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Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 64
As we proceed through the second year of these open posts, it's pretty clear that the official narrative is cracking as the toll of deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccines rises steadily and the vaccines themselves demonstrate their total uselesness at preventing Covid infection or transmission. It's still important to keep watch over the mis-, mal- and nonfeasance of our self-proclaimed health gruppenfuehrers, and the disastrous results of the Covid mania, but I think it's also time to begin thinking about what might be possible as the existing medical industry reels under the impact of its own self-inflicted injuries. So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before:
1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry et al. are causing injury and death. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.
2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its tame politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here.
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue.
4. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules.
With that said, the floor is open for discussion.
Re: smoking gun for lab leak hypothesis
It means that someone sequenced a virus, put the sequence in a computer, modified it with some goal in mind, adjusted "cut and paste" sites* so that DNA fragments could be assembled, synthesized the fragments with chemistry, assembled them with the "cut and paste" sites, converted it to RNA, and put the whole thing back in a virus.
Their analysis is actually quite convincing, as they show that for one commonly-used combination of "cut and paste" enzymes, the relevant sequences have been added/removed compared to the closest known relatives in order to divide the viral genome into four equal-sized fragments, and furthermore that naturally occurring coronaviruses almost never break so readily into equal-sized fragments with any two-way combination of available "cut and paste" enzymes.
This sort of "in vitro genome assembly" is actually quite common in viral engineering research, but finding evidence of it goes beyond suggesting a lab leak to suggesting a very intentional plan to create this particular virus for some research goal.
*"Cut and paste" in this context refers to "restriction enzymes" which are DNA-chopping enzymes from bacterial immune systems that are widely utilized in molecular biology. Most of them recognize a specific six-nucleotide sequence of double-stranded DNA and cut the two strands at different points leaving a four-nucleotide "sticky end" of single-stranded DNA hanging off of each. Under the right conditions complementary "sticky ends" will attach to each other, allowing sections of genetic sequence to be rationally assembled according to research aims.
Re: smoking gun for lab leak hypothesis
(Anonymous) 2022-10-26 03:50 pm (UTC)(link)I kid, I kid.
Murmuration
Re: smoking gun for lab leak hypothesis
Mmm, good point. "Synthetic" is orthogonal to "lab leak" and the two can be connected by "and," "or," "xor," "this one, but not that one," etc. Thanks for picking up on that distinction.