Thanks for adding this perspective to the whole discussion. I look forward to watching you with some other scientists like JJ to out the pros and cons.
I'll look into BsaXI, I may be behind the times on a lot of the particular controversies. Could be interesting as far as speculating whether that's a rescue mechanism to guard against the FCS dropping out in cell culture. But as far as an IC fingerprint you wouldn't want to look at BsaXI since it excises. So both things would matter rather than just one or the other. At the same time the FCS is there and an IC platform is sufficient to bring that about. (And it hasn't been the case in previous cov experiments that IC cut sites being near "target" mutations or not is very critical.)
Thank you, that is helpful. The problem I have is that I don't see what use that would have as far as producing infectious virus. This site would cause the corresponding RE to excise the FCS from any DNA molecule that already contained it. It doesn't help to incorporate it into a given DNA or RNA molecule as far as I can tell, since it can't create the appropriate sticky ends except via removing another RS-containing segment. At the same time, it seems to operate pretty well as another "look at me" signature around the FCS. So you have an NLS, FCS, Moderna/DOW patent sequence, and BsaXI site all in one place. But none of them is required to produce the other. The whole thing could have just been worked out on paper.
Correct, PRRAR is suboptimal, though more-so for being nRRAR_ vs nRaRR_ than for P being the n. Regardless furin S1/S2 cleavage seems to be robust, reflecting the limits of algorithms in predicting biological outcomes.
Being 'forced' to include proline, meanwhile, doesn't confer a value to a BsaXI site in a virus amplification context. In other words, what value would having that site add? You wouldn't need it to put the FCS into an IC platform, and if your problem was that cell culture tends to drop the FCS its a bit unclear how the BsaXI contributes to post-cell-culture rescue (how does it help you re-insert the FCS into virions?). But I could still see it as some kind of QA feature if there was a problem with the FCS dropping out even in BAC constructs. Still seems like less or at best equally valid as the IC map evidence.
Along with rejecting the (probably op-seeded) meme that the experimental mRNA transfections (“Covid vaccines”) are “causing variants,”
---------
I really, really, really! want to hear more about this aspect of speculation.
Obviously, this is Geert Vanden Bossche, and others, sure.
And I have written a bit how Ops require True Believers to buy in. (And they do.)
And I have written a lot about how you cannot make Heroes (or Villains) out of people when considering evidence (look at things like a math problem, no "benefits of the doubt")
-----------
If this is a reference to GVB, do you think he is a True Believer, mistaken?
or Pumping out some Diversionary Bullshit at the behest of Overlords.
I'd be interested in your thoughts on this as well. (I'll send you a paid comp right now.)
He may not be accurate, but I find him to be a credible narrator.
Now. That could mean that he is a True Believer in what he is espousing, (and thus still "operationalized" Manchurian Candidate style) or just mistaken.
Or GVB is correct, and Brian is mistaken.
see also: Yeadon, Rancourt.
I mean this is all I do every day is try to sort out what is reliable. And there are so many variables that go into parsing out what is what.
Thank you. And if you get a notice that Unglossed is recommending you, I am just now noticing the button. I thought Unglossed was already recommending since whenever I first set up my recs.
Difficult to offer a quick take on the Ebola trial except that it seems like they simply declared victory before there was enough time for failure to show.
Vanden Bossche is absolutely the seed of the vaccines cause variants meme, thanks to that Dark Horse Podcast interview. As I see it, "Everyone knows you don't vaccinate into a pandemic" is probably the manifestation of a successful mind-control spell that has been cast over the counter-narrative. People say it like they have been saying and thinking it their whole lives as opposed to since about breakfast. That doesn't mean vanden Bossche is the "op," but I do feel there has been some type of promotion of the narrative - someone planting the seed. I suppose it could be "emergent," some intrinsic gravity of the idea ("ooh, it's like, natural selection or whatever, I better let everyone else know I definitely get it, too") and so it's just a big coincidence that it gives cover to the lack of evolutionary trails for the Variants of Concerns. It's like vanden Bossche is Tinkles reminding us of that time we went to Never Past Bedtime Land; but maybe he just really thinks that happened.
Okay, the root of the Ebola trial thought bubble is that of the two, GVB seems far more likely to value the actual science and the ramifications of such than Vaccine Sherpa.
My sense of GVB has always been that he is a True Believer in the scientific method, (and he did discuss with Del Bigtree that if evidence was presented that Vaccines (generally) were a higher risk than reward that he would revise his positions.
This is not to make a Hero of GVB, which I should not have to qualify, but apparently as I go through my searches, I do!
As you know, I ask experts to weigh in on areas of discrepancy. All I ever want to know is what is real.
On a scale of 0-100%, knowing that "the Science" is rarely settled, to what degree of certainty do you feel that the *vaccines* do NOT cause variants?
No bias, no nothing, any more than I would ask Mike Yeadon if a non-lethal new pathogen could or did happen.
Thanks if you have time to reply. Appreciate your expertise, and your willingness to deviate from the herd.
I would simply say I haven't seen anything that looks like "vaccines cause variants." Let's take the new scrabble variants - These are all gaining mutations to escape Omicron immunity. But where does Omicron immunity come from? It comes from loads of people having Omicron infections.
Rolling back, there's the original Omicron family - well, they came from a lab. There's not much other way to explain how they could diverge so much evolutionarily and yet appear in the same place and same time. If there were somewhere that wasn't a lab they would already both have been everywhere, or only one would have crossed over (achieved whatever theoretical mutation you want to imagine would make a hidden virus become noticeable). Like you could say, "maybe someone had a year-long infection that grew into two co-infecting genomes and then both the genomes near-simultaneously got the same gene that allowed them to transmit." Or you could say, these probably came from a lab. Regarding whether the vaccines nonetheless made things favorable for Omicron, I've pointed to Hong Kong as an example where Omicron voided pre-existing "dark matter" immunity* to the previous strains and yet it was the unvaccinated elderly who were hit hardest (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7115e1.htm?s_cid=mm7115e1_w
).
*A mystery which is pretty easy to explain in Couey's model, btw. But I am not ready to toss out some level of sustaining transmission.
Finally, there are the other VOCs, which dropped out of nowhere in October when very very few people were yet vaxxed, but don't actually "hit the ground running." They go on to mutate at a slow pace everywhere regardless of vaccine uptake, or temporary vaccine efficacy in the winter or dissolving of vaccine efficacy in the summer. Especially the latter makes sense since why would the virus care if people have circulating IgG antibodies in their blood since that doesn't pose an obstacle to infection or transmission?
I guess if one believed the "vaccines" to be very effective esp. w.r.t. curbing transmission and infection, one would reckon that it must exert a seizable selection pressure on the bug.
But from what I saw in depictions in books and have been told by a bunch of people who studied that stuff is that the type of antibodies the production of which is induced by that intramuscular injection are hardly present on the mucosa.
So the wonderjuice would only, eh, bug that bug with a deeper down infection, which is not what happens with most people - so the overall, population wide potential effect in shaping the bug can't be that great.
Right. It's akin to killing only one type of deer... but only after reproductive age. Well that isn't going to reduce how many of that type of deer reproduce, so there's no fitness impact.
The question of whether we should even expect any type of immune escape from coronavirus is more open than usually taken to be. We've all been trained to expect it from the hyped up examples of antibiotic resistance and flu drift/shift. Neither of those are cov's. I discuss the exceptions to immune escape here https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-synthetic-origin-paper-out-of/comment/9897404
That said, I do think we are finally seeing some organic evidence of immune escape in the scrabble variants. So it took getting seropositivity / infectious very high, it didn't happen until Omicron. One potential to keep in mind is that selection might not actually be in the infection / transmission stage at all, which would be pretty trippy, but is a bit more consistent for explaining some of the mysteries of flu seasonality. So maybe selection is exerted when the virus is passing through the "background," opportunistically replicating without causing symptoms (and when it is symptomatic and PCR/sequence-visible, all we are seeing is a reflection of that background selection), but in that case it is still based on mucosal immune recognition and circulating IgG in the blood is irrelevant.
I have so many convergent tracks of logic and it's tough to sort them out.
I find much of Couey's model highly explanatory.
I found "don't vax into an active pandemic" highly explanatory, too, though! 😅
The Omicron mutations seem to me to be somewhat displaced from the theory as the OG vaccines were still in use and were already useless against the OG variants, much less the brand new one trotted out (or leaked).
A lot to think about, thanks. A lot that is way over my head, for sure.
I am still somewhat baffled how "don't vax into an active pandemic" or the larger "vaccine creates variants" generally (whether accurate or completely bogus), serves the "get the needles in arms" Operation.
Ah - "I am still somewhat baffled how "don't vax into an active pandemic" or the larger "vaccine creates variants" generally (whether accurate or completely bogus), serves the "get the needles in arms" Operation." It creates overly high expectations of a "leaky vaccine disaster."
You oversell the benefits of being unvaccinated so that no one is making or listening to the harder cost-benefit argument, "Look, actually the vaccines reduce severe outcomes and no they don't actually cause a sci-fi-movie evolution disaster, but they are still experimental with unknown long term harms, and severe outcomes have never been the norm for infection."
So there's tons of attrition as time goes by and the prophesy is never fulfilled. You build a cult instead of a movement, and the people who do succeed in retaining followers are the ones who go even more extreme. 1 in 70 vaccinees dead after a year (as if that isn't predicted by normal human life spans)! I think that is exactly what an op to infiltrate the counter-narrative would have as one of its goals.
I'm intrigued by, but still deeply skeptical of, the theory of continual release (though I strongly suspect that BA.1/BA.2 were released whether intentionally or accidentally).
I imagine you will be sharing this eventually, but I would want to see hypotheses of:
--which mutations, exactly, represent releases and which ones likely arose naturally?
--where, and how, would these releases have occurred?
--how should the pandemic have behaved differently in the absence of continual release?
--what might the "releasers" be trying to accomplish, given that pathogenicity has demonstrably not been increasing with time across multiple variants?
4) One can only imagine - there are so many reasons to throw a pandemic, especially one with an overhyped virus. And with so much hyping of pandemics over the last decades anyone with a reason would have had plenty of time to think about the benefits. On the other hand since I don't buy Couey's full embrace of a purity / high dose requirement to deliver pathogenic effects, it's difficult to imagine the answer is actually as easy as "anyone who would benefit from a pandemic." Regarding intentions of releasing updated versions - which once again grooves into a hyped up narrative, that of flu's genetic volatility and the significance of same - as with my comment on the first post I am agnostic here because I don't think mutations can have safely predictable qualities.
3 - Why not fizzle out, like SARS-1, or become uninteresting background noise, like pdm2009 flu? A good example is California, where I am, we were at almost 2% seropositivity in donors in December 2019 and yet cases never took off in early 2020. Well, maybe it was because we didn't get any B.1 imports from Europe unlike NYC. And really maybe B.1 was pretty close to pdm2009 in terms of being sporadic background noise which is why 2020 really became defined by other stuff in the West. I would say nothing in 2020 *demands* believing in continuous release except the sudden, simultaneous dropping of the VOCs (and, again, some unnamed sequences in C.Am and CA) in October. (One day I would like to see if a case for B.1 as a second global seeding can be made, but I am skeptical after the Italy Measles paper).
*edit: There's always parts of the picture I forget since I never have written this whole thing down. So additionally I would expect "ancestral," as in pre-VOC, genomes to last longer after early 2021 if in fact the virus was self-sustaining. They don't. And I don't think there's a good immune escape argument for why this is the case. With flu we have a sort-of-understood natural phenomenon where the HA proteins act as a single organism but other genes as a whole species, but that is in part related to the magic of assortment in flu. I don't think we should have expected "loser" versions of SARS-CoV-2 to actually die out unless it was the case that they couldn't have stuck around anyway, meaning the VOCs headed off what otherwise would have been impending extinction. Whereas with Omicron, which seems much more robustly transmissible and "pandemic"-capable (as a cold-like illness), there's loser retention: BA.2 didn't just die after BA.4/5 gained an advantage. So I think that looks a lot more natural, more wild and chaotic.
2 One thing to say about this is that DNA / IC solves the hardest parts of this question. The rest is, "anywhere chain of custody on a vector starts in a black box." Which these days is a lot of stuff, if for example you have ever looked at hand soap labels for the last half a decade at least, nearly everything you can buy is made in China or Italy (in Chinese labor factories). Handsoap is probably a terrible choice but the point is there's a lot of choices.
1 As above, I'd love to still be able to postulate B.1 as a second lab release from the start (with maybe Wuhan in fact being a B.1 offshoot), but that theory appears deflated for the moment. But I think all the Greek letter variants (except maybe actually Delta; it's reasonable for a sequence-evading variant to have emerged from Central Asia given high seropositivity) and some un-named late 2020 sequences that fizzled out, and then Omicron. Anything that has the B.1 mutation triplet and starts from over the cloud with no clear root to anything besides B.1 in nextstrain clock view is a suspect at least.
Thanks for adding this perspective to the whole discussion. I look forward to watching you with some other scientists like JJ to out the pros and cons.
the only RE site in SARS2 that matters is BsaXI, which flanks the FCS, and Ralph published in 2017
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7120940/
and Laos Banal was collected by US Military in 2017
https://twitter.com/BillyBostickson/status/1438929425047822339?s=20&t=QIGJI25wcud4jn1SMG2Uow
I'll look into BsaXI, I may be behind the times on a lot of the particular controversies. Could be interesting as far as speculating whether that's a rescue mechanism to guard against the FCS dropping out in cell culture. But as far as an IC fingerprint you wouldn't want to look at BsaXI since it excises. So both things would matter rather than just one or the other. At the same time the FCS is there and an IC platform is sufficient to bring that about. (And it hasn't been the case in previous cov experiments that IC cut sites being near "target" mutations or not is very critical.)
Very cool link RE BANAL, thanks
here's a better visual
https://twitter.com/jhas5/status/1591097796106637313?s=20&t=V_lpAEINxp0M-jT6TqPb9Q
it's the restriction site Fauci & co debated on Feb 1 2020
https://twitter.com/jhas5/status/1526333883570077697?s=20&t=V_lpAEINxp0M-jT6TqPb9Q
Thank you, that is helpful. The problem I have is that I don't see what use that would have as far as producing infectious virus. This site would cause the corresponding RE to excise the FCS from any DNA molecule that already contained it. It doesn't help to incorporate it into a given DNA or RNA molecule as far as I can tell, since it can't create the appropriate sticky ends except via removing another RS-containing segment. At the same time, it seems to operate pretty well as another "look at me" signature around the FCS. So you have an NLS, FCS, Moderna/DOW patent sequence, and BsaXI site all in one place. But none of them is required to produce the other. The whole thing could have just been worked out on paper.
It's important b/c Fauci's virologist argue the PRRAR furin cleavage isn't optimal (i.e. should RRRAR).
The BsaXI site forces the Proline so it's PRRAR.
https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1391507255413985280?s=20&t=EyGtFUwGI0F8xxG27JqAEQ
Also forces an out of frame insertion.
https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1391507237705687040?s=20&t=K4Kk4nshdun7rLZ6_ilr6w
Correct, PRRAR is suboptimal, though more-so for being nRRAR_ vs nRaRR_ than for P being the n. Regardless furin S1/S2 cleavage seems to be robust, reflecting the limits of algorithms in predicting biological outcomes.
Being 'forced' to include proline, meanwhile, doesn't confer a value to a BsaXI site in a virus amplification context. In other words, what value would having that site add? You wouldn't need it to put the FCS into an IC platform, and if your problem was that cell culture tends to drop the FCS its a bit unclear how the BsaXI contributes to post-cell-culture rescue (how does it help you re-insert the FCS into virions?). But I could still see it as some kind of QA feature if there was a problem with the FCS dropping out even in BAC constructs. Still seems like less or at best equally valid as the IC map evidence.
Hi, pretty interesting.
Thank you much for the write-up.
You seem to be pretty much in sync with the theory of Jonathan Couey.
(You can get the outline sprinkled throughout this video https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1643304490?filter=archives&sort=time)
Yes - as my post mentions we are hopefully going to link up for a talk w/ Crawford. Should be fun.
This is an excellent post, Brian.
-----------
Along with rejecting the (probably op-seeded) meme that the experimental mRNA transfections (“Covid vaccines”) are “causing variants,”
---------
I really, really, really! want to hear more about this aspect of speculation.
Obviously, this is Geert Vanden Bossche, and others, sure.
And I have written a bit how Ops require True Believers to buy in. (And they do.)
And I have written a lot about how you cannot make Heroes (or Villains) out of people when considering evidence (look at things like a math problem, no "benefits of the doubt")
-----------
If this is a reference to GVB, do you think he is a True Believer, mistaken?
or Pumping out some Diversionary Bullshit at the behest of Overlords.
I'd be interested in your thoughts on this as well. (I'll send you a paid comp right now.)
--------https://sagehana.substack.com/p/what-went-wrong-with-the-west-africa
GVB is not paid opposition, he is as sincere as you are. He is has done enough interviews and I am very good at reading people.
My sense as well.
He may not be accurate, but I find him to be a credible narrator.
Now. That could mean that he is a True Believer in what he is espousing, (and thus still "operationalized" Manchurian Candidate style) or just mistaken.
Or GVB is correct, and Brian is mistaken.
see also: Yeadon, Rancourt.
I mean this is all I do every day is try to sort out what is reliable. And there are so many variables that go into parsing out what is what.
Thank you. And if you get a notice that Unglossed is recommending you, I am just now noticing the button. I thought Unglossed was already recommending since whenever I first set up my recs.
Difficult to offer a quick take on the Ebola trial except that it seems like they simply declared victory before there was enough time for failure to show.
Vanden Bossche is absolutely the seed of the vaccines cause variants meme, thanks to that Dark Horse Podcast interview. As I see it, "Everyone knows you don't vaccinate into a pandemic" is probably the manifestation of a successful mind-control spell that has been cast over the counter-narrative. People say it like they have been saying and thinking it their whole lives as opposed to since about breakfast. That doesn't mean vanden Bossche is the "op," but I do feel there has been some type of promotion of the narrative - someone planting the seed. I suppose it could be "emergent," some intrinsic gravity of the idea ("ooh, it's like, natural selection or whatever, I better let everyone else know I definitely get it, too") and so it's just a big coincidence that it gives cover to the lack of evolutionary trails for the Variants of Concerns. It's like vanden Bossche is Tinkles reminding us of that time we went to Never Past Bedtime Land; but maybe he just really thinks that happened.
Okay, the root of the Ebola trial thought bubble is that of the two, GVB seems far more likely to value the actual science and the ramifications of such than Vaccine Sherpa.
My sense of GVB has always been that he is a True Believer in the scientific method, (and he did discuss with Del Bigtree that if evidence was presented that Vaccines (generally) were a higher risk than reward that he would revise his positions.
This is not to make a Hero of GVB, which I should not have to qualify, but apparently as I go through my searches, I do!
As you know, I ask experts to weigh in on areas of discrepancy. All I ever want to know is what is real.
On a scale of 0-100%, knowing that "the Science" is rarely settled, to what degree of certainty do you feel that the *vaccines* do NOT cause variants?
No bias, no nothing, any more than I would ask Mike Yeadon if a non-lethal new pathogen could or did happen.
Thanks if you have time to reply. Appreciate your expertise, and your willingness to deviate from the herd.
I would simply say I haven't seen anything that looks like "vaccines cause variants." Let's take the new scrabble variants - These are all gaining mutations to escape Omicron immunity. But where does Omicron immunity come from? It comes from loads of people having Omicron infections.
Rolling back, there's the original Omicron family - well, they came from a lab. There's not much other way to explain how they could diverge so much evolutionarily and yet appear in the same place and same time. If there were somewhere that wasn't a lab they would already both have been everywhere, or only one would have crossed over (achieved whatever theoretical mutation you want to imagine would make a hidden virus become noticeable). Like you could say, "maybe someone had a year-long infection that grew into two co-infecting genomes and then both the genomes near-simultaneously got the same gene that allowed them to transmit." Or you could say, these probably came from a lab. Regarding whether the vaccines nonetheless made things favorable for Omicron, I've pointed to Hong Kong as an example where Omicron voided pre-existing "dark matter" immunity* to the previous strains and yet it was the unvaccinated elderly who were hit hardest (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7115e1.htm?s_cid=mm7115e1_w
).
*A mystery which is pretty easy to explain in Couey's model, btw. But I am not ready to toss out some level of sustaining transmission.
Finally, there are the other VOCs, which dropped out of nowhere in October when very very few people were yet vaxxed, but don't actually "hit the ground running." They go on to mutate at a slow pace everywhere regardless of vaccine uptake, or temporary vaccine efficacy in the winter or dissolving of vaccine efficacy in the summer. Especially the latter makes sense since why would the virus care if people have circulating IgG antibodies in their blood since that doesn't pose an obstacle to infection or transmission?
I guess if one believed the "vaccines" to be very effective esp. w.r.t. curbing transmission and infection, one would reckon that it must exert a seizable selection pressure on the bug.
But from what I saw in depictions in books and have been told by a bunch of people who studied that stuff is that the type of antibodies the production of which is induced by that intramuscular injection are hardly present on the mucosa.
So the wonderjuice would only, eh, bug that bug with a deeper down infection, which is not what happens with most people - so the overall, population wide potential effect in shaping the bug can't be that great.
Does that make sense?
Right. It's akin to killing only one type of deer... but only after reproductive age. Well that isn't going to reduce how many of that type of deer reproduce, so there's no fitness impact.
The question of whether we should even expect any type of immune escape from coronavirus is more open than usually taken to be. We've all been trained to expect it from the hyped up examples of antibiotic resistance and flu drift/shift. Neither of those are cov's. I discuss the exceptions to immune escape here https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-synthetic-origin-paper-out-of/comment/9897404
That said, I do think we are finally seeing some organic evidence of immune escape in the scrabble variants. So it took getting seropositivity / infectious very high, it didn't happen until Omicron. One potential to keep in mind is that selection might not actually be in the infection / transmission stage at all, which would be pretty trippy, but is a bit more consistent for explaining some of the mysteries of flu seasonality. So maybe selection is exerted when the virus is passing through the "background," opportunistically replicating without causing symptoms (and when it is symptomatic and PCR/sequence-visible, all we are seeing is a reflection of that background selection), but in that case it is still based on mucosal immune recognition and circulating IgG in the blood is irrelevant.
Okay, thanks. Will digest.
I have so many convergent tracks of logic and it's tough to sort them out.
I find much of Couey's model highly explanatory.
I found "don't vax into an active pandemic" highly explanatory, too, though! 😅
The Omicron mutations seem to me to be somewhat displaced from the theory as the OG vaccines were still in use and were already useless against the OG variants, much less the brand new one trotted out (or leaked).
A lot to think about, thanks. A lot that is way over my head, for sure.
I am still somewhat baffled how "don't vax into an active pandemic" or the larger "vaccine creates variants" generally (whether accurate or completely bogus), serves the "get the needles in arms" Operation.
Ah - "I am still somewhat baffled how "don't vax into an active pandemic" or the larger "vaccine creates variants" generally (whether accurate or completely bogus), serves the "get the needles in arms" Operation." It creates overly high expectations of a "leaky vaccine disaster."
You oversell the benefits of being unvaccinated so that no one is making or listening to the harder cost-benefit argument, "Look, actually the vaccines reduce severe outcomes and no they don't actually cause a sci-fi-movie evolution disaster, but they are still experimental with unknown long term harms, and severe outcomes have never been the norm for infection."
So there's tons of attrition as time goes by and the prophesy is never fulfilled. You build a cult instead of a movement, and the people who do succeed in retaining followers are the ones who go even more extreme. 1 in 70 vaccinees dead after a year (as if that isn't predicted by normal human life spans)! I think that is exactly what an op to infiltrate the counter-narrative would have as one of its goals.
Okay, now (as with Snake Venom), let's do the logistics. (which to me was where it fell apart immediately, even before the science).
Op is planned. Operation Build a Cult.
Now you mobilize GVB? How so?
Also, speaking of Ops, I'm thinking about running this letter:
-------
https://expose-news.com/2022/11/09/military-intel-personnel-made-and-funded-the-virus/
-------
I'm intrigued by, but still deeply skeptical of, the theory of continual release (though I strongly suspect that BA.1/BA.2 were released whether intentionally or accidentally).
I imagine you will be sharing this eventually, but I would want to see hypotheses of:
--which mutations, exactly, represent releases and which ones likely arose naturally?
--where, and how, would these releases have occurred?
--how should the pandemic have behaved differently in the absence of continual release?
--what might the "releasers" be trying to accomplish, given that pathogenicity has demonstrably not been increasing with time across multiple variants?
4) One can only imagine - there are so many reasons to throw a pandemic, especially one with an overhyped virus. And with so much hyping of pandemics over the last decades anyone with a reason would have had plenty of time to think about the benefits. On the other hand since I don't buy Couey's full embrace of a purity / high dose requirement to deliver pathogenic effects, it's difficult to imagine the answer is actually as easy as "anyone who would benefit from a pandemic." Regarding intentions of releasing updated versions - which once again grooves into a hyped up narrative, that of flu's genetic volatility and the significance of same - as with my comment on the first post I am agnostic here because I don't think mutations can have safely predictable qualities.
3 - Why not fizzle out, like SARS-1, or become uninteresting background noise, like pdm2009 flu? A good example is California, where I am, we were at almost 2% seropositivity in donors in December 2019 and yet cases never took off in early 2020. Well, maybe it was because we didn't get any B.1 imports from Europe unlike NYC. And really maybe B.1 was pretty close to pdm2009 in terms of being sporadic background noise which is why 2020 really became defined by other stuff in the West. I would say nothing in 2020 *demands* believing in continuous release except the sudden, simultaneous dropping of the VOCs (and, again, some unnamed sequences in C.Am and CA) in October. (One day I would like to see if a case for B.1 as a second global seeding can be made, but I am skeptical after the Italy Measles paper).
*edit: There's always parts of the picture I forget since I never have written this whole thing down. So additionally I would expect "ancestral," as in pre-VOC, genomes to last longer after early 2021 if in fact the virus was self-sustaining. They don't. And I don't think there's a good immune escape argument for why this is the case. With flu we have a sort-of-understood natural phenomenon where the HA proteins act as a single organism but other genes as a whole species, but that is in part related to the magic of assortment in flu. I don't think we should have expected "loser" versions of SARS-CoV-2 to actually die out unless it was the case that they couldn't have stuck around anyway, meaning the VOCs headed off what otherwise would have been impending extinction. Whereas with Omicron, which seems much more robustly transmissible and "pandemic"-capable (as a cold-like illness), there's loser retention: BA.2 didn't just die after BA.4/5 gained an advantage. So I think that looks a lot more natural, more wild and chaotic.
2 One thing to say about this is that DNA / IC solves the hardest parts of this question. The rest is, "anywhere chain of custody on a vector starts in a black box." Which these days is a lot of stuff, if for example you have ever looked at hand soap labels for the last half a decade at least, nearly everything you can buy is made in China or Italy (in Chinese labor factories). Handsoap is probably a terrible choice but the point is there's a lot of choices.
1 As above, I'd love to still be able to postulate B.1 as a second lab release from the start (with maybe Wuhan in fact being a B.1 offshoot), but that theory appears deflated for the moment. But I think all the Greek letter variants (except maybe actually Delta; it's reasonable for a sequence-evading variant to have emerged from Central Asia given high seropositivity) and some un-named late 2020 sequences that fizzled out, and then Omicron. Anything that has the B.1 mutation triplet and starts from over the cloud with no clear root to anything besides B.1 in nextstrain clock view is a suspect at least.