Origins of Covid

[Skeptic Ginger]

Indeed. This is why I am extremely skeptical of the source and don't trust anything on that webpage given that it is building its case using all kinds of red herrings about the gain of function stuff and bioweapons etc...

If you mean the State Department page, monitoring for bioterrorism is clearly one of their functions. So you would expect that to be the focus. Doesn't mean the information on the page should be dismissed out of hand. I cited it because it was clearcut and easy to read, unlike my link in the last post and Chris H's link. Some of this stuff is more clear when it's in lay terms and not the genetic science terminology.

 

[arthwollipot]

This might be of interest...

I was the Australian doctor on the WHO's COVID-19 mission to China. Here's what we found about the origins of the coronavirus

Relevant quotes:

It was in Wuhan, in central China, that the virus, now called SARS-CoV-2, emerged in December 2019, unleashing the greatest infectious disease outbreak since the 1918-19 influenza pandemic.

Our investigations concluded the virus was most likely of animal origin. It probably crossed over to humans from bats, via an as-yet-unknown intermediary animal, at an unknown location.

The most politically sensitive option we looked at was the virus escaping from a laboratory. We concluded this was extremely unlikely.

We visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is an impressive research facility, and looks to be run well, with due regard to staff health.

We spoke to the scientists there. We heard that scientists' blood samples, which are routinely taken and stored, were tested for signs they had been infected. No evidence of antibodies to the coronavirus was found. We looked at their biosecurity audits. No evidence.

 

[angrysoba]

If you mean the State Department page, monitoring for bioterrorism is clearly one of their functions. So you would expect that to be the focus. Doesn't mean the information on the page should be dismissed out of hand. I cited it because it was clearcut and easy to read, unlike my link in the last post and Chris H's link. Some of this stuff is more clear when it's in lay terms and not the genetic science terminology.

The only stuff that may be of interest is the claim that scientists at the Wuhan lab got sick. If that is true, then there could be an issue. But most of what is written there is irrelevant and looks almost like a Trumped up accusation.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Someone posted this link to the Scientific American in one of these threads but I thought I would point out some excerpts here.

How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus

The mysterious patient samples arrived at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at 7 P.M. on December 30, 2019. Moments later Shi Zhengli’s cell phone rang. It was her boss, the institute’s director. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention had detected a novel coronavirus in two hospital patients with atypical pneumonia, and it wanted Shi’s renowned laboratory to investigate. If the finding was confirmed, the new pathogen could pose a serious public health threat—because it belonged to the same family of viruses as the one that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a disease that plagued 8,100 people and killed nearly 800 of them between 2002 and 2003. “Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.

Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”

1) SARS 2 is the kind of viruses they were studying at the Wuhan Institute.

2) Most (all?) of the coronaviruses they were studying did not naturally occur in the Wuhan area.

By April 20 more than 84,000 people in China had been infected. About 80 percent of them lived in the province of Hubei, of which Wuhan is the capital

Very likely ground zero at that point.

The initial cases seem to have been from ~August 2019. And some of those cases were found in Italy IIRC.

It would be a sad irony if the lab meant to study these viruses to prevent the next pandemic inadvertently caused one.

In Shitou Cave—where painstaking scrutiny has yielded a natural genetic library of bat-borne viruses—the team discovered a coronavirus strain that came from horseshoe bats with a genomic sequence nearly 97 percent identical to the one found in civets in Guangdong. The finding concluded a decade-long search for the natural reservoir of the SARS coronavirus.

Look at the picture with this caption: "ON THE SAME 2004 trip, a group of researchers prepare bat blood samples that they will screen for viruses and other pathogens. Credit: Shuyi Zhang" and tell me that looks like level 4 biosafety.

This is the strongest evidence it didn't come from the lab:

Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.” ...

... The genomic sequence of the virus, eventually named SARS-CoV-2, was 96 percent identical to that of a coronavirus the researchers had identified in horseshoe bats in Yunnan

The article goes on to suggest the wet market was the initial source but we now know cases occurred earlier. But whether it came from the lab or not, we still have the problem of species jumping in multiple scenarios around the world. I'm not suggesting we forget that.

Daszak and his colleagues have analyzed approximately 500 human infectious diseases from the past century. They found that the emergence of new pathogens tends to happen in places where a dense population has been changing the landscape—by building roads and mines, cutting down forests and intensifying agriculture. “China is not the only hotspot,” he says, noting that other major emerging economies, such as India, Nigeria and Brazil, are also at great risk.

But one still has to wonder why was the initial explosion of cases into the population around Wuhan? It was not an area that was home to all the culprit bat species.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

The only stuff that may be of interest is the claim that scientists at the Wuhan lab got sick. If that is true, then there could be an issue. But most of what is written there is irrelevant and looks almost like a Trumped up accusation.

No, it doesn't. If this was BS manufactured by Trump it would not look this sophisticated. All that moron knows how to do is demonize China in a crude way. He certainly has not appointed scientists with actual expertise to investigate.

 

[Rolfe]

There's no doubt it can happen. Bear in mind that the limited outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease in the south of England in 2007 was traced to a broken drain leading out of the world's top scientific institute for the study of the virus, at Pirbright. (I can't quite believe that when that outbreak was first announced on TV, and I realised where it was, I turned to my mother and said, well that's handy, they're so close to the top institute for the study of the disease they could send a boy on a bike over with the samples, and didn't take the train of thought further.)

Cover-ups happen too, we know that. We shouldn't be dismissing this as a wild conspiracy theory, it deserves serious attention. It may not be what happened, but shouting "conspiracy theory!" in the face of a decent prima facie case and the known likelihood of a cover-up if it were indeed to be what happened, is just silly.

 

[Lplus]

Someone posted this link to the Scientific American in one of these threads but I thought I would point out some excerpts here.

How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus

1) SARS 2 is the kind of viruses they were studying at the Wuhan Institute.

2) Most (all?) of the coronaviruses they were studying did not naturally occur in the Wuhan area.

Very likely ground zero at that point.

The initial cases seem to have been from ~August 2019. And some of those cases were found in Italy IIRC.

It would be a sad irony if the lab meant to study these viruses to prevent the next pandemic inadvertently caused one.



Look at the picture with this caption: "ON THE SAME 2004 trip, a group of researchers prepare bat blood samples that they will screen for viruses and other pathogens. Credit: Shuyi Zhang" and tell me that looks like level 4 biosafety.

This is the strongest evidence it didn't come from the lab:

The article goes on to suggest the wet market was the initial source but we now know cases occurred earlier. But whether it came from the lab or not, we still have the problem of species jumping in multiple scenarios around the world. I'm not suggesting we forget that.

But one still has to wonder why was the initial explosion of cases into the population around Wuhan? It was not an area that was home to all the culprit bat species.

One might postulate that an earlier variant with much less transmissability occurred first - maybe starting closer to the bats - which only became more infectious after mutation in one of the human population of Wuhan? It's mutated to be more infectious since the pandemic started, so why not before?

 

[RolandRat]

There's no doubt it can happen. Bear in mind that the limited outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease in the south of England in 2007 was traced to a broken drain leading out of the world's top scientific institute for the study of the virus, at Pirbright. (I can't quite believe that when that outbreak was first announced on TV, and I realised where it was, I turned to my mother and said, well that's handy, they're so close to the top institute for the study of the disease they could send a boy on a bike over with the samples, and didn't take the train of thought further.)

Cover-ups happen too, we know that. We shouldn't be dismissing this as a wild conspiracy theory, it deserves serious attention. It may not be what happened, but shouting "conspiracy theory!" in the face of a decent prima facie case and the known likelihood of a cover-up if it were indeed to be what happened, is just silly.

If there is evidence to support it then great. Everything I've seen seems to clear the lab. If there is no further evidence then it is just a conspiracy theory.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

This thread is to discuss the origins of the disease, as there's quite a bit of discussion on it in the main thread and still quite a bit of discussion to go.

The main claim at this stage is that it came from the Wuhan laboratory.

That's incredibly reductionist. We must also give credit to the tremendous work down by the coordinating laboratories here in the US under the direction of Bill Gates.

 

[Puppycow]

If there is evidence to support it then great. Everything I've seen seems to clear the lab. If there is no further evidence then it is just a conspiracy theory.

And what have you seen?

(Snippet from arthwollipot's link above)

Our investigations concluded the virus was most likely of animal origin. It probably crossed over to humans from bats, via an as-yet-unknown intermediary animal, at an unknown location.

Both the location and the intermediary animal are unknown. That it "probably crossed over to humans from bats" doesn't seem the exclude the Institute of Virology, since they were studying bat-derived coronaviruses there.

You can argue that there is no evidence, but where is the evidence to support any alternative hypothesis? They haven't identified an intermediary animal and evidence as to the location would seem to point to somewhere in Wuhan.

ETA: I would also object to the term "conspiracy theory" to describe this hypothesis, since I am proposing some sort of accident, not an intentional act. (A subsequent cover-up of the accident notwithstanding.)

 

[The Atheist]

Our investigations concluded the virus was most likely of animal origin. It probably crossed over to humans from bats, via an as-yet-unknown intermediary animal, at an unknown location.

As always, the answer is there online - even kids know the origin of Covid: http://charman.co.nz/covid.html

 

[catsmate]

The main claim at this stage is that it came from the Wuhan laboratory.

So it's not, that's the conspiratorial ramblings of fringe idiots.

 

[Lithrael]

I do remember hearing it, but never saw the ‘sick/missing Wuhan lab staff’ scuttlebutt substantiated. Did anyone figure out whether those claims were based on reality or if they were just armchair Internet sleuthing and/or rumor mill type stuff?

The researcher’s claim that the strains they were working with have been checked against COVID-19 and weren’t a match, is reassuring. If I was them I’d be sigh-of-relief-ing too. It’s hard not to be suspicious of face-saving activity.... but on the other hand I’ve read enough anecdotes about Chinese folks so wracked with guilt over doing harm that they just totally break down, ‘getting away with it’ aside, that I’d really expect to see a few people drop out of society if they really did know or strongly suspect they’d set off a chain of events that killed millions of innocent people.

 

[lomiller]

And what have you seen?

(Snippet from arthwollipot's link above)


Both the location and the intermediary animal are unknown.

This isn't true. The intermediary is almost certainly a Pangolin. The spike protean for Covid-19 has characteristic who's only known natural counterpart is found in several Coronaviruses that infect Pangolins. It's not out of the question it exists elsewhere and we just haven't found it yet, but Pangolins as the intermediary fits everything else as well.

 

[RolandRat]

And what have you seen?

(Snippet from arthwollipot's link above)


Both the location and the intermediary animal are unknown. That it "probably crossed over to humans from bats" doesn't seem the exclude the Institute of Virology, since they were studying bat-derived coronaviruses there.

You can argue that there is no evidence, but where is the evidence to support any alternative hypothesis? They haven't identified an intermediary animal and evidence as to the location would seem to point to somewhere in Wuhan.

ETA: I would also object to the term "conspiracy theory" to describe this hypothesis, since I am proposing some sort of accident, not an intentional act. (A subsequent cover-up of the accident notwithstanding.)

The WHO have stated it's "extremely unlikely"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-theory-on-virus-saying-animals-likely-source

"A World Health Organization-led investigation in China found that the coronavirus most likely jumped to humans through an animal host or frozen wildlife products, finding that it’s “extremely unlikely” it came from a laboratory leak.

No further research is needed to look into the theory about a leak, Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO food-safety scientist, told reporters Tuesday at a joint briefing with China in Wuhan, the city where Covid-19 first mushroomed at the end of 2019"

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

One might postulate that an earlier variant with much less transmissability occurred first - maybe starting closer to the bats - which only became more infectious after mutation in one of the human population of Wuhan? It's mutated to be more infectious since the pandemic started, so why not before?

There are a lot of possibilities. I just don't think it's CTish to not rule the lab out until the origin is definitively identified.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

If there is evidence to support it then great. Everything I've seen seems to clear the lab. If there is no further evidence then it is just a conspiracy theory.

So let's look at this: The WHO said so.
The one researcher in the SA article said so.

Have you seen anything else?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

...

ETA: I would also object to the term "conspiracy theory" to describe this hypothesis, since I am proposing some sort of accident, not an intentional act. (A subsequent cover-up of the accident notwithstanding.)

Important point.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

This thread is to discuss the origins of the disease, as there's quite a bit of discussion on it in the main thread and still quite a bit of discussion to go.

The main claim at this stage is that it came from the Wuhan laboratory.

If I may, I assume you mean that was the main reason for the thread, not that the lab hypothesis is the main claim.

If it's not what you meant then you'd be wrong that the main ie the top possibility is the lab. There may be one or more persons leaning that way but there are people like me simply sitting on the fence until the source is identified.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

This isn't true. The intermediary is almost certainly a Pangolin. The spike protean for Covid-19 has characteristic who's only known natural counterpart is found in several Coronaviruses that infect Pangolins. It's not out of the question it exists elsewhere and we just haven't found it yet, but Pangolins as the intermediary fits everything else as well.

Has that been narrowed down? I thought there were one or more possible animals besides the pangolin.