"Jeffrey Sachs: " I'm pretty convinced COVID came out of U.S. lab biotechnology"

[butters]

Yes, we actually study viruses like this so that we can get to a vaccine quickly if it were to occur, because we understand it better. The deaths would've been much higher without the vaccines which were developed quickly because we understood the virus better. If the studies wouldnt have been done,.many more people would've died.

There is not sufficient evidence to say we created the virus. At worst, we brought the virus into an area which allowed it to jump to humans.

The thing about Covid and these other respiratory viruses is that we know what makes them dangerous.....we just don't know the conditions in which the dangerous but evolve. You can't study that without poking and prodding....working with the actual viruses.

and now, with the identifying of mutations across the body of the virus and not just the spike, SARS-COV2 is entering a different phase; this brings into question its newest impacts on the virus' abilities to stay with us and also this: "These accumulating mutations across the novel-coronavirus—on the spike and not on the spike—could start to mess with the polymerase chain-reaction tests we use to detect and track the virus."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/me...sedgntp&cvid=79c2eb7f5e0f401ea0305146b9b27eca

Geneticists noted that BA.5, currently the dominant subvariant, doesn’t just have mutations along its spike—it features changes all across its structure.

“With each major variant that has been identified, we are seeing mutations outside of [the] spike that we are trying to figure out,” Matthew Frieman, a University of Maryland School of Medicine immunologist and microbiologist and lead author of the new study, told The Daily Beast.

It’s possible the virus is accumulating non-spike mutations in an attempt to gain some advantage over our collective immunity as the COVID pandemic grinds toward its fourth year. These new mutations might not make the virus more infectious the way spike mutations do, but they could be associated with longer infections.

Take this as an urgent call for further study of non-spike mutations. “As more variants emerge, we will identify additional mutations outside of [the] spike that contribute significantly to viral replication, transmission and pathogenesis,” Frieman and his coauthors wrote.

Frieman said his goal is to scrutinize these non-spike mutations in order to “figure out what they do, how they do it [and] why they make the virus better at being a virus.” “Then we can use that information to make drugs,” including new antiviral therapies and vaccine formulations.