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Comment by nexuist | Hacker News Reader

Scientifically speaking, what is the most probable estimate of how this emerged? From the news (and I know it's hyper sensationalized, so YMMV) it feels like this virus attacks the body in bizarre ways we have never seen from the coronavirus family before.

Were those earlier theories that it was made / escaped from a lab thoroughly debunked, or has there been more evidence since then? I know that WIV released a genome very close to SARS-CoV-2 (RatG-13) that supposedly came from the SARS-CoV-1 bat cave, is it highly likely that cave was the origin for SARS-CoV-2 as well?

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It’s not really that this virus is strange, it’s more that we’ve never really dug into the subtler effects of a lot of viruses that humans suffer infections from.

Herpes is another virus that when’re just now finding far removed links to, alzheimer's disease being one.

My take is because we developed vaccines for most seriously bad human infectious diseases we've just forgotten how deviously sneaky they can be.

If you read up on measles, mumps, polio, typhus, etc and look at the various complications, you'll realize there is nothing that special about covid19.

I was just reading about how Measles basically wipes out your acquired immune system's memory of everything its fought before and developed a resistance to, and more or less sets you back at square one. "Immune Amnesia" as its called sis pretty terrifying, as is the fact that Measles should absolutely be nowhere near first world countries right now, yet there's outbreaks in some of the richest zip codes in USA

Yeah does that. Also in a small number of patients causes a fatal neurological syndrome months to years after infection. Est 1:2500 to 1:10000 no one really knows.

Lot of these diseases have far milder courses in children than adults. Polio I think is also often asymptomatic. Mumps can cause sterility. Even consider after the Spanish Flu in 1918 there was a 10 year long epidemic of sleeping sickness. That might, might not be related.

Also now I'm in my 50's I have half a dozen friends who used to be healthy and vibrant who now appear to have some sort of chronic fatigue syndrome. Old age? Post viral syndrome? No idea but makes me nervous. And there are the two older people I knew who had lingering effects from polio who both died in middle age.

Look into Filovirus or Retrovirus.

Those make Corona look like the sniffles.

Why haven't we dug into them more deeply?

Because research prioritization and funding is comically, hilariously, pathetically, tragically broken? The research proposals which get funded are never the best ones given our current knowledge, much less the right ones for advancing our current knowledge.

(Source: see username. I've seen inside a few of the US academic funding sausage factories, and it's not pretty.)

I set out to read most if not all of the annual reports of small public companies, an awful lot of which are drug/biotech startups, and the odd thing I've noticed is that many of them, if not a majority, seem to be focusing on rare diseases, and not only that, but there's more overlap than you'd think (you'd think there would be a huge number of different rare diseases by definition).

I have a vague sense of the rationalizations of that, there's less competition, more chance of discovering something revolutionary, but...

I couldn't help thinking, where are the companies trying to change the world with moonshots that address common diseases? My kneejerk reaction is that incentives must be screwed up at some level of regulation.

It’s pretty clear this is from a lab. A number of well known scientists have said so, including the guy who got a Nobel prize for working on hiv has said so.

I heard the opposite. Sources?

Presumably this is the Nobel prize laureate: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier. (Personally, I find it unconvincing.)

Montagnier's "proof" is a questionable paper (that has not his name on it, though) that does "decomposing" on the RNA of the viruses with a mathematical transformation that has no biological sense, and by using "patterns" and "waves" "deduces" that there must be something from HIV.

I've read it. It's embarassing on how bad it is written, and the mental gymnastics it uses to "explain" things.

Im too busy to lay it all out, but at this point it’s not really a conspiracy theory. There are arguments it’s not from a lab.

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