Covid Vaccine

[YoDoug]

Everyone that calls people science deniers because they are concerned about the health risks and freedom loss of forcing people to get vaccinated. I say to you, the science clearly shows that every virus or infectious disease that humans have had to endure was originally found in wildlife. When we began domesticating and farming animals for food these viruses mutated to humans. Medical anthropologists have traced the roots of nearly every disease from flu viruses to measles, to small pox, etc. They all lead back to animal origins before transferring to humans after we began domesticating/farming these animals. The pandemic of 1918 has been sequenced to match poultry viruses. H1N1 from pig farming. SARS from Civet coffee. If you are still buying, consuming, and supporting the industries that are creating and growing the risk of the next major pandemic, but you are pointing your finger at unvaccinated people, isn't that a bit hypocritical? Shouldn't we be just as concerned about reducing the risk of the next pandemic? Shouldn't we follow the science?

[HTM01]

Nope, don't fall for totalitarian dictators being able to restrict your freedom to decide your medical needs, based on a 5% chance you could get a virus after being vaccinated. It won't end with Covid. Every year or two when big pharma needs to line their pockets and politicians need campaign donations from big pharma there will be a new vaccine that "must" be had by all, for our safety.

i guess you don't wear a seat belt and you must disable your air bags

[Smit]

I'm amazed at the evolution of forum member's attitudes on covid. Some on either end of the spectrum who haven't budged an iota and a lot of gradual movement towards accepting the current consensus that covid is a real thing and that getting the vaccine is a good thing.

I think a bunch of people were stunned when the election was over and Covid was still there.

One of my Republican friends was telling me how Covid was going to just go away after the election, then 3 weeks later (after the election) his father died of Covid complications.

[YoDoug]

Nope, don't fall for totalitarian dictators being able to restrict your freedom to decide your medical needs, based on a 5% chance you could get a virus after being vaccinated. It won't end with Covid. Every year or two when big pharma needs to line their pockets and politicians need campaign donations from big pharma there will be a new vaccine that "must" be had by all, for our safety.

i guess you don't wear a seat belt and you must disable your air bags

Not at all, I wear my seat belt and have a car with all the air bags.

As for my personal health protection I have changed my diet/exercise/lifestyle to be the healthiest I can be. I have proactively made my immune system stronger so that Viruses like Covid-19, which statistically only kills people with underlying chronic illness, are not a big risk to me.

[Matthew Hajicek]

The numbers show elderly, overweight, and other chronic diseases are factors in the majority of Covid deaths.

I don't know about the other factors, but around 35% of American adults are obese.  Should they be disregarded?

[YoDoug]

[quote="Matthew Hajicek" post_id=11091 time=1621010961 user_id=57]

The numbers show elderly, overweight, and other chronic diseases are factors in the majority of Covid deaths.

I don't know about the other factors, but around 35% of American adults are obese.  Should they be disregarded?
[/quote]

Not at all. That's why an unprecedented amount of money and resources were put towards creating a vaccine as fast as possible. Those 35% of people now have a vaccine that is claiming 95%+ protection, should they choose to get it.

What about my concerns? I am being told that I am being selfish and putting people at risk by not wanting to get vaccinated. Science says that factory farming is a huge risk for creating pandemics. If the 35% of obese people can tell me I need to take a vaccine to keep them safe, shouldn't I be able to tell them they need to stop consuming animal products for my safety against future pandemics?

[Matthew Hajicek]

What about my concerns? I am being told that I am being selfish and putting people at risk by not wanting to get vaccinated. Science says that factory farming is a huge risk for creating pandemics. If the 35% of obese people can tell me I need to take a vaccine to keep them safe, shouldn't I be able to tell them they need to stop consuming animal products for my safety against future pandemics?

I think that's a legitimate concern.  The problem there is regulatory capture, bribery, and consolidation; capitalism at it's finest.

[YoDoug]

[quote="Matthew Hajicek" post_id=11100 time=1621017277 user_id=57]

What about my concerns? I am being told that I am being selfish and putting people at risk by not wanting to get vaccinated. Science says that factory farming is a huge risk for creating pandemics. If the 35% of obese people can tell me I need to take a vaccine to keep them safe, shouldn't I be able to tell them they need to stop consuming animal products for my safety against future pandemics?

I think that's a legitimate concern.  The problem there is regulatory capture, bribery, and consolidation; capitalism at it's finest.
[/quote]

I'll agree but doesn't the negatives of capitalism also affect big pharma and the FDA as well? There are .1%'s out there that stand to make millions, if not billions, from these vaccines. They have ulterior motives as well.

[CNCAppsJames]

...If the 35% of obese people can tell me I need to take a vaccine to keep them safe, shouldn't I be able to tell them they need to stop consuming animal products for my safety against future pandemics?

What about past pandemics that were FAR more deadly than Miss 'Rona that ocurred during times where the percentage of "animal products" consumed was much lower than today?

Consumption of "animal products" is NOT "the" problem. Is it "a" problem... Possibly.

Poor snack choices, quantity of food consumed, processed food, quality of food consumed are all real problems especially in the US.

[YoDoug]

...If the 35% of obese people can tell me I need to take a vaccine to keep them safe, shouldn't I be able to tell them they need to stop consuming animal products for my safety against future pandemics?

What about past pandemics that were FAR more deadly than Miss 'Rona that ocurred during times where the percentage of "animal products" consumed was much lower than today?

Consumption of "animal products" is NOT "the" problem. Is it "a" problem... Possibly.

Poor snack choices, quantity of food consumed, processed food, quality of food consumed are all real problems especially in the US.

Aids has killed 35 million people over the last 40 years. It has been traced back to migrant workers in the jungle consuming monkeys that were infected with a version of aids. I would guess that the number of people in the world that consume monkey is probably less than .0001%, yet all it took was a group of people eating infected monkeys and 35 million people are dead from it. SARS came from Civet coffee. Again a rare delicacy. While less animal consumption may reduce the risk, as long as it is still done the risk is there. The real risk is that you get a SARS/Aids/Ebola mortality in a easily transferred virus like Covid.  

As far as eating better, I don't think we agree on what "better" is. The science shows that the higher the meat and dairy consumption, the higher the all cause mortality is. I could post links to a dozen studies that show definitive cause/effect relations of meat and dairy consumption to cancer, heart disease, etc. And when I say studies, I mean long term, large scale studies, Versus cherry picked, meat and dairy industry studies structured to produce desired results. However you have previously shown that you are not interested in hearing that truth.

[Matthew Hajicek]

I'll agree but doesn't the negatives of capitalism also affect big pharma and the FDA as well? There are .1%'s out there that stand to make millions, if not billions, from these vaccines. They have ulterior motives as well.

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/599405054469865492/838540789784903720/FB_IMG_1619994092498.jpg?width=786&height=910">

[Dan_AKA_ROY23]

Everyone that calls people science deniers because they are concerned about the health risks and freedom loss of forcing people to get vaccinated. I say to you, the science clearly shows that every virus or infectious disease that humans have had to endure was originally found in wildlife. When we began domesticating and farming animals for food these viruses mutated to humans. Medical anthropologists have traced the roots of nearly every disease from flu viruses to measles, to small pox, etc. They all lead back to animal origins before transferring to humans after we began domesticating/farming these animals. The pandemic of 1918 has been sequenced to match poultry viruses. H1N1 from pig farming. SARS from Civet coffee. If you are still buying, consuming, and supporting the industries that are creating and growing the risk of the next major pandemic, but you are pointing your finger at unvaccinated people, isn't that a bit hypocritical? Shouldn't we be just as concerned about reducing the risk of the next pandemic? Shouldn't we follow the science?

True. Good points. Have you read the article (LONG but really good) linked in the Origins of COVID-19 thread?

It talks about viral transmissions from specie to specie. It's been 9 months and counting and they are no where close to finding that link with the current COVID-19 virus. The article explains this is detail (it explains everything in detail). The evidences strongly point to it escaping from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The specie links you mentioned above for all those other viruses show it was connected with wildlife transmission to humans. All proven without a doubt.

No such link has yet been established with COVID. And as more time passes it becomes harder and harder to find one.

[Dan_AKA_ROY23]

Parts of the article I'll paste here, Doug...

Doubts about natural emergence

Natural emergence was the media's preferred theory until around February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization commission to China. The commission's composition and access were heavily controlled by the Chinese authorities. Its members, who included the ubiquitous Dr. Daszak, kept asserting before, during and after their visit that lab escape was extremely unlikely. But this was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese authorities may have been hoping for. What became clear was that the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory.

This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic's outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 pandemic began, and a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019. Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year.

And as long as that remains the case, it's logical to pay serious attention to the alternative conjecture, that SARS2 escaped from a lab.

Why would anyone want to create a novel virus capable of causing a pandemic? Ever since virologists gained the tools for manipulating a virus's genes, they have argued they could get ahead of a potential pandemic by exploring how close a given animal virus might be to making the jump to humans. And that justified lab experiments in enhancing the ability of dangerous animal viruses to infect people, virologists asserted.

With this rationale, they have recreated the 1918 flu virus, shown how the almost extinct polio virus can be synthesized from its published DNA sequence, and introduced a smallpox gene into a related virus.

These enhancements of viral capabilities are known blandly as gain-of-function experiments. With coronaviruses, there was particular interest in the spike proteins, which jut out all around the spherical surface of the virus and pretty much determine which species of animal it will target. In 2000 Dutch researchers, for instance, earned the gratitude of rodents everywhere by genetically engineering the spike protein of a mouse coronavirus so that it would attack only cats.

Virologists started studying bat coronaviruses in earnest after these turned out to be the source of both the SARS1 and MERS epidemics. In particular, researchers wanted to understand what changes needed to occur in a bat virus's spike proteins before it could infect people.

Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led by China's leading expert on bat viruses, Dr. Shi Zheng-li or "Bat Lady", mounted frequent expeditions to the bat-infested caves of Yunnan in southern China and collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses.

Dr. Shi then teamed up with Ralph S. Baric, an eminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina. Their work focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as to "examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs [coronaviruses]." In pursuit of this aim, in November 2015 they created a novel virus by taking the backbone of the SARS1 virus and replacing its spike protein with one from a bat virus (known as SHC014-CoV). This manufactured virus was able to infect the cells of the human airway, at least when tested against a lab culture of such cells.

The SHC014-CoV/SARS1 virus is known as a chimera because its genome contains genetic material from two strains of virus. If the SARS2 virus were to have been cooked up in Dr. Shi's lab, then its direct prototype would have been the SHC014-CoV/SARS1 chimera, the potential danger of which concerned many observers and prompted intense discussion.

"If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory," said Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

Dr. Baric and Dr. Shi referred to the obvious risks in their paper but argued they should be weighed against the benefit of foreshadowing future spillovers. Scientific review panels, they wrote, "may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue." Given various restrictions being placed on gain-of function (GOF) research, matters had arrived in their view at "a crossroads of GOF research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens. In developing policies moving forward, it is important to consider the value of the data generated by these studies and whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation versus the inherent risks involved."

That statement was made in 2015. From the hindsight of 2021, one can say that the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the SARS2 epidemic was zero. The risk was catastrophic, if indeed the SARS2 virus was generated in a gain-of-function experiment.

[Dan_AKA_ROY23]

Another part of the article below... (yes, kinda long)

Comparing the Rival Scenarios of SARS2 Origin

The evidence above adds up to a serious case that the SARS2 virus could have been created in a lab, from which it then escaped. But the case, however substantial, falls short of proof. Proof would consist of evidence from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or related labs in Wuhan, that SARS2 or a predecessor virus was under development there. For lack of access to such records, another approach is to take certain salient facts about the SARS2 virus and ask how well each is explained by the two rival scenarios of origin, those of natural emergence and lab escape. Here are four tests of the two hypotheses. A couple have some technical detail, but these are among the most persuasive for those who may care to follow the argument.

1) The place of origin.

Start with geography. The two closest known relatives of the SARS2 virus were collected from bats living in caves in Yunnan, a province of southern China. If the SARS2 virus had first infected people living around the Yunnan caves, that would strongly support the idea that the virus had spilled over to people naturally. But this isn't what happened. The pandemic broke out 1,500 kilometers away, in Wuhan.

Beta-coronaviruses, the family of bat viruses to which SARS2 belongs, infect the horseshoe bat Rhinolophus affinis, which ranges across southern China. The bats' range is 50 kilometers, so it's unlikely that any made it to Wuhan. In any case, the first cases of the Covid-19 pandemic probably occurred in September, when temperatures in Hubei province are already cold enough to send bats into hibernation.

What if the bat viruses infected some intermediate host first? You would need a longstanding population of bats in frequent proximity with an intermediate host, which in turn must often cross paths with people. All these exchanges of virus must take place somewhere outside Wuhan, a busy metropolis which so far as is known is not a natural habitat of Rhinolophus bat colonies. The infected person (or animal) carrying this highly transmissible virus must have traveled to Wuhan without infecting anyone else. No one in his or her family got sick. If the person jumped on a train to Wuhan, no fellow passengers fell ill.

It's a stretch, in other words, to get the pandemic to break out naturally outside Wuhan and then, without leaving any trace, to make its first appearance there.

For the lab escape scenario, a Wuhan origin for the virus is a no-brainer. Wuhan is home to China's leading center of coronavirus research where, as noted above, researchers were genetically engineering bat coronaviruses to attack human cells. They were doing so under the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 lab. If a virus with the unexpected infectiousness of SARS2 had been generated there, its escape would be no surprise.

2) Natural history and evolution

The initial location of the pandemic is a small part of a larger problem, that of its natural history. Viruses don't just make one time jumps from one species to another. The coronavirus spike protein, adapted to attack bat cells, needs repeated jumps to another species, most of which fail, before it gains a lucky mutation. Mutation — a change in one of its RNA units — causes a different amino acid unit to be incorporated into its spike protein and makes the spike protein better able to attack the cells of some other species.

Through several more such mutation-driven adjustments, the virus adapts to its new host, say some animal with which bats are in frequent contact. The whole process then resumes as the virus moves from this intermediate host to people.

In the case of SARS1, researchers have documented the successive changes in its spike protein as the virus evolved step by step into a dangerous pathogen. After it had gotten from bats into civets, there were six further changes in its spike protein before it became a mild pathogen in people. After a further 14 changes, the virus was much better adapted to humans, and with a further 4 the epidemic took off.

But when you look for the fingerprints of a similar transition in SARS2, a strange surprise awaits. The virus has changed hardly at all, at least until recently. From its very first appearance, it was well adapted to human cells. Researchers led by Alina Chan of the Broad Institute compared SARS2 with late stage SARS1, which by then was well adapted to human cells, and found that the two viruses were similarly well adapted. "By the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV," they wrote.

Even those who think lab origin unlikely agree that SARS2 genomes are remarkably uniform. Dr. Baric writes that "early strains identified in Wuhan, China, showed limited genetic diversity, which suggests that the virus may have been introduced from a single source."

A single source would of course be compatible with lab escape, less so with the massive variation and selection which is evolution's hallmark way of doing business.

The uniform structure of SARS2 genomes gives no hint of any passage through an intermediate animal host, and no such host has been identified in nature.

Proponents of natural emergence suggest that SARS2 incubated in a yet-to-be found human population before gaining its special properties. Or that it jumped to a host animal outside China.

All these conjectures are possible, but strained. Proponents of lab leak have a simpler explanation. SARS2 was adapted to human cells from the start because it was grown in humanized mice or in lab cultures of human cells, just as described in Dr. Daszak's grant proposal. Its genome shows little diversity because the hallmark of lab cultures is uniformity.

Proponents of laboratory escape joke that of course the SARS2 virus infected an intermediary host species before spreading to people, and that they have identified it — a humanized mouse from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

3) The furin cleavage site.

The furin cleavage site is a minute part of the virus's anatomy but one that exerts great influence on its infectivity. It sits in the middle of the SARS2 spike protein. It also lies at the heart of the puzzle of where the virus came from.

The spike protein has two sub-units with different roles. The first, called S1, recognizes the virus's target, a protein called angiotensin converting enzyme-2 (or ACE2) which studs the surface of cells lining the human airways. The second, S2, helps the virus, once anchored to the cell, to fuse with the cell's membrane. After the virus's outer membrane has coalesced with that of the stricken cell, the viral genome is injected into the cell, hijacks its protein-making machinery and forces it to generate new viruses.

But this invasion cannot begin until the S1 and S2 subunits have been cut apart. And there, right at the S1/S2 junction, is the furin cleavage site that ensures the spike protein will be cleaved in exactly the right place.

The virus, a model of economic design, does not carry its own cleaver. It relies on the cell to do the cleaving for it. Human cells have a protein cutting tool on their surface known as furin. Furin will cut any protein chain that carries its signature target cutting site. This is the sequence of amino acid units proline-arginine-arginine-alanine, or PRRA in the code that refers to each amino acid by a letter of the alphabet. PRRA is the amino acid sequence at the core of SARS2's furin cleavage site.

Viruses have all kinds of clever tricks, so why does the furin cleavage site stand out? Because of all known SARS-related beta-coronaviruses, only SARS2 possesses a furin cleavage site. All the other viruses have their S2 unit cleaved at a different site and by a different mechanism.

How then did SARS2 acquire its furin cleavage site? Either the site evolved naturally, or it was inserted by researchers at the S1/S2 junction in a gain-of-function experiment.

Consider natural origin first. Two ways viruses evolve are by mutation and by recombination. Mutation is the process of random change in DNA (or RNA for coronaviruses) that usually results in one amino acid in a protein chain being switched for another. Many of these changes harm the virus but natural selection retains the few that do something useful. Mutation is the process by which the SARS1 spike protein gradually switched its preferred target cells from those of bats to civets, and then to humans.

Mutation seems a less likely way for SARS2's furin cleavage site to be generated, even though it can't completely be ruled out. The site's four amino acid units are all together, and all at just the right place in the S1/S2 junction. Mutation is a random process triggered by copying errors (when new viral genomes are being generated) or by chemical decay of genomic units. So it typically affects single amino acids at different spots in a protein chain. A string of amino acids like that of the furin cleavage site is much more likely to be acquired all together through a quite different process known as recombination.

Recombination is an inadvertent swapping of genomic material that occurs when two viruses happen to invade the same cell, and their progeny are assembled with bits and pieces of RNA belonging to the other. Beta-coronaviruses will only combine with other beta-coronaviruses but can acquire, by recombination, almost any genetic element present in the collective genomic pool. What they cannot acquire is an element the pool does not possess. And no known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, the class to which SARS2 belongs, possesses a furin cleavage site.

Proponents of natural emergence say SARS2 could have picked up the site from some as yet unknown beta-coronavirus. But bat SARS-related beta-coronaviruses evidently don't need a furin cleavage site to infect bat cells, so there's no great likelihood that any in fact possesses one, and indeed none has been found so far.

The proponents' next argument is that SARS2 acquired its furin cleavage site from people. A predecessor of SARS2 could have been circulating in the human population for months or years until at some point it acquired a furin cleavage site from human cells. It would then have been ready to break out as a pandemic.

If this is what happened, there should be traces in hospital surveillance records of the people infected by the slowly evolving virus. But none has so far come to light. According to the WHO report on the origins of the virus, the sentinel hospitals in Hubei province, home of Wuhan, routinely monitor influenza-like illnesses and "no evidence to suggest substantial SARSCoV-2 transmission in the months preceding the outbreak in December was observed."

So it's hard to explain how the SARS2 virus picked up its furin cleavage site naturally, whether by mutation or recombination.

That leaves a gain-of-function experiment. For those who think SARS2 may have escaped from a lab, explaining the furin cleavage site is no problem at all. "Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory," writes Dr. Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2. "At least eleven gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology."

4) A Question of Codons

There's another aspect of the furin cleavage site that narrows the path for a natural emergence origin even further.

As everyone knows (or may at least recall from high school), the genetic code uses three units of DNA to specify each amino acid unit of a protein chain. When read in groups of 3, the 4 different kinds of DNA unit can specify 4 x 4 x 4 or 64 different triplets, or codons as they are called. Since there are only 20 kinds of amino acid, there are more than enough codons to go around, allowing some amino acids to be specified by more than one codon. The amino acid arginine, for instance, can be designated by any of the six codons CGU, CGC, CGA, CGG, AGA or AGG, where A, U, G and C stand for the four different kinds of unit in RNA.

Here's where it gets interesting. Different organisms have different codon preferences. Human cells like to designate arginine with the codons CGT, CGC or CGG. But CGG is coronavirus's least popular codon for arginine. Keep that in mind when looking at how the amino acids in the furin cleavage site are encoded in the SARS2 genome.

Now the functional reason why SARS2 has a furin cleavage site, and its cousin viruses don't, can be seen by lining up (in a computer) the string of nearly 30,000 nucleotides in its genome with those of its cousin coronaviruses, of which the closest so far known is one called RaTG13. Compared with RaTG13, SARS2 has a 12-nucleotide insert right at the S1/S2 junction. The insert is the sequence T-CCT-CGG-CGG-GC. The CCT codes for proline, the two CGG's for two arginines, and the GC is the beginning of a GCA codon that codes for alanine.

There are several curious features about this insert but the oddest is that of the two side-by-side CGG codons. Only 5% of SARS2's arginine codons are CGG, and the double codon CGG-CGG has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus. So how did SARS2 acquire a pair of arginine codons that are favored by human cells but not by coronaviruses?

Proponents of natural emergence have an up-hill task to explain all the features of SARS2's furin cleavage site. They have to postulate a recombination event at a site on the virus's genome where recombinations are rare, and the insertion of a 12-nucleotide sequence with a double arginine codon unknown in the beta-coronavirus repertoire, at the only site in the genome that would significantly expand the virus's infectivity.

"Yes, but your wording makes this sound unlikely — viruses are specialists at unusual events," is the riposte of David L. Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow who regards lab escape as a conspiracy theory. "Recombination is naturally very, very frequent in these viruses, there are recombination breakpoints in the spike protein and these codons appear unusual exactly because we've not sampled enough."

Dr. Robertson is correct that evolution is always producing results that may seem unlikely but in fact are not. Viruses can generate untold numbers of variants but we see only the one-in-a-billion that natural selection picks for survival. But this argument could be pushed too far. For instance any result of a gain-of-function experiment could be explained as one that evolution would have arrived at in time. And the numbers game can be played the other way. For the furin cleavage site to arise naturally in SARS2, a chain of events has to happen, each of which is quite unlikely for the reasons given above. A long chain with several improbable steps is unlikely to ever be completed.

For the lab escape scenario, the double CGG codon is no surprise. The human-preferred codon is routinely used in labs. So anyone who wanted to insert a furin cleavage site into the virus's genome would synthesize the PRRA-making sequence in the lab and would be likely to use CGG codons to do so.

"When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus," said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. "These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2," he said.

[YoDoug]

Everyone that calls people science deniers because they are concerned about the health risks and freedom loss of forcing people to get vaccinated. I say to you, the science clearly shows that every virus or infectious disease that humans have had to endure was originally found in wildlife. When we began domesticating and farming animals for food these viruses mutated to humans. Medical anthropologists have traced the roots of nearly every disease from flu viruses to measles, to small pox, etc. They all lead back to animal origins before transferring to humans after we began domesticating/farming these animals. The pandemic of 1918 has been sequenced to match poultry viruses. H1N1 from pig farming. SARS from Civet coffee. If you are still buying, consuming, and supporting the industries that are creating and growing the risk of the next major pandemic, but you are pointing your finger at unvaccinated people, isn't that a bit hypocritical? Shouldn't we be just as concerned about reducing the risk of the next pandemic? Shouldn't we follow the science?

True. Good points. Have you read the article (LONG but really good) linked in the Origins of COVID-19 thread?

It talks about viral transmissions from specie to specie. It's been 9 months and counting and they are no where close to finding that link with the current COVID-19 virus. The article explains this is detail (it explains everything in detail). The evidences strongly point to it escaping from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The specie links you mentioned above for all those other viruses show it was connected with wildlife transmission to humans. All proven without a doubt.

No such link has yet been established with COVID. And as more time passes it becomes harder and harder to find one.

I read the article, and I agree. I think that Covid-19 was engineered in a lab. I'll go even further to say that I believe the Chinese engineered it and let it loose to take out Trump's chances of reelection. Before Covid, China was in trouble. Their economy was suffering and heading towards doom. Trump's America first, Tax cuts, tariffs, and other measures had money and business heading back to America. He was also willing to call them out on the world stage for their ways. They needed him gone. I don't think they colluded with the Dems. I think they just understand the Dems well enough to put the pandemic in play and watch the Dems predictively use it for a massive election steal and power grab.

That however, doesn't mean that we aren't putting ourselves at risk for a bigger/worse pandemic by continuing to consume animal products.