>> Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, was adamant that the proposal did not change his opinion that the pandemic was caused by a natural spillover from animals to humans. “There are zero data to support a lab origin ‘notion,’” Racaniello wrote in an email.
There seems to be zero data to support his spillover idea too. But now we have documentation of people wanting to do the exact experiments that could lead to this, and he's still sticking to his fantasy.
I dont think the point here is to definitively determine the origin of this virus, it's to point to the fact that unchecked scientists are wanting to do exactly the kind of experiments that could kill us all. IIRC an Ebola gene was successfully put in a flu virus years ago but contained - hemorrhagic influenza anyone?
This stuff needs to stop.
Interviewer: You say these are diverse coronaviruses and you can’t vaccinate against them, and no anti-virals — so what do we do?
Daszak: Well I think…coronaviruses — you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happen with coronavirus, in zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. So you can get more predictive when you find a sequence. You’ve got this diversity. Now the logical progression for vaccines is, if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s insert some of these other things and get a better vaccine.
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYDL_RK--w
more info: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...