Maybe I’m too cynical, but that’s what I got from it. The video way overstates the ease of DIY viral research and understates how tightly regulated it already is.
Is that known? I haven’t kept up but it was never my impression.
There were specific material situations which allowed this pwrticular pathogen to spread. Having to do with patterns of people living and moving, all highly influence by economics. Likely such pathogens pop into existence all the time but the stars do not align and they don’t come to attention.
Ebola was a novel virus in the 70s and it is highly infectious but it was fairly limited in scope.
HIV on the other hand was new about 100 years ago, with infectiousness close to zero. It is basically a miracle to seroconvert. But look at its impact. Once again, everything to do with material conditions.
Trade routes are central to all 4 of the above viruses iirc.
Neither Ebola nor HIV spread through aerosolized particles, which is far and away the main transmission vector of COVID-19. They both only spread through direct bodily contact, so they were nowhere near as infectious.
Again, I don’t deny material conditions play a part, and also that if all humans just stood still it wouldn’t have spread. But it should be self-evident that the properties of COVID-19 were a key part of its success in spreading, and that those properties are encoded by such little information is all I was marvelling at.
Unfortunately, you are completely incorrect about ebola. It was a sheer miracle of fate Reston virus did not wipe America off the face of the earth in the 1990s. It is asymptomatic in humans - so far.
It would take minimal effort to either modify another virus in the ebola family to take on the airborne properties of Reston virus, or change the virulence in humans. I would not be surprised at all if that had already been done somewhere.
Huh? How am I “completely incorrect about Ebola”? It seems consensus that it spreads through direct contact. Is that not true?
Ebola then spreads through human-to-human transmission via direct contact
If you’re arguing the Reston “ebolavirus” (which is not synonymous with “Ebola” as we know it, just as COVID-19 is a specific member of a large group of ‘coronavirus’) is more transmissive because it can be airborne, and if it was pathogenic to humans it’d be very dangerous. Then, like, we are saying the same thing.
It is basically a miracle to seroconvert
Could you explain this to a philistine such as myself?
