Bad Rumors, Righteous Responses

                            Bad Rumors, Righteous Responses


Facebook Inc said it will take down misinformation about China’s fast-spreading coronavirus, in a rare departure from its usual approach to dubious health content that is presenting a fresh challenge for social media companies. How "dubious" is defined is anyone's guess.

Here is a particularly delicious one.

There is a theory that China obtained the coronavirus via a Canadian research program, and started molding it into a bioweapon at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan.

The narrative is that the virus, which was developed by infectious disease experts, may have originated in the Wuhan-based lab of Dr. Peng Zhou, China's preeminent researcher of bat immune systems. The lab specializes in how bat immune systems adapt to the presence of viruses like coronavirus and other destructive viruses. Somehow, the virus escaped from the lab, and the Hunan fish market where the virus supposedly originated is merely a ruse.

Now, a respected epidemiologist, who recently caught flack for claiming in a twitter threat that the virus appeared to be much more contagious than initially believed, is pointing out irregularities in the virus's genome that suggests it might have been genetically engineered for the purposes of a weapon, and not just any weapon but a really deadly one.

In "Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag", Indian researchers are baffled by segments of the virus's RNA that have no relation to other coronaviruses like SARS, and instead appear to be closer to HIV. The virus even responds to treatment by HIV medications.

Just as if it were built.