MicrobeTV
7 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2021
35:53 · 181K views · May 19, 2020
An episode of This Week in Virology in which Vincent Racaniello interviews Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance about virus spillover, bats and wildlife sampling. It was recorded in 2020 during the early pandemic.
HN uses it mainly as a source in COVID origin debates, quoting what Daszak says about manipulating coronaviruses in the lab.
7 comments from Hacker News
Sure. Part 1, from 2014-2019, for 3.7M: [LINK] Part 2, from 2019 until it was cancelled in April 2020: [LINK] Both led by Peter Daszak who is now also the lead WHO investigator. The same person who decided the WHO didn’t need to see the deleted virus databases, and the same person who co-ordinated the Lancet statement which minimised the lab leak theory early on (and let to it being considered a conspiracy theory). Here he is on This Week In Virology, describing this sort of work. It’s worth watching the whole thing, but gets most interesting from minute 27 onward: this video For example he confirms it’s easy to modify these viruses in the lab, and mentions collaborating with Ralph Baric at UNC. Baric invented Remdesivir (with Gilead) - the “cure” that turned out not to work very well. His lab was doing gain of function experiments before the ban. Shi Zhengli (“bat woman” from Wuhan) worked very closely with Baric and Daszak.
December 9, 2019 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: this video more info: [LINK]
Ok then. Let's watch TWiV 615, where they interview Peter Daszak, the virologist which headed the recent WHO origin seeking mission in China. Listen to him talk about how easy is to modify coronaviruses in labs and how they are actually doing this, mixing and matching viruses at 29:50: > Well, coronaviruses are pretty good... you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot what happens in a coronavirus. Zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can bulid a protein, and we work 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. this video
>Sars-Cov-2 looks like pretty much what it is: a zoonotic virus that "doesn't know what's going on" It was actually remarkably stable in the early days suggesting it was used to reproducing in human cells. Or so Professor Petrovsky says [LINK] As how that could have happened lab wise here's Daszak saying they routinely infect human cells with coronavirus in the lab this video Or maybe it was in humans a bit before it took off. I see Daszak's kind of changed his tune a bit these days to not mention anything like that lab stuff.
Liaison for the Wuhan Virology Institute and later WHO Investigator into his own lab, in his own words, 1 year pre Covid outbreak : this video But honestly, it does not matter. What matters is that there is a whole culture who allows shutting down narratives, as it pleases for whatever failed reflexes control it. That culture has to go. Right, Left and center.