| > I think you may be approaching the discussion more from the standpoint of where to assign blame specifically regarding COVID-19 No, I'm approaching it from the standpoint of how to not have a pandemic like this happen again. > I'm more interested in the benefits from infectious clone technology and infection experiments in general What are the benefits? What benefits have we gained specifically from this research, that we wouldn't have gained without it? > why you say human testing is a requirement, when almost all work is done in cell & animal models Because we can't reliably predict what a virus will do to humans unless humans have been infected with it. Cell and animal models are nice, but they aren't the same as actual human patients. > Usually human tests are restricted to treatments Exactly. And that's for good reasons. And my point is that testing treatments isn't the same as testing the viruses themselves. The Wuhan lab wasn't testing treatments, they were testing viruses. So how treatments are tested, and how confident we feel that they are safe based on cell and animal testing, is irrelevant to work with viruses themselves. > and only those that have already gone through cell and animal testing to ensure as much safety as possible. And even then we find effects in humans that we didn't expect. And that's for treatments, where we have more control over the variables than we do with viruses themselves. > The ones that are notable enough to make it into reports kind of do. "Kind of" isn't the same thing. I'm not talking about how infective they got in the first year. I'm talking about the way SARS-CoV-2 was in the very first human patients we have records of, back in late 2019. The strains isolated from that time were already highly infective. Initial strains of previous viruses were not; they increased in infectivity as they spread in humans and evolved to adapt. That's what we expect to happen for a virus that naturally jumps to humans from some other source. But when we see a virus that is already highly infective in the first human cases we know of, that's an indication that it did not naturally jump to humans, but was specifically engineered in a lab to be more infective to humans. > There were also several leaks of the 2002 SARS virus that could easily have gone the same way COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) did. How do we know they could have? |