[psychphysic]

Can someone explain this it's probably not relevant but baffles me why it's never spoken about.

Let's say you were tasked with making a virus like COVID-19. How would you go about it?

I think the answers obvious you take a potential source virus like the coronaviruses in bats and expose humans. You could literally culture the virus and inject it into a human.

Let's put on tinfoil hats, and say you could run this experiment in a prison. If you're careful you could introduce it at a bloc and culture the result if an infection seems to spread.

After a few cycles you're likely to get something like COVID out the other end. This is the bioengineering we do for attenuated pathogen vaccines.

So what exactly do they mean that it'd be impossible to bioengineer COVID?

[willcipriano]

You form a group, call it something like Eco Health Alliance, and the give financial stakes like offering to put names on any future patents to members of the NIH and FDA making it in their best personal interest to approve your "not gain of function", but really gain of function research in Wuhan China, then sit back the let the Chinese figure out the particulars. If it escapes the lab, just order the evidence deleted and have one of the members of the project write a paper that will be taken at face value, uncritically, that it's impossible that the virus came from a lab and use that paper as a justification for censorship of anyone on social media who says otherwise, you can also claim they are all racist.

[machina_ex_deus]

Just make sure you have the world media prepared with an appropriate wargame to simulate what would happen if an unrelated coronavirus would start spreading. Give it a boring name like event 201. Since it's all out in the open it's clearly not a conspiracy.

Then have the world media present you as the Oracle of Delphi because you had such an accurate prediction.

[ethanbond]

Doesn’t take a genius to know live animal markets in urban centers are risky and that respiratory viruses can emerge + spread.

[baja_blast]

> Doesn’t take a genius to know live animal markets in urban centers are risky and that respiratory viruses can emerge + spread.

Yes and when that happens the virus is circulating in an animal population. And this results in multiple independent outbreaks overtime across the entire region the animals live in. For example MERS a few years earlier has independent outbreaks in multiple countries, same with SARS. And it is due to the fact the virus is circulating in an intermediate animal species that for both SARS and MERS they were able to identify the animal that infected patient zero within months.

For SARS2 we have not found any intermediate species with the virus, or has there been other spillovers. You'd think that if it was circulating in something like racoon dogs there would be an outbreak in LAOS or we would find the ancestor virus in racoon dogs in bordering countries of China.

[ethanbond]

Sure. Doesn’t point at all to a deliberate leak like what GP was alluding to (the existence of a similar war game scenario implying that “they knew” it was going to happen).

[wen_1k_btc]

Especially if there happens to be an Institute of Virology in close proximity

[peyton]

Don’t forget that you’re in China because EU and US regulations mandate an unaffiliated member of the public exercises active oversight of this research.

[nradov]

Some experimental gain-of-function work has been done by passaging viruses through transgenic animals such as mice that have been modified to have more human-like respiratory systems. So, it wouldn't strictly be necessary to use human test subjects.

[eurticket]

This must be what theyve been calling 'humanized mice.'

[ethanbond]

Who says it’d be impossible to bioengineer COVID? Never heard that claim.