"Norway Scientist Claims Report Proves Covid Was Lab-Made" Topic

Norwegian scientist Birger Sørensen has claimed the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is not natural in origin. The claims by the co-author of the British-Norwegian study—published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics—are supported by the former head of Britain's MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove.

The study from Sørensen and British professor Angus Dalgleish show that the coronavirus's spike protein contains sequences that appear to be artificially inserted.

They also highlight the lack of mutation since its discovery, which suggests it was already fully adapted to humans. The study goes on to explain the rationale for the development of Biovacc-19, a candidate vaccine for COVID-19 that is now in advanced pre-clinical development.

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The study from Sørensen and British professor Angus Dalgleish show that the coronavirus's spike protein contains sequences that appear to be artificially inserted.

They also highlight the lack of mutation since its discovery, which suggests it was already fully adapted to humans.

Nope

nextstrain.org/ncov/global

Straight to the circular filing bin.

Straight to the circular filing bin.

Now, I can't tell from the in-depth analysis you provided for your rejection, but I am assuming from the link you provided that you mean the different strains summarily disprove everything Sørensen is saying.

I suppose you reject JHU, the WHO, and the CDC as well:

Sørensen didn't say NO mutation at all whatsoever, nope, none not at all any way zero. He said practically nil. That is, significantly less than other such viruses. In fact, this is an important point for making vaccines.

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Maybe you should take it to the CBC in your own country and their obviously fake reports about how slow COVID19 mutates.

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Or maybe the CBC, CDC, WHO, JHU and every other medical research facility that has found slow mutation in COVID-19 are not actual experts in their field.

Well Martin is an expert and he probably has a chart showing that it wasn't created in a Lab that was located in Wuhan, China.

When you have China and WHO, which is being controlled by China coming out and saying it wasn't.

Then go with the assumption that it was.

As i just read the norwegian newspapers on the subject, it seeems that he hasnt published the article yet, and other norwegian scientists doubt his claims, and points out the he tries to get funding for his private vaccine research. So i would say no also.

He is obviously dumb. Lower mutation rate leads to smaller numbers of vaccines that come out less often, which limits the need for continual and rapid vaccine research on many fronts.

Or he's telling the truth even when it does not work toward his personal financial advantage.

Maybe, Maybe Not.

I do think we're going to have to wait on this one and then somebody will either be right/wrong or the truth will be somewhere in the middle.

I'm off to have a beer.

Well Martin is an expert

He really only has some knowledge of rocks.

my default position is that I will defer to subject matter experts in their own fields.

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Yet, continually mocks and belittles those who would be classified as experts.

Like what he tried with the fellow from my university who is a paleo-geologist who has a record of publications as long as my jab. But Martin claims that person cannot comment on paleo geological evidence showing the current global warming extremism is not what they claim it is, because Martin claims it's outside of his level of expertise…

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I think we can tell whose stuff ends up in the bin.

Aw, come on, Martin from Canada routinely comes up with well though out, referenced logical arguments like "Nope".

Well we can be assured that he would have a chart for whatever the subject matter is.

The paper has been published.

Norwegian and British vaccine scientists have published unequivocal evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, is man-made.

The authors state two conclusions: (1) the mutations that would normally be seen in the course of animal to human transmission have not occurred in SARS-CoV-2, indicating that it was fully "pre-adapted" for human infection and (2) SARS-CoV-2 has insertions in its protein sequence that have never been detected in nature and contribute to its infectivity and pathogenicity.

That is, SARS-CoV-2 has a receptor binding domain specifically designed for the human angiotensin converting enzyme-2 receptor (ACE2) found in lungs, kidneys, intestines and blood vessels.

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Other than the initial phrasing*, this is a decent news article and I believe it is roughly the same version of the paper I had read.

* – While the evidence is unequivocal**, the conclusion that COVID-19 was man made is not. In exactly the same way that other papers demonstrating that SARS-CoV-2 lacked common properties of being genetically engineered by a specific set of (not all) techniques/tools. That evidence is also unequivocal**, but it does not necessarily mean that the virus wasn't genetically engineered (by other techniques/tools) or that it wasn't man-made (by non direct genetic engineering techniques).

The sum total means the virus lacks indicators of certain types of human manipulations and has indicators of other types.

** Unequivocal relates to the evidence within context. The evidence is there. Maybe in the light of other constraints (like the other techniques cited above), you draw different conclusions. However, within its context, it is solid.

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If the footnotes and caveats in this post bother you, good. Beyond the content, my point is that science is very specific and does not equate well to general statements made in common speech.

I've demonstrated X phenomenology is vastly different than every (or even any) possible positive conclusion stemming from that is valid. Generally that is a vast gap and usually many of the things required to span the gap are not scientific in nature.

Thank you for the insight and information!

It's very nice to read responses on here that are informative and not based on attacking or belittling.

I'm not a scientist and the original paper was clearly not an investigation into whether it could be proven to be lab made or natural. I guess the results of what research they did show a lot of indicators for one way.

Future research may help show more definitively how this began.

It seems money (ie salary) drives a lot of exact research focus. Being able to make a vaccine would bring untold amounts to a firm not to mention the fame of the researchers who then would be able to get more grants (salary).

There's been a lot of pressure from China to not even "go there" with origin of this.

"Straight to the circular filing bin."

Maybe you'd feel better if it was filed in The Lancet?

Most people (including former heads of intelligence agencies) aren't trained in how to decipher genetic codes, so we have to assess the rigour of competing research to determine the truth of claims that Covid-19 was manmade. Writing in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Medicine, researchers strongly refuted the idea that the code had been purposefully manipulated. Whereas the article in Nature Medicine was written by senior virologists, one author, John Fredrik Moxnes, the chief scientific adviser to the Norwegian military, has already withdrawn his name from the paper cited by Dearlove – while scientists from the Francis Crick institute and Imperial College London also dismissed its conclusions.

And the claim in the earlier version of this paper to have proven "beyond reasonable doubt that the Covid-19 virus is engineered" was removed in the later version. This claim relied on an insertion in the genetic code for the spike protein of the virus, the place where the virus locks into our own cells. But the discovery of another novel bat coronavirus in southern China, very closely related to Sars-CoV-2, that includes a similar insertion shows this can evolve naturally.

Contrary to the idea that Chinese scientists deliberately released the virus, existing patterns of infection suggest that the wide spread of Covid-19 was a question of when, not if. Only a handful of people work on bat coronaviruses in labs in China, and they wear masks and gloves so as not to contaminate their laboratories. In 2018, we conducted a pilot survey of people living in rural Yunnan province and found nearly 3% had antibodies for bat coronaviruses. Expanding this data to cover the densely populated area in southeast Asia where there are bats known to harbour coronaviruses, we can safely estimate that between one and seven million people are infected with bat coronaviruses each year.

Unfortunately, this sort of logic will not deter conspiracy theorists. The dark power of the internet means that anyone, anywhere, can find evidence to echo even the most outlandish of claims. Theories that Sars originated from space or that HIV was manmade are readily available, but it doesn't make them true. Such conspiracies play to our most base instincts and paranoias – fears that dissolve logic and reason. The details of how this virus emerged naturally are far less exciting. They're about how humans and animals have interacted for millennia, now at an unprecedented rate. They're about how human domination of the world's ecosystems as we encroach on animal habitats is opening new pathways for viruses, once hidden in the depths of the forest, to be transmitted to humans.

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Martin, perhaps you should be checking your sources for "contamination".

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EcoHealth Alliance has been partnered with China for 15 years; working in that same Wuhan lab.

I [Peter Daszak] also know the work of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, because we have partnered with them on research projects. For the past 15 years we've been working in China

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How anti-science propaganda works.

Martin, how exactly is revealing your source is comprised anti-science?

To recap, an author bailed out on the paper you provided since was making claims that are at odds with the overall ensemble of evidence. Secondly, the paper walked back it's most explosive claims after being forced to acknowledge that it misinterpreted the spike protein evidence (it exists in nature). Thirdly, anybody with expertise on Bat-born corona-virus will be to some degree affiliated or 6 degrees to Kevin Bacon-ed to the lab. And lastly, there are a multitude of better viruses to use as bio-weapons in terms on infectiousness and lethality than this one. Unfortunately, this one hit a sweetspot of infectiousness to lethality to have the Branch Covidians and assorted wingnuts ignore it at their and their community's peril.

Furthermore, the silence has been deafening on the number of papers replicating this result.

That didn't answer the question, by the way.

You just "talked" around it.

6 degrees to Kevin Bacon

Well I am just one individual away from Kevin Bacon.

Since my youngest daughter was working as a waitress and Kevin Bacon & his wife were up in the area for their kid graduation and they went to where my daughter was working.

there are a multitude of better viruses to use as bio-weapons in terms on infectiousness and lethality than this one

Yes there are but you are forgetting that a good bio-weapon does not need to be lethal.

Nope it just need to disrupt your enemy, which this one has done with very little.

But as infectiousness goes this one just not that good.

Less than 1% of the population confirm and most individuals who did get it didn't even know that they did.

Plus it not all that lethal either.

Yes there are but you are forgetting that a good bio-weapon does not need to be lethal.

There are two ways to take over another country. Militarily or economically.

Why risk getting nuked when you can play the long game (https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergeorgescu/2020/04/15/against-china-play-a-very-long-game/#3846b62b79ac )?

We, in the West, are beholden to China for manufacturing and debt (https://hbr.org/2020/02/how-much-money-does-the-world-owe-china ).

the average stock of debt owed to China has increased from less than 1% of debtor country GDP in 2005 to more than 15% in 2017. A dozen of these countries owe debt of at least 20% of their nominal GDP to China (Djibouti, Tonga, Maldives, the Republic of the Congo, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, Niger, Laos, Zambia, Samoa, Vanuatu, and Mongolia).

Maybe more importantly, our analysis reveals that 50% of China's loans to developing countries go unreported, meaning that these debt stocks do not appear in the "gold standard" data sources provided by the World Bank, the IMF, or credit-rating agencies. The unreported lending from China has grown to more than $200 USD billion USD as of 2016.

Bio weapons need to be developed. They also need to be tested. If they escape or if they are released is the end result really any different?

Plus we need to ask:

Why does the United States have around 26% of all known cases?

Plus 26% of all known deaths (sure inflated count)?

Oh and why does China have so few cases?

Sure we have a ton of unhealthy individuals but that is not the reason.