This is a conspiracy theory by someone who doesn’t really understand biology. Nothing more.
I’m not exactly a bio expert, but here are my thoughts:
My nagging fear is that China is buying up food supplies in preparation for another pandemic just the way it bought up medical supplies from around the world before we were aware of the coming Covid19 pandemic.
No, China, as in the government/CCP, didn’t buy up medical supplies. Some businesses advised employees travelling abroad to buy some. Families asked their overseas relatives to send some back as well, just in case. That was after word of the outbreak in Wuhan had gotten out in the Chinese media but before China declared a national emergency because they didn’t know the extent of the outbreak at the time. Chinese people tend to be cautious and doing this seems, to me, a Chinese born person, fairly reasonable in the early days of the pandemic when not much about it was known and people didn’t even know if it would spread internationally or not.
Today news broke that allegedly laboratory workers tested positive for COVID-19 after conducting experiments involving the insertion of COVID-19 genetic material into the bacterium E.coli as an expression vector for COVID-19 proteins.
Using E-coli to copy DNA or produce proteins is a common lab procedure done all over the bio field. Microbiology undergrads learn how to do it fairly early on. Bacteria and yeasts that were modified to produce proteins they normally don’t make are also used industrially to make many things we enjoy today, from insulin and other pharmaceuticals to various enzymes that are used as dietary supplements or biomed procedures that require them. It’s much more efficient than things like PCR and it’s the only reliable and cost effective method for copying long segments of DNA or producing big complex proteins. Also, the author really doesn’t know their genetics if they think a bacterium expressing viral proteins will actually make it behave like a virus. No. First, a bacterium has a wildly different biochemistry than a virus, and two, the proteins need to be expressed on the membrane of the cell to even have the possibility of being infectious, which, one, the bacteria is likely not doing because proteins require additional processing to be expressed on the membrane, instead their default state is just floating around in the cytoplasm, and two, I don’t even know if the proteins would work at all on bacteria cell membranes because it’s much thicker and more complex (it has a third layer) than coronavirus membrane, not to mention that all the proteins the bacterium naturally has on its membrane could well interfere with the attachment process if the sheer size difference of the two things didn’t already. This is assuming they put the entire viral genome all at once into the bacteria.
If they’re just using them to make proteins, they’re probably only inserting the gene for a single viral protein into each strain they’re making, to make extracting and purifying the produced proteins easier. Each viral protein on its own is not infectious and will never replicate, so if the bacteria only have one protein out of the many required to make a functional virus, it’s absolutely impossible for them to exhibit any viral traits on top of all the other reasons they won’t. It’s like saying that those bacteria and yeasts that produce human insulin I mentioned before might turn into a full blown human. That’s not how it works.
Not to mention that COVID is an RNA virus, not DNA. Presumably they converted the sequence to its equivalent in DNA to insert into the bacteria, but that could very well have killed any ability for the sequence to replicate as a nothing other than the bacteria genome. DNA has regulatory sequences, promotors, and molecular tags which control how, how much, and when genes are expressed. It’s the reason your skin cells don’t produce neurotransmitters, your nerve cells don’t produce stomach acid, and your stomach cells don’t produce melanin.
Also, it’s not unlikely that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines also use some manner of bacterium to make their RNA, and even if that’s not the case it’s almost certainly not the first time E. Coli has been used for covid DNA or protein production in research settings.
As for them getting infected, it’s most likely from outside sources of real COVID viruses. Correlation is not causation and all that.
This is a pretty cool video by a genetic biologist about inserting DNA into E. Coli and using them to produce proteins for you, and also talks about gene expression regulation and using E. Coli as DNA copiers: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=F0_q-fD_lyU
Remember when Chipotle restaurants had to be closed? It was due to E.coli outbreaks
There are pathogenic and non pathogenic strains of E. Coli. Laboratories who use them as experimental organisms use the latter (unless they’re actually studying pathodenic E. Coli I guess). Every healthy person has massive amounts of E. Coli in their intestines, and they don’t harm you unless your digestive system gets perforated or you have an immunodeficiency.
Also, a foodbourne disease is unlikely to become a pandemic. Almost every pandemic has been spread by air or insects, spreading through food is much easier to quarantine and manage. Chipotle was back to normal once they found and eliminated the source of E. Coli in their supply chain, for example.
E.coli spreads via food and China is stockpiling food
And there you have it, the pieces of the jigsaw come together to give you a picture of my nagging concern
That’s your evidence? China is doing lots of things. Electricity can kill you instantly and China is one of the largest electricity producers in the world. OMG China is trying to electrocute everyone!
This is a conspiracy theory by someone who doesn’t really understand biology. Nothing more.
I’m not exactly a bio expert, but here are my thoughts:
No, China, as in the government/CCP, didn’t buy up medical supplies. Some businesses advised employees travelling abroad to buy some. Families asked their overseas relatives to send some back as well, just in case. That was after word of the outbreak in Wuhan had gotten out in the Chinese media but before China declared a national emergency because they didn’t know the extent of the outbreak at the time. Chinese people tend to be cautious and doing this seems, to me, a Chinese born person, fairly reasonable in the early days of the pandemic when not much about it was known and people didn’t even know if it would spread internationally or not.
Using E-coli to copy DNA or produce proteins is a common lab procedure done all over the bio field. Microbiology undergrads learn how to do it fairly early on. Bacteria and yeasts that were modified to produce proteins they normally don’t make are also used industrially to make many things we enjoy today, from insulin and other pharmaceuticals to various enzymes that are used as dietary supplements or biomed procedures that require them. It’s much more efficient than things like PCR and it’s the only reliable and cost effective method for copying long segments of DNA or producing big complex proteins. Also, the author really doesn’t know their genetics if they think a bacterium expressing viral proteins will actually make it behave like a virus. No. First, a bacterium has a wildly different biochemistry than a virus, and two, the proteins need to be expressed on the membrane of the cell to even have the possibility of being infectious, which, one, the bacteria is likely not doing because proteins require additional processing to be expressed on the membrane, instead their default state is just floating around in the cytoplasm, and two, I don’t even know if the proteins would work at all on bacteria cell membranes because it’s much thicker and more complex (it has a third layer) than coronavirus membrane, not to mention that all the proteins the bacterium naturally has on its membrane could well interfere with the attachment process if the sheer size difference of the two things didn’t already. This is assuming they put the entire viral genome all at once into the bacteria.
If they’re just using them to make proteins, they’re probably only inserting the gene for a single viral protein into each strain they’re making, to make extracting and purifying the produced proteins easier. Each viral protein on its own is not infectious and will never replicate, so if the bacteria only have one protein out of the many required to make a functional virus, it’s absolutely impossible for them to exhibit any viral traits on top of all the other reasons they won’t. It’s like saying that those bacteria and yeasts that produce human insulin I mentioned before might turn into a full blown human. That’s not how it works.
Not to mention that COVID is an RNA virus, not DNA. Presumably they converted the sequence to its equivalent in DNA to insert into the bacteria, but that could very well have killed any ability for the sequence to replicate as a nothing other than the bacteria genome. DNA has regulatory sequences, promotors, and molecular tags which control how, how much, and when genes are expressed. It’s the reason your skin cells don’t produce neurotransmitters, your nerve cells don’t produce stomach acid, and your stomach cells don’t produce melanin.
Also, it’s not unlikely that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines also use some manner of bacterium to make their RNA, and even if that’s not the case it’s almost certainly not the first time E. Coli has been used for covid DNA or protein production in research settings.
As for them getting infected, it’s most likely from outside sources of real COVID viruses. Correlation is not causation and all that.
This is a pretty cool video by a genetic biologist about inserting DNA into E. Coli and using them to produce proteins for you, and also talks about gene expression regulation and using E. Coli as DNA copiers: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=F0_q-fD_lyU
These videos from the same guy talk a bit more about using E. Coli to copy DNA: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=2hf9yN-oBV4 and https://yewtu.be/watch?v=DHNPnO5UOYQ
There are pathogenic and non pathogenic strains of E. Coli. Laboratories who use them as experimental organisms use the latter (unless they’re actually studying pathodenic E. Coli I guess). Every healthy person has massive amounts of E. Coli in their intestines, and they don’t harm you unless your digestive system gets perforated or you have an immunodeficiency.
Also, a foodbourne disease is unlikely to become a pandemic. Almost every pandemic has been spread by air or insects, spreading through food is much easier to quarantine and manage. Chipotle was back to normal once they found and eliminated the source of E. Coli in their supply chain, for example.
That’s your evidence? China is doing lots of things. Electricity can kill you instantly and China is one of the largest electricity producers in the world. OMG China is trying to electrocute everyone!