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Gary Ogden's avatar

Alex: Thank you very much for this tour de force. I agree that the creation of this virus was intentional, but the leak an accident. By the way, the virus did not kill a million Americans. A not insignificant number of the deaths were iatrogenic (ventilators, refusal of clearly effective early treatment, sending sick people back to nursing homes); a more significant number by four factors: 1. A PCR test not fit for purpose; 2. A change in the way death certificates attributed cause of death; 3. CMS monetarily incentivizing hospitals to attribute covid illness to as many patients os possible; and 4. Incentivizing hospitals with a 20% increase on the entire bill for using, to the exclusion of all other drugs, the very toxic (especially renal toxicity) and very expensive, Remdesivir. This is an enormous rabbit hole I'd be delighted to see you dive into, but perhaps the new Congress will do so in January (Not holding my breath, though, that Congress is capable of doing anything useful ).

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Marc G. Wathelet's avatar

I would add a fifth key piece of evidence to the lab origin, the fact that SARS-CoV-2 Spike had the highest affinity for human ACE2 of all animal species tested, including bats [e.g., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34558627/]. There is no scenario of a recent zoonotic event that can account for this observation. I specify recent because of the 2012 miners in southwest China who were sick with a coronavirus for months: samples from them were sent to the WIV in Wuhan and it is possible Spike would have evolved to maximise interaction with human ACE2 during the long illness, but even in this scenario, the virus would be coming from the lab.

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