Origins of Covid
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. |
Since it's not exactly rare for viruses to jump to humans, and the whole reason the lab in question was studying coronaviruses seemed to be that people around the world saw a new coronavirus jumping to humans as a likely event and one we should prepare for...
I'm not closed off to the idea that something with a lab might be involved, but it's the more extraordinary claim than believing that exactly what a lot of scientists feared happened more or less as they feared. It strikes me as a 'Hear hoofbeats, think horse not zebra" situation. |
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In that sense, we have no need of the "escaped from a lab" hypothesis. That said, it obviously cannot be completely ruled out, the Virology Institute being located in Wuhan itself obviously raises eyebrows. It seems if such a virus did escape it would have been most likely to have been a "wild virus" recently captured. My understanding is that nobody who has studied it has found any reason to believe that it was created or manipulated there. |
By the way, an important thing to bear in mind, is that wherever a virus is first detected does not mean that that is where the virus originated.
I don't know what the Wuhan Institute of Virology's role was in detecting the virus, but the relative proximity could have more to say about the detection and understanding of it rather than the origins. |
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Yeah, the origins are far more likely to be prosaic, so I am listening to the TWiV people talk about this paper on the types of Covid-similar viruses that have been found in bats across South-East Asia as well as China, and even Japan.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21240-1 Quote:
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This is an example of multiple people here clinging to their initial beliefs and failing to consider additional evidence. For the record, I initially thought the lab had been either ruled out or at least was very unlikely. The more recent WHO report supported that POV. But unlike some people in this discussion, I'm willing to entertain new evidence. While this State Dept report is just before Trump left, by that time Biden had been certified the winner and Trump was completely disengaged. But some of it was collected while Trump was in office. I expect Biden will do better. Fact Sheet: Activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (2017-2021 ARCHIVED CONTENT) Quote:
Lab leaks have occurred before. They were studying SARS and other coronaviruses there. Quote:
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This episode of This Week in Virology begins with talk about the paper I posted above.
They talk about how there are a lot of bats around carrying very similar viruses to SARS Cov-2 and how the range of bats can be far and wide, that bats can sometimes be traded etc... that the origins should not be assumed to be the same as where the virus was first located etc... And yes, they caution against making the rather simplistic assumption that the institute being there means it was the source of the virus itself.
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I do have to wonder who wrote that factsheet. It is a little on the dramatic in tone. The kind of thing that I could imagine between written by Trumpers and it is dated in the last week of the Trump administration: Quote:
Then all this other stuff.... Quote:
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I just wanted to get rid of it from the main Covid thread. |
Well even if it came from the lab, the question remains .. where did the lab get it ? Problem is, China won't admit it came from the lab, even if it did .. thus will also cover all information leading to where the lab got it.
I think the discussion is kinda pointless. We simply have no facts. |
ACE2 receptor
"Surprisingly, the S protein of SARS-CoV-2 does not contain this optimal set of amino acids[4], yet is nonetheless able to bind ACE2 with a greater affinity than SARS-CoV-1[7]. Taken together, these findings strongly suggest that SARS-CoV-2 evolved independently of human intervention and undermine the claim that it was manmade[1]. This is because if scientists had attempted to engineer improved ACE2 binding in a coronavirus, the best strategy would have been to harness the already-known and efficient amino acid sequences described in SARS-CoV-1 in order to produce a more optimal molecular design for SARS-CoV-2. The authors of the Nature Medicine study[4] concluded that “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”"
"Did the COVID-19 virus originate from a lab or nature? Examining the evidence for different hypotheses of the novel coronavirus’ origins" link This article treats several hypotheses. |
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I don't believe it was created artificially or released intentionally. (Not "man made") However, it is conceivable that a virus that was being studied there was mishandled for some reason. Someone became infected, did not report what happened out of fear of getting into trouble or losing their job, and then passed it on to others. One issue is that they still have not conclusively nailed down which species it came from or how it was originally transmitted to humans. We don't know who was "patient zero". The WHO even said that they were considering the possibility that it came from imported frozen food, while dismissing the possibility that it somehow escaped from the lab as "highly unlikely". I don't put a lot of faith in the WHO effort to be immune to political pressure. |
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https://osp.od.nih.gov/biotechnology...tion-research/ Quote:
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As far as the "purposefully manipulated" part goes, isn't that what they do in gain-of-function studies? It's very hard to know what kind of research was actually happening at that laboratory, because China would likely cover up any evidence that might lead people to suspect that it escaped from that lab somehow. I'm not saying that's what happened, I just don't think it can be conclusively ruled out since they haven't really nailed down what the true origin is. They are still entertaining multiple hypotheses. |
Assuming for a second that Covid came via the Wuhan Institute, it is extremely unlikely that it was release intentionally in the same city and that city only.
Someone out for doing bio-terrorism would not do that, because the chance of it being quickly identified and contained, and those responsible identified and apprehended, as way too high. |
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I'm not sure what to make of the WHO dismissing the lab accident hypothesis before they actually found the intermediary species between bats and humans. I'm not sure how strong the consensus is that it wasn't a direct transfer. Looking at the SARS research they found it in palm civet cats and that was thought to have been the source. One thing about SARS in palm civet cats is that there wasn't much genetic diversity suggesting it hadn't been in that species for very long. NIH 2008: A review of studies on animal reservoirs of the SARS coronavirus Quote:
On a separate note re secrecy in China, I have mentioned this before but there is a cultural pressure to 'save face' which means hide things and cover things up. There were some high level authorities during the SARS epidemic that chastised this secrecy when they found it. But on the local level, and certainly the lab managers would not want an accident to be found. Don't forget the ophthalmologist who tried to raise the alarm and was told to keep quiet. SARS festered in Guangdong for a couple months before anyone heard about it. Reports were coming in about a pneumonia that was killing heath care workers. It wasn't recognized as a new lethal pathogen for a couple months. |
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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: Quote:
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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 Quote:
2) Most (all?) of the coronaviruses they were studying did not naturally occur in the Wuhan area. Quote:
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. Quote:
This is the strongest evidence it didn't come from the lab: Quote:
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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. |
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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. |
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(Snippet from arthwollipot's link above) Quote:
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.) |
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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. |
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-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" |
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The one researcher in the SA article said so. Have you seen anything else? |
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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. |
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