artis said:
From what I read I believe that fetal cells are used because they are "new" and haven't divided yet beyond the usable limit and are best suited for growing human infecting viruses?
The thing I don't know is how many are needed to produce such a vast amount of vaccines given the virus has to be grown constantly otherwise it would run out of virus?
From this news report, it seems the cells are used simply because they are by now standard in research, and their properties well understood. In fact, the HEK293 cells are so standard that I have read about them in countless research papers since I was an undergraduate more than 20 years ago (at which time they were already standard), and although I should have realized it (because HEK stands for "human embryonic kidney"), I didn't know till this very moment that they were from an aborted fetus.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08...accine-ethical-religious-foetal-cell/12592800
Off topic, but there are completely different ethical problems (in part related to racial discrimination) with another standard cell line HeLa.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02494-z
Henrietta Lacks: science must right a historical wrong
artis said:
I believe that it is simply because not all people have the time and capacity to process all this information to arrive at some generally sound conclusions. Like I myself had the time and willingness to think about all of this and from what it seems I am almost certain the Chinese screwed up their bat research gain of function stuff in Wuhan and the virus although having a natural origin is "spiced up" and so was able to take off from day one like a jet from a runway (unlike the previous SARS and MERS) and pretty much any other virus but that doesn't make me go crazy and refuse all medicine alltogether. Once the harm is done we need to find ways out of this. One way , especially for those older and weaker is the vaccine.
SARS-CoV-2 could not have arisen from anything resembling the known so-called "gain-of-function" (using the term in a loose and broad sense, not in the technical sense relevant for the NIH funding pause) work at the institute (which has been published). That research used viruses that have only 80% similarity to SARS-CoV-2. It is conceivable that they had other gain-of-function research going on, but they have said that all their "live" viruses (a pre-requisite for gain-of-function) have only about 80% similarity to SARS-CoV-2. Although it cannot be ruled out that they are lying, what they say makes sense. Their gain-of-function experiments are based on Sars-1, which has only about 80% similarity to SARS-CoV-2.
Christian Drosten, a German virologist, has explained it with an analogy.
https://www.republik.ch/2021/06/05/herr-drosten-woher-kam-dieses-virus: "Let me explain it with a picture: To check, for example, whether adjustments make the virus more contagious, I would take an existing system, incorporate the change and then compare it with the old system. If I want to know whether a new car radio improves the sound, I take an existing car and replace the radio there. Then I compare. I'm not building a completely new car for it. But that's exactly how it was with Sars-2: The whole car is different."
artis said:
I don't know whether this makes me part of the conspiracy world but in this case I am quite alarmed and angry that if the lab theory is correct it seems China and it's dangerous regime will get away with it. Given the circumstances the least they should have done was to allow a complete and thorough access to both Wuhan (lab , etc) and elsewhere. Although I guess chasing a virus origin is like chasing the wind somewhat. Unless someone comes forward and admits (if there is anything to admit) we will never know. Anyway I am going off topic here so pardon me
Shi Zhengli, the relevant Principal Investigator at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has reported the results of active investigations into the possibility of a lab leak, and these constitute evidence against a leak (including accidental release of a natural virus from a sample they collected), meaning a lab leak is extremely unlikely.
1) All of her staff had blood drawn in March 2020. These blood samples were tested for antibodies, and the results were negative for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2.
2) A search through all of her bat samples for sequences turned up no sequence closer than RaTG13, which at 96% similarity is about 30 years or more in natural evolution from SARS-CoV-2, and even if hastened by lab-evolution is extremely unlikely to be a source of SARS-CoV-2. They have published the full sequence of RaTG13. Their "live" viruses (the most likely sources of any leaks) have only about 80% similarity to SARS-CoV-2.
The above 2 results mean a lab leak is extremely unlikely. They do not rule it out only because no tests are 100%. But they do mean that assigning a considerably higher plausibility to the lab leak theory than the WHO report must be based on unfounded accusations that Shi Zhengli and her colleagues are lying.
However, if you take the trouble to read her https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli%20Q&A.pdf, I believe you will find her remarks to be in the character of a careful and honest scientist. Furthermore, the lab has openly published its work for many years. Thus its work has not been any secret. In fact, RaTG13, the virus they have that is closest to SARS-CoV-2 and whose full sequence they published in 2020, had already been previously published as a partial sequence (quite the opposite of doing anything in secret).
I also recommend reading the
WHO report, which has additional details. For example, the interview did not state when the antibody testing was carried out. That detail is in the Annex to the WHO report. Note also that the WHO report did not rule out a lab leak, and said that it would be worth investigating further if new evidence came to light.
