Covid19 Part XV - 15,251 in ROI (610 deaths) 2,645 in NI (194 deaths) (19/04) Read OP

ACitizenErased wrote: »

Sky News reporting that a vaccine could be ready as soon as September.
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-vaccine-could-be-ready-as-early-as-september-according-to-scientist-11971804

Gynoid wrote: »

Caveat, it is just too soon for this I reckon. There are odd things for sure but it is too freaky. You are not the only person I have heard/read speculating this way, but people generally are not that open to receive this kind of speculation right now. I think it is worth keeping an open mind, for what its worth, but it is also disconcerting to do so.

Main thing is, it does not really matter where it came from. It is here now and needs dealing with. It is like that old story- if an arrow pierces you there is no point in wondering where it was made or even who shot you. You just gotta treat the wound.

And then, it is already wrecking everyone's heads enough, in various ways, that we have this feck of a yoke invisibly threatening us. To pile on top of that the possibility of a leak from a lab where scientists mess around with really dangerous viruses - which does really happen, for both peaceful and nefarious purposes- is just to add too much to the head wrecking. And that is without even going near that it could be deliberate. That would be a dystopian narrative too far.

There will be time when people will hopefully look into it. Very tricky it being the tightly controlled country of China. Still if it was a movie I know where I would be doing the investigative journalism on this! But for now it is too indecipherable, murky, freaky. Let's just accept bat peed on pangolin. Maybe that is true. And concentrate on the arrow wound. In some years people might say/know other things. After all it only took Bob Dylan 57 years to be singing about JFK
Well, this is the way I am dealing with the fukkiness of this blasted virus.

OscarMIlde wrote: »

This part in bold combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system is describing lentiviral particles, which is a replication deficient system widely used in molecular biology. It is not entirely without risk, but is deemed safe enough to use in a bsl 2 lab. It's basically the means to manufacture a non pathogenic 'virus' that contains whatever genetic material you want. This 'virus' is then used to infect whatever cell you want with the genetic material you have incorporated into it. This genetic material is then integrated into the DNA of the cell where it stays. It is very useful in molecular biology as you can create cell lines that will make less or more of the proteins you are studying for as long as you want. With older techniques the genetic material is only there for a short while, maybe a week or two, so you are limited in what you can do.

The important thing from a safety viewpoint is that the material encoding the viral part is not integrated into the host cell and cannot be copied, so the virus is a one shot thing. Basically to make a long story short biologists made use of the fact that viruses are great at injecting genetic material into cells and incorporating them into host DNA to make use of the injecting and intergrating parts of viruses for research purposes, while removing the capacity of the virus to make copies of itself.

In other words journalists who know nothing about molecular biology are misinterpreting standard techniques as something ominous.