You’re welcome! I wasn’t trying to correct anything because you are 100% right. I just like Pasteur’s tribute. Sorry for saying “actually..”

It was actually Louis Pasteur who started calling them all vaccines in honor of Jenner.

I love goblin valley. From the parking lot, in the right light, one of the goblins looks like Bart Simpson mooning you.

It’s well established. They are all viruses because they are all made of protein and nucleic acid, and cannot replicate without a cell, but can reproduce with one. In terms of evolutionary relationships, though, it may be that certain viruses are less related to each other than we are to jellyfish.

It’s true, and even weirder. Different lineages of RNA viruses evolved separately as well. There is no real virus “tree of life” there are probably like 4.

There is a long and thorough process to ensure that the participants’ well being is considered. I think that choosing participants by “fitness to enter into people’s hearts” would introduce massive bias

Aaaaaaaagh!!

Yeah biology becomes very probabilistic when it comes to viruses

And billions of units is low. In graduate school I worked with a common virus that was present at 10000000000000 copies per ml of blood. That’s a LOT of virus

Yep

Masks work extremely well for preventing influenza transmission. The measures during COVID eliminated an entire type of influenza.

RNA viruses make so many errors that they exist as something called a quasi-species where every possible mutation exists in a single infection at the same time

About 1 error per 100000 nucleotides