The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function Debate (2015)

Re:The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function ... by newacct583 on Sunday August 09, 2020 @04:32PM (#24102618)

Good grief. The contention here is that in 1977 the Russians were culturing samples of an existing strain of H1N1 that was known to researchers from an outbreak 26 years previous, but which had dropped out of circulation. And they oopsed, and it got out. That seems not totally improbable, and I'll believe the sequencing results.

I don't know how you get from there to (sigh) "Covid is human-engineered", at all. Can you explain how this is relevant at all, except in the way both hypotheses invoke evil foreign laboratories in totalitarian states?

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Re:The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function ... by svd4anything on Sunday August 09, 2020 @09:17PM (#24104516)

I’m curious if you have done any research at all into Covid’s origin? For me it would be very surprising to find someone who has now expressing your implied distain for those who are considering the possibility it originated in the Wuhan lab. This isn’t a political topic or at least shouldn’t be.

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Re:The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function ... by newacct583 on Sunday August 09, 2020 @10:54PM (#24105012)

No, sorry. You can't float a conspiracy theory, cite an unrelated point as "evidence", and then demand that I be a professional virologist before being allowed to tell you the argument is inapplicable.

This doesn't make sense because nothing the Russians did in 1977 (before the invention of PCR!) to culture an existing wild virus tells us anything about what the Chinese were doing in this virology lab.

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