Coronavirus

You created a breed of dog or horse from humans...

Or are you talking about breeding dogs and horses for your dinner?

Side note: Not all animal diseases are contagious (and deadly) to humans, as not all human diseases are contagious (or deadly) to animals.

If "you" wanted to engineer a bio-weapon, you have essentially three choices:

1. Try to start from scratch and completely create an artificial virus, bacteria, or parasite. (Good luck with that one.)

2. Try by trial and error to find an animal disease that is contagious to humans and then try to engineer it to your specifications.

3. Pick a known disease (virus, bacteria, parasite) that is contagious to humans and engineer it to your specifications.

Now, there are some known diseases with animal hosts that are contagious to humans: examples include rabies, some influenzas (though not all), some coronaviruses (though not all), etc.

On the other hand if you were to pick a disease where humans are a host (Polio as an example), or a disease that has already jumped into humans (Ebola as an example), you will have saved yourself a lot of wasted trial and error. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, just modify the wheel you already have.

Of course there is nothing wrong with trying to start from scratch... if you have the time and money and resources...etc...

My degree is not in bio engineering. However, everyone knows dog breeds are based on artificial selection (as opposed to natural selection)by humans. People selected the dog traits they wanted and bred more puppies. These dogs started out as wild dogs (not humans) and have different purposes in the case of working dogs. Bird dogs like the Pointer, hunting dogs like the Norwegian Elk Hound, war dog breeds like the Rottweiler.

If it is true, and it appears so, that viruses can cross species. Then the similarity of Ebola to Parvo virus could be a case of the disease losing it's canine specific gene and infecting humans. At first the disease might be far too virile and kill it's human host on average, before it could infect another host. This would mean the scientists, or nature, would begin selecting ones that spread more by being less virile (ie. lower death rate).

Further,if that is true then logically it could happen with other disease mutations in the general animal population. The only difficulty in creating this virus would be to isolate that particular strain.
It makes far more sense to simply artificially select the strains from the animal virus population that give the best chance of infecting humans to create a bio-weapon, most of the work has already been done by nature.

Well that is surprising.




Your comparison between where viruses come from and where dog breeds come from isn't working.

You should try another analogy.

There is literally no doubt that COVID-19 crossed species.

Some viruses do.

Some do not.




Some viruses do.

Some do not.

I'd venture to guess some do, but most do not.

I'm not a virologist, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express.

It's belief in generalizations like that which lead people to drink aquarium chemicals to ward off COVID-19.

I read a book and a few scientific articles on the topic. They basically said what you said... some do, most don't.

Of course the book was written by a scientist and we all know that they are stupid liars.

And the articles were in a scientific journal, which is like the news, so is clearly FAKE NEWS!

No doubt Trump will one day enlighten us on the source of this (and all viruses) and we can certainly trust his stable genius opinion.

viruses literally don't work the way other "living" things do (dogs, horses, humans, etc) at the cellular level their structure and behavior is different.

any comparison to the behavior of a living animal is automatically incorrect, They don't even work like bacteria. even though both can make humans or animals similarly sick.

Actually viruses do work like other living things; they evolve the same way. However, they reproduce, and therefore evolve, at a more rapid pace. Their environment is their host, so they evolve to exploit their host for energy. That is why many diseases are species specific. The odds of them being able to cross species and become infectious low. This can be said of any adaptation. The Swine Flu or Spanish Flu of 1917 was an example of a Flu being able to cross from a pig to a human.
The odds being low has less meaning for a rapidly producing and abundant virus strain with many individual virus cells.

cross species transmission
note the section on predicting and preventing cross species transmission
and Using genetic markers
according to this wiki on spillover zoonosis almost 2/3 of human viruses originated in other animals. Some of these occurrences have no result, some have limited infectious ability in humans that get them, like rabies, others adapt to the new host environment and become contagious within the human population

Therefore, to breed a virus strain from an animal strain one simply needs to keep injecting human subjects with the animal strain they wish to use. If the subject gets sick, swab their saliva, put it in a petri dish and breed another batch. Keep injecting until one is transmitted from a subject to a non injected subject. Each injection has thousands of individual virus cells, somewhere in there is the right mutation. The ability of scientists to use genetic markers and visually identify them with research equipment would shorten the time necessary for success in this effort

Could this have been done, yes. Was it done is a question. The different articles I've read have different spins and professionals and scientists weighing in.
Not too many seem to be paying attention to the scientists that actually worked in the lab in Wuhan. Factually there has been concerted effort to shut them up.

The Beijing sponsored South China University of Technology doesn’t think the virus originated at the Wuhan fish market. This Investment Watch article details the claims. In their paper ‘The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus,’ penned by scholars Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao claims the WHCDC kept disease-ridden animals in laboratories, including 605 bats.

We also know scientists from the lab in Wuhan China say the virus was being held in their facility. According to this 2017 Nature article, which has had a disclaimer recently added, the lab in Wuhan was holding the SARS virus for study.

Then there's the "whistleblower" scientist Li Wenliang who died of the coronavirus. His story in The Guardian

The Chinese scientists are saying it did come from the lab. the question is if it was released intentionally or not.