Sanjeev Sabhlok's blog

20th February 2021

No, it is FALSE to claim that SARS-Cov2 doesn’t exist or has not been isolated

COMMENT FROM A SCIENTIST WHO STRONGLY REFUTES SUCH CLAIMS

The statement “Covid-19 is the disease which has been attributed to the SARS-Cov-2 virus, which has never been seen (except on TV) or isolated in vivo or in vitro.” is untrue.
The virus is real alright, the sequence has been isolated both in vivo and in vitro many times, and grown in vitro in permissive human cells, and has been isolated as a sequence perhaps > 55,000 times in many different regions in the world (all bona fide isolations uploaded to GenBank/NCBI Virus– but not by many countries, the UK being an opaque stand-out). All my own detailed and coherent haplotype switching work, on some 14, 000 full length genomes (29903 nt) isolated first in Wuhan, then Tehran, Spain, New York City, France, California, Florida or Victoria Australia etc, would be unintelligible if the claim that SARS-Cov-2 has not been isolated were true.
It is not true and I want to emphatically bury that “conspiracy theory” here and now.

I have seen similar comments on Twitter by those who study this issue.

I’ve not had personal time to check, so assume that the virus does exist.

8th February 2021

Covid seems to have been in the range of the flu in India – preliminary data

Nirmesh has sent in this info, that I’m hoping can be finalised – once as many loose ends as possible are sorted out, I’ll write about it in my TOI blog.

We know for sure that flu + pneumonia together kill around 600k in India each year.

We also know that globally there’s been a lower incidence of flu in 2020 (got to confirm this for India), and India has reproted around 150k covid deaths (of which real covid is likely to be around half if we go by international trends). It seems very unlikely, therefore, that covid + flu + pneumonia would exceed 600k by much. That’s something to investigate. DEFINITELY NOT SPANISH FLU!!

I think pneumonia is a small contributor. It accounted for 1.5L deaths in 2019. Will try to get exact data from a primary source.https://t.co/OACe5Gq3bw
— Nirmesh Mehta (@NirmeshMehta) February 8, 2021