Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Inside Climate News thinks the mounting death toll from Covid-19 will push climate skeptics to embrace blind faith in experts. But they completely ignore that many climate skeptics are deeply worried about Covid-19, and have been from the start.
Decades of Science Denial Related to Climate Change Has Led to Denial of the Coronavirus Pandemic
After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars undermining climate science, it’s easy to see how epidemiology came next.
BY NEELA BANERJEE
BY DAVID HASEMYERAmerican science denialism, deployed for years against climate change and, most recently, the coronavirus, can be traced back to the early 1950s during the fight over smog in Los Angeles.
…
Decades of climate denial now appear to have paved the way for denial of Covid-19 by many on the right, according to experts on climate politics. After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars attacking climate scientists and accentuating the supposed uncertainty of climate science, it isn’t hard to understand how that happened.
President Trump, who denies climate change, has brushed off Covid-19’s seriousness until recently by relying on many of the same arguments he uses to dismiss global warming, such as ignoring government scientists or blaming China.
…
Will Covid-19 Deaths Lead Skeptics to Rethink Views on Climate Change?
…
Conservatives have also been encouraged to doubt the objectivity of scientists, Taylor said. Ideological champions on the right such as Rush Limbaugh have described scientists as part of a liberal cabal to deceive the American people on issues like climate change.
In 2009, thousands of hacked emails from climate scientists were leaked, in a scandal known as Climategate. Climate deniers seized upon excerpts from the emails to cast doubt on the scientific consensus about global warming before international negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Multiple reviews of the scientists’ emails exonerated them of tampering with data, but to deniers, Climategate remains proof of the dishonesty of climate researchers.
“There’s a hostility toward the messengers,” Taylor said. “Technocratic elites and scientists are for the most part Democrats, and that’s one thing the Republican base knows really well. They’re not trustworthy. They’re not part of the tribe. And Republicans have been hearing for 30 years that they have an agenda they want to advance.”
…
As the death toll from the pandemic climbs, conservatives are likely to set aside their continued skepticism of science, including the facts underpinning climate change, Taylor said. “The distrust of expertise and the medical profession will wither away,” he said, “because we’ll see the consequences of that distrust.”
But Goldman is less optimistic that the impact of Covid-19 can lead doubters to reconsider anything other than Covid-19.
…
Read more: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08042020/science-denial-coronavirus-covid-climate-change
Nullius in verba – Take nobody’s word for it. This is the ancient motto of the Royal Society, a science organisation which was founded in 1660.
Granted much of the Royal Society in my opinion no longer lives up to that motto, but there is no reason we shouldn’t. The blind acceptance of “experts” advocated by Inside Climate News is a religious belief system, not science. Experts frequently get things wrong. Sometimes entire professions get things wrong, for extended periods. History is full of groups of experts who blindly rejected the evidence they had made a mistake.
Consider the alleged expert advice from the WHO. If President Trump had blindly accepted the bad advice of WHO experts, who were still arguing against travel bans in late February, Trump would not have imposed a travel ban on China in January, against expert advice, and the situation in the USA would likely have been much worse than it currently is. The WHO refused to release the names of the “expert” doctors who vetoed a motion to declare a pandemic in January.
Trump’s rival Joe Biden at the time described the January Chinese travel ban as “xenophobia” and “hysteria”, not supported by the advice of experts. Even CNN says that Biden later flipped on supporting the travel ban.
What about the other claim Inside Climate News made, that skeptics’ blind distrust in experts is leading us to reject evidence that Coronavirus is a problem?
For starters, the most damaging rejection of evidence to date in the Coronavirus saga had nothing to do with Conservatives. The corrupt socialists who run China imprisoned and disappeared entire teams of doctors who tried to warn people. Worse the Chinese programme of disappearances is ongoing; According to The Times of Israel, Dr. Ai Fen recently disappeared after publishing a story “The one who supplied the whistle” in China’s People Magazine in March. Many of Dr. Ai Fen’s colleagues including the famous Dr. Li Wenliang have also disappeared or died.
But socialists like the CCP frequently get a free pass from greens when they shoot the messenger, in this case maybe literally.
What about the alleged climate skeptic rejection of the evidence? It is true there are disagreements amongst climate skeptics about the appropriate response to Coronavirus. But readers might remember WUWT raised the alarm about Coronavirus in January, in a post titled China Corona Virus Horror: Hospital Corridor of the Dead and Dying. I don’t think anyone could reasonably describe the WUWT January post as evidence of blanket climate skeptic rejection of the threat posed by the Chinese Coronavirus.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I don’t see science at work among the climate scam artists.
Science is data driven, objective, open to being wrong.
The errors in the virus models remind me of Pat Frank’s work on error propagation. We have this huge unknown in the actual number of people infected. It is a measurement error. That ignorance propagates forward creating huge uncertainty, making the models essentially useless.
I could be wrong but it reminded me of that.
Wow! Good observation. Models with even a small unknown interval at the start wind up with a large unknown interval after several iterations. That goes for both climate models and for corona virus models.
Virus models having errors causing error propagation reminds me of the situation in western medicine that is only more recently coming to grips with the human microbiome and the enormous role it has to play in modulating the immune system of mammals in general in this instance, and amongst other things.
If the microbiome and the virome is not taken into account, it creates uncertainty when modeling the growth of single viruses, for example. I guess i am trying to say that it takes more than a fistful of experts to make a good model, with minimal error propagation.
From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6K6ssEziwM
Title: “The human virome: what is it and why should we care?”
•Oct 10, 2018
“Amy Proal
“Here I talk about the human virome – recently discovered ecosystems of viruses that persist in all human tissue and blood. The virome is much more expansive then first believed: an estimated 380 trillion viruses inhabit the human body at any given time! Most of these viruses are bacteriophages – viruses that infect bacteria. By infecting bacteria, these phages are able to modify their behavior. It follows that studying the human virome can give us much more context on bacterial microbiome activity in the human body…leading to a better understanding of chronic disease processes tied to microbiome dysbiosis/imbalance.”
“Why is clean air important? Is it simply the viral percentage in the air? Is CV-19 stuck to water or hydrocarbons in the air? The fact that it infects lung tissues suggests that anyone with hydrocarbon lined lungs is susceptible. This will apply to healthy young people. Diesel vehicles and ships will be deadly in a new way.”
I really don’t mean to pick on you but you don’t seem to understand how corona cold viruses spread. I suggest rereading Rud Istvan’s recent articles here. Nor do you seem to know that modern internal combustion engines do not fill the air with hydrocarbons.
This was in reply to comment farther up. I must have mistakenly posted this as a comment on its own rather than as a reply to that comment.
Interesting study that suggests people who have Epstein Barr virus are at much greater risk for covid19 complications
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-21580/v1
Does that include latent virus?
I think includes latent virus cases as well. But seems strange that this would cause worse outcomes, study may just be an anomaly and too small sample size.
“After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars undermining climate science,”
And I begged for them to send me just a little bit of that money. I
Yep, still waiting for my dark money cheque…
The only dark money “cheque” I get is the dividends that any oil company stocks I own distribute, and as that’s a very small part of my diverse portfolio, it’s not really all that much.
“After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars undermining climate science,”
As the authors of that statement ought to know, that figure was the amount donated to pro-business organizations, only 10% of whose efforts were devoted to the climate change issue. Greenpeace called the recipients “climate change denial organizations, falsely insinuating (as they knew) that the all the donations were to to climate change “denial.” They have misled their readers as they intended.
Rethink THIS:
From about the start of the COVID-19 crisis in December 2019 until now, April 12, 2020, a total of 120 days have gone by. On each and every one of those days, here are how many people died, in the United States alone, of the following:
442 deaths per day from preventable cardiovascular disease
1,315 deaths per day from smoking
88 deaths per day from motor-vehicle crashes
241 deaths per day from alcohol-related causes
120 days x 442 cardio deaths/day = 53,040 cardio deaths
120 days x 1,315 smoking deaths/day = 157,800 smoking deaths
120 days x 88 motor-vehicle deaths/day = 10,560 motor-vehicle deaths
120 days x 241 alcohol-related deaths/day = 28,920 alcohol-related deaths
So, during the 120 days, when 22,071 people in the United States died from COVID-19, … 53,040 people died from preventable heart disease, 157,800 people died from smoking, 10,560 people died from motor-vehicles, and 28,920 people died from alcohol.
53,040 + 157,800 + 10,560 + 28,920 = 250,320 people in the United States — people who made individual choices to accept the risks of their behavior that could kill them and DID kill them — received no news coverage, while 22,071 people caused the entire country to shut down normal operations.
250,320 divided by 22,071 = 11 times more people in the United States died of other PREVENTABLE causes than from COVID-19. That’s 11 x 22,071 = 250,320 people died from other largely PREVENTABLE causes than from COVID-19. And the whole country shut down normal operations, because of them alone!
Just a note: there are quite a few more cardio deaths than my number, but I figured the percentage of those that were preventable, and that’s the number I used.
Robert were can I find your numbers?
Thanks
Derg,
For all those numbers, just go to CDC, and other prominent medical organizations’ webpages. You’ll probably find yearly totals, which you can reduce to daily totals. On the heart disease statistic, I used a fairly established yearly total, and then, from another website, I determined the number of those that were preventable.
I did the 120-day totals based on a daily average from the yearly figures, and then I went on from there to clarify what these mean, compared to COVID-19 stats. It’s not an Eschenbach statistical masterwork, but it’s an idea. (^_^)
Now I need a Monckton graphic masterwork to illustrate it. (^_^)
Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, Bill Nye, “Pope Francis,” Angela Merkel — which expert would you like me to, uh, skeptic all over first? In fact, Pooh’s WuFlu has given me even more reason to doubt global warming and plenty of examples of why command economies can’t save themselves.
I didn’t know I distrusted scientists! I thought it was just the idiots pretending to use science that I distrusted. That and the people who belittle skeptics for daring to have doubts.
A pandemic is a scary thing. You can actually identify the virus, see it’s structure, watch as it kills people, study the spread, fight the disease.
Climate Change is not a scary thing. You can’t separate it from natural change, it has no shape or structure, it doesn’t kill anyone that you can identify (weather kills people, climate change does not), you can’t study the future (only the past), and you can’t fight what is mixed in with and probably only a small contributor to natural variations.
The only people I know of denying the truth about CovID-19 is the Chinese – a communist government.
What is going to be fun is watching for a pause in the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere. Talk about your unplanned experiment. We will get to see if man is contributing at all to the rise of CO2, or if it’s out gassing by the oceans.
Nothing so far.
Not the only people denying the truth. Have you heard of David Icke?
Robert,
+ many pluses, from a man with consistently good replies to a wide range of questions.
You left out the real main difference you can die in a week vs perhaps in 100 years.
“American science denialism, deployed for years against climate change”
I apoligize for my science denial and promise to change my ways once they get their statistics right.
Multiple links below with apologies to the moderators.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/04/09/climate-statistics/
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/11/16/agw-issues/
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/07/28/rcb/
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/04/30/illusory-statistical-power-in-time-series-analysis/
If you go back to that January posting and peruse the comments, you’ll find that from the start there was a broad range of opinions. No groupthink by any means.
There is still a broad range of opinion and an admirable amount of changing of opinions as more information comes to light.
This community is to be commended I’d say. I have learned far more about COVID-19 here than from any other source, and generally a few days ahead of the curve. Stuff shows up in the popular media that is old news to me.
Well, I have had a very long career in science and engineering and there are a lot of experts I trust and rely on around the world, and as a senior consulting engineer and geologist I’m relied upon.
When you charge a fee for your research, advice and designs for a company to base investments of 100s of millions of dollars on, you better have done your homework well. Your models better be validated, pilot plants better perform. Forecasts better be close to the mark.
There is no way that consensus climate ‘scientists’ could make a living at what most scientists, mathematicians and engineers do on the sceptical side. Sceptics routinely won all the debates and that is why the consensus hasn’t debated for 15 to twenty years.
Oh no, its not de*Nile of science (what the hell does that mean, anyway). It’s outrage over what passes for science in this field, it’s resistance to the fiddling of data, the cherrypicking and manipulating to end up with the answers you were looking for. We’ve been tough on the same kinds of negligent science and political agendas re Cov-19. China keeping secrets that have cost untold tens of thousands of lives and trillions in economic losses. WUWT has taken a leadership role in putting out top flight information on the virus globally by very talented scientists.
Finally, we are equal opportunity sceptics. We even fight among our selves on many topics. That is supposed to be the norm for a scientific community. ‘Sceptic’, believe it or not, is not a perjoratve term . Its a vital part of real science. Its the engine of advancement. To have spent hundreds of billions and to have not changed the guess by Charney in the 1970s on climate sensitivity of CO2. To be quoting Arhenius and Tyndall from the 19th Century on how climate works….this is not advancement. This is not ‘progressive’.
I really like this comment by Mr Gary Pearce. Real scientists don’t need to scare you into accepting their findings or to whine if you don’t accept their findings on the basis of their scientific authority. In fact, real scientists would consider the the claim to truth by virtue of scientific authority as a logical fallacy.
Thank you Gary, the voice of mature sense and balance.
If only those on the other side of the climate divide, the alarmists, could see their constant over dramatic prose, are less credible than their “adjusted” data. Maybe, post Covid mania, they might reflect on their position. The current lock down, whether valid or overreaction, at least shows what happens when wealth creation is stopped, which is something the climate alarmists are constantly demanding!!
Another three weeks of social distancing and economic destruction should give us all a clear indication of what a post capitalist world would look like.
Anyone who is not troubled by lock downs and what is going on across the developed economies of the world, isn’t seeing the bigger picture.
Protect the vulnerable, yes. Protect the weak, ye. So let us strengthen the economies of the world to do those things, yes!
The engines of wealth creation must be restarted.
Climate Science is like social science … not really a science and never has been. It is mainly a group of left wing hacks from other fields with no formal science degree can feel like they are important and call themselves scientists.
You cannot be an expert in anything unless you can comprehend all the facts. At present we have no really reliable experts in the theories of the world’s changing climates – because it will take perhaps a thousand years to gather enough scientific solar and global data to be able to come up with a reasonably sound theory.
Likewise, it will be at least a year before we have enough data about this particular virus and its progress in the wildly varying demographic and geographic circumstances on this green globe of ours, for any experts to appear.
Therefore, let us sit down, breathe through our noses – and just get stuck in to helping all the victims of this epidemic in the best and most charitable way possible. And let us all get back to work if we are lucky enough to have a job – and let us work particularly diligently and save our money so that we can recover the sooner from the havoc wrought by this nasty, but luckily not very dangerous epidemic. That’s how our ancestors dealt with epidemics. Of course, they never had the hubris to imagine that they could ever contain, even eradicate, the illness – and never in their wildest fantasies would they destroy their hard-won economy for that purpose.
Don’t get spell-bound by large fatality numbers. We only die one death each – which, alas, none of us can avoid some time, sooner or later.
“But not today. Not today.”
-Likable Gladiator, from famous movie.
I’ve yet to see a definitive number virions you have to breathe in to become infected. Is it one or ten or hundreds or a thousand? How many do you have to transfer to your eye, nose or mouth?
If you breathe in a small number does the slow rate of replication in the body give it a chance to power up the immune system and fight it off before it becomes symptomatic? Is this why we have a fairly large number of asymptomatic people?
What are the treatment protocols currently? Why is the CDC trying to maximize the death numbers? Why don’t the “journalists” ask these questions?
Why did the CDC try to make its own tests?
Why is that “Trump’s CDC” when the same “Trump’s CDC” people object to Trump (who has no medical qualification and only his common sense (*)) giving his mere OPINION on a drug?
They can’t have it both ways, not even with Macron’s “en même temps” (= at the same time…).
Either Trump should not touch medical matters, and it isn’t his political responsibility, or he can (**).
(*) which made him question the safety of vaccines, so common sense is quite sharp
(**) and it still isn’t his responsibility any more, as nothing can make President Trump responsible for ANYTHING presidential, as long as the impeachment case is taken seriously; the hypothesis for impeachment was that he was a UK queen style head of state.
Multiplicity of infection (MOI) is a term to google. I believe I’ve read of cell cultures seeded with between 100,000 and 1,000,000 viral particles to achieve at least partial infection.
If the answer to your second pair of questions is ‘yes’ that would make a lot of sense to me. I have wondered about that, also.
Pretty sure the answer to your final question is ‘Kool-Aid’.
“I’ve yet to see a definitive number virions you have to breathe in to become infected. Is it one or ten or hundreds or a thousand? How many do you have to transfer to your eye, nose or mouth?”
No one knows.
How would anyone find out?
Who has had the time to even try?
Who is gonna volunteer to be the test subjects?
It has been extremely difficult to get any sort of definitive answer even for viruses which have existed far a very long time and many studies have been done, and and for which it is possible to recruit volunteers to be inoculated to try to find out.
In fact, virions are far to small to measure out some known number of viral particles, given that many viruses are of visually indistinguishable morphology and/or viability.
The studies that have looked at such questions have generally made use of a unit called a Tissue Culture Infective Dose 50, TCID50, the number of such units which will cause infection in 50 percent of culture inoculated with a virus. There is no way to even compare the absolute relative number of virions between such units from one study or one virus to another, with any sort of useful degree of precision or accuracy.
Since animals, cells in culture, and tissues in culture vary so widely in how they become infected, the only way to definitively answer such a question for people would be to do experiments on people and see who did and did not get sick, IMO.
Impossible and unethical for a deadly virus with no known cure.
We will have to get by with indirect evidence for now, or so it seems to me.
It seems the concept is to some degree a theoretical one based on relative numbers, not precise counts.
Also, it must be a statistical quantity, like (with toxins) the lethal dose for 50% of subjects, LD50, is, since the number is known to vary from one individual host to another.
Here is one review study that has a great deal of info from numerous tests of various disease-causing respiratory and enteric viruses inoculated into human volunteers:
“Doses of <1 TCID50 of influenza virus, rhinovirus, and adenovirus were reported to infect 50% of the tested population. Similarly, low doses of the enteric viruses, norovirus, rotavirus, echovirus, poliovirus, and hepatitis A virus, caused infection in at least some of the volunteers tested. A number of factors may influence viruses’ infectivity in experimentally infected human volunteers. These include host and pathogen factors as well as the experimental methodology. As a result, the reported infective doses of human viruses have to be interpreted with caution."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12560-011-9056-7
Others have looked at questions from a theoretical perspective, such as "Can one virion cause an infection?"
Here:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090313150254.htm
Is WHO investigating the almost magical elimination of the CV19 virus in China?
From 80,000 cases at the start of March, just 82,000 cases by early April, with over 77,000 recovered, and only 1,150 active cases with just 2 deaths per day in April.
Smoke and mirrors and Chinese handshakes…
The climategate suspects (Mann, Jones and Trenberth) were indeed exonerated by people with heavy interests in maintaining the credibility of climate change alarmism. I have read the excerpts in question and there is no way to parse them as anything other than attempts to aggressively defend their theories from examination by anyone who might doubt them. There is no doubt that they were manipulating data to fit the theory. There is no doubt that they were denying access to the raw data to their critics. There is no doubt that they were conspiring to subvert the peer review process to punish anyone who would question their theory. If those lads weren’t guilty of some scientific malfeasance, why were they so devoted to maintaining secrecy among themselves about their adjustments to data? If you have a theory you can prove, you don’t deny anyone else an opportunity to independently see your evidence, surely.
The whole process of extrapolating a temperature record from proxies (the width of tree rings in petrified trees from a single, specific location can tell you the history of the temperature all over the world?) seens pretty hinky from the get-go.
The same way vaccines are exonerated each and every time.
(And I am NOT saying some Africa mass vaccination caused AIDS, I note that the question was open before it was closed, so the case was PLAUSIBLE.)
If as much time and wealth had been devoted to the possibility of virus and bacteria pandemics as has been wasted on the ‘Climate Change’ thingy the world would have been far better prepared for Covid-19, likewise many other real harmful natural factors.
“…I don’t think anyone could reasonably describe the WUWT January post as evidence of blanket climate skeptic rejection of the threat posed by the Chinese Coronavirus.”
It’s not about what Climate skeptics did, it’s about what Climate Alsrmists can get people to believe skeptics did.
“…I don’t think anyone could reasonably describe the WUWT January post as evidence of blanket climate skeptic rejection of the threat posed by the Chinese Coronavirus.”
Climate change skeptic JoNova was an early and ardent believer in the threat of the coronavirus on her popular blog.
Until the vaccine is created, the lives of everyone infected will be at risk. There is no effective cure for Covid-19.
Herd immunity. Only viable course of action at present.
There is NO effective CURE for any virus, and never will be.
Good gawd, how do you sleep at night?
“Ideological champions on the right such as Rush Limbaugh have described scientists as part of a liberal cabal to deceive the American people on issues like climate change. ”
They probably deceive on pretty everything, it’s more obvious to even the people with the lowest information and lowest time to digest it when such deception requires changing models, data sets, and explanations, at high frequency.
Trump first spoke about his friend as he described the “viciousness” of the disease on March 29.
“I had a friend who went to a hospital the other day. He’s a little older, and he’s heavy, but he’s tough person,” Trump said. “And he went to the hospital, and a day later, he’s in a coma … he’s not doing well.”
“The speed and the viciousness, especially if it gets the right person, it’s horrible. It’s really horrible,” he said.
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3079571/donald-trumps-friend-and-donor-stanley-chera-dies
Hospitals are full of people that were perfectly healthy and well just before they went in. It is one reason why I do not go there!
The virulence of SARS-Cov-2 is due to the fact that T-cells do not recognize the new virus in people over 65 years of age.
Have you heard of phages? Some people think they were “made” by God. Others suggest they are in fact “good” viruses. I err on the latter based on my reading.
It has an age detector, really?
Smart man. Iatrogenesis is the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.
He was probably in a coma because he was anesthetized for intubation. It’s such a horrid procedure they have to knock people out.
Type A was also found in Americans who had lived in Wuhan, and in other patients diagnosed in the United States and Australia.
The most common variant found in Wuhan was type B, the study said, though this appeared not to have travelled much beyond East Asia before mutating, which the researchers said was probably due to some form of resistance to it outside that region.
Finally, type C was the variant found most often in Europe based on cases in France, Italy, Sweden and England. It had not been detected in any patients in mainland China, though had been found in samples from Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea, the study said.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3079491/deadly-coronavirus-comes-three-variants-researchers-find
Coronavirus could attack immune system like HIV by targeting protective cells, warn scientists
Researchers in China and the US find that the virus that causes Covid-19 can destroy the T cells that are supposed to protect the body from harmful invaders
One doctor said concern is growing in medical circles that effect could be similar to HIV
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3079443/coronavirus-could-target-immune-system-targeting-protective
Puhlease! Comparing COVID19 with HIV/AIDS? Throw me a frikken research grant for the next 20 years!
Acquired immune function shows recognizable changes over time with organismal aging. These changes include T-cell dysfunction, which may underlie diminished resistance to infection and possibly various chronic age-associated diseases in the elderly. T-cell dysfunction may occur at distinct stages, from naive cells to the end stages of differentiation during immune responses. The thymus, which generates naive T cells, shows unusually early involution resulting in progressive reduction of T-cell output after adolescence, but peripheral T-cell numbers are maintained through antigen-independent homeostatic proliferation of naive T cells driven by the major histocompatibility complex associated with self-peptides and homeostatic cytokines, retaining the diverse repertoire. However, extensive homeostatic proliferation may lead to the emergence of dysfunctional CD4+ T cells with features resembling senescent cells, termed senescence-associated T (SA-T) cells, which increase and accumulate with age.
https://academic.oup.com/intimm/article/32/4/223/5713759
In the 1980’s we were supposed to be mostly dead by 2000. We’re not even with 40million+, today, HIV/AIDS positive sufferers.
And we are worrying about 1million, if that, COVID-19 sufferers?
In the thymus gland, undifferentiated T lymphocytes are formed in young people, which can respond quickly to new viruses.
So nothing then?
“We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019- nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses. Importantly, amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV-1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag. Interestingly, despite the inserts being discontinuous on the primary amino acid sequence, 3D-modelling of the 2019-nCoV suggests that they converge to constitute the receptor binding site. The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have identity /similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature.”
From here:-https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338957445_Uncanny_similarity_of_unique_inserts_in_the_2019-nCoV_spike_protein_to_HIV-1_gp120_and_Gag
This is by no means the only paper to suggest that this coronavirus is a designer “gain-in-function” virus rather than something attributable to natural evolution.
More virus fear porn.
Why so hostile?
The original paper is here:-
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41423-020-0424-9
There seems little doubt that SARS-COV-2 can attack T lymphocytes, whereas SARS-COV could not. The authors also demonstrate fairly clearly that this is via S protein mediation. If you want to understand why the S protein (spike glycoprotein) in SARS-COV-2 is different, then you should read the reference I included above:- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338957445_Uncanny_similarity_of_unique_inserts_in_the_2019-nCoV_spike_protein_to_HIV-1_gp120_and_Gag
So yes there is a HIV connection there, but it seems unlikely that the glycoprotein inserts are there by any act of nature. Pornography is too nice a word to describe what this looks like.
Not hostile at all. Just really tired of all the fear porn. That study didn’t really prove any pathogenesis, did it?
In answer to the headline straw man question, when it comes to the fraud known as man made climate change and associated ‘experts’, the answer is still “Nope!”
As a skeptic, I believe that waves of Arctic air in the US are conducive to the spread of the epidemic.
No. Because people will realise that humanity has real and urgent problems to address.