2721

All of a sudden the alternative is front and center.

2722

More people are coming forward saying this novel coronavirus was manipulated in a lab. This time from French Virologist and Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier, who helped discover HIV.
He says “Presence of elements of HIV and germ of malaria in the genome of coronavirus is highly suspect and the characteristics of the virus could not have arisen naturally.”

2723

By the way,he didn’t help to discover HIV,he was the one to discover it. Just sayin’

2724

That idea seems based on a preprint paper that has since been withdrawn by the authors: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v2

This French article reports on Luc Montagnier’s claims and the scientific community’s response to it (or see an English translation via Google Translate). It’s a big nope. The similarities with HIV seem trivial and are also found in many other viruses (more details here).

Unfortunately, Luc Montagnier has been involved in a lot of pseudo-scientific quackery. The article points out that several science Nobel laureates have “derailed” in ideological or false scientific statements.

In any case, I was waiting to see how long it would take for that news to show up in this thread. :nerd_face:

2725

Consider the source and the history. And of course try to find the origin of the story, not just the many copypastes being circulated.

There’s a lot of misinformation out there. Wikipedia has some of it gathered up.

Even the brightest scientists may go emeritus eventually.

2726

So far, I think California has handled COVID-19 pretty well, so we have been lucky.

I hope that we don't try to open up for business too soon quickly, but I'm pretty sure it will happen (too quickly) in different places all around the world.

2727

Thanks for the additional information. The jury is still out for me. I’m still leaning towards accidental released bat corona virus, possibly manipulated.

2728

Thanksfor a wealth of information.

2729

If you are looking for sequences: a lot can be said for the theory that modern man was created by a bunch of mad chimps in lab coats on the shore of Lake Tanganyika.

2730
2731

In addition to the Santa Clara study, in the Netherlands which currently has twice the amount of deaths per capita as the US, 4000 common blood donors, which are considered to be a close to random sample of the population, were tested in the last weeks for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, and 3% was found to be positive for it. This suggests that about half a million people have had the disease out of 17 million, with or without symptons. This number is way higher than the amount actually positive tested at the time of the research (about 30,000, the test rate is rather low here). The resulting death rate for all the people who contracted this virus in The Netherlands would be about 0.65%.

Given that the current first wave of COVID-19 reached the very limits of our (modern but not as extensive as in Germany) health care system, only to be stopped by 5 weeks of moderately serious lockdown, and still only reached 3% of the population sofar, we are nowhere close to obtaining herd immunity, plenty of opportunity left for the virus to cause many more waves, with each one capable again of clogging up our health care system and causing uncomfortable amounts of deaths. So normal life will not start any time soon, instead we are on our way to a “six feet apart society” for an unknown amount of time ahead, with lots of testing and contact tracing.

2732

Sadly, I do agree. This coronavirus will be a huge influence on our world and the way welive and interact for a couple of years at least.

2733

3.7 million dollar grant to Wuhan lab in Obama era

2734

Meanwhile some disturbing news for worldwide fighting of pandemics from sunday’s G20 meeting

2735

How this coronavirus kills…

2736

I’m sorry, I can not watch this type of youtube stuff, blaming begins at 5 seconds before any information is even started, I just clicked it away.
Is there a coherent news article about this subject that I can read, from a credible source, so that I can form my own opinion instead of other people trying to infect me with theirs??

2737

Scary stuff! It may not be appropriate with the epidemic still in full devastating progress, but as a biologist I’m fascinated!

2738

No reliable source for the conspiracy stories; the bots are spreading them widely but there’s no original fact basis to be found.

2739

Same. No value there.

2740

Wow. It’s a good thing phouton joined BLF a little less than 6 months ago, so we can have the benefit of his debunking skills. Kudos to phouton for his tireless work maintaining the extreme danger level! Always ready to pounce on any downplay-the-virus posts. I have been amazed again and again by his incredibly knowledgeable responses. He came along just in time for this crisis! Thank you, phouton! :exclamation:

So sad that Montagnier has gotten so sloppy with his facts in his old age.