I’m glad to hear that.

Surely highly infectious and deadly is preferable to deadly but not so infectious, as the former spreads more effectively from the expired host?

Certainly a way for Labour to exert influence in areas where it has little electoral support. If you took out Bangor Uni then Labour would be really struggling in Gwynedd. Same in Ceredigion with the influence of Aber Uni.

Don’t worry, I try to keep up with Mr Haynes.

I’ll settle for that. Don’t want to annoy the great man.

It’s not a linear process. It’s cyclical. A virus evolves its attributes, some are infectious but not deadly, some are deadly but not so infectious. Having an attribute of both would result in extinction of the strain, as you cannot spread if the host is dead. Like any evolutionary cycle, it develops a niche into in which it can multiply. If that niche ceases to exist, like a sparce host population, it would evolve, sometimes retrospectively to the attributes of the original strain. In the case of SARS-Cov2, and various strains. it was first identified in 2013, long before the Wuhan Lab. Does not mean it wasn’t farmed in the lab but also doesn’t mean the lab strain was the origin of the outbreak.

With directed evolution in a lab setting, how would this be proven? Genuinely curious, as wholesale splicing in of genes would presumably not be hard to test, but the former is simply speeding up that which would happen in nature under certain conditions.

A fifth column?

or the Hugh Pugh of everywhere in Wales bar Fishguard?