Skeptic Ginger
Nasty Woman
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2005
- Messages
- 96,619
Re #1: BS. You know so little about infectious disease. There were traces of HIV going back before the first recognized cases. Blood specimens stored years before.1) For most zoonotic outbreaks there is no clear trail. Look at mpox. No clear trail from source to human pandemic. Look at HIV no clear trail from primate to human. Look at TB no clear trail into the human populations e.g. South America. What traces are you suggesting should exist? Antibodies?
2) The virus was no more ready to infect humans than many other mammalian species like mink, deer etc.
3) How do we know no precursor virus circulated? No one was looking., if the precursor virus didn't cause deaths in humans no one would have looked for it.
Again you just claim that absence of evidence is evidence in itself. That is only true if you would have expected evidence to exist.
Oldest 'nearly complete' HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966
So what's your assertion here? How is this anything like COVID 19? Let me guess, you are going by Worobey who had some success determining elements of the early HIV pandemic now insists on applying that to COVID 19.The virus was found in a tissue sample from 1966, almost two decades before HIV was discovered. ...
... Based on genetic sequencing of samples of the virus, scientists think that HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, first found a foothold in humans in Central Africa sometime in the early 1900s, spilling over from chimpanzees. There are multiple strains of the virus, but the ones responsible for 95% of cases worldwide are in a subgroup called HIV-1 group M. More than 32 million people have died of AIDS, the disease caused by HIV, since the pandemic began.
... There are older fragments of HIV out there, one from 1959 and one from 1960, also from DRC. But those pieces aren't as complete, and thus can't offer as much information about the virus' mutations. Those fragments were also from different subtypes of HIV, Gryseels said, which shows that the virus had been circulating for some time in humans before the 1950s. ...
It's possible that some change in HIV-1's genome made it more efficient, Gryseels said, but more likely that societal changes made the difference. Urbanization rose rapidly during the early 1900s in Central Africa.
Early SARS 1 is a much better model. It's been discussed in detail up thread.
And you bring up TB? Oh my word! TB is thousands of years old. It's been found in Egyptian mummies.
Re#2: Nonsense! So do you have a link where the source species was mink? Deer? Pigs? Rats? Raccoon dogs?
Re#3: No one was looking? Are you kidding? Did all traces of the virus vanish just when researchers started looking for it?
Re the absence of evidence, you are leaving an important clause out of that sentence. It's absence of evidence where one expects evidence to be.
This has all been discussed ad nauseum in this thread. Is there anything new? If not, what is the point in rehashing these debate points over and over and over?