> To make the discovery, Marc Eloit, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and his colleagues in France and Laos, took saliva, faeces and urine samples from 645 bats in caves in northern Laos. In three horseshoe (Rhinolophus) bat species, they found viruses that are each more than 95% identical to SARS-CoV-2, which they named BANAL-52, BANAL-103 and BANAL-236.
The most scary thing about this research is scientists creating a non-zero risk of another zoonotic virus transfer by getting up close and personal with live bats.
The benefits of the research (extremely minor) don't seem to justify the risk. We should just defund not only gain of function research but also trips to remote bat caves that have no particular benefit but a lot of downside risk.
> The benefits of the research (extremely minor) don't seem to justify the risk.
There's an entire industry that literally harvests tons of bat guano for fertilizer that's shipped around the world and preventative research carried out by a few scientists is where you draw the line?
Bats fill several important ecological niches globally and based on hendra virus outbreaks in Australia alone, it's clear that interacting with them in the wild is inevitable. Pretending they don't exist is only going to leave us unprepared and defenseless.
It is not equivalent tho is it? There’s a large difference between actually capturing a bat and extracting its saliva, and obtaining bat guano via an industrial process. We know that covid jumps from humans to cats and dogs simply by being in proximity with them - so actually capturing bats is going to be vastly more risky.
We know there is a huge downside risk. Dismissing that with non-equivalent whataboutism doesn’t change that. What is the benefit of this research that justifies a non-zero chance of sparking pandemic 2.0?
COVID jumps from humans to cats and dogs because the virus is well adapted to our lungs and throat, where it's easily aerosolized and expelled. Bats are a completely different organism with different adaptations.
Most viruses that live in bats get shed through their feces which animals and humans come into contact with quite frequently in the wild (again, just look at hendra outbreaks). Chances are, even more people are exposed to the droppings in industrial settings before the sterilization step. A few scientists handling bats with protective gear is a drop in the bucket to real world exposure and it's hardly whataboutism when it's about research meant to protect the whatabouts.
Sampling seems reasonable to me, especially now that we can spin up vaccines so quickly. In this new age of rapid mRNA vaccines it may make a lot of sense to catalog and sequence viruses before they jump the species barrier.
The genetic code is a redudant code, small difference in the code can still yield the same information.
There are 64 triplets, start is one and stop are 2 and there are 20 coded amino acids coded with the rest. So 22 out of 64.
There is a direct similarity and a similarity of information. For redudant code the former is useless. You can have a direct similarity of 30% and a similarity of information of 100%. (Considering a 1:3 redundant code at its worst, DNA performs much better)
There is also a third layer of redundancy, that is still under investigation, where certain sequences of triplets can be permuted and still yield the same result. The order of assembly is redundant for some big projects also, allowing for the code to be permuted in chunks as well.
So we are looking for the similarity of a redundant code that allows for permutations on two scales.
Without considering how the measure of similarity is taken, something being X percent identical means absolute BUNK.
It can not be a direct comparison of the code.
The SARS COV 2 virus has 3 times the code of HIV. You are also dealing with different sizes.
But one can cut everything between start and stop, translate it to amino acids and permute the result into oblivion.
Whatever is left can be compared by a huge variety of measures.
But when working with it, you just sequence your stuff, feed it into the commerical software and click compare.
The most scary thing about this research is scientists creating a non-zero risk of another zoonotic virus transfer by getting up close and personal with live bats.
The benefits of the research (extremely minor) don't seem to justify the risk. We should just defund not only gain of function research but also trips to remote bat caves that have no particular benefit but a lot of downside risk.