Origins of Covid

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by GraculusTheGreenBird

Could you explain this? I don't quite understand the "would happen regardless bit", but it seems like it would also apply to any evidence of something that happened in the past, including a natural spillover.

Why is the fact that natural spillover occurred in the past being used as evidence for a natural spillover theory, but the fact that lab leaks have occurred in the past discounted as evidence for a lab leak theory?

I would consider spillover to be the null hypothesis as it is for most outbreaks. That said, there are almost always accusations of lab leak or human engineering of viruses whenever there is a serious outbreak. They usually turn out not to be true (AIDS, Lassa fever, Ebola etc…)

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by GraculusTheGreenBird

Its not her ethnicity that is the issue, its the fact that she is a Chinese citizen and thus under the control of the CCP. China 2002 is not China 2021. If the CCP of 2021 tell her to hide evidence or delete databases or samples, or straight up lie, she will do those things or at best get jailed for "picking quarrels and causing trouble", "national security" or any other spurious charge; at worst she will get disappeared.

She may well be a paragon of scientific virtue. The CCP is not, and the sad fact is that we cannot really trust anything that comes out of China at the moment.

Sure, but we should at least listen to virologists who are not in the same situation, and most of them don’t see a reason to think it leaked from a lab.

[Roger Ramjets]

Originally Posted by GraculusTheGreenBird

Its not her ethnicity that is the issue, its the fact that she is a Chinese citizen and thus under the control of the CCP. China 2002 is not China 2021. If the CCP of 2021 tell her to hide evidence or delete databases or samples, or straight up lie, she will do those things or at best get jailed for "picking quarrels and causing trouble", "national security" or any other spurious charge; at worst she will get disappeared.

She may well be a paragon of scientific virtue.

Let's not mince words here. If she was a 'paragon of scientific virtue' then she wouldn't hide evidence or lie - so what you are really saying is you don't trust her.

I don't trust her either. Being a true skeptic, I don't trust anybody, especially anyone pushing conspiracy theories about 'lab leaks'.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Sure, but we should at least listen to virologists who are not in the same situation, and most of them don’t see a reason to think it leaked from a lab.

Do you have evidence of a survey of these virologists because what I see are that some support spillover, a few support the lab origin and the majority agree both origin hypotheses are still on the table.

Originally Posted by Roger Ramjets

... I don't trust her either. Being a true skeptic, I don't trust anybody, especially anyone pushing conspiracy theories about 'lab leaks'.

Posting evidence is not "pushing" a CT. I'm not sure what category to put denial of evidence and attacking every source of that evidence as not qualified unless they are specifically virologists in. And one virologist, Dr Redfield, was dismissed out of hand.

There was a well documented concerted effort by certain people with conflicts of interest involved (Daszak, Shi, the Chinese government) to portray anyone suggesting this virus leaked from a lab as a conspiracy theorist. There is no conspiracy unless you want to call the Chinese government's lack of transparency a conspiracy.

While we in this forum are mostly aware of the true Scotsman fallacy, I find it interesting that more than a few people posting in this thread have as a knee-jerk reaction put the lab origin hypothesis into the CT category as if it must belong there. You are not a true skeptic unless you believe the spillover hypothesis?

A lab accident does not require a conspiracy. No one is asserting anything that is not supported by actual evidence. The lack of transparency by the Chinese government is well documented and persists despite multiple requests from the WHO to provide the information they have sought to investigate the origin of COVID. Daszak's efforts to claim the lab origin hypothesis is a CT before any evidence whatsoever was looked at re that origin hypothesis is well documented.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Do you have evidence of a survey of these virologists because what I see are that some support spillover, a few support the lab origin and the majority agree both origin hypotheses are still on the table.

I would say the evidence is that the most influential paper on the subject has been by Andersen et. al.

I don't think there are any that have had a similar number of citations, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, looks like a new WHO origins team has been convened, so I guess we will have to see what they conclude, if anything.

[Myriad]

Originally Posted by GraculusTheGreenBird

Why is the fact that natural spillover occurred in the past being used as evidence for a natural spillover theory, but the fact that lab leaks have occurred in the past discounted as evidence for a lab leak theory?

I second this question.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Myriad

I second this question.

I don’t know that this is what is being claimed.

Let’s say someone has a virus - the flu, HIV, a cold, herpes. Did they get this from the environment or did it come from a lab? In most cases, the answer is from the environment and ultimately from nature.

This is the baseline assumption.

However, because it was in Wuhan we now have an extra possibility of it being from a lab in addition to the likelihood of it being from nature. But it is also a new virus, so unlike the usual type of lab escape it would have to be an unusual lab escape as opposed to the type of zoonotic spillover that viruses tend to be.

So what evidence furthers that? The fact that viruses have escaped from labs before? Well, not really, because we are not talking about the type of virus we would expect to be there but a new one. Trying to figure out how it got there is the interesting question not that viruses can escape.

[Dr.Sid]

Well the virus for sure came from nature. Question is, if it was aided by research in any way, be it simply sample collection, some basic research or gain of function research.
And claims of Chinese scientist are completely irrelevant, because of repression. Also claims of official WHO representatives are somewhat irrelevant .. as for them maintaining good relationship with China is more important even that the truth.
But nobody outside WHO and China can even know anything. So I guess this is were it will stay .. we can't prove anything, and we can't rule out anything.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

I would say the evidence is that the most influential paper on the subject has been by Andersen et. al.

"Influential"? To whom besides yourself?

I think the things revealed by DRASTIC have been influential in getting people to recognize Daszak's conflict of interest, his manipulation of the direction of the investigation and his lying to other researchers about the Lancet opinion piece. DRASTIC's uncovering of the two contemporary theses based on the infected miners in Yunnan in 2012 did a lot to dispel Shi's claim the miners died of a fungus. And DRASTIC exposed the fact, with evidence, there are hundreds of SARS-like CoV specimens that have been collected from the area yet there is little record of them in what the WIV has released. They have also documented the fact there are indeed live bats kept at the WIV, another thing Shi denies.

Clearly we value different sources of information here.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

I don’t know that this is what is being claimed.

Let’s say someone has a virus - the flu, HIV, a cold, herpes. Did they get this from the environment or did it come from a lab? In most cases, the answer is from the environment and ultimately from nature.

This is the baseline assumption.

Re that analogy: One doesn't get the viruses you note from the environment, they get them from another person and the epidemiological trail can very often be discovered.

After two years no such trail for COVID has been found. It took 4 months to find the proximal source of SARS 1. And at that time it was discovered the virus had gone through adapting to human cells while circulating in both civet cats and people before the pandemic took off.

Historically it may have taken longer to find the source of things like HIV, but there are many reasons why that was. In particular, the science of detecting the viral source of HIV was difficult in the 80s. It wasn't until after 1983 when the PCR technique became readily available that research on genomes really took off.

The long incubation period of HIV before it leads to AIDS delayed discovery of the trail. We know the source of influenza because its evolution is monitored from sampling around the world. It's the most closely followed virus in the world. As for herpes, contact tracing plays a big role in determining the source of the infection.

The common cold is the result of a number of different viruses. When diagnosing a person's common cold infection one uses the information of any community outbreaks to make the determination. If it is flu season and flu is circulating one adds that to the mix. So for example, one's patient shows up in June with cold symptoms, with no history of travel, and when sentinel sampling of viral cultures of upper respiratory infections shows no flu, the suggested diagnosis is that it is not influenza.

Your oversimplification of how we trace infectious disease sources is affecting your assumptions about the origin of COVID-19.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

However, because it was in Wuhan we now have an extra possibility of it being from a lab in addition to the likelihood of it being from nature. But it is also a new virus, so unlike the usual type of lab escape it would have to be an unusual lab escape as opposed to the type of zoonotic spillover that viruses tend to be.

This makes no logical sense whatsoever.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

So what evidence furthers that? The fact that viruses have escaped from labs before? Well, not really, because we are not talking about the type of virus we would expect to be there but a new one. Trying to figure out how it got there is the interesting question not that viruses can escape.

Yes really. I fail to see how a new virus or a known pathogen is a relevant variable. Whereas knowing viruses have escaped from labs and infected people and animals before is a relevant variable.

[Reality Check]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

DRASTIC's uncovering of the two contemporary theses based on the infected miners in Yunnan in 2012 did a lot to dispel Shi's claim the miners died of a fungus. ...

Theses are not published papers. Few people other than the authors and reviewers would know about their contents and speculation about the source of miner infections. The fact that there seem no published papers from the authors with the speculations says that the authors were not confident about their speculations. Or that they were quickly shown to be wrong - see below.
DRASTIC's contemporary stupidity. Sceince does not stop whenever someone wants it to.

There were no viruses close to SARS-CoV in the bat cave.
6 September 2021: Shi was correct that the miners [probably] had fungal infections (the bats did not have SARS-CoV or SARS-CoV 2 !)
There were no coronavirus found in blood samples from the miners analyzed 3 months after the became ill. ("Doctors sent her the samples for testing after something like three
months of illness").
8 September 2021: Shi has reported that her lab tested blood from the miners and did not find evidence of coronaviruses or antibodies to them.

1 September 2021: There were no Rhinolophus bats at WIV because no lab has been able to keep them in captivity !
It is probably a (DRASTIC?) lie that Shi claimed that there were no live bats at WIV. There is no source for this cited by Skeptic Ginger in this thread. Researching gives a different claim. Daszak stated that no labs he had collaborated with had live (or dead) bats.
"Evidence mounts Wuhan lab studied live bats despite denials

Quote:

Daszak then tweeted back, “This is a widely circulated conspiracy theory. This piece describes work I'm the lead on & labs I've collaborated with for 15 years. They DO NOT have live or dead bats in them. There is no evidence anywhere that this happened.”
Daszak seemed to concede months later that the Wuhan lab may have had live bats after all, admitting he hadn’t asked about it when the WHO-China team visited the laboratory.

Jason Tetro of the Super Awesome Science Show tweeted: “A new angle for the lab leakers has been the alleged presence of ‘bat rooms’ in the WIV BSL4 … Any chance you can simply point out that the animal husbandry BSL4 is in Harbin and not WIV?”

Daszak replied: “You're right, labs in US & around world are trying to keep bats to test viral immune responses etc. None are successfully doing this at scale like lab mice & animals are always screened virus-free before experiments, so even if WIV were trying this, it's prob irrelevant for origins ... I also think it's in the WHO report (annexes) that they were working with animals in WIV at BSL-4, just like US labs.”
...
The WHO-China joint team’s numerous annexes totaled 193 pages, but the annex on its Feb. 3, 2021, visit to the Wuhan lab is just four pages and does not mention live bats being studied there.

DRASTIC probably lied by "quote mining" a video produced and released by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2017 about the opening of the then-new biosafety level four laboratory at WIV. DRASTIC show the outside of WIV and the bats somewhere in cages and a worker feeding a bat a worm.

[Skeptic Ginger]

A master's thesis and doctoral dissertation aren't peer reviewed?



Why no, no they are not. That begs the question: so what?

Quote:

Dissertations and theses may be considered scholarly sources since they are closely supervised by a dissertation committee made up of scholars, are directed at an academic audience, are extensively researched, follow research methodology, and are cited in other scholarly work.

[GraculusTheGreenBird]

Originally Posted by Roger Ramjets

Let's not mince words here. If she was a 'paragon of scientific virtue' then she wouldn't hide evidence or lie - so what you are really saying is you don't trust her.

I don't trust her either. Being a true skeptic, I don't trust anybody, especially anyone pushing conspiracy theories about 'lab leaks'.

No, completely wrong. I don't trust the CCP. Even a paragon of scientific virtue would think twice when their family is threatened. She is only human, and if that situation ever happened (and we are talking hypothetical anyway) I wouldn't blame her one bit.

[GraculusTheGreenBird]

Originally Posted by Roger Ramjets

Let's not mince words here. If she was a 'paragon of scientific virtue' then she wouldn't hide evidence or lie - so what you are really saying is you don't trust her.

I don't trust her either. Being a true skeptic, I don't trust anybody, especially anyone pushing conspiracy theories about 'lab leaks'.

In case it wasn't clear, my interjection here came because it was suggested that accusing Dr. Shi of anything nefarious was likely due to her ethnicity and hence de facto racism, wheras in fact the suspicions come about because of where she lives (under the control of the CCP), not her personal skin colour.

[Reality Check]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

A master's thesis and doctoral dissertation aren't peer reviewed? ...

Read what I actually wrote.

Originally Posted by Reality Check

Theses are not published papers. Few people other than the authors and reviewers would know about their contents and speculation about the source of miner infections. The fact that there seem no published papers from the authors with the speculations says that the authors were not confident about their speculations. Or that they were quickly shown to be wrong - see below.
DRASTIC's contemporary stupidity. Sceince does not stop whenever someone wants it to.

I have highlighted what the paragraph is about.
That paragraph is about knowledge of the existence of a thesis. A thesis sitting in a library is not read by the general scientific community. Theses can be made generally available, e.g. on a university web site, but scientists read published papers. They get to know about thesis contents from the published papers that reference the thesis. For example my thesis has been sitting in the Victoria University of Wellington library for 30 years. As far as I know no one has read it. The paper my supervisor and I published based on that thesis is the only public record of its existence.

You ignored the rest of the post. The theses were shown to be wrong within a few months. There is no evidence of live Rhinolophus bats at WIV (or apparently any lab in the world !)

• 6 September 2021: Shi was correct that the miners [probably] had fungal infections (the bats did not have SARS-CoV or SARS-CoV 2 !)
• 8 September 2021: Shi has reported that her lab tested blood from the miners and did not find evidence of coronaviruses or antibodies to them.
• 1 September 2021: There were no Rhinolophus bats at WIV because no lab has been able to keep them in captivity !
• 18 October 2021: It is probably a (DRASTIC?) lie that Shi claimed that there were no live bats at WIV.
• 18 October 2021: DRASTIC probably lied by "quote mining" a video produced and released by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2017.

[Skeptic Ginger]

First the qualifications of these 2 authors since that seems to be a hand-waving off issue here. I cited them before.

Bioscience Resource founders:

Quote:

Jonathan R Latham, PhD is co-founder and Executive Director of the Bioscience Resource Project and the Editor of Independent Science News. ...

Dr. Latham holds a Masters degree in Crop Genetics and a PhD in Virology. He was subsequently a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Genetics, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published scientific papers in disciplines as diverse as plant ecology, plant virology, genetics and genetic engineering.

Quote:

Allison K Wilson, PhD is co-founder and Science Director of the Bioscience Resource Project; Editor of the Bioscience Resource Project website; Assistant Editor of Independent Science News; ...

Dr. Wilson holds a BA in Biology from Cornell University, a doctorate in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Indiana University, Bloomington, and was formerly a postdoctoral research associate at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle and the John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK.

Next, their discussion of the origin of COVID. Sorry, I know I cited these two authors before but I want to come back to a couple of specific things in this citation.

Aug 2, 2021; Phylogeographic Mapping of Newly Discovered Coronaviruses Pinpoints the Direct Progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 as Originating from Mojiang, China

From the synopsis:

Quote:

Many scientists are now openly considering whether a lab leak best explains the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Yet it is frequently also suggested in the media that the data ‘hasn’t changed’, only people’s opinions. This is far from the truth. One data set that has grown substantively since the pandemic broke out is the number of wild virus relatives of SARS-CoV-2 that have been identified and sequenced. In all, twelve isolates have now been described, ten obtained from bats and two from pangolins. All 12 isolates were found in Asia. These viruses constitute what we know of the SARS-CoV-2 reservoir population in its bat hosts.

If anyone wants to explain how one of these closely related viruses resulted in a spillover event in Wuhan, have at it.


The full paper:
The full article: Phylogeographic Mapping of Newly Discovered Coronaviruses Pinpoints the Direct Progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 as Originating from Mojiang, China

Quote:

... according to that WHO report, scientists across China have sampled and tested over 80,000 animals, including 1,100 bats just in Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital. Yet beyond a few tantalising discoveries, which are discussed below, the search has been unsuccessful.

The broad failure of this enormous research effort has been scantly reported by the media and sometimes its significance has been dismissed entirely. ...

The Mojiang mine is also where RaTG13, the closest known natural relative of SARS-CoV-2 was found by Zheng-li Shi of the WIV. RaTG13 was collected during sampling efforts to determine the cause of the mine outbreak. For these and other reasons, the mine is already the focus of lab origin theories. ...

Our assessment of the widespread mischaracterisation of all this new evidence–in the media and the scientific literature–is therefore that most scientists and most media still resist evidence when it challenges a zoonotic origin or supports a lab leak. These new results do both.

Quote:

By showing that the highest related genomes are all nearby and only less related ones far away, the association of the mine with SARS-CoV-2 is not a happenstance but part of a general phylogeographic pattern among the SARS-CoV-2 lineage. This pattern makes it highly probable that the direct bat precursor virus of SARS-CoV-2 came from, at most, within a few hundred kilometres of the Mojiang mine, with the mine itself being the epicentre of the probability gradient, i.e. the most likely single spot.

The paper contains a detailed discussion of how these authors concluded the viruses which led to SARS-CoV-2 came from the Yunnan mine. They then analyze the different origin hypotheses from spillover to lab origin and see how well they fit or do not fit with the phylogeographic pattern of sampled coronaviruses.

It's hard to fit a spillover scenario to the data. Likewise a lab constructed virus is unlikely, a finding that has indeed been concluded by a consensus among scientists.

Quote:

A Mojiang location constrains other lab origin theories too.

Three distinct categories of lab accident theory have been proposed so far. The simplest scenario is that SARS-CoV-2 resulted from infection of a researcher on a sample collecting trip. This worker could have infected others when they returned to Wuhan. From the present analysis it can be inferred that any such collecting trip would have been to south/central Yunnan. Consequently, it may be possible to effectively rule out this possibility if it could be shown that no virologist from Wuhan travelled to Yunnan province in mid-to-late 2019.

A second category of lab origin postulates that RaTG13 (or a similar virus) was obtained from the Mojiang mine and enhanced or altered for some vaccine or technology-related research purpose.

The second category is supported by the phylogeographic pattern of sampled coronaviruses. But the authors propose a third hypothesis they feel has a better fit to the data.

Quote:

The third category of lab escape is our Mojiang Miners Passage theory. This is based on the medical cases of the six miners, mentioned above, who all became sick in 2012 whilst shovelling bat guano at the Mojiang mine (Rahalkar and Bahulikar, 2020). ...

The theory proposes that a RaTG13-like coronavirus (or mixture of viruses that later recombined into one) from the mine infected the miners. Some of these miners were ill for almost six months. Our suggestion, therefore, is that the bat virus(es) that infected them evolved (through a passaging-like process) inside their bodies to become human-adapted.

That hypothesis is consistent with recent data that SARS-CoV-2 undergoes significant genetic changes in persons who are chronically infected.

Quote:

Since it is known that numerous medical samples were taken from the miners and many were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, this virus may have escaped when those medical samples were used for research, perhaps to culture the virus or to manipulate it.

We favour this theory because it explains numerous otherwise puzzling features of SARS-CoV-2. These features are (1) the high improbability of a zoonotic appearance of a SARS-related coronavirus in Wuhan; (2) the apparently pre-adapted nature of the virus to humans (Piplani et al., 2021; van Dorp et al., 2020; Zhan et al, 2020); (3) a miner’s passage predicts a single zoonotic jump to humans [which fits the data on early human sequences (Bloom, 2021)] and which is inconsistent with most viral zoonoses, which typically feature multiple jumps into humans; (4) a miner-derived virus also explains the proclivity of SARS-CoV-2 for human lungs, which is a characteristic that many coronaviruses lack; (5) the theory can also explain the extensive attempts to deny or obscure research occurring at the WIV (see also the Zhou P. et al., 2020a addendum). The Mojiang miners hypothesis even has an evolutionary explanation for the infamous furin cleavage site. However, none of this precludes the possibility that the miner-derived virus was also lab-altered.

We know or can guess why China and/or the WIV are withholding evidence about the origin of COVID. But why would EcoHealth Alliance be doing the same?

Quote:

To date, both the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) in New York have refused requests by Congress and others, to allow public access to their existing coronavirus samples and their viral databases.

Speculative opinion that makes sense:

Quote:

The problem is not lack of data. As this article and the creative approaches of members of DRASTIC, and others, have shown, there is plenty of valuable data waiting to be brought forth. Rather, the obstacle is simply a deep and broad fear on the part of the scientific establishment that the trail might lead to a lab leak.

[W.D.Clinger]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

A master's thesis and doctoral dissertation aren't peer reviewed?



Why no, no they are not. That begs the question: so what?

Quote:

Dissertations and theses may be considered scholarly sources since they are closely supervised by a dissertation committee made up of scholars, are directed at an academic audience, are extensively researched, follow research methodology, and are cited in other scholarly work.

In the United States, a PhD dissertation is usually supervised by a single thesis advisor before being read and eventually approved by a dissertation committee that usually consists of three to five people. Many universities require at least one member of the dissertation committee to come from outside the department.

A US master's thesis is usually supervised by a single advisor, and may be read and approved by a small committee, but master's theses are generally held to a lower standard than PhD dissertations.

The quality of these supervision and approval processes varies by institution, and often varies by department even within a single institution.

Outside the US, standards vary quite widely, as illustrated by Sebastian Gorka's dissertation.

Generalizing, I'd say a PhD dissertation from a good university in the US or UK or Germany or a few other countries is likely to have been subjected to approximately the same scrutiny as peer-reviewed articles in reputable journals. On the other hand, I would not automatically assume some random master's thesis from China has been subjected to any more scrutiny than a random article published in one of the less reputable pay-to-publish online journals.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by W.D.Clinger

... I would not automatically assume some random master's thesis from China has been subjected to any more scrutiny than a random article published in one of the less reputable pay-to-publish online journals.

The thesis and dissertation speak for themselves. People looking at the thesis and dissertation cited the detailed documentation of the miners' symptoms. Anyone keeping up on this thread who is not just hand-waving away without looking, anything that doesn't confirm a spillover would know that.

[Reality Check]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

The thesis and dissertation speak for themselves. ...

They do. The issue is how you and DRASTIC are speaking about them.
A thesis need not be generally known because they are not published in scientific journals. It is unlikely that Shi ever read the thesis and dissertation. Their existence is irrelevant to your accusation that Shi lied about the miners.

A thesis need not be correct forever. The speculation of the miners having virus infections from bats was shown to be wrong within 3 months of the event by testing their blood. Shi and her colleagues are researching the possible transmission of bat coronavirus to humans. Of course they asked for and analyzed samples from the miners! Shi and her colleagues knew that there was no coronavirus or antibodies in the blood samples. That leaves fungal infection as the probable cause of their illness and deaths.

The thesis and dissertation speak for themselves - they probably do not say that there were virial infections ! DRASTIC do not quote anything from them stating this. It is DRASTIC who deny the blond samples having no coronavirus or antibodies. There is the DRASTIC idiocy of comparing the miner's symptoms to COVID-19 patients when COVID-19 did not exist ion 2012. Anyone who can use Google can find that fungal pneumonia exists and:

1. The radiological picture seems consistent with pneumonia.
2. Pneumonia causes elevated D-dimer values and pulmonary thromboembolism.
3. Patients with pneumonia have lymphopenia.
4. Pneumonia causes elevated serum amyloid A protein.
5. The miners were treated for pneumonia with the addition of antifungals.
   COVID-19 patients have similar treatment for similar symptoms including antifungals for opportunist infections.

Fungal Diseases and COVID-19 from the CDC.

Quote:

Symptoms of some fungal diseases can be similar to those of COVID-19, including fever, cough, and shortness of breath.1 Laboratory testing is necessary to determine if a person has a fungal infection or COVID-19. Some patients can have COVID-19 and a fungal infection at the same time.

People with severe COVID-19, such as those in an intensive care unit (ICU), are particularly vulnerable to bacterial and fungal infections. The most common fungal infections in patients with COVID-19 include aspergillosis or invasive candidiasis.1–6 These fungal co-infections are reported with increasing frequency and can be associated with severe illness and death.1,3,4,7,8 Awareness of the possibility of fungal co-infection is essential to reduce delays in diagnosis and treatment in order to help prevent severe illness and death from these infections.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Round and round the mulberry bush ...

Dr Shi claimed in an interview with Scientific American that the miners died of a fungal infection. She provided no evidence and no basis for that claim.


Reposting for thread readers with short memories: Lethal Pneumonia Cases in Mojiang Miners (2012) and the Mineshaft Could Provide Important Clues to the Origin of SARS-CoV-2 published in Frontiers in Public Health, Oct 2020.

Quote:

Frontiers in Public Health is a multidisciplinary open-access journal which publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research and is at the forefront of disseminating and communicating scientific knowledge and impactful discoveries to researchers, academics, clinicians, policy makers and the public worldwide.

Quote:

5. Elevated Serum Amyloid A protein: is an inflammatory marker that shows characteristic high values in cases of viral infection. A high SAA value or an increasing trend is an indicator of bad prognosis in the case of COVID-19 (15). In the miners' pneumonia, this marker showed high initial values in the first four serious patients and later showed peaks of up to 1,000–1,200 mg/L in some cases. ...

Based on the detailed evidence presented in the Master's thesis (7) and the Ph.D. thesis (9) and the discussion presented here, we do not think that fungus was the primary reason for the illness. Dr. Nanshan predicted the miners' illness to be a primary interstitial viral pneumonia (high probability) with invasive aspergillosis as a secondary infection (a condition commonly observed in COVID-19) (16). We think that if it was a fungal disease, only antifungals could have cured the illness. Vascular complications such as elevated D-dimer and thromboembolism are not common in fungal disease and have been observed in the miners' illness and COVID-19 (14). Elevated SAA (serum amyloid A) and declined lymphocytes are indicative of the fact that it was primary viral pneumonia (Supplementary Information C).

Remember, not only did the 2 theses list lab results for the miners, also included were images of their chest CT scans.

Quote:

1. The radiological picture seen in the CT scans of COVID-19 patients (13) and miners cases (7) is very similar, which includes ground-glass opacities, peripheral consolidation, and clear indications of bilateral pneumonia (characteristic in COVID-19). This is highly evident on pages 25, 26 and 35, 37 in the translation

So other than Dr Shi's claim, what is the evidence? Why does not a single paper on the miners' illnesses support the diagnosis of a primary fungal infection? Multiple papers support the diagnosis of a viral infection and the most likely virus being a SARS-like CoV the miner's contracted while working in the mine.

If anyone has more than Dr Shi's word for it being a primary fungal infection, let's see it. And while you're at it, explain how one miner recovered without any anti-fungal drugs. Otherwise stop repeating an unsupported claim is a fact. Speculate all you want, repeat it to your heart's content, but stop saying without evidence it is a 'fact'.

[Reality Check]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Dr Shi claimed in an interview with Scientific American that the miners died of a fungal infection. She provided no evidence and no basis for that claim.

Shi does not need to present evidence an interview with basically a newspaper. Shi is speaking from personal experience. Shi and her colleagues knew that there was no coronavirus or antibodies in miner blood samples because they analyzed the samples.

Lethal Pneumonia Cases in Mojiang Miners (2012) and the Mineshaft Could Provide Important Clues to the Origin of SARS-CoV-2 published in Frontiers in Public Health, Oct 2020. That is the DRASTIC inspired paper that ignores the medical facts that fungal pneumonia exists, gives similar symptoms to COVID-10 and is treated similarly.

Read what Shi actually said in the interview. How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus

Quote:

Three years earlier Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses.

“The mine shaft stunk like hell,” says Shi, who, like her colleagues, went in wearing a protective mask and clothing. “Bat guano, covered in fungus, littered the cave.” Although the fungus turned out to be the pathogen that had sickened the miners, she says it would have been only a matter of time before they caught the coronaviruses if the mine had not been promptly shut.

That part in bold is from the reporter. It probably is their version of something that Shi stated. It could be part of the reporter's research. What it is not is a quote from Shi.

[Reality Check]

From 6 September 2021

Originally Posted by Reality Check

WHO study Annex, p131.

Quote:

With regard to the matter of morbidity and mortality in miners in a mine in Mojiang, Yunnan Province, where bats were present, Professor Shi said that the events had been clarified in an addendum to her Nature article. Doctors sent her the samples for testing after something like three months of illness. Miners had been to the cave 2-3 times and it was 1 meter thick with bat feces. Professor Shi’s team went there in 2012-15 about seven times to look for novel viruses. They found no viruses close to SARS-CoV but there was a rat henipa-like virus (Mojiang paramyxovirus), as reported by another group in China. Samples taken during subsequent visits to the cave were found to contain no viral sequence related to SARS-CoV-2 (like RaTG13). However, none of them has higher similarity to SARS-CoV-2 than the RaTG13 has. Therefore, none of them are the progenitor virus of SARS-CoV-2 (this would usually entail >99% in genome). None could be isolated. The reported illnesses associated with the miners, according to the WIV experts, were more likely explained by fungal infections acquired when removing a thick layer of guano.

Google 'shi nature article miners'
Addendum: A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin by 28 authors and Zheng-Li Shi. Published 17 November 2020.

Quote:

Here we provide further information about the bat SARS-related coronavirus (SARSr-CoV) strain RaTG13 reported in our Article. Between 1 July and 1 October 2012, we received 13 serum samples collected from 4 patients (one of whom was deceased) who showed severe respiratory disease. These patients had visited a mine cave in Tongguan town, Mojiang County, Yunnan Province, China, to clean bat faeces in order to mine copper before being admitted to the First Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University on 26–27 April 2012. The samples we received were collected by the hospital staff in June, July, August and September 2012. To investigate the cause of the respiratory disease, we tested the samples using PCR methods developed in our laboratory targeting the RNA-dependent RNA polymerases (RdRp) of Ebola virus, Nipah virus and bat SARSr-CoV Rp3, and all of the samples were negative for the presence of these viruses. We also tested the serum samples for the presence of antibodies against the nucleocapsid proteins of these three viruses, and none of the samples gave a positive result. Recently, we retested the samples with our validated enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) against the SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) nucleocapsid protein—which has greater than 90% amino acid sequence identity with bat SARSr-CoV Rp3—and confirmed that these patients were not infected by SARS-CoV-2.

These samples from the miners had no coronaviruses and no antibodies to them in late 2012. Possibly not widely known outside of this group of 29 scientists. Shi and her colleges have known since 2013 that the miners were not infected by those viruses.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by GraculusTheGreenBird

Could you explain this? I don't quite understand the "would happen regardless bit",

If the fact that some lab accidents have been documented, is "evidence" for a lab leak then it's evidence every single time there is a disease outbreak even the ones that didn't come from a lab. It can't be used to to decern when something is a lab leak because it always says everything is a lab leak whether it really was one or not.


If the the mere existence of lab accidents is evidence for a lab leak, surely it's also evidence Zika came from a lab. And Ebola. And H1N1. And SARS. And AIDS. And so on. Every major disease outbreak of a new disease or strain brings accusations of it having come from a lab and every time the CT can be supported by "lab accidents have occurred" (even though none of these has ever caused a major human disease outbreak.)

Originally Posted by GraculusTheGreenBird

Why is the fact that natural spillover occurred in the past being used as evidence for a natural spillover theory, but the fact that lab leaks have occurred in the past discounted as evidence for a lab leak theory?

Spillover is the norm and ahs occured an uncountable number of times in the last. Lab leaks occurred rarely at best and have never caused a major human disease outbreak. The side making the extraordinary claim needs to present evidence.

Originally Posted by GraculusTheGreenBird

Its not her ethnicity that is the issue, its the fact that she is a Chinese citizen and thus under the control of the CCP.

Not un-coincidentally, the majority of such people are ethnically Chinese...

In Shi's case we have a conformed track record of her following the science even when it conflicted with the Chinese governments narrative.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Do you have evidence of a survey of these virologists because what I see are that some support spillover, a few support the lab origin and the majority agree both origin hypotheses are still on the table.

Don't confuses someone saying "it's not impossible" with them saying there is any evidence it happened that way. It's like saying "god did it", sure you can't prove that god didn't do it but that doesn't put it on par with actual scientific arguments that have actual evidence behind them.

The published science is heavily weighted to research into it being a naturally evolving virus that crossed over to humans from a wild animal population. In fact there is precisely NO convincing scientific evidence for a lab leak.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

"Influential"? To whom besides yourself?

I think the things revealed by DRASTIC have been influential in getting people to recognize Daszak's conflict of interest, his manipulation of the direction of the investigation and his lying to other researchers about the Lancet opinion piece. DRASTIC's uncovering of the two contemporary theses based on the infected miners in Yunnan in 2012 did a lot to dispel Shi's claim the miners died of a fungus. And DRASTIC exposed the fact, with evidence, there are hundreds of SARS-like CoV specimens that have been collected from the area yet there is little record of them in what the WIV has released. They have also documented the fact there are indeed live bats kept at the WIV, another thing Shi denies.

Their misleading and out of context quote mining is directly borrowed from the attacks on climate scientists over the last 2 decades. In fact they are even leveraging the same misinformation network to sell their attacks on science. Eg you personally have cited climate denier websites like polarbearsceince for "evidence" of a lab leak.

[GraculusTheGreenBird]

Originally Posted by lomiller

Not un-coincidentally, the majority of such people are ethnically Chinese...

In Shi's case we have a conformed track record of her following the science even when it conflicted with the Chinese governments narrative.

Cant quite parse "not uncoincidentally": Could you rephrase? It seems like you are saying its a coincidence that someone living in China is ethnically Chinese? Despite being wrong, I fail to see the relevance.

Anyone who is living under the control of the CCP is by definition, under control of the CCP. Their ethnicity has nothing to do with it. Non ethnically Chinese people living in China are also under the control of the CCP and subject to the same laws and restrictions.

And to the last point, once again China era 2003 is not China 2021. Its a completely different beast, the government and the security services behave completely differently. They will not tolerate dissent from anyone internally, they will not allow the official narrative to be challenged. Her historical track record could be used as evidence if all things were equal, and we were still living in that era. We are not.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by GraculusTheGreenBird

Cant quite parse "not uncoincidentally": Could you rephrase? It seems like you are saying its a coincidence that someone living in China is ethnically Chinese? Despite being wrong, I fail to see the relevance.

Anyone who is living under the control of the CCP is by definition, under control of the CCP. Their ethnicity has nothing to do with it. Non ethnically Chinese people living in China are also under the control of the CCP and subject to the same laws and restrictions.

And to the last point, once again China era 2003 is not China 2021. Its a completely different beast, the government and the security services behave completely differently. They will not tolerate dissent from anyone internally, they will not allow the official narrative to be challenged. Her historical track record could be used as evidence if all things were equal, and we were still living in that era. We are not.

This ^. The ophthalmologist who notified colleagues outside of China that there was an unusual pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan was threatened by the authorities and told to shut up. He later died of COVID and got a posthumous apology from the government.

And, what do we know about Shi's scientific integrity? We have good evidence she lied about the miners' cause of death. We have good evidence she lied about not having any live bats at the WIV and about claiming there were no in vitro CoV cultures at the WIV. And we have both Shi and Daszak currently refusing to share their databases on the coronavirus genome records.

[angrysoba]

Well, we talked before about the Nipah conference that Zhengli Shi attended. Now our friend Dr Quay has a theory that the WIV is going to make a new pandemic by messing around with Nipah.

Well, he's got a book to flog with Great Barrington Declaration co-signer, Professor Angus "four in a row is against the laws of physics" Dalgliesh.

[angrysoba]

I really have no idea what Steven Quay is claiming here.

He says something like "when patients were sampled in December at a hospital in Wuhan, samples sent to the WIV, they are put on a special sequencing machine, it's American technology actually, ... it generates copies of everything in the sample, but it's so sensitive it generates copies of everything in the laboratory. We actually found twenty different things that shouldn't have been in the patient. We found honeysuckle genes, okay the plants, and so what I did was I looked at research publications from the WIV over the last two years, I was able to identify 18 out of 20 prior publications. The two I couldn't was a deadly influenza virus...and the Nipah virus! And we found a third of the virus in a vector as it's called which is something used to make large copies of something and this is something unmistakable, this is a smoking gun for the Nipah virus. This is what you'd have expected to see two years ago for SARS-CoV2"

I have no idea what that means....

Does anyone else know what Dr Quay is talking about here? I can't even understand what he means about how some equipment manages to copy everything in the lab, or how he got hold of these samples, or whether these were written in some raw data in a paper.

But if it is a "smoking gun" I am sure he will write up his findings and publish them, or just put them on a pre-print server or something.

Link

[angrysoba]

Oh, so it looks like Dr Quay did write a paper, with Yuri Deigin and Daoyu Zhang and some other guy.

Link

Quote:

Abstract
We report the detection of Nipah virus in an infectious clone format, a BSL4-level pathogen and
CDC-designated Bioterrorism Agent, in raw RNA-Seq sequencing reads deposited by the Wuhan
Institute of Virology (WIV) produced from five December 2019 patients infected with
SARS-CoV-2. Research involving Nipah infectious clones has never been reported to have
occured at the WIV. These patient samples have been previously reported to contain reads from
several other viruses: Influenza A, Spodoptera frugiperda rhabdovirus and Nipah. Previous
authors have interpreted the presence of these virus sequences as indicative of co-infections of
the patients in question by these pathogens or laboratory contamination. However, our analysis
shows that NiV genes are encapsulated in synthetic vectors, which we infer was for assembly of
a NiV infectious clone. In particular, we document the finding of internal N, P/V/W/C and L
protein coding sequences as well as coverage of the G and F genes. Furthermore, the format of
Hepatitis D virus ribozyme and T7 terminator downstream of the 5’ end of the NiV sequence is
consistent with truncation required at the end of the genome for a full length infectious clone.
This indicates that research at WIV was being conducted on an assembled NiV infectious clone.
Contamination of patient sequencing reads by an infectious NiV clone of the highly pathogenic
Bangladesh strain could indicate a significant breach of BSL4 protocols. We call on WIV to
explain the purpose of this research on infectious clones of Nipah Virus, the full chronology of
this work, and to explain how and at what stage of sample preparation this contamination
occurred.

Does anyone understand this?

[Capsid]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

I really have no idea what Steven Quay is claiming here.

He says something like "when patients were sampled in December at a hospital in Wuhan, samples sent to the WIV, they are put on a special sequencing machine, it's American technology actually, ... it generates copies of everything in the sample, but it's so sensitive it generates copies of everything in the laboratory. We actually found twenty different things that shouldn't have been in the patient. We found honeysuckle genes, okay the plants, and so what I did was I looked at research publications from the WIV over the last two years, I was able to identify 18 out of 20 prior publications. The two I couldn't was a deadly influenza virus...and the Nipah virus! And we found a third of the virus in a vector as it's called which is something used to make large copies of something and this is something unmistakable, this is a smoking gun for the Nipah virus. This is what you'd have expected to see two years ago for SARS-CoV2"

I have no idea what that means....

Does anyone else know what Dr Quay is talking about here? I can't even understand what he means about how some equipment manages to copy everything in the lab, or how he got hold of these samples, or whether these were written in some raw data in a paper.

But if it is a "smoking gun" I am sure he will write up his findings and publish them, or just put them on a pre-print server or something.

Link

The sequencing reaction has to make a copy of the DNA template to derive the sequence.

[Capsid]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Oh, so it looks like Dr Quay did write a paper, with Yuri Deigin and Daoyu Zhang and some other guy.

Link



Does anyone understand this?

Sort of. Looks like they could have been making pseudotyped viruses hence the HIV vector. I'm not sure about the conclusion that "the Hepatitis D virus ribozyme and T7 terminator downstream of the 5’ end of the NiV sequence is
consistent with truncation required at the end of the genome for a full-length infectious clone".

[Reality Check]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

This ^. The ophthalmologist who notified colleagues outside of China that there was an unusual pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan was threatened by the authorities and told to shut up. He later died of COVID and got a posthumous apology from the government. ...

More misinformation. This is Li Wenliang.
30 December 2019: The Wuhan CDC alerted local hospitals to be on the lookout for pneumonia of unknown cases after doctors had noticed them.
Li read that memo and posted that there were 7 cases of SARS on a private WeChat group of his medical school classmates. Screenshots were shared on the Chinese internet.
3 January 2020: he was one of eight people reprimanded for "spreading rumors".
7 February 2020: Li died of COVID-19.
The local authorities reacted with a tribute and condolences. Later the Chinese government honored Li "as a "martyr," which is the highest honor the government can bestow on a citizen who dies from serving China".

Repeating fantasies does not make Shi into a liar.

• 6 September 2021: Shi was correct that the miners [probably] had fungal infections (the bats did not have SARS-CoV or SARS-CoV 2 !)
• 8 September 2021: Shi has reported that her lab tested blood from the miners and did not find evidence of coronaviruses or antibodies to them.
• 1 September 2021: There were no Rhinolophus bats at WIV because no lab has been able to keep them in captivity !
• 18 October 2021: It is probably a (DRASTIC?) lie that Shi claimed that there were no live bats at WIV.
• 18 October 2021: DRASTIC probably lied by "quote mining" a video produced and released by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2017.
• 19 October 2021: "Although the fungus turned out to be the pathogen..." is the reporter's words, not a quote from Shi.
• 19 October 2021: Shi and 28 colleagues published that miner blood samples were tested (no coronavirus or antibodies)

Has anyone seen any any quote "claiming there were no in vitro CoV cultures at the WIV" from Shi?

A Shi refusing to share the WIV database on the coronavirus genome records fantasy. No one seems to have asked for that database that was taken offline due to hacking. Probably because they know that the majority of the records are available elsewhere. Ditto for Daszak and seemingly a personal database.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Well this is interesting and maybe significant, maybe not.

There was a finding of a Nipah related virus in rats in the Mojiang mine in 2012, 6 months after the miners died.
Novel Henipa-like Virus, Mojiang Paramyxovirus, in Rats, China, 2012

Quote:

Our study showed the presence of a rodent-origin, henipa-like virus, MojV, in China. R. flavipectus rats are the natural reservoir of MojV. This finding and its context indicate that Henipavirus spp. viruses might infect more mammalian hosts than previously thought and that bats may not be the only hosts of henipaviruses

IIRC it was not found again and was ruled out as the virus that infected the miners. I'd have to go look at citations from pages back. And this may or may not be relevant. But the following could be more than just a coincidence.

One from the above link to the Quay et al report:

Quote:

Abstract:
Previous authors have interpreted the presence of these virus sequences as indicative of co-infections of the patients in question by these pathogens or laboratory contamination....

Intro:
Here we document the presence of Nipah virus (NiV) sequences, Banglisash strain, interpreted as likely for assembly of a NiV infectious clone, found in raw sequencing reads by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) from five patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 sampled by the Wuhan Jin Yin-Tan Hospital at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak (Zhou et al. 2020).
...

Given that the coverage of the NiV by this pooled dataset is c. 42% and in particular coverage of the G and F gene sequences are low, it is possible that the NiV sequence is an unpublished, closely related strain to NiV Bangladesh (AY9688601.1). ...

Chakraborty (2020a) and Abouelkhair (2020) interpreted the presence of these virus sequences as indicative of co-infection of early Wuhan COVID-19 infected patients with these microbes. However Quay et al. (2021) discuss the presence of a sequence H7N9 Hemagglutinin A segment 4 gene found in a synthetic vector in these COVID-19 patient samples and found contamination the likely cause, while Zhang (2020) identified the presence of a NiV infectious clone in the datasets. Here we review the recovery of a partial infectious clone of a Bangladesh strain of Nipah virus, a BSL4 level virus, with sequences joined directly to synthetic vector DNA.

And then there is this: Science, 2013: In a new study, U.S. researchers estimate that there are more than 320,000 unknown viruses lurking in mammals alone.

Quote:

To estimate how many viruses might be lurking in in wild mammals, researchers from Columbia University and [b]EcoHealth Alliance[/], a conservation organization in New York City, studied flying foxes in Bangladesh. From 2006 to 2010, they caught hundreds of the big bats and collected urine and fecal samples as well as throat swabs before releasing them. They then fished out all the viral sequences they could find belonging to nine virus families, including the coronaviruses, herpesviruses, and influenza A viruses. Each family was chosen because it is already known to include human pathogens and because good tests are available for finding new viruses in the family, says Simon Anthony, a virologist at Columbia University and one of the authors on the paper. They found 55 viruses in all, 50 of which had never been seen before, including 10 in the same family as the Nipah virus that has caused numerous outbreaks in South Asia since surfacing in 1999.

That was after SARS 1 but before the miners got sick.

The specimens were first sequenced by the WIV so contamination is certainly on the table.

Quote:

Significant contamination at Wuhan sequencing facilities was previously documented by Zhang et al. (2021) with MERS-r CoV and SARS-r CoV genomes recovered from agricultural sequencing datasets.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by GraculusTheGreenBird

And to the last point, once again China era 2003 is not China 2021.

Other than being significantly more developed now what do you *think* has changed? The current regime is simpler a continuation of the one that has ruled China or decades.

If you are so worried about China don't you think it's worth investing in the critical thinking skills needed to figure out what they are really up to? I don't trust China so I'm willing to believe anything anyone says about it isn't exactly a good way to protect yourself, it just opens you up for manipulation.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

I really have no idea what Steven Quay is claiming here.

He says something like "when patients were sampled in December at a hospital in Wuhan, samples sent to the WIV, they are put on a special sequencing machine, it's American technology actually, ... it generates copies of everything in the sample, but it's so sensitive it generates copies of everything in the laboratory. We actually found twenty different things that shouldn't have been in the patient. We found honeysuckle genes, okay the plants, and so what I did was I looked at research publications from the WIV over the last two years, I was able to identify 18 out of 20 prior publications. The two I couldn't was a deadly influenza virus...and the Nipah virus! And we found a third of the virus in a vector as it's called which is something used to make large copies of something and this is something unmistakable, this is a smoking gun for the Nipah virus. This is what you'd have expected to see two years ago for SARS-CoV2"

I have no idea what that means....

Does anyone else know what Dr Quay is talking about here? I can't even understand what he means about how some equipment manages to copy everything in the lab, or how he got hold of these samples, or whether these were written in some raw data in a paper.

But if it is a "smoking gun" I am sure he will write up his findings and publish them, or just put them on a pre-print server or something.

Link

While it is unfortunate Quay is interviewed on Fox and worse by an anchor who states right out that the lab hypothesis is true, I looked for corroboration separate from Quay even though there are 3 other names on the cited paper. I found this:
A Canadian news source, Aug 2021: Samples From Early Wuhan COVID Patients Had Genetically Modified Henipah, One of Two Types of Viruses Sent From Canadian Lab

Quote:

The Epoch Times asked Joe Wang, PhD, who formerly spearheaded a vaccine development program for SARS in Canada with one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, to verify the finding. Wang is currently the president of NTD Television Canada, the sister company of The Epoch Times in Canada.

After examining the evidence, Wang said he was able to replicate Quay’s findings on the Henipah virus. He explains that the genetic manipulation of the virus was likely for the purposes of vaccine development.

In that same news link is a new rabbit hole:

Quote:

Henipah was one of the two types of viruses sent to China by Chinese-born scientists from a Canadian laboratory at the centre of a controversy over the firing of the scientists and collaboration with Chinese military researchers. It is not clear whether the virus found in the Chinese samples is related to the samples sent by the Canadian lab, which were shipped in late March 2019. ...

The firing of Chinese-born scientist Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, from the National Microbiology laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg has been the subject of much controversy in Canada, with opposition parties pressing the government for more details on the case, and the government refusing to release information citing national security and privacy concerns.

Qiu and Cheng along with several Chinese students were escorted out of NML, Canada’s only Level 4 lab, in July 2019, amid a police investigation. The two scientists were formally fired in January 2021. ...

During her time at NML, Qiu travelled several times in an official capacity to WIV, helping train personnel on Level 4 safety. The Globe and Mail later reported that scientists at NML have been collaborating with Chinese military researchers on deadly pathogens, and that one of the Chinese military researchers worked at the high-security Winnipeg lab for a period of time.

Documents and emails released by PHAC show that the shipment of Henipah and Ebola samples was done with the permission of NML authorities. ...

After the House of Commons issued an order for the government to disclose the information, the government took the Speaker of the House to court to obtain confirmation from a judge that it can withhold the documents. The government later dropped its court case once Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called an election and Parliament was dissolved.

On a separate note, here's the main Quay Tweet minus the childish replies you see when you click on the post: https://twitter.com/quay_dr

I don't understand why one sees two different Tweet threads, the one you linked to: https://twitter.com/quay_dr/status/1450236918956838912 and Quay's main Twitter thread without the troll replies. It would seem the troll replies are still there somewhere but not visible in the main Twitter account.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

While it is unfortunate Quay is interviewed on Fox and worse by an anchor who states right out that the lab hypothesis is true, I looked for corroboration separate from Quay even though there are 3 other names on the cited paper. I found this:
A Canadian news source, Aug 2021: Samples From Early Wuhan COVID Patients Had Genetically Modified Henipah, One of Two Types of Viruses Sent From Canadian Lab




In that same news link is a new rabbit hole:




On a separate note, here's the main Quay Tweet minus the childish replies you see when you click on the post: https://twitter.com/quay_dr

I don't understand why one sees two different Tweet threads, the one you linked to: https://twitter.com/quay_dr/status/1450236918956838912 and Quay's main Twitter thread without the troll replies. It would seem the troll replies are still there somewhere but not visible in the main Twitter account.

I wouldn’t consider any of that to be “corroboration”. The guy who apparently “replicated” the findings is President of the New Tang Dynasty network. I mean, huh? He is not a working scientist then, but someone who heads up the Epoch Times, Falun Gong’s right-wing media outlet.

Sorry, I am sure that Falun Gong suffered a lot of persecution by the Chinese government but it is still a wacko cult and their news media is to the right of Fox News. Seriously, they make Fox News look like the BBC.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by lomiller

Other than being significantly more developed now what do you *think* has changed? The current regime is simpler a continuation of the one that has ruled China or decades.

If you are so worried about China don't you think it's worth investing in the critical thinking skills needed to figure out what they are really up to? I don't trust China so I'm willing to believe anything anyone says about it isn't exactly a good way to protect yourself, it just opens you up for manipulation.

I don’t think that’s fair. From what I can see Graculus has not said that it’s definitely a lab leak, but only said that the Chinese government cannot be trusted and has become even more intolerant of dissent in recent decades compared with the fairly brief relative opening up of China in the nineties and early 2000s. It seems China no longer feels the need to be ambiguous about its aims regarding Hong Kong (where Graculus lives) or Taiwan which it has openly said it will take over one way or another.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

I wouldn’t consider any of that to be “corroboration”. The guy who apparently “replicated” the findings is President of the New Tang Dynasty network. I mean, huh? He is not a working scientist then, but someone who heads up the Epoch Times, Falun Gong’s right-wing media outlet.

Sorry, I am sure that Falun Gong suffered a lot of persecution by the Chinese government but it is still a wacko cult and their news media is to the right of Fox News. Seriously, they make Fox News look like the BBC.

Everyone you don't agree with is lying and with those who evidence shows are actually lying like Shi and Daszak, you dismiss the evidence.

There's a reason why a lot of this evidence is coming to light from right-wing sources and in preprints. Many scientists, especially virologists, are reluctant to criticize things like GoF research that might limit their own research, and they've been cowed by the efforts to label the lab leak as a CT.

Vanity Fair: Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.

Quote:

The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf, following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone.”

The statement struck Demaneuf as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find. ...

And yet, in the wake of the Lancet statement and under the cloud of Donald Trump’s toxic racism, ... one possible answer to this all-important question remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021. ...

That's only a couple months ago.

Quote:

A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it. ...

In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.” ...

Dr. Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, said that from the very first reports of a novel bat-related coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it took him “a nanosecond or a picosecond” to consider a link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Only two other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were doing similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” he said. “It’s three places.”

Then came the revelation that the Lancet statement was not only signed but organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself. David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, ran the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry. He said it soon became clear that “there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy” inside the federal government.

BTW, I believe someone upthread tried to downplay the whistleblower ophthalmologist case:

Quote:

In January 2020, a Wuhan ophthalmologist named Li Wenliang, who’d tried to warn his colleagues that the pneumonia could be a form of SARS was arrested, accused of disrupting the social order, and forced to write a self-criticism. He died of COVID-19 in February, lionized by the Chinese public as a hero and whistleblower.

Are you suggesting Quay made his findings up and conned the other researchers to sign on? Maybe like Daszak did re the Lancet article?

Quote:

The present study was initiated to validate the results obtained in earlier studies by Aboulkhair 2020¹, Quay2021,³and Zhang 2021⁴and to correlate the overall findings from these studies. We also wanted to find out why the non-SARS-CoV-2 sequences were seen in these early patients, the nature of the sequences, and their probable origin.

Quote:

References

1) Aboulkhair, M. (2020). Non-SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences identified in clinical samples from COVID-19 infected patients: Evidence for co-infections. PeerjDOI 10.7717/peerj.10246.

I'm looking for this paper and will post it when I find it. In the meantime, here's this one:

Quote:

4) Zhang D. (2021) Vector sequences in early WIV SRA sequencing data of SARS-CoV-2 inform on a potential large-scale security breach at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic https://zenodo.org/record/4486195#.YNM6uuhKjO

February 1, 2021Dataset Open Access
Vector sequences in early WIV SRA sequencing data of SARS-CoV-2 inform on a potential large-scale security breach at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic; Daoyu Zhang

So if the conclusions about the genome data findings are simply false, I'm sure we'll hear about it soon enough. Maybe you could use that as your bases of discrediting Quay et al's findings instead of attacking the sources.

I get it something claimed without evidence by Fox News or the Epoch Times has no value. But this is a detailed paper with detailed methodology and results and it corroborates past work and is in turn corroborated by another researcher who claims to have been able to repeat the results.


It would move this discussion along if people addressed the actual evidence instead of basing their sole arguments on discrediting sources. Quay was dismissed at the beginning of the thread as not understanding Bayesian analyses, as having a private company, and whatever else was said about the physical connection to the line 2 subway he noted. The man is not stupid, he is well qualified by education and experience and he's been dismissed with few specifics that actually address the papers he's put forward.

Obviously his politics are not his best quality. I find them less suspect than Daszak's whose blatant conflict of interest has been exposed at every turn.

To review what Daszak said in that 2019 podcast interview just before the pandemic emerged, here it is in another article addressing the bias in investigating the lab leak theory: Oct 5th 2021; Origins of COVID-19: Who Opened Pandora’s Box at Wuhan – People or Nature? Yes the article was written by Nicholas Wade. But he makes a well supported case that speaks for itself.

Quote:

On December 9, 2019, before the outbreak of the pandemic became generally known, Dr. Daszak gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanised mice.

“And we have now found, you know, after 6 or 7 years of doing this, over 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS,” Dr. Daszak says around minute 28 of the interview. “Some of them get into human cells in the lab, some of them can cause SARS disease in humanised mice models and are untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals and you can’t vaccinate against them with a vaccine. So, these are a clear and present danger…

“Interviewer: You say these are diverse coronaviruses and you can’t vaccinate against them, and no anti-virals – so what do we do?

“Daszak: Well I think … coronaviruses – you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happen with coronavirus, in zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. So you can get more predictive when you find a sequence. You’ve got this diversity. Now the logical progression for vaccines is, if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s insert some of these other things and get a better vaccine.” The insertions he referred to perhaps included an element called the furin cleavage site, discussed below, which greatly increases viral infectivity for human cells.

And what followed:

Quote:

One can only imagine Dr. Daszak’s reaction when he heard of the outbreak of the epidemic in Wuhan a few days later. He would have known better than anyone the Wuhan Institute’s goal of making bat coronaviruses infectious to humans, as well as the weaknesses in the institute’s defense against their own researchers becoming infected.

But instead of providing public health authorities with the plentiful information at his disposal, he immediately launched a public relations campaign to persuade the world that the epidemic couldn’t possibly have been caused by one of the institute’s souped-up viruses. “The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It’s simply not true,” he declared in an April 2020 interview.

[angrysoba]

Yeah. We’ve been through all of this before. I don’t believe Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists. At least there is surely no way he knows particular scientists that have given him death threats as that is illegal and he could have them prosecuted. Maybe he received anonymous ones but if so he doesn’t know they are from scientists.

That said Fauci, Daszak and Shi have doubtless been receiving all kinds of threats .

[DetectedMotion]

So does anybody here know of any reviewable records of scientific laboratory tests, under a microscope, analyzing and identifying the COVID-19 delta variant (SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant) virus from isolated samples extracted from a human being?