana u Splitskoj županiji'https://t.co/aMs9EKdH72 pic.twitter.com/xFAs2xnD1e

— 24sata (@24sata_HR) June 2, 2021

Sotir wrote:Из Новости, о секвенцирању. 
Код нас присутан само енглески сој, индијског још нема. 

Navodi da se sekvenciranje koronavirusa i praćenje njegovih mutacija obavlja u dva centra u Srbiji – Veterinarskom institutu u Kraljevu i Institutu za mikrobiologiju Medicinskog fakulteta.
[size=31]Ističe da sekvenciranje nije postupak koji se završava za dan, već da se radi više dana – nekoliko dana traje priprema uzorka, zatim nekoliko dana se obrađuje u mašini, pa opet nekoliko dana traje opsežna bioinformatička analiza.[/size]

[size=31]-----[/size]

[size=31]Ово се не уклапа са оним што је покојни Васа причао да се код нас не ради секвенцирање.[/size]

[Aleksandra Knežević iz Instituta za mikrobiologiju i imunologiju Medicinskog fakulteta] Ističe da sekvenciranje nije postupak koji se završava za dan, već da se radi više dana – nekoliko dana traje priprema uzorka, zatim nekoliko dana se obrađuje u mašini, pa opet nekoliko dana traje opsežna bioinformatička analiza.

Island je genetski sekvencirao sve potvrđene slučajeve zaraze korona virusom u zemlji od početka pandemije, što je ključno u vrijeme pojave novih sojeva korona virusa...
“Samo sekvenciranje traje relativno kratko”, objašnjava šef Geneticsova laboratorija Olafur Thor Magnusson. “Otprilike tri sata su dovoljna da odredimo soj virusa”.
Cijeli proces, od izoliranja DNK do sekvenciranja traje oko dan i pol.