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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (702994)	2/5/2020 4:59:42 PM
From: sense	Respond to of 793623

From the many links in my post is this one: Lab-made coronavirus triggers debate While the U.S., in theory, and by law, does not have an offensive bio-warfare program... we do maintain a defensive program... because we have to be able to defend Americans from others bio-warfare efforts. As a part of that, you have to anticipate others efforts... and to study how to defend against them you will have to... etc. The North Carolina experiment scared people... and in result it generated a tacit agreement among countries and particularly among scientists as a function of scientific ethics... that "we wouldn't do that any more"... in context meaning no one would again try to make bad things worse in that way... because of the obvious risk of "success" IF something like that ever got out... because if that happened... Then we'd be exactly where we are now, with the origin of exactly such an event in China today... For many reasons not being discussed much... 2019-nCoV looks to me like China got ahead of their skis while trying to catch up and get out in front of what they could glean of the state-of-the-art in others efforts... which they WERE doing by extracting info from our universities, penetrating and spying on our programs, stealing some VERY hazardous bio-materials from our labs, (also transporting them illegally) etc. In that effort, they CLEARLY were NOT sufficiently prepared to manage the efforts they enabled safely... while those responsible, in their zeal, apparently failed to heed the warnings from the North Carolina effort... that had put the fear of God into operations run by far more capable people. So, yes, science is easily capable of creating novel viruses... And, there is not only not a question about it... it is already a fairly routine part of scientific work done in conducting routine investigations of viruses. Scientists doing research might routinely modify things for lots of reasons... one very commonly being to try to simplify growing the things in the lab... just to make their research on one aspect or another that much easier than if growing them was hard... Otherwise... creating vaccines would be a lot harder and more expensive, for instance... One of the signatures of the four genetic insertions on the 2019-nCoV includes the residuals of known tools that have that function. One of the modifications made to 2019-nCoV was done to make it easier to grow in the lab... which is fully consistent with making it easier to use it in bat research... and fully consistent with someone making it easier to grow to use it as a weapon... Far more problematic is that the other three insertions... seem to be responsible for altering the way the virus acts in infecting people... where it acts a whole lot differently than any other known coronavirus... I could pontificate on that more... Instead I'll just point out my own interpretation of the new name they've stuck on it... They call it "2019-nCoV"... which stands for "2019 - novel Coronavirus" I'll take the word novel in context... to be an acronym... standing for "Not Very Likely"...