Hey, It’s me - a virologist! #SARSCoV2 isn’t man made and here’s why /1

Let’s start with WHY - why would someone make this virus in a lab?

Making money from selling vaccines and antivirals?

Disrupting global society (terrorism) or hating Trump?

Ok - let’s say there was a valid reason to do this... YOU WOULD NOT PICK A CORONAVIRUS! /2

If you want to make millions of dollars selling vaccines/antivirals - why not take a virus we all know has vaccines/antivirals for?

INFLUENZA

No need to spend millions on clinical trials - just use what is already approved! There are several FDA approved agents for flu /3

These agents are approved for PREVENTATIVE use (not just when people are sick) - so every single American could potentially take these drugs for up to 3 weeks to stop the spread of your pandemic man made virus and you would be RAKING IN THE DOUGH (330,000,000 x 21 doses = $$$) /4

But because you picked coronavirus, you need run multiple phase trials, spend $$$ to get approved for general use by the FDA. Why would you want to lose money on trials that may end up with negative results? And bad PR from the risk of your drug killing people in these trials! /5

Look at the budgets of pharma companies - Merck, maker of the influenza and HPV vaccines has one of the highest revenues from vaccines at $8.4 billion, but that is only a small part of its $46.8 billion revenue! /6

Vaccines are not moneymakers for pharmaceutical companies, despite what conspiracy theorists would have you believe.

Don’t believe me?

Remind me how many commercial vaccines are for malaria? How many pharma companies have cholera vaccines? /7

Moneymakers are drugs for diseases that people take every single day for their entire lives (heart disease, diabetes, cancer). Pharma companies salivate over these drugs. And trials for these drugs have stopped because of the pandemic! /8

OK, so money is not the reason to make a pandemic virus - maybe you just want to watch the world burn /9

Again - why would you use a coronavirus? Why not generate antibiotic-resistant plague or tuberculosis, modify a filovirus (like Ebola/Marburg), or again... influenza? If you’d really want to watch the world burn, maybe pick something worse/more terrifying? /10

I’m not trying to diminish the amount of people who have died - but if you wanted to create a bioterror weapon, it really doesn’t make any sense for someone to pick *this* virus. /11

For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re a really dumb scientist and love coronaviruses, HOW would you make a man made pandemic strain? /12

First - you need a coronavirus genome. What do you start with? Based upon publicly available sequences, you would need to start with a random genome from a coronavirus that infected bats. Seems like a logical choice when you could start with any other known human virus... /13

You could have started with MERS or SARS, which have each killed almost a thousand people and then optimized the virus to be more infective... but bat virus... OK... /14

So, let’s take your bat virus sequence that‘s never been shown to infect humans, and make a bunch of mutations so that it WILL infect humans. How do you know what mutations to make?

????

/15

You’d want it to infect humans - so first thing is to swap out the bat S gene with a known infectious virus. The S gene makes the protein responsible for binding host cells and allows a virus to infect cells.

Oh, you’d rather use some sequence nobody has seen before? Cool. /16

So, take your sequence and replace the bat S gene sequence that is responsible for binding a host cell. Assuming your sequence doesn’t screw up the S protein (big assumption), you’ll have to test that the mutant virus can infect human cells /17

Again, if you weren’t an idiot, you’d just use a known virus sequence, and save yourself a lot of time... But you’re making this “man made” pandemic coronavirus!

Once you’ve proven the virus infects human cells, you’ll need to test it can replicate and spread to other humans /18

Since you decided to start with a bat virus - most likely your virus is not going to make humans sick. Because our innate immune system will recognize this foreign virus and get rid of it easily /19

That’s why bat viruses (or dog, cat, or any other animal viruses) generally don’t make us sick. Viruses for other species are usually adapted for that species (and don’t often infect multiple species). A bat virus would likely be confused in a human cell /20

Not trying to point fingers, but if you wanted a pandemic coronavirus and started with SARS or MERS, most of the hard work would already be done for you by nature.

Nevertheless, you keep trying to spray people with your mutant bat virus... until you finally get success! /21

It’s infected people and is spreading from person to person. Congrats?

To make it a pandemic - you need those people to travel around the globe spreading the virus and not get too sick in the process. How would you thread that needle of disease? /22

Because if people get TOO sick from your virus, they’ll stay home and never spread it to anyone. if the disease is more mild (like the cold) they’ll spread it globally, but nobody will care. /23

Maybe some scientist months later will identify it as a new cold strain, but that’ll be it.

How do you make that perfect virus that is so lethal that it will have such an impact that it is currently, but not too lethal that it won’t get spread because everyone is terrified? /24

Again - your life would have been much easier had you not chosen a random bat sequence, but you could figure that out by spending a lifetime researching bat virus pathogenicity and live in a world where people thought the time and money spent on that was a worthwhile pursuit. /25

No government would pay for that research, because why waste money on bat virology when you could just buy bigger tanks or aircraft carriers?

And no billionaire or private organization would pay for such unnecessary research /26

Nature is far smarter and capable of way more than any human (especially scientists)

I think we need to give credit where credit is due.

Nature made this virus. /end