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Rich Z's Blatherings Since Connie and I have retired the SerpenCo business, topics here will focus on topics of a more personal and general nature.

Coronavirus infection from China
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Old 01-29-2020, 03:09 PM   #1
Rich Z
Coronavirus infection from China

I don't know how many of you all are aware of this, but I think it might be prudent to keep an eye on developments. Could get quite serious.
 
Old 01-29-2020, 06:51 PM   #2
Frank Pinello
Yes. Just read about what it’s doing to people in China and what drastic measures China is doing to try to control the virus.
 
Old 01-29-2020, 07:21 PM   #3
Rich Z
This is a very fast moving development. I read last night that the central core of the Chinese government has relocated to an isolated island bunker.

So I guess they don't believe this is just a garden style variety of a flu virus.

The virus is already on the loose around the world. And since it is contagious while the victim is asymptomatic, a lot of people could have it right now and not know they are spreading it around to other victims. Could be an undetected fire raging right now, for all we know, with suddenly a LOT of people catching fire. Figuratively speaking, of course.

Coincidentally enough, the city that was ground zero, Wuhan I believe, is also home to a facility handling very dangerous pathogens for "research". Rumors flying that this facility was involved in biological warfare research and one of the subjects just got loose on them.

But who knows? Truth is hard to come by when dealing with the Chinese government. Well, any government, to be honest. Especially when they don't want the public to know that they might have screwed up big time.

But if this becomes a pandemic, this organism will likely be coming to your neighborhood. An ounce of prevention will be worth a couple pounds of cure.

Hope for the best, but plan for the worst, I think would be advisable.
 
Old 01-30-2020, 08:19 PM   #4
DeuceRon
The WHO just declared this a global health emergency. I'm not liking this one..
 
Old 01-30-2020, 11:39 PM   #5
Rich Z
They should have been on top of this a long time ago. Doesn't take a genius to see how things were deteriorating in China to realize it was highly contagious and causing pretty serious pathological effects.

It may be far to late to do anything for the Chinese. The only feasible plan at this point may have to be to try to contain the satellite outbreaks before the entire world gets infected.

Wouldn't surprise me one bit if international travel just has to shut down completely for a while.

Expect the military to be called in. People don't tend to like quarantines much when they are on the inside.

To be honest, Connie and I were out shopping today, and when I spotted an oriental woman, I couldn't help but think "I wonder if she just returned from China very recently?" Unfortunate to think that way, but I would bet money I am not alone with that kind of thought.
 
Old 02-03-2020, 07:20 PM   #6
DeuceRon
I agree. Wouldn't doubt that China may be fabricating how many are actually infected there as well.
Take care of yourselves folks!
 
Old 02-04-2020, 12:38 AM   #7
Rich Z
Well now, this is darn interesting reading.

Quote:
Logistical and technical analysis of the origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus (2019-nCoV)

Posted on January 31, 2020 by harvard2thebighouse

This report is the product of a collaboration between a retired professional scientist with 30 years of experience in genomic sequencing and analysis who helped design several ubiquitous bioinformatic software tools, and a former NSA counterterrorism analyst. It considers whether the Wuhan Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is the result of naturally emergent mutations against the possibility that it may be a bio-engineered strain meant for defensive immunotherapy protocols that was released into the public, most likely by accident since China’s rate of occupational accidents is about ten-times higher than America’s, and some twenty-times more than Europe’s – the only other regions with high-level virology labs.

This mistake was likely precipitated by the need to quickly finish research that was being rushed for John Hopkin’s Event 201 this past October, as well as possibly being hurried due to meet deadlines before the impending Chinese New Year – the timing of these events point to increased human error, not a globalist conspiracy. Beijing has had four known accidental leaks of the SARS virus in recent years, at present there is absolutely no reason to assume that this strain of the Wuhan Coronavirus didn’t accidentally leak out as well.

Given that the Chinese horseshoe bat’s habitat covers an enormous swath of the region containing scores of cities and hundreds of millions people, the fact that this Wuhan Coronavirus strain emerged in close proximity to the only BSL-4 virology lab in China, now notoriously located in Wuhan, which in turn was staffed with at least two Chinese scientists – Zhengli Shi and Xing-Yi Ge – both virologists who had previously worked at an American lab which already bio-engineered an incredibly virulent strain of bat coronavirus – the accidental release of a bio-engineered virus meant for defensive immunotherapy research from Wuhan’s virology lab cannot be automatically discounted, especially when the Wuhan Strain’s unnatural genomic signal is considered.

– In 2002, Stony Brook first assembled a virus from scratch, building a polio-virus, and providing proof-of-concept for the creation, alteration, and manipulation of viral genomes.

– By 2015, conducting research that was challenged with an enormous amount of concern, scientists at UNC had successfully created a “chimeric, SARS-like virus” by altering the viral genome of a Chinese bat coronavirus’s spike-protein genes – sequences that code for the spikes that poke out from surface of viruses and allow them to unlock entry into hosts, in this case making the bio-engineered virus incredibly contagious. A virologist with the Louis Pasteur Institute of Paris warned: “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,”

– Scientists have expressed concern about China’s ability to safely monitor this BSL-4 lab in Wuhan since it opened in 2017: “an open culture is important to keeping BSL-4 labs safe, and he questions how easy this will be in China, where society emphasizes hierarchy. ‘Diversity of viewpoint, flat structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important.'” This lab is at most 20 miles from the wet market where the virus had been assumed to have jumped from animal to human. However the idea that a Chinese lab could have a viral sample escape is well-documented – as mentioned, one lab in Beijing has had four separate incidents of the SARS virus leaking out accidentally.

– Notably, the first three known cases from early December had no contact with that market, and roughly one-third of the initial exposed cohort had no direct ties to Wusan’s wild meat market, the presumptive source of the virus.

– Since its discovery, scientists have been unable to fully determine the zoological source of 2019-nCoV, it was initially thought to have passed through snakes, but now all that’s agreed upon is that it’s mostly bat in origin. This inability to derive a zoological origin is exactly what would be expected if the virus had been artificially engineered to target humans as UNC already has, this doesn’t prove an artificial nature – but it is consistent with one.

– Early research found that this coronavirus targets the ACE2 receptor, which is found in Asians at roughly five-times the rate of other global populations, indicating that 2019-nCoV was likely in development as part of a defensive project likely linked to immunotherapy – never meant to leave the lab, but meant to serve as a Red Team to fight back against, not as an offensive weapon since the virus is likely wired to be much more virulent among Asian populations. Further support for this is the fact that the Wuhan BSL-4 virology lab was already actively looking into the risks posed from bat coronaviruses, and actively researching coronavirus treatments – by definition both of these projects would require live virulent strains of coronavirus.

– The Wuhan Strain of coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, appears to be transmissible even before its host shows any symptoms at all, making temperature-scanning at airports ineffective since hosts appear to be contagious for about a week before any symptoms emerge. This is in stark contrast with SARS, whose hosts weren’t contagious until they were symptomatic, allowing for its relatively quick containment. A recent pre-print now gives 2019-nCoV a rating of R4, meaning each host passes the virus on to four new victims, a rate significantly higher than any past global viral outbreak.

– Following the aforementioned bat coronavirus bio-engineering research that was critiqued for being too risky in 2015, in the paper from UNC eventually published the next year that describing their successful bio-engineering of a highly-virulent coronavirus derived from bats, researcher #8 is listed as one “Zheng-li Shi” attached to the “Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China.”

– Zhengli Shi seems to have returned to Wuhan at some point since 2016, since she then appears in this September 2019 paper on the human behaviors most likely to lead to bat-borne coronavirus exposure in southern China, and in this pending preprint on the current outbreak of 2019-nCoV – just a sample of the dozens of coronavirus-related papers she’s published over a three decade career. And not only does she provide a direct chain of expertise tying the already successful bio-engineering of a virulent bat-based coronavirus at UNC directly to the BSL-4 virology lab in Wuhan, but back in January 2014 she’d received a $665,000 grant from NIH for a study titled The Ecology of Bat Coronaviruses and the Risk of Future Coronavirus Emergence (NIAID R01 AI1 10964) as well as $559,500 more from USAID for a study titled Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT_2China (Project No. AID-OAA-A-14-00102). Beyond this American funding specifically into viral diseases zoonotically transferring from animals to humans, over the years she’s also received around $3 million in grants to study these zoonotic viruses from China and other countries, and has served on the editorial board of several virological research magazines. More of her research into the intersection of coronaviruses like the Wuhan Strain and their epidemic potential was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Threat Reduction Agency, and U.S. Biological Defense Research Directorate of the Naval Medical Research Center.

– And so a scientist who’s been prolifically involved with studying the molecular interaction of coronaviruses and humanity, spending decades and millions of dollars, and having even helped build a hyper-virulent coronavirus from scratch at UNC – just so happens to be working at the only BSL-4 virology lab in China that also just so happens to be at the epicenter of this outbreak.

– Another Chinese virologist, Xing-Yi Ge, appears as an author on the 2016 UNC paper and is also attached to the lab in Wuhan. Previously in 2013, he’d successfully isolated a SARS-like coronavirus from bats which targets the ACE2 receptor, just like our present virus, the Wuhan Coronavirus 2019-nCoV.

– Numerous videos purportedly from inside hospitals in Wuhan depict a crisis that is far greater than the numbers released by China to date. Example 1. Example 2. Example 3. Example 4. Chinese language social media also reflects a sense of panic and desperation that is highly discordant with the numbers being released by the Chinese government. Who, notably, are refusing any assistance from the American CDC.

– Although it has not yet passed peer-review, a full-genome evolutionary analysis of 2019-nCoV rejects the hypothesis of emergence as a result of a recent recombination event, since it seems that this novel coronavirusis not a mosaic of previously known coronaviruses, but instead draws from distant, discrete parts of the coronavirus family tree – not what usually happens. And notably, a genetic analysis of the spike-protein genes – the exact coronavirus gene that was bio-engineered by the UNC lab in 2015, where Zhengli Shi and Xing-Yi Ge previously isolated a batty coronavirus that targets the ACE2 receptor just like 2019-nCoV – indicates the very likely artificial and unnatural origins of 2019-nCoV’s spike-protein genes when they are compared to the genomes of wild relatives. Instead of appearing similar to its wild relatives, the 2019-nCoV’s spike-protein genes look most similar to bio-engineered commercially available gene sequences that are designed to help with immunotherapy research.

– Additionally, another pre-print noted several very short genomic sequences in 2019-nCoV’s spike-protein gene that look far more similar to sequences found in HIV than to other coronaviruses – further bolstering support for the idea that the Wuhan Strain of this coronavirus was originally meant as part of a defensive immunotherapy research. However, this report does leave questions because it doesn’t disclose exactly which of HIV’s highly-variable regions the Wuhan Strain was compared against. And reporting from Thailand indicates that adding a cocktail of two different anti-HIV drugs to the typical treatment regime is the best defense against the Wuhan Strain, further indicating a close genetic homology with HIV.

– Giving further credence to the idea that the Wuhan Strain was bio-engineered is the existence of a patent application that looks to modulate a coronavirus’ spike-protein genes – the precise region altered by Zhengli Shi at UNC to make a hyper-virulent strain of coronavirus, and whose alteration and adaptation towards HIV would explain the Wuhan Strain’s unusually behavior as discussed above.



Given the above facts, either:

– A coronavirus spontaneously mutated and jumped to humans at a wet market or deep in some random bat cave which just so happened to be 20 miles from China’s only BSL-4 virology lab, a virus with an unusually slippery never-before-seen genome that’s evading zoological classification, and whose spike-protein region which allows it to enter host cells appears most like a bio-engineered commercial product, that somehow managed to infect its first three and roughly one-third of its initial victims despite them not being connected to this market, and then be so fined-tuned to humans that it’s gone on to create the single greatest public health crisis in Chinese history with approaching 100 million citizens locked-down or quarantined – also causing Mongolia to close its border with its largest trading partner for the first time in modern history.

– Or, Chinese scientists failed to follow correct sanitation protocols possibly while in a rush during their boisterous holiday season, something that had been anticipated since the opening of the BSL-4 lab and has happened at least four times previously, and accidentally released this bio-engineered Wuhan Strain – likely created by scientists researching immunotherapy regimes against bat coronaviruses, who’ve already demonstrated the ability to perform every step necessary to bio-engineer 2019-nCov – into their population, and now the world. As would be expected, this virus appears to have been bio-engineered at the spike-protein genes which was already done at UNC to make an extraordinarily virulent coronavirus. Chinese hesitancy to disclose the full story about what’s going on are because they want the scales to be even since they’re now facing a severe pandemic. No facts point against this conclusion.
SOURCE: https://harvardtothebighouse.com/202...rus-2019-ncov/
 
Old 02-04-2020, 07:02 PM   #8
DeuceRon
Hmm.. Almost sounds like a science fiction movie! I heard bat to snake to human at a market as the most likely scenario. We may never know.
It's just getting crazy now.

Good post Rich
 
Old 02-04-2020, 08:49 PM   #9
Rich Z
I think the weight of evidence is pointing to a manufacturer pathogen.

China acted WAY too concerned when it first showed up for just a common flu, which most people would have assumed they were dealing with. Then to quarantine off an entire city of 11 million people? They acted like they knew exactly what it was, and it was not good.

A weaponized pathogen launched by someone else against China? Doubtful. If the Chinese thought for an instant that this was the case, that would have been an act of war, and we would all be looking at mushroom clouds right now.

IMHO.
 
Old 02-08-2020, 02:09 AM   #10
Rich Z
This video about the 1918 spanish flu pandemic is well worth watching. However it is kind of terrifying, to be honest. Mistakes were made that hopefully will not be made again.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDY5COg2P2c
 

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