Origins of Covid

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by lomiller

... Unlike you,

Quote:

I don’t need jump from "I question the motives of people saying differently" to saying the market must of have been where the virus crossed into humans. I have actual evidence, specifically the genetic connection to the Pangolin virus and Pangolin’s presence at the market. Granted there are other possibility’s but they all involve a more complex series of events. Occam’s razor applies and Pangolins at the Wuhan market is the simplest plausible explanation.

So actual evidence related viruses have been found in Pangolins? Or actual evidence the pangolin has been narrowed down to being the source?

Because no one has argued against the former.

And pangolin's presence in the market? Did you miss the memo the original cases did not occur in the market?

[The Atheist]

Originally Posted by RolandRat

A study released by the National Cancer Institute (INT) in Milan in November showed the new coronavirus was circulating in Italy in September 2019."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/h...-b1802081.html

Anyone know anymore detail about this?

That was brought up a while back in the Covid thread, and I don't buy it.

If it was in Italy in September, it would have broken out before February. I've mentioned several times the "phony war" period of Covid, where it looks to be minimal before busting out all over.

That typical period is 3-4 weeks, as shown by all the outbreaks to date. The idea that it was circulating undiscovered anywhere for over three months (five in Italy's case) is nonsensical.

The opinion was formed early in the pandemic that a significant percentage of people are immune to Covid, and that's probably due to the same antibodies being claimed in Italy. Coronaviruses are all related - which is why they're all coronaviruses - and the very high probability is that some people produce the right antibodies to combat Covid.

Give it another year or so and we'll know what that it, which is going to be quite helpful.

[TruthJonsen]

There was a Wikipedia page on the topic: COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis. It served as a collection of the main ideas and references concerning this theory. It has been taken down and is now only viewable via the WayBackMachine:

Wikipedia: COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis
https://web.archive.org/web/20210210...eak_hypothesis

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Why drag their feet at all?

You can refuse to look at the role Chinese culture plays when it comes to scientific research reliability, but it doesn't change the fact it does. I believe that's called ethnocentrism: a tendency to view other ethnic or cultural groups from the perspective of one's own.

....

It only makes sense if you understand the Chinese culture of 'saving face'. And lest you think that's an ancient thing, look at the ophthalmologist who was told by authorities to shut up when he tried to raise the alarm about another pneumonia of unknown etiology that was all too frequently fatal.


I can imagine you don't see how the lab could be the source when you build a straw man like this to argue with.

First, I said I don't know. I am just not ready to rule out the lab.

Second, the point about considering the Wuhan lab people and the WHO may not be reliable is where the 'face saving' comes in. It's why those reports are not absolutely reliable. Reliable? Possibly maybe even probably, but not irrefutable.

Nobody is saying that Chinese culture doesn't have any concept of face, or that it is ancient. The problem for me is the way you are applying it.

You don't need to invoke face given that any country with a secret lab doing secret research is going to be resistant to having the WHO turn up and inspecting whatever they like.

This kind of thing is hardly unique to China. If you want to look at a previous escape/deliberate release from a lab example, look at the anthrax poisonings of 2001. Coverups and destruction of evidence happening all over the place there. Are these to be explained by "face"?

The point is, the concept of face is far too nebulous to do any of the heavy-lifting for your theory. Any normal investigation should assume secrecy, especially from an authoritarian government (do you think Soviet and US secrecy is down to face?).

But I love the way you turn it back against people who disregard your clumsy stereotyping and argue that those people are the racists for being ethnocentric.

Honestly, you may as well be saying that Bat Woman, being an industrious Boomer, did the hard work of collecting the samples, but may have left the security down to a Gen Xer, who are notorious slackers. That's really the level at which "face" is doing any legwork here.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by lomiller

Just to be clear neither Pangolin-CoV-2019 nor the bat virus RaTG13 is a direct ancestor to Covid-19. RaTG13 is the closest relative but not an ancestor. Pangolin-CoV-2019 is even more distantly related but it or a closely related Pangolin virus supplied important genes that give Covid-19 specific features to it’s spike that make if very efficient in infecting humans.

This contradicts your claim you have evidence the pangolin is the source.

Quote:

This exchange of genetic material from Pangolin-CoV-2019 to the real Covid-19 direct ancestor is very unlikely to have been deliberate manipulation for 2 reasons:

First, we can’t even find the direct ancestor after a year of intense search, so how would a lab have had it 18 months ago?

Umm, because maybe they did but they don't want to admit it?

Quote:

Second, while the spike protein in the Pangolin virus is very efficient for infecting humans this wasn’t know prior to seeing Covid itself. Similarly, the bat virus couldn’t infect humans. So essentially the researcher would have to have been splicing together random chunks of random viruses to see if they could make something that infects humans. This isn’t how a research would proceed with something like this they would take parts of viruses already know to infect humans.

Or for pity's sake.

You don't have to splice "random" chunks. It's much more sophisticated than that.

You think they wouldn't do research on a known serious human pathogen?

Quote:

Nature, on the other hand does this kind of thing all the time RNA viruses undergo recombination all the time. Most, like Covid, show signs of numerous recombination events. For this to happen either the bat virus would have needed to infect a Pangolin or the Pangolin virus would have needed to infect a bat. Even if the two viruses are not very infectious across species this can still occur on occasion. In this case it looks like the bat virus infected the Pangolin. The resultant virus isn’t very infectious to bats so it would have been facing a dead end if it was stuck inside a bat. Since it was infectious to both Pangolins and humans it could spread within Pangolins until one of them was take to the Wuhan market where it jumped to humans.

It’s possible that both jumped to a third species but this is completely unnecessary and would require 2 unlikely infections simultaneous rather than just one. Also, we now know that Covid-19 neutralizing antibodies can be found in wild bats and Pangolins in SE Asia indicating closely related viruses or Corvid itself was already circulating there.

So much rationalizing and speculating. The research is close, we in the thread all know that. But the source and the jump event has not yet been pinned down.


I thought this was interesting, just a comment, no specific significance just yet..
New Scientist Feb 16: Exclusive: Two variants have merged into heavily mutated coronavirus

Quote:

If confirmed, the recombinant would be the first to be detected in this pandemic. In December and January, two research groups independently reported that they hadn’t seen any evidence of recombination, even though it has long been expected as it is common in coronaviruses.

So after a year, one recombinant found.

Influenza, OTOH, recombines every time two strains infect one cell. They shuffle the cards.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

So much rationalizing and speculating.

That just about sums up the thread.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by The Atheist

.... If it was in Italy in September, it would have broken out before February. I've mentioned several times the "phony war" period of Covid, where it looks to be minimal before busting out all over.

That typical period is 3-4 weeks, as shown by all the outbreaks to date. The idea that it was circulating undiscovered anywhere for over three months (five in Italy's case) is nonsensical.

What outbreaks to date? You mean the outbreaks after intense surveillance was looking for it?

People died here in WA State a couple weeks or more before it was recognized to be circulating.

NYT (still no paywall on COVID articles) April 2020: Hidden Outbreaks Spread Through U.S. Cities Far Earlier Than Americans Knew, Estimates Say

Quote:

By the time New York City confirmed its first case of the coronavirus on March 1, thousands of infections were already silently spreading through the city, a hidden explosion of a disease that many still viewed as a remote threat as the city awaited the first signs of spring.

Hidden outbreaks were also spreading almost completely undetected in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle, long before testing showed that each city had a major problem, according to a model of the spread of the disease by researchers at Northeastern University who shared their results with The New York Times.

Even in early February — while the world focused on China — the virus was not only likely to be spreading in multiple American cities, but also seeding blooms of infection elsewhere in the United States, the researchers found.

Yet Dr Redfield claimed:

Quote:

“Through Feb. 27, this country only had 14 cases,” he said during a briefing.

We had more cases than that already in WA State. So he was lying.

Quote:

“We weren’t testing, and if you’re not testing you don’t know,” Dr. Heguy said. The new estimates suggesting that thousands of infections were spreading silently in the first months of the year “don’t seem surprising at all,” she said....

In mid-February, a month before New York City schools were closed, New York City and San Francisco already had more than 600 people with unidentified infections, and Seattle, Chicago and Boston already had more than 100 people, the findings estimate. By March 1, as New York confirmed its first case, the numbers there may already have surpassed 10,000.

Not to get too far off the topic of the origin, I have seen reports of early cases in Italy and some rebuttals. But believing we would have known is only if people were looking and if they had the tools to look.

Quote:

The virus moved under the radar swiftly in February and March, doctors and researchers said, because few cities or states had adequate surveillance systems in place. And testing, if it was being done at all, was haphazard.

And denial:

Quote:

“We were talking to officials here, and it was the same reaction we got in Italy, in the U.K., in Spain,” Dr. Vespignani said. “They told me, ‘OK, that’s happening on your computer, not in reality.’

Seems to be a common human affliction.

There's pretty good evidence we should look for the jump event sometime in Oct or Nov. And we should keep an open mind if evidence pushes that back further.

Quote:

The opinion was formed early in the pandemic that a significant percentage of people are immune to Covid, and that's probably due to the same antibodies being claimed in Italy. Coronaviruses are all related - which is why they're all coronaviruses - and the very high probability is that some people produce the right antibodies to combat Covid. ...

If you mean this just as a rebuttal to the early antibodies detected in blood in Italy, then yeah, some of the data has been questioned.

Beyond that, "significant percentage of people are immune" is an unsupported assertion but that debate belongs in the other thread. An asymptomatic infection is not the same as being immune to infection.

[angrysoba]

Denials, lies, secrecy...

This is exactly why you don’t need to invoke a special category “saving face” to explain the same behaviour at the Wuhan lab.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Denials, lies, secrecy...

This is exactly why you don’t need to invoke a special category “saving face” to explain the same behaviour at the Wuhan lab.

It's a special category in China because it affects researchers who one would not think needed denials, lies, and secrecy.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

It's a special category in China because it affects researchers who one would not think needed denials, lies, and secrecy.

Well, from what I can see, Shi Zhengli has been pretty open to having her work studied and looked at. Lots of the “evidence” that you and Sherkeu are using to support your lab escape theory is hers. But the institute itself has said that these are just her personal opinions and don’t reflect those of the Institute.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

So actual evidence related viruses have been found in Pangolins? Or actual evidence the pangolin has been narrowed down to being the source?

Because no one has argued against the former.

And pangolin's presence in the market? Did you miss the memo the original cases did not occur in the market?

Genetic material from a Pangolin virus makes up a key part of the Covid-19 genome. That's a little difficult to explain if Pangolins didn't play a major role in the origin of the disease. I've also show that being carried to the Wuhan market in a Pangolin is by far the simplest most plausible explanation for how the jump to humans occurred.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by The Atheist

That typical period is 3-4 weeks, as shown by all the outbreaks to date. The idea that it was circulating undiscovered anywhere for over three months (five in Italy's case) is nonsensical.

3-4 weeks is a little to short to go from a single case to a major outbreak IMO.

Using a very crude model where infections go up 2.5X every weak and cumulative deaths are ~1% of the cumulative cases 3 weeks early it takes ~ 8 weeks on average to see the first death but between weak 8 and weak 12 cases and deaths absolutely explode.

Again, it's a crude model but the explosion of cases in Italy in march would suggest the first infection in Italy was in early Jan, or late Dec at the soonest.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

This contradicts your claim you have evidence the pangolin is the source.

No, it doesn’t. The recombination that put Pangolin virus genes into the bat virus almost certainly occurred in a Pangolin.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Umm, because maybe they did but they don't want to admit it?

Why were they trying to hide it before it “escaped” and why has no one been able to find it since?

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

You don't have to splice "random" chunks. It's much more sophisticated than that.

You think they wouldn't do research on a known serious human pathogen?

Exactly my point. In this case, neither virus was a known human pathogen. It’d be completely nonsensical for a researcher to use them as a starting point. There is no logical reason to say this was a lab experiment and not recombination.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

So much rationalizing and speculating. The research is close, we in the thread all know that.

Recombination is well understood and known to be a major source of novel RNA viruses. If you are going to hand wave such well understood science I don’t know where we can go from here.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

But the source and the jump event has not yet been pinned down.

There are 2 sources, 1 bat virus 1 Pangolin virus.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

I thought this was interesting, just a comment, no specific significance just yet..
New Scientist Feb 16: Exclusive: Two variants have merged into heavily mutated coronavirusSo after a year, one recombinant found.

Covid-19 IS the product recombination between a bat virus and a Pangolin virus.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

It's a special category in China because it affects researchers who one would not think needed denials, lies, and secrecy.

“Face saving” would be more relevant for discussing why Chinese scientists would want to downplay the role of the Pangolins and Wuhan market in the outbreak. In the wake of Covid-19 there have been widespread international condemnation of live animal markets and calls to shut them down permanently.

Secrecy around the Wuhan lab is better explained by nationalism, the existence of government research and participation in industrial espionage.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by lomiller

Genetic material from a Pangolin virus makes up a key part of the Covid-19 genome. That's a little difficult to explain if Pangolins didn't play a major role in the origin of the disease. I've also show that being carried to the Wuhan market in a Pangolin is by far the simplest most plausible explanation for how the jump to humans occurred.

Of all the gin joints is a fictional line.

I didn't say pangolins weren't involved in the genome mixing.

[Sherkeu]

Originally Posted by lomiller

Second, while the spike protein in the Pangolin virus is very efficient for infecting humans this wasn’t know prior to seeing Covid itself. Similarly, the bat virus couldn’t infect humans. So essentially the researcher would have to have been splicing together random chunks of random viruses to see if they could make something that infects humans. This isn’t how a research would proceed with something like this they would take parts of viruses already know to infect humans.

Nature, on the other hand does this kind of thing all the time RNA viruses undergo recombination all the time. Most, like Covid, show signs of numerous recombination events. For this to happen either the bat virus would have needed to infect a Pangolin or the Pangolin virus would have needed to infect a bat. Even if the two viruses are not very infectious across species this can still occur on occasion. In this case it looks like the bat virus infected the Pangolin. The resultant virus isn’t very infectious to bats so it would have been facing a dead end if it was stuck inside a bat. Since it was infectious to both Pangolins and humans it could spread within Pangolins until one of them was take to the Wuhan market where it jumped to humans.

It’s possible that both jumped to a third species but this is completely unnecessary and would require 2 unlikely infections simultaneous rather than just one. Also, we now know that Covid-19 neutralizing antibodies can be found in wild bats and Pangolins in SE Asia indicating closely related viruses or Corvid itself was already circulating there.

This whole cross-species infection is quite interesting to me because the current virus seems to cross many species in it's current iteration.

What we know now is that there are many mammals that can be infected with the Covid-19 virus- directly and unadulterated. Some mammals can then infect others. Some infections are essentially dead-ends. Many are unknown.

Q: If I gave a researcher a Covid-19 virus sample from a currently covid-19 infected tiger, ferret, deer mouse, house cat, dog, mink, hamster, etc... could they tell the difference from a sample from a human?

If that virus went back, in short time, to a human from one of these mammals, could science tell us if it came from a human or other mammal?

[Orphia Nay]

I've just been reading a 26 February Nature summary about COVID-19's origins, and thought I'd share the conclusion.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00502-4

Quote:

To establish which animal passed the virus to people, researchers need to find evidence of the virus in that species. Researchers in China have tested some 30,000 wild, farmed and domestic animals in 2019 and 2020 but found no evidence of active or past SARS-CoV-2 infection, except in some cats in Wuhan in March 20205.

However, Ben Embarek says these surveys were not representative of China’s overall animal population, and that many more animals need to be tested for traces of infection, particularly on wildlife farms. “The amount of testing that’s been done is not sufficient to say, in any way, that wildlife farms were not carrying the virus,” says Daszak.

The explosive way in which the outbreak took off in Wuhan in December suggests that the virus was probably introduced once, through the wildlife trade, says Daszak. He says future testing should focus on farmed wild animals.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Wildlife farms are a viable place to look for the origin, Orphia. Thanks for the link.

I just did a cursory search for wildlife farms near Wuhan and it seems all the farms are in southern provinces. Pangolin farms are uncommon because they are hard to breed.

And referring to the seafood market in Wuhan continues after the idea has been discarded when cases unrelated to the market were found. The article in Nature notes it didn't seem to come from the market.

Quote:

The intermediate animal that passed the virus from bats to people has not been identified, but researchers think it might be a wild species that is sold as food in ‘wet markets’, which typically sell live animals. Early in the pandemic, investigators homed in on the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, because it sold fresh and frozen animals and many of the earliest infections were in people who had visited it. But the lead went cold when other early cases were found that were not associated with the market. Viral material was identified in drains and sewage at the market, but none was found on any animal carcasses.

I don't see anything saying the viral material was COVID. ???

Then it goes on describing the WHO investigators still focusing on the market.

Quote:

The WHO team concluded that it’s most likely the virus jumped from live animals to people, but Ben Embarek says it is possible the virus entered the Huanan market through infected frozen wild animals from farms in southern China, and then sparked an outbreak. Daszak wonders whether frozen ferret-badgers sold at the market could have carried the virus. “These were carcasses skinned at the market, not just cubes of meat in a plastic packet,” he says.

Focus on farmed wild animals, focus on the market, anything except the lab. I doubt investigators are being given free reign to look at the virology lab.

If it truly was ruled out, meaning we can trust the researchers and the claims they tested all the lab workers and students for the virus was verified by WHO investigators, ..... to be continued.

[Skeptic Ginger]

I was looking for additional virology labs in Wuhan... I haven't found any yet but I thought there were some.

In the meantime there were a couple news stories with headlines blaming the lab. But they turned to be based on a Fox News report. Nuff said.

Then I found this: TaiwanNews Feb 23, 2021: German scientist says 99.9% chance coronavirus leaked from Wuhan lab - Year-long study of pandemic's origin concludes it started with 'laboratory accident' in Wuhan The Chinese embassy in Germany is having a cow over it. But here's what the researcher based his conclusion on.

Quote:

A new study based on a year of research by a German physicist ...

Dr. Roland Wiesendanger, who specializes in nanoscience at the University of Hamburg, on Feb. 18 published a 105-page report on ReasearchGate titled "Study on the Origin of the Coronavirus Pandemic." The study was carried out from January to December 2020 based on scientific literature, print articles, online media, and correspondence with international researchers.

In his report, Wiesendanger listed six "significant indications" that the coronavirus pandemic started with a leak from the WIV....

His evidence:

No natural host found
Well-suited for hACE2 receptors
Wrong bats in Wuhan
History of making chimeras
Lax safety measures
Direct evidence of a lab leak

Re the chimeras:

Quote:

The scientist then mentioned that a research group, which is headed by Shi Zhengli (石正麗), also known as "Bat Woman," has since 2007 been researching how spike proteins in natural and chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses bind to the ACE2 receptors in the cells of humans, bats, and other animals. Wiesendanger alleged that the goal of this research is to make these viruses "more infectious, more dangerous, and more fatal."

Re the Direct indications of lab leak:

Quote:

Wiesendanger then cites several incidents that are indicative of a lab accident, such as reports that a young researcher in the lab, identified as Huang Yanling, was allegedly "patient zero" and had disappeared after contracting the disease. The WIV and Chinese government have vehemently denied she was infected, but over a year later, her whereabouts are still unknown, and all information about her has been scrubbed from the WIV website.

He also touched on analysis by American intelligence agencies of a private report purporting to have found evidence of a "shutdown" and "hazardous event" allegedly taking place at the WIV in October 2019. More recently, on Jan. 15, the U.S. State Department released a report stating that several scientists inside the lab had become ill with "symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses" in the fall of 2019.

Unfortunately for that last bit we are stuck with the evidence having been found on Trump's watch making it unreliable.

There are other stories in the link that sound outrageous:

Quote:

PLA experimented in Wuhan lab, covered up outbreak
2021/02/22 18:11
WHO inspector's 'natural hosts' experimented on in Wuhan lab
2021/02/20 17:59
WHO inspector's denial of bats in Wuhan lab contradicted by facts
2021/02/18 18:29
Vanished 150,000 elderly residents raise doubts about Wuhan's Covid death toll
2021/02/18 13:20

But I will take a look at them after I look for the original article published in Researchgate.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Oh darn, DW News discredits the study because they don't consider it an actual study, but DW is neutral on the hypothesis.

Google translated

Quote:

The University of Hamburg is disseminating a professor's research that the coronavirus came from a laboratory in Wuhan. In the fact check you can read why the term "study" does not fit here and what problems the publication has....

... or it was caused by an accident at the Institute of Virology in the metropolis.

Roland Wiesendanger, professor at the University of Hamburg , supports the latter theory with his recently published "Study on the Origin of the Coronavirus Pandemic". Since, as he emphasizes in the text, there is no "scientifically based, strict evidence" for the theories about the origin of the coronavirus, he compiles evidence: on the basis of scientific articles, publications in the media and social networks and discussions with international scientists. Work on it ran throughout 2020.

I can't read the captions to the true/false meter but I am totally guessing that's what it is. If you move the needle it looks like vote tallies. Maybe people reading this thread speak German and can fill us in.

ETA Maybe the meter is a referendum on the web site.

One side says:

Quote:

It's good. Citizens should be protected from misinformation.

And the other side says:

Quote:

I see that critically. There can be no official truth by law.

Google translate leaves a lot to be desired.


Here's a link to the 105 page pdf but I don't know how to translate it. Does anyone else know?

scroll down to Studie zum Ursprung der Coronavirus-Pandemie


Edited to add from the Focus link:

Quote:

Conclusion
The publication from Wiesendanger can be viewed as a search to collect possible evidence for the theory of the laboratory origin of Sars-CoV-2. We do not evaluate this theory and the quality of the evidence here. But the university professor did not adhere to some basic criteria of scientific work, so that the publication cannot be described as a study.

[Sherkeu]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Oh darn, DW News discredits the study because they don't consider it an actual study, but DW is neutral on the hypothesis.

Google translatedI can't read the captions to the true/false meter but I am totally guessing that's what it is. If you move the needle it looks like vote tallies. Maybe people reading this thread speak German and can fill us in.

ETA Maybe the meter is a referendum on the web site.

One side says:
And the other side says:Google translate leaves a lot to be desired.


Here's a link to the 105 page pdf but I don't know how to translate it. Does anyone else know?

scroll down to Studie zum Ursprung der Coronavirus-Pandemie


Edited to add from the Focus link:

I do not speak zee Deutsch, but it would be unusual not to have an English version of a scientific publication. It's the lingua franca for global sharing. Even most pre-prints use English. If it has merit, we should see a translation very soon.

[Skeptic Ginger]

More from TaiwanNews:

WHO inspector's 'natural hosts' experimented on in Wuhan lab There are a lot of specifics about the lab. Given it is unclear about the cred of the source, I'm just quoting this:

Quote:

Meanwhile, an Australian geneticist who publishes scientific papers under the name Zhang Daoyu told Taiwan News in an email that the ferret-badger ACE2 receptor cannot bind to the S1 subunit of the spike protein. He added that animals cannot be infected with the disease in-vivo, and adaptations in them give a very different receptor-binding motif (RBM) than what is currently seen in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Another of Daszak's claims is that rabbits were sold at the wet market and the animals "turn out to be quite susceptible to SARS-CoV-2." However, Zhang said that since the currently observed RBM of SARS-CoV-2 does not efficiently use ferret-badger ACE2 and is not optimal for binding to rabbit ACE2, this rules out the possibility the virus may have "naturally" adapted to these two species.....

From a conference the Institute's expert spoke at:

Quote:

In an archive of the company's deleted press release, it stated that "Beijing Huironghe Technology Co., Ltd. has been deeply involved in the field of inhalation toxicology for many years." As a "special sponsor," the company demonstrated its "main oral and nose inhalation exposure systems."

Could be routine purging of old stuff. Needs checking for which I'm not going down that additional rabbit hole.


And mixed whether the Taiwan News is reliable:

Quote:

What Daszak does not mention is that in 2019, a member of Shi Zhengli's team, assistant researcher Hu Ben (胡犇), embarked on high-risk GOF research on coronaviruses and chimeras in humanized mice at WIV. According to a researcher who goes by the pseudonym Billy Bostickson, and who is in contact with Taiwan News: "This research involved 'novel' bat coronaviruses inoculated into immuno-suppressed mice with humanized features, such as hACE2, and possibly humanized lungs, bone marrow, etc..."

No information about this research has been released to the public since the start of the pandemic, including data on the eight chimeric viruses WIV had been infecting the mice with. In fact, all the WIV institute's databases have been offline since the start of the pandemic for alleged "cybersecurity issues," including 100 unpublished sequences of bat betacoronaviruses, which need to be sequenced by international scientists, according to Bostickson.

If it was online and now it isn't, that seems like reliable news as it is easily checked.

But their source might as well be anonymous. Keep in mind the news source did rebut their own anonymous source.

[Skeptic Ginger]

This looks interesting and before you all go discounting what I'm posting here, keep in mind I am trying to post what I'm finding as I look for more objective evidence. I don't think all of this is unreliable even if some is:

Taiwan News

Quote:

Researchers have uncovered accounts from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) scientists and applications for patents for bat breeding that refute World Health Organization (WHO) inspector Peter Daszak's claims that the lab does not house live bats captured in the wild.

An international network of researchers and scientists investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic who call themselves DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19) have found evidence from Chinese media reports that in fact the WIV scientists captured bats alive and kept them inside the lab. The lab has also filed two patents for cages to be used in bat breeding and one for lab accidents just before the start of the pandemic.

British zoologist and the president of EcoHealth Alliance Peter Daszak is the only individual to be part of both the WHO and The Lancet teams investigating the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. However, he has long-term professional and financial ties with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) spanning two decades and valued in the millions of dollars, which represents a conflict of interest.

Daszak has some rebuttal Tweets that no live bats were at the Institute, some deleted, you can all look for yourselves about that part of the report.

Quote:

However, the team at DRASTIC uncovered comments made at a conference in 2017 by the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at WIV, Shi Zhengli (石正麗) — also known as "Bat Woman" — claiming that she had experimented on live bats with Nipah. The Nipah virus is a highly infectious disease carried by bats that can easily be transmitted to other animals and humans and have a high mortality rate. ...

In an article posted on Sixth Tone in May of 2018, the news site interviewed WIV scientist Luo Dongsheng, who is part of a working group at the lab that sequences coronaviruses and enters the data into a genetic database. Luo describes the process of exploring Taiyi Cave in Xianning, Hubei Province, and collecting horseshoe bat samples and the bats themselves....

There are screenshots of things including this one:

Quote:

In an archived article from ScienceNet.cn which has since been scrubbed from the internet, WIV scientist Zhang Huajun praised Shi for helping to feed the bats while the interns were out for the Lunar New Year holiday:

More:

Quote:

In addition, an open-source intelligence consultant discovered that the WIV has filed at least two patents that appear to point to a bat breeding program in the lab. The first patent was filed in June of 2018 and was called "A kind of carnivorism bat rearing cage." The patent was granted in April of 2019.

There is a lot of good evidence there which suggests the lab has lied about housing live bats at the facility. It doesn't look like the usual tabloid fake news. These patents can be checked.

Here are two more with the last one being quite odd:

Quote:

The second patent describes an artificial breeding method of feeding insectivorous bats with predatory insects, ensuring their safe "overwintering," and ensuring a "high breeding rate and survival rate." A third patent, filed in November of 2019, just one month before the first COVID-19 cases in Wuhan were announced, is an instrument designed to quickly stop the bleeding on a finger if it had been injured while working pathogenic viruses in a biosafety lab.

When I was a kid I was bit by someone's pet (hamster I think or a similar animal). It made two tiny little puncture wounds in my finger tip that spurted arterial blood. It wasn't scary because the punctures were so small and I remember watching it for a bit, showing it to the kids there before I put a bandaid on. I wonder what bat bites look like? Sorry, I digress...


I think that's enough rabbit holes for now.

[Sherkeu]

Daszak's company, Eco Health Alliance, partnered with the Wuhan lab (by invitation from China) in the SARS research- specifically looking into the bat caves in Yunnan.

https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/20...eople-in-china

He might be forthright as he sees it, but there is a serious conflict of interest there.

eta: I should mention that Eco Health Alliance also has a grant from the US NIH- though not specific to China. Wuhan also had US money for research, and there is a partnership with Duke Medical (yeah the NC school) with both of them. Duke has a campus in Wuhan. Like many relationships, it's complicated.

Still, Daszak seems to be bending over quite a bit in China's favor. I think I'll go google what other scientists think of his responses. .....

[Sherkeu]

From the WSJ bios of the WHO team, including Daszak.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-are...rs-11613401955

Quote:

His (Daszak's) interest is understandable. The British-born U.S. citizen has deep ties with the WIV. Millions of U.S. government dollars went to his organization to fund research at the Chinese institution. Mr. Daszak, who has consistently defended the Chinese government, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“You’re looking for small clusters of outbreaks that went to a clinic because they were severe and their symptoms were just like Covid,” Mr. Daszak said during a CNN interview from Wuhan earlier this month. “That didn’t happen. We didn’t see that in the data earlier than December.” Never mind that Washington said it found exactly that at the WIV.

While Mr. Daszak touted the “really remarkable openness from China,” other experts from the WHO committee complained about political pressure and uncooperative hosts blocking access to important data. The Australian team member Dominic Dwyer in particular deserves credit for speaking candidly.

eta: Emails show Daszak coordinated a letter discounting lab theories as 'crackpot' early on in Feb 2020. Wow, that is very early to discount any origin hypothesis!

https://www.independentsciencenews.o...of-sars-cov-2/

[Skeptic Ginger]

More Taiwan News but the podcast they are reporting on is embedded in the article

From Dec 2019 podcast uncovered by DRASTIC:

Quote:

At the 28:10 mark of the podcast interview, Daszak states that researchers found that SARS likely originated from bats and then set out to find more SARS-related coronaviruses, eventually finding over 100. He observed that some coronaviruses can "get into human cells in the lab," and others can cause SARS disease in "humanized mouse models."...

When Racaniello asks what can be done to deal with coronavirus given that there is no vaccine or therapeutic for them, Daszak at the 29:54 mark appears to reveal that the goal of the GoF experiments was to develop a pan-coronavirus vaccine for many different types of coronaviruses.

More:

Quote:

Based on his response, it is evident that just before the start of the pandemic, the WIV was modifying coronaviruses in the lab. "You can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily." What he then mentioned has become the telltale trait of SARS-CoV-2, its spike protein: "Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus, zoonotic risk."

Daszak mentions the WIV's collaboration with Baric: "and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC [University of North Carolina] to do this." As has been suggested by proponents that SARS-CoV-2 is a chimera made in a lab, he speaks of inserting the spike protein "into a backbone of another virus" and then doing "some work in the lab."

Providing evidence of the creation of chimeras for the sake of a vaccine, he states "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 try to insert these other related diseases and get a better vaccine.”...

In a presentation titled "Assessing Coronavirus Threats," which was delivered four years before the pandemic in 2015, Daszak points out that experiments involving humanized mice have the highest degree of risk. Demonstrating his close ties with the WIV, he also listed the lab as a collaborator at the end of the presentation.

[Sherkeu]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

More Taiwan News but the podcast they are reporting on is embedded in the article

From Dec 2019 podcast uncovered by DRASTIC:


More:

Good find SG. You have to go back in time to see under the lid.

[Skeptic Ginger]

This is from the Aussie version of Spectator. I think the US version if they are related is a right-leaning news magazine.

Covid cuckoo clock - Australia is stuck in a viral Groundhog Day

It's mostly about treatments saying if you can't beat them treat them while lamenting shut down economies. But there is this:

Quote:

And while the WHO team in Wuhan is being taken to visit museums, Dr Steven Quay, a top medical scientist, has published a paper concluding that there is a 99.8 per cent chance that Sars-Cov-2 escaped from a lab, that some of the early patients may have been part of a vaccine trial and that if this is the case, the research may have been part of a bioweapons program. This confirms the work of numerous scientists including a group of internet sleuths who use the jocular moniker DRASTIC (Decentralised Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating Covid-19) and who, over the last year, were able to piece together the evidence to show that the original bat virus was found in an abandoned mine in Mojiang and brought to Wuhan where it was made more infectious at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It escaped between September and November 2019 and the Chinese government and its scientific shills in top Western universities have been engaged in a shameful cover-up ever since.

There's an assertion that Western universities are involved in a coverup. That plus the Steven Quay paper really drift off into CT territory. ( Bolded just so you know I am trying to be objective here even though I know some of you don't believe that.)

Is there a link to the Quay paper here? The number 99+% certainty rings a bell.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Always more rabbit holes to chase down:

Bibiography of COVID origin news reports

The links are embedded so go to the list yourself, plus people get annoyed if I post bibliographies. Some of them look like valid links like:

Quote:

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Did the SARS-CoV-2 virus arise from a bat coronavirus research program in a Chinese laboratory? Very possibly. Milton Leitenberg. June 4, 2020....

The Washington Post. State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses. Josh Rogin. April 14, 2020....

Houston Chronicle. UTMB scientist acknowledges safety risks at Chinese lab doing coronavirus research. Nick Powell. April 23, 2020. ...

Newsweek. The controversial experiments and Wuhan lab suspected of starting the coronavirus pandemic. Fred Guterl, Naveed Jamali and Tom O’Connor. April 27, 2020.

The Washington Post. State Department releases cable that launched claims that coronavirus escaped from Chinese lab. John Hudson and Nate Jones. July 17, 2020. ...

NBC News. Report says cellphone data suggests October shutdown at Wuhan lab, but experts are skeptical. Ken Dilanian, Ruaridh Arrow, Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Louise Jones and Lorand Bodo. May 9, 2020. ...

The New York Times. In Hunt for Virus Source, W.H.O. Let China Take Charge. Selam Gebrekidan, Matt Apuzzo, Amy Qin and Javier C. Hernández. November 2, 2020....

Gawd, so much research is hard to trust, one more Trump gift that keeps on giving. The WA Po cites cables more than once. But that bibliography has all kinds of interesting avenues.

Useful notes from one of the science news papers

Quote:

Genome sequence comparisons of viral samples from different patients infected by SARS-CoV-2 have revealed an identity rate of 99.98%, indicating that the strain emerged in humans very recently.

That makes sense, a fact I think we can rely on.

Interesting:

Quote:

In addition, one fragment of this genome proved to be totally identical to another, made up of 370 nucleotides, sequenced in 2016 from samples collected in 2013 at a mine in China’s Yunnan province where three miners had died of severe pneumonia.

There's a review of all of the stuff we know and that has been discussed here including:

Quote:

Isn’t there a risk that this last hypothesis may uphold the conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 pandemic?
É.D.: Studying the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is a scientific process that cannot be equated with a conspiracy theory. At the same time, I would like to underline the fact that, as long as no intermediate host has been identified, the scientific community cannot rule out the possibility of an accidental leak.

There's a lot of discussion about CTs including this:

Quote:

Meanwhile, faced with the difficulty of understanding the origin of this pathogen, we have conducted phylogenetic analyses in collaboration with bioinformaticians and phylogeneticists. Their findings show that three of the four insertions observed in SARS-CoV-2 can be found in older coronavirus strains. Our study clearly shows that these sequences appeared independently, at different times in the evolutionary history of the virus. This data invalidates the hypothesis of a recent and intentional insertion by a laboratory of those three sequences.

But I'm not sure "intentional" rules out all chimera research. And in fact the paper continues:

Quote:

That leaves the fourth insertion, which produces a furin protease cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 that is not found in the other viruses of the SARS-CoV family. Consequently, the possibility cannot be ruled out that this insertion results from experiments designed to allow an animal virus to jump species to humans, since it is well known that this type of insertion plays a key role in the propagation of many pathogens in humans.

Quote:

In any case, whether the virus is natural or not, the very fact that this question can now be seriously considered calls for a critical review of the reconstruction tools and methods being used in today’s research laboratories, and of their potential use in “gain-of-function” experiments.

That paper is well worth reading. I'm looking at more links from the bib.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Is there a link to the Quay paper here? The number 99+% certainty rings a bell.

Isn't that what the German scientist you posted about earlier said. Maybe this group are just saying this number.

So the theory now is that Ratg13 has been modified somehow to make Covid-19?

Is this the whole "gain of function" theory?

I think I'll just point out that the podcast in that Taiwan News link is TWiV (This Week in Virology). The host, Vincent Racaniello, has mentioned these types of theories in episodes I have listened to. I posted an episode in this thread, in fact. He doesn't find them compelling.

Also, the EcoHealth Alliance

Quote:

focuses on diseases caused by deforestation and increased interaction between humans and wildlife. The organization has researched the emergence of diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Nipah virus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Rift Valley fever, and Ebola virus.

Link

They are mentioned in the book I am reading, Spillover, by David Quammen in relation to looking for the Ebola reservoir and about the interaction between forest life in Africa and how it got into humans and gorillas. In the book, there is also a big mystery surrounding how similar viruses ended up in the Philippines where they also seem to have a non-human reservoir. Much of the point of the book is just how incredibly difficult it is to discover the ways in which viruses can emerge from their reservoir hosts.

PeterDaszak is also mentioned in the book:

Quote:

Peter Daszak is a British zoologist and an expert on disease ecology, in particular on zoonosis. He is currently president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit non-governmental organization that supports various programs on global health and pandemic prevention with headquarters in New York City. He is a researcher, consultant, and public expert in the cause and spread of zoonotic disease outbreaks like that of COVID-19, Ebola, Nipah virus, and other zoonoses

Link

I think it is a bit simplistic just to say, "Oh, he worked with the Wuhan lab before. Conflict of interest! Not to be trusted!"

Besides, here are the members of the group:

Quote:

Members of the international team:

Prof. Dr. Thea Fisher, MD, DMSc(PhD) (Nordsjællands Hospital, Denmark)
Prof. John Watson (Public Health England, United Kingdom)
Prof. Dr. Marion Koopmans, DVM PhD (Erasmus MC, Netherlands)
Prof. Dr. Dominic Dwyer, MD (Westmead Hospital, Australia)
Vladimir Dedkov, Ph.D (Institute Pasteur, Russia)
Dr. Hung Nguyen-Viet, PhD (International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Vietnam)
PD. Dr. med vet. Fabian Leendertz (Robert Koch-Institute, Germany)
Dr. Peter Daszak, Ph.D (EcoHealth Alliance, USA)
Dr. Farag El Moubasher, Ph.D (Ministry of Public Health, Qatar)
Prof. Dr. Ken Maeda, PhD, DVM (National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Japan)
The international team also includes five WHO experts led by Dr Peter Ben Embarek; two Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) representatives and two World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) representatives.

So it is not as if it is just one lackey for the Chinese who is a part of this mission.

Link

I have to wonder if these DRASTIC scientists ("This confirms the work of numerous scientists including a group of internet sleuths who use the jocular moniker DRASTIC (Decentralised Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating Covid-19)") are the AE911 of Covid. Do they actually have the necessary qualifications? Or are they trying to fool people by simply having Dr or PhD in their title?

For example, who is Dr Steven Quay?

Quote:

Dr. Steven Quay has 360+ published contributions to medicine and has been cited over 10,000 times, placing him in the top 1% of scientists worldwide. He holds 87 US patents and has invented seven FDA-approved pharmaceuticals which have helped over 80 million people. He is the author of the best-selling book on surviving the pandemic, Stay Safe: A Physician's Guide to Survive Coronavirus. He is the CEO of Atossa Therapeutics Inc. (Nasdaq: ATOS), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel therapeutics for treating breast cancer and COVID-19.

Link

I'm underwhelmed.

Who is Roland Wiesendanger?

Quote:

Roland Wiesendanger (born October 5 1961 in Basel) is a German physicist, specializing in nanoscience. Since 1993 he has been a full professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany, where he established a National Center of Competence in Nanotechnology.

A physicist specializing in nanotechnology?

What makes him a reliable source?

Again, we have seen this before with Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth

[Sherkeu]

October 2014: US suspends risky disease research- Government to cease funding gain-of-function studies that make viruses more dangerous, pending a safety assessment.
https://www.nature.com/news/us-suspe...search-1.16192

Given the US ban on the risky research following lab leaks in the US, any research would have moved to labs outside the US. No wonder I could not find much done here after 2015.

November 2015: Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research
Lab-made coronavirus related to SARS can infect human cells.
https://www.nature.com/news/engineer...%201.18787#/b1

The paper of the second one has this note:

Quote:

Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.

I do tend to believe the majority of scientists who have looked at it and determined it is not engineered- at least not the dice and splice way.
At the same time, I wonder why there was so much 'don't consider this theory!" so early when everything was speculation....and still is!

[Samson]

I think it is time to assume that the existence of the viral lab in Wuhan and the emergence of covid 19 in Wuhan are connected.
The onus should be on the investigators to demonstrate no connection.

[Skeptic Ginger]

NYT COVID articles still free access: IN HUNT FOR VIRUS SOURCE, W.H.O. LET CHINA TAKE CHARGE

This is why the WHO report needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The article is a study in how politics in this case interfered royally with the science.

Quote:

As it praised Beijing, the World Health Organization concealed concessions to China and may have sacrificed the best chance to unravel the virus’s origins. Now it’s a favorite Trump attack line. ...The search for the virus’s origins is a study in the compromises the W.H.O. has made....

“Divisions between and within countries have provided fertile ground for this fast-moving virus to grow and gain the upper hand,” the W.H.O.’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a statement to The Times. He said political attacks had undermined the world’s response. “Leadership in a crisis such as this requires listening, understanding, trust and moving forward together.”

Kind of sums up the mess that's been made of looking for the origin.

Daszak's name shows up again:

Quote:

“This is part of the Chinese psyche — to demonstrate to the world that they do the very best science,” said Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist and president of EcoHealth Alliance in New York. “But in this case, it didn’t work. And I think that is the reason why we don’t know much more.”

While Trump picked a fight with China over their initial response and Xi didn't want China to look like their surveillance was flawed, looking for the origin was lost in the shuffle.

Quote:

On the origins of the virus, the experts mostly shifted the onus to China, asking the government to prioritize a “rigorous investigation.” But they also assured people that numerous investigations were underway.

“It was an absolute whitewash,” said Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. “But the answer was, that was the best they could negotiate with Xi Jinping.”...

Privately, Dr. Tedros told colleagues and others that he felt stuck between China and the United States. He compared them to two playground bullies....

“It is difficult to do this work in a politically intoxicated environment,” Dr. Ryan, the organization’s emergency director, said at a news conference later that day.

“It is hard for scientists to do what they have to do and want to do in situations like this,” he said.

Not much in the article that is helpful looking at the origin science. But it is important to understanding the WHO investigation. And I don't think a list of the WHO team members rebuts the political interference.

[angrysoba]

By the way, there is a more recent podcast episode with Peter Daszak, which you might be interested in (I haven't watched it yet, though)...

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-623/#comments

In the comments, I noticed this...

Quote:

Vincent is in the news again.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/virolo...ry?id=71097846

So what's the story?

Well, apparently a joint British and Norwegian team claimed the virus showed elements of being man-made.

Then, in steps Vincent...

Quote:

"The paper is nonsense," said Vincent Racaniello, Ph.D., professor of virology at Columbia University. "The manuscript is replete with incorrect science."

"It is absolutely 100% impossible that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a laboratory. The elements in the virus, SARS-CoV-2, all came from bat SARS-like CoVs that circulate in nature," Racaniello told ABC News.

What? But, wait, ... isn't he part of the International Global Conspiracy of Virologists along with all the others who are fiercely closing ranks to support the Wuhan Institute of Virology due to...what reason? Funding or something? Being secret Communists? Saving face?

Well, the researchers of this brave study made a prediction...

Quote:

This time, the allegation stemmed from a team of researchers from Britain and Norway, who warned in a research paper that current efforts to make a coronavirus vaccine are likely to fail because scientists have fundamentally misunderstood the virus SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19.

I guess we will have to wait and see if a vaccine ever gets made... oh wait!

Why would they say this, then?

Quote:

The British/Norwegian team -- also working on a vaccine -- argued that their vaccine approach was likely to work where other existing efforts would fail. They claim the virus' RNA sequence has elements that appear man-made, or artificially inserted, and that their vaccine, Biovacc-19, will take these purported elements into account.

hmmmm....

Anyway, here come those so-called experts. The virologists!

Quote:

"No scientist or group of scientists created this virus in a laboratory. That would require insight into [viral] pathogenesis and protein engineering that does not exist," said Robert Garry, Ph.D., virologist at Tulane University.

Garry explained that much of the genetic material of the virus that caused COVID-19 is similar to that found in viruses sampled from animals, and was unknown to science until after the pandemic, ruling out the possibility the virus was created beforehand in a lab.

The genetic material and genetic changes to the novel coronavirus are "all what you would expect from natural evolution and an animal source," said Amesh Adalja, MD, infectious disease fellow and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

"There've been multiple rumors and conspiracy theories," he said. "And I do think you'll probably see more."

[Sherkeu]

Well, no one here has yet made a pet theory of an engineered virus but it's always good to have all the info. Thanks for the links that shed a bit more light on what scientists are thinking.

That said, there is still the notion of a natural novel virus being linked to the lab, or the researchers who collaborated. Not engineered- or done in a 'controlled but natural' way (which from what I know is pretty unlikely but I am not a virologist).

Anthrax, smallpox, and even the plague have leaked from labs...and those were not engineered.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Here are the two Quay papers:

Zenodo. Where Did the 2019 Coronavirus Pandemic Begin and How Did it Spread? The People’s Liberation Army Hospital in Wuhan China and Line 2 of the Wuhan Metro System Are Compelling Answers. Steven Carl Quay. October 28, 2020. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.4119262

Zenodo. A Bayesian analysis concludes beyond a reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural zoonosis but instead is laboratory derived. Dr. Steven Quay. January 29, 2021.

https://zenodo.org/record/4477081#

Quote:

Wuhan Institute of Virology analysis of bronchial lavage specimens from ICU patients at Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital in December 2019 contain both SARS-CoV-2 and adenovirus vaccine sequences, consistent with a vaccine challenge trial.

In the acknowledgements:

Quote:

I want to thank a Twitter group called #DRASTIC for many useful discussions that found their way into this document. Dr. Martin Lee, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor of Statistics at UCLA provided statistical support throughout this work. H. Lawrence Remmel provided input on the adenovirus vaccine as a dual target vaccine. I want to thank D.A. for originally suggesting performing a Bayesian analysis on the work I had done on SARS-CoV-2 and for his facilitation of the review of this work by a diverse group of scientists and policy makers. In all cases, however, this is my own work product.

From the executive summary:

Quote:

Given the strong sentiment in the scientific community in favor of a zoonosis and the massive effort undertaken by China to find the natural animal source, one can assume that any evidence in favor of a natural origin, no matter how trivial, would become widely disseminated and known. This provides a potential evidence bias within the scientific community in favor of a natural origin which isn’t quantifiable but should be kept in mind.

This becomes especially important background....

The starting probability for origin of SARS-CoV-2 was set with the zoonotic or natural hypothesis at 98.8% likelihood with the laboratory origin hypothesis set at 1.2%. The initial state was biased as much as possible towards a zoonotic origin...

The most significant evidence provided herein is the finding from RNA-Seq performed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) of lavage patient samples collected on December 30, 2019.3 These ICU patients were the subject of the seminal paper, entitled, “A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin,” from Dr. Zhengli Shi and colleagues that first characterized SARS-CoV-2.4 This author has confirmed that the RNA-Seq of all five patients contained SARS-CoV-2 sequences. Surprisingly the specimens also contained the adenovirus “pShuttle” vector, developed by Chinese scientists in 2005 for SARS-CoV-1.5 Two immunogens were identified, the Spike Protein gene of SARS-CoV-2 and the synthetic construct H7N9 HA gene.6 Hundreds of perfectly homologous (150/150) raw reads suggest this is not an artefact. Reads that cross the vector-immunogen junction are identified. An example of the read contigs for CoV-2 is shown in this figure:

So Zhengli Shi's own work.


Controls:

Quote:

Two patients from the same hospital who had bronchial lavage on the same day but had their specimens sent to the Hubei CDC did not have adenovirus vaccine sequences.

Quote:

With CoV-2, every one of the more than 294,000 virus genomes sequenced can be traced back to the first genomic cluster and in the first patient in that cluster, a 39-year-old man who was seen at the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Hospital about one mile from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The CoV-2 pandemic has the phylogenetic signature of one pure virus sequence infecting one human, with human-to-human spread thereafter; there is just the one and only jump into the human population ever seen. This lack of posterior diversity has been alluded to by Dr. Shi, by the WHO, and by other prominent virologists; they just never take that critical piece of the evidence to the next the proper inference.

The virus in a true zoonosis also contains the signature record of the gradual changes and adaptions it made in the protein key, the Spike Protein, it uses to unlock human cells and cause infection. With SARS-CoV-1 the Spike Protein had fewer than one-third of all the changes it would later develop by the time it became an epidemic. With CoV-2 the Spike Protein was almost perfectly adapted to the human lock, using 99.5% of the best amino acids possible

So no gradual changes in the human infection and earlier I posted a reference to the fact that the genetic evidence is this pathogen has only been in the human population recently.

So it was a perfect match on the first jump? Quay compares this to SARS (1) which was not.

I'm going to leave it to the people in this thread who "are not impressed" to sift through this scientific paper and find the faults in it. I'm not seeing them.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Isn't that what the German scientist you posted about earlier said. Maybe this group are just saying this number.

Nope, I tried to edit that post but I was too late.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

So the theory now is that Ratg13 has been modified somehow to make Covid-19?

Is this the whole "gain of function" theory?

GoF is the type of study. Your oversimplification is underwhelming.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

I think I'll just point out that the podcast in that Taiwan News link is TWiV (This Week in Virology). The host, Vincent Racaniello, has mentioned these types of theories in episodes I have listened to. I posted an episode in this thread, in fact. He doesn't find them compelling.

He doesn't find who compelling and who cares? Listen to the couple minutes flagged in my link if you want to address the podcast.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

... I think it is a bit simplistic just to say, "Oh, he worked with the Wuhan lab before. Conflict of interest! Not to be trusted!"

Good because NO ONE SAID THAT.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

...
I have to wonder if these DRASTIC scientists ("This confirms the work of numerous scientists including a group of internet sleuths who use the jocular moniker DRASTIC (Decentralised Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating Covid-19)") are the AE911 of Covid. Do they actually have the necessary qualifications? Or are they trying to fool people by simply having Dr or PhD in their title?

Again you try to discredit links by ad hominems.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

For example, who is Dr Steven Quay?

Link

I'm underwhelmed.

Did you look at the research paper? Without looking at his work, I bet you are underwhelmed.

I posted a link to the paper.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Who is Roland Wiesendanger?

A physicist specializing in nanotechnology?

What makes him a reliable source?

Again, we have seen this before with Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth

You need to keep up. We're past this now.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

By the way, there is a more recent podcast episode with Peter Daszak, which you might be interested in (I haven't watched it yet, though)...

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-623/#comments

In the comments, I noticed this...

So what's the story?

Well, apparently a joint British and Norwegian team claimed the virus showed elements of being man-made.

Then, in steps Vincent...

What? But, wait, ... isn't he part of the International Global Conspiracy of Virologists along with all the others who are fiercely closing ranks to support the Wuhan Institute of Virology due to...what reason? Funding or something? Being secret Communists? Saving face?

Well, the researchers of this brave study made a prediction...

Would you please take this crap to the CT thread? Some of us here are actually having an evidence-supported discussion and this sarcastic ad hom language is not moving the discussion forward.

And I don't want to watch a podcast you haven't listened to unless you flag segments you think are relevant. It suggests you aren't reading our posts where manmade was discussed. See post #149

Quote:

Quote:

This data invalidates the hypothesis of a recent and intentional insertion by a laboratory of those three sequences.

But I'm not sure "intentional" rules out all chimera research. And in fact the paper continues:

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Here are the two Quay papers:

Zenodo. Where Did the 2019 Coronavirus Pandemic Begin and How Did it Spread? The People’s Liberation Army Hospital in Wuhan China and Line 2 of the Wuhan Metro System Are Compelling Answers. Steven Carl Quay. October 28, 2020. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.4119262

Zenodo. A Bayesian analysis concludes beyond a reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural zoonosis but instead is laboratory derived. Dr. Steven Quay. January 29, 2021.

https://zenodo.org/record/4477081#


In the acknowledgements:


From the executive summary:So Zhengli Shi's own work.


Controls:


So no gradual changes in the human infection and earlier I posted a reference to the fact that the genetic evidence is this pathogen has only been in the human population recently.

So it was a perfect match on the first jump? Quay compares this to SARS (1) which was not.

I'm going to leave it to the people in this thread who "are not impressed" to sift through this scientific paper and find the faults in it. I'm not seeing them.

A non-peer-reviewed Word document by a non-expert, written in October 2020 that apparently nobody in the relevant fields of expertise has found interesting enough to follow-up on?

And it's 198 pages.

What's your TL;DR on this?

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Would you please take this crap to the CT thread? Some of us here are actually having an evidence-supported discussion and this sarcastic ad hom language is not moving the discussion forward.

And I don't want to watch a podcast you haven't listened to unless you flag segments you think are relevant. It suggests you aren't reading our posts where manmade was discussed. See post #149

I said "which you might be interested in (I haven't watched it yet, though)."

If you are not interested in some virologists talking to each other and prefer DRASTIC instead, then that's fine.