Origins of Covid

[Orphia Nay]

I looked up Dr Steven Quay, and he's a breast cancer doctor with a company trying to make money on COVID-19 nasal sprays and inhalers.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Orphia Nay

I looked up Dr Steven Quay, and he's a breast cancer doctor with a company trying to make money on COVID-19 nasal sprays and inhalers.

Yeah, I noticed that too. Seems to be a bit of a red flag.

If I am to give the benefit of the doubt, then presumably his work will find its way to the relevant experts and relevant publications. Then when his work is peer-reviewed by those relevant experts then maybe something can come of it.

However, if that does not happen, then we have to ask, why are the relevant experts not weighing in or accepting these conclusions?

The answers are either that the study isn't very good, or they take us to the realm of conspiracy theory.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by 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. .....

Okay, I don't really see what the angle is here.

Was Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance and / or the Wuhan Institute of Virology doing this stuff in secret?

It seems that they were not. All of the "evidence" against them seems to be published studies and public broadcasts on podcasts etc...

We know that they were working on coronaviruses because they said they were!

This is not sleuthing! Rather much of this stuff is people who knew nothing at all about this, suddenly discovering stuff they didn't know and yelling "Eureka!"

EcoHealth Alliance, for example, is basically a very public pressure group trying to get people to understand the dangers of animal-borne viruses and trying to make ecological policies based on this. The stuff being dredged up in this thread seems to be waved around as though it is some kind of smoking gun, and the fact that these virologists are working with the Chinese on coronaviruses is somehow seen as being massively incriminating. No! This outbreak is exactly what they have been warning would happen for a very long time.

Similarly, EcoHealth Alliance has been working in Africa and southeast Asia on Ebola and the Nipah virus for the same reasons. Guess what! These diseases will also emerge again at some point. And in fact they often do over a very wide area. It is seldom clear where exactly they came from.

As for the whole conflict of interest, well, it seems because Donald Trump was peddling the "escaped from a lab" theory that he orchestrated the cutting in funding for EcoHealth Alliance.

Quote:

The research community is reacting with alarm and anger to the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) abrupt decision to kill a grant that helped support research in China on how coronaviruses—such as the one causing the current COVID-19 pandemic—move from bats to humans.

The unusual 24 April move occurred shortly after President Donald Trump alleged—without providing evidence—that the pandemic virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory supported by the NIH grant, and vowed to end the funding. The episode came as calls mounted for China to allow an independent investigation, perhaps led by the United Nations. “The whole world wants the exact origin of the virus to be clarified,” German Minister of Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas said on 4 May.

Many scientists are skeptical of the laboratory escape theory, and the Chinese virologist at the heart of the allegation rejects the idea. Critics of NIH's decision, meanwhile, say it represents an unacceptable intrusion of politics into the agency's grants process and possibly violated its rules.

Link

Do any of us have expertise on viruses?

No, we don't. We don't understand this stuff, so we have to put a certain trust in the experts being able to police their own fields. That usually means, we accept the words of experts, particularly when there is an apparent consensus around certain issues such as this.

It seems to me that the vast majority of the "escape from a lab" narrative is being pushed by right-wing sources such as Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, Fox News, the Spectator - for obvious political reasons, and the "science" such as it is, seems to be a Gish Gallop of amateurs, cranks, quacks, people with some financial interests involved, and in some cases downright bigots (no, I am not referring to anyone here).

[Sherkeu]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Okay, I don't really see what the angle is here.

Was Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance and / or the Wuhan Institute of Virology doing this stuff in secret?

It seems that they were not. All of the "evidence" against them seems to be published studies and public broadcasts on podcasts etc...

We know that they were working on coronaviruses because they said they were!

This is not sleuthing! Rather much of this stuff is people who knew nothing at all about this, suddenly discovering stuff they didn't know and yelling "Eureka!"

EcoHealth Alliance, for example, is basically a very public pressure group trying to get people to understand the dangers of animal-borne viruses and trying to make ecological policies based on this. The stuff being dredged up in this thread seems to be waved around as though it is some kind of smoking gun, and the fact that these virologists are working with the Chinese on coronaviruses is somehow seen as being massively incriminating. No! This outbreak is exactly what they have been warning would happen for a very long time.

Similarly, EcoHealth Alliance has been working in Africa and southeast Asia on Ebola and the Nipah virus for the same reasons. Guess what! These diseases will also emerge again at some point. And in fact they often do over a very wide area. It is seldom clear where exactly they came from.

As for the whole conflict of interest, well, it seems because Donald Trump was peddling the "escaped from a lab" theory that he orchestrated the cutting in funding for EcoHealth Alliance.

The point of it is that those organizations working closely with China, and who really need to continue doing so for meaningful work to happen, will have to frame things in such a way as not to be too critical.

Like I said before (a few times now), they likely have no choice in it without jeopardizing relations. So when I see close links like this, it helps me to interpret what is being said and why.

I really don't care what Trump said or did. Haven't even read anything about what his accusations were other than headlines of "China's fault!".

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by Orphia Nay

I looked up Dr Steven Quay, and he's a breast cancer doctor with a company trying to make money on COVID-19 nasal sprays and inhalers.

Given he promotes his company and his products I can see why you describe Dr Quay with dismissive language. I know he promoted his work on NewsMax. If that's all I saw I might have mischaracterized the guy as well. But I looked at his paper and it was clear he was not a quack.

Sometimes there really are qualified professionals who also push their products.

He's a pathologist and breast cancer is one of his specialties. He has a slew of published papers. Expand on the list of publications in the following link to see just what it is he has expertise in.

Dr. Quay, MD, PhD: Education & Experience

Quote:

Medical School & Residency
Massachusetts General Hospital
Residency, Anatomic and Clinical Pathology
University of Michigan Medical School
Certifications & Licensure
American Board of Pathology
Certified in Anatomic Pathology

[he's licensed in every state]

SPECIALTY
Pathology

Pathologists diagnose and characterize diseases. They analyze biopsied tissue or bodily fluids, and interpret medical tests, including tests done by other specialists like dermatologists and cardiologists. Most cancer diagnoses are done by pathologists.

SUBSPECIALTIES
Cytopathology
Anatomic Pathology

Here are a couple of papers related to the nasal sprays you mentioned:

Intranasal administration of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors.
Costantino, H. R., Leonard, A. K., Brandt, G., Johnson, P. H., Quay, S. C.

Intranasal delivery: physicochemical and therapeutic aspects.
Henry R. Costantino, Lisbeth Illum, Gordon Brandt, Paul H. Johnson, Steven C. Quay

In vitro formulation optimization of intranasal galantamine leading to enhanced bioavailability and reduced emetic response in vivo.
Alexis Kays Leonard, Anthony P. Sileno, Gordon Brandt, Charles Arthur Foerder, Steven C. Quay, Henry R. Costantino

Advances in nasal drug delivery through tight junction technology.
Johnson, P. H., Quay, S. C.


Does that sound like a quack pushing nasal sprays? He has an FDA approved nasal spray for B12 that doesn't require an injection. He has another spray of calcitonin that is not FDA approved, it falls in the supplement category.

He has papers on treating COVID with standard prescription drugs but administered intranasally instead of IV. I'll have to look again for those. They weren't anything a person would buy from him or his company directly.

Atossa Therapeutics President and CEO Dr. Steven C. Quay to Speak at Precision Medicine World Conference, Spotlighting Anthony S. Fauci, MD, Director NIAID January 25-27, 2021

Quote:

Atossa Therapeutics, Inc. is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company seeking to discover and develop innovative medicines in areas of significant unmet medical need with a current focus on breast cancer and COVID-19. For more information, please visit www.atossatherapeutics.com.

Guess he can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Patents, Dr Quay, MD PhD There are 184 Dr Quay has, many are with other researchers.

Here's the first one granted in 1987:

Quote:

Ferrioxamine-paramagnetic contrast agents for MR imaging, composition, apparatus and use
Patent number: 4637929
Abstract: The Ferrioxamine (FOM) family of chelates and amide homologs thereof provide excellent contrast agents for magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. The magnetic dipole generated by unpaired electrons within the paramagnetic Fe(III) atoms, cause a local reduction in the bulk magnetic field Bz of the MR system. The resulting shorting of the T1 (spin lattice) relaxation time in the local hydrogen protons within the area of interest, causes an intense "free induction signal" and a corresponding modulation in the collected scanning data. The contrast agent within the tissue or organ of interest causes the tissue to appear on the MR display as a high intensity or white area. Background tissue is displayed as darker or lower intensity greys.FOM does not penetrate the blood-brain-barrier under normal circumstances; and is therefore useful in detecting the extravasation of arterial blood in the extravascular space during cerebral hemorrhaging and in the endema fluid surrounding tumors.
Type: Grant
Filed: January 4, 1985
Date of Patent: January 20, 1987
Assignee: Salutar, Inc.
Inventor: Steven C. Quay

Here's the last one:

Quote:

INTRADUCTAL METHODS OF TREATMENT OF BREAST DISORDERS
Publication number: 20210000920
Abstract: The present invention relates to intraductal methods and compositions for treating subjects having breast disorders. Compositions comprise repolarizing agents and polarization blockading agents capable of repolarizing M2-macrophages to M1-macrophages in the tumor microenvironment, decreasing M2-macrophages, increasing M1-macrophages and/or increasing sensitivity to chemotherapy in the subject.
Type: Application
Filed: December 20, 2018
Publication date: January 7, 2021
Applicant: Atossa Therapeutics, Inc.
Inventor: Steven C. Quay

In his words

Quote:

About Steven Quay, M.D., Ph.D.

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.

He received his M.D. and Ph.D. from The University of Michigan, was a postdoctoral fellow in the Chemistry Department at MIT with Nobel Laureate H. Gobind Khorana, a resident at the Harvard-MGH Hospital, and spent almost a decade on the faculty of Stanford University School of Medicine. A TEDx talk he delivered on breast cancer prevention has been viewed over 220,000 times. For more information, visit www.DrQuay.com

Does this sound like a guy peddling nasal sprays for COVID? His paper on the origin of COVID stands on its own merits.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Yeah, I noticed that too. Seems to be a bit of a red flag.

If I am to give the benefit of the doubt, then presumably his work will find its way to the relevant experts and relevant publications. Then when his work is peer-reviewed by those relevant experts then maybe something can come of it.

However, if that does not happen, then we have to ask, why are the relevant experts not weighing in or accepting these conclusions?

The answers are either that the study isn't very good, or they take us to the realm of conspiracy theory.

Is this because you can't judge that paper yourself?

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

... As for the whole conflict of interest, well, it seems because Donald Trump was peddling the "escaped from a lab" theory that he orchestrated the cutting in funding for EcoHealth Alliance.

Clearly this has been a serious problem.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

....Link

Do any of us have expertise on viruses?

No, we don't.

Speak for yourself. Yes, I do.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

.We don't understand this stuff, so we have to put a certain trust in the experts being able to police their own fields. That usually means, we accept the words of experts, particularly when there is an apparent consensus around certain issues such as this.

Oh I've only worked in occupational infectious disease for 30 years. I don't work with viruses in a lab.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

.It seems to me that the vast majority of the "escape from a lab" narrative is being pushed by right-wing sources such as Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, Fox News, the Spectator - for obvious political reasons, and the "science" such as it is, seems to be a Gish Gallop of amateurs, cranks, quacks, people with some financial interests involved, and in some cases downright bigots (no, I am not referring to anyone here).

And it seems to me people need to get over this and look at the evidence that doesn't come from right wing peddlers. Take that **** back to the CT forum.

We have posted legit sources here and the State Department was only one thing I posted way back at the beginning of this thread. I cited Spectator with plenty of caveats and instead went to the source they cited rather than relying on anything in the magazine.

[Samson]

One obvious corollary if Trump is proven correct, is that the Trump virus is harder to eradicate.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Is this because you can't judge that paper yourself?

Sure. I have no expertise in the relevant areas. Anyway, he says he sent his paper to these people:

John Amuasi
Kristian Andersen
Danielle Anderson
Ralph Baric
Francis Collins
Carlosdas Neves
Peter Daszak
Vladimir Dedkov
Dominic Dwyer
Anthony Fauci
Hume Field
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
Eddie Holmes
Gerald Keusch
Marion Koopmans
Dato' Sai Kit (Ken)Lam
Fabian Lendertz
W. Ian Lipkin
Ken Maeda
Hung Nguyen
Stanley Perlman
David Quammen
Andrew Rambaut
Angelie Rassmussen
Linda Saif
Zhengli Shi
Supaporn Wacharapluesadde

Now, if some of them start to take an interest in the paper, I might consider it worth looking at more. At the moment, why should anyone even pay attention to it? How do I know if he worked out his probabilities correctly, or if he is characterizing the research correctly?

It may well be that none of the people he contacted will take it seriously. Then what?

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Clearly this has been a serious problem.


Speak for yourself. Yes, I do.

Oh I've only worked in occupational infectious disease for 30 years. I don't work with viruses in a lab.


And it seems to me people need to get over this and look at the evidence that doesn't come from right wing peddlers. Take that **** back to the CT forum.

We have posted legit sources here and the State Department was only one thing I posted way back at the beginning of this thread. I cited Spectator with plenty of caveats and instead went to the source they cited rather than relying on anything in the magazine.

The thing is, I don't even know if these papers you are citing actually are evidence.

You give the impression that you have made up your mind on the escaped from a lab theory and then gone about finding confirming evidence to support it. Does it not give you pause that actual virologists have not supported the escaped from a lab theory?

What is your explanation for this?
They are too close-minded?
They are not very bright?
They are worried about upsetting China? All of them?

They are part of a conspiracy?

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

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.



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 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.

Okay, so this goes to the question I was asking you about the so-called evidence for lab workers getting sick.

It seems that Huang Yanling is the person who many people tweeted about saying she was "patient zero".

I tried to look into this. Apparently...according to a website called Health Analytics Asia, the Wuhan Institute of Virology pointed out that she was a research student who graduated in 2015 and has since been living elsewhere.

Quote:

The claim is false. It was spread without any evidence. As soon as this news started spreading like wildfire, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences issued a statement on their official website dated February 16, debunking these claims.

The statement highlights that false information is being circulated regarding the identification of Huang Yanling as ‘patient zero.’

The institute confirmed that she was a former student at the institute and had completed her master’s degree in 2015. They gave information about her area of expertise and that she has been living elsewhere after her graduation. She is in perfectly good health and has not been infected by the virus at all.

Link

Of course, this won't convince conspiracy theorists who want proof she is still alive.

That said, her Research Gate page suggests she has papers that only go up to 2015. Why wouldn't she have published papers since then? Well, maybe if she had graduated like the WIV said.

Research Gate page.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by 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:



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!

Regarding these things, Vincent Racaniello is highly critical of the banning of the research, and essentially points fingers of blame at short-sighted US policies regarding both research into coronaviruses on bats, funding of organizations such as EcoHealth Alliance (which as we have seen was stopped by Trump), and also the lack of funding for a CoV vaccine or anti-viral that could have been developed over the years since 2003:

Quote:

Every American should be outraged that the US has cut off funding for EcoHealth Alliance, an organization that supports wildlife sampling to discover viruses with pandemic potential in bats and other species. It is exactly that type of work that is needed to prepare therapeutics for the next pandemic. There is no scientific justification for such a move, only political motives.

I would also like to point out that due to pressure from a number of individuals who felt that determining the pandemic potential of SARS-like CoV in bats was too dangerous, a research moratorium on certain kinds of this research was imposed in 2014. I do hope the authors of that moratorium feel at least a small amount of regret as they look at the rising COVID-19 numbers. After all, Nature does not observe our moratoriums.

Now, as a consequence of this lack of vision, many people have died, economies have been destroyed, and the social structure of the world has changed. The US alone is spending trillions of dollars on recovery assistance. It would have been far cheaper to spend just billions for prevention.

Link

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Okay, so this goes to the question I was asking you about the so-called evidence for lab workers getting sick.

It seems that Huang Yanling is the person who many people tweeted about saying she was "patient zero".

I tried to look into this. Apparently...according to a website called Health Analytics Asia, the Wuhan Institute of Virology pointed out that she was a research student who graduated in 2015 and has since been living elsewhere.

Link

If you look at what I posted following that paragraph you will see I did not find the information on pt zero to be reliable:

Quote:

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

Your post describes the claim patient zero came from social media.

If you want to add to the evidence by saying patient zero was debunked, at least acknowledge that I said that information from Wiesendanger was unreliable instead of still trying to drag this thread into CT territory.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

If you look at what I posted following that paragraph you will see I did not find the information on pt zero to be reliable:

Your post describes the claim patient zero came from social media.

If you want to add to the evidence by saying patient zero was debunked, at least acknowledge that I said that information from Wiesendanger was unreliable instead of still trying to drag this thread into CT territory.

I have a better idea.

Instead of posting a Gish Gallop of unreliable BS and then inserting a few qualifiers about how maybe perhaps it is not the best information, how about not posting this crap at all.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

The thing is, I don't even know if these papers you are citing actually are evidence.

Then I suspect you didn't actually look at Dr Quay's paper or his credentials which I spoon fed thread readers.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

You give the impression that you have made up your mind on the escaped from a lab theory and then gone about finding confirming evidence to support it.

Yeah well that's just crap. I have looked at a wide variety of sources posted in this thread both pro and con. I think I've made a damn good effort to keep an open mind. I still have one. If the source is found and it isn't the lab that would be overwhelming evidence it wasn't the lab.

At first I thought the evidence leaned against a lab accident. But the more evidence I've found, the more a lab accident best fits the evidence.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Does it not give you pause that actual virologists have not supported the escaped from a lab theory?

What is your explanation for this?
They are too close-minded?
They are not very bright?
They are worried about upsetting China? All of them?

They are part of a conspiracy?

First, there are virologists on both sides of the aisle. So when you say "all of them" who are you referring to that aren't either directly from the lab, or at least compromised to some degree?

Evidence to that compromise has been posted here. You have chosen to dismiss that evidence. Your particular bias on this has been quite blatant. You refuse to consider what 'saving face' means in the Chinese culture unless you are presented with a term paper on the matter. Chinese leaders and scientists don't want to look incompetent. This was significant enough they shut one physician up.

Fortunately for the rest of the world, the government didn't try to cover this up for as long as SARS was downplayed. I don't buy at all the Trump crap that China is responsible that the virus wasn't stopped before it spread. It's ignorant. Even our own excellent surveillance system would not have been able to stop a pathogen that was spreading in asymptomatic and mildly ill persons. I'm sure this pandemic had a very extensive silent head start before China recognized they had a new SARS on their hands.

I don't think we've seen any good evidence this was bioweapons research. I think it's exactly what the WIV says they were researching, potential coronavirus dangers. It will be horrific if they caused what they were trying to prevent. BTW, people researching the 1918 flu strain have raised alarm bells here.

Right now the evidence is very strong for a lab accident.

First, it was the location.
Second, the source has not been found.
Third, Quay makes a good case that the virus was too perfect when it emerged.

As opposed to SARS 1 which wasn't.

Fourth, the lab has denied live bat research but the evidence is very strong they were doing research on live bats. And there's a lot more evidence what they were doing could have resulted in the kind of genetic recombinant event that would have resulted in COVID.
Fifth, it's undeniable China is restricting access to an investigation and an audit of the lab.
And finally, given the WHO team cannot say where the virus jumped, how are they so quick to say 'but it wasn't the lab'?


I'm probably missing something.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

I have a better idea.

Instead of posting a Gish Gallop of unreliable BS and then inserting a few qualifiers about how maybe perhaps it is not the best information, how about not posting this crap at all.

There is not a gish gallop in this thread.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

First, there are virologists on both sides of the aisle. So when you say "all of them" who are you referring to that aren't either directly from the lab, or at least compromised to some degree?

Who are the virologists who argue that it was a lab leak?

For example, how is this guy "compromised"?

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.

Is his claim true?

Quote:

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.

How is he compromised?

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Evidence to that compromise has been posted here. You have chosen to dismiss that evidence. Your particular bias on this has been quite blatant.

You mean NIH funding for Peter Daszak and his work at the WIV? I think that he and EcoHealth Alliance do a lot of work, not only on SARS etc... but also Ebola, Nipah and Hendra. But okay then, maybe he and others are compromised because they support gain of function research, so what about those virologists or infectious disease experts who oppose gain of function research? Which of them support the lab leak hypothesis?

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Right now the evidence is very strong for a lab accident.

First, it was the location.

Okay.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Second, the source has not been found.

True, but that is like looking for a needle in haystack. My understanding is that many of the "compromised" researchers are the ones that found bats were the reservoir.

Third, Quay makes a good case that the virus was too perfect when it emerged.

As opposed to SARS 1 which wasn't.

[/quote]

I don't know if that began with Quay. I think a lot of researchers have noticed that it seems particularly adapted to humans, including these who also remark it is "improbable" that it was the result of human manipulation:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

However, they suggest it could be:

Quote:

1. Natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer
2. Natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer

...Sufficient opportunity could have arisen if there had been many prior zoonotic events that produced short chains of human-to-human transmission over an extended period. This is essentially the situation for MERS-CoV, for which all human cases are the result of repeated jumps of the virus from dromedary camels, producing single infections or short transmission chains that eventually resolve, with no adaptation to sustained transmission25.

Studies of banked human samples could provide information on whether such cryptic spread has occurred.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Fourth, the lab has denied live bat research but the evidence is very strong they were doing research on live bats. And there's a lot more evidence what they were doing could have resulted in the kind of genetic recombinant event that would have resulted in COVID.

Is this secret or published? It seems to me people are suggesting both, which makes no sense.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Fifth, it's undeniable China is restricting access to an investigation and an audit of the lab.
And finally, given the WHO team cannot say where the virus jumped, how are they so quick to say 'but it wasn't the lab'?

My understanding is that there are two possibilities:

a) manipulation and escape.

b) captured in the wild and escaped.

a) is largely being ruled out because the virologists don't believe it could have been manipulated to look the way it did. At least that is what I understand of what they argue. Dr Quay may think otherwise, but does he have the expertise to judge what is possible in the lab?

Furthermore, given we are talking about escaped and not released, they appear not to have published anything on the particular type of virus.

In addition, you quote Shi Zhengli initially fearing it might have escaped and then looking at the genomes of her viruses and concluding they are not the same. Of course, you may not believe her, but then why would she even raise the possibility anyway?

b) This theory is almost like the idea that William Shakespeare was not the actual writer of Shakespeare's plays but rather another author who just happened to be called William Shakespeare.

[Sherkeu]

Why do some here seem so against skeptics exploring and looking at various information (reliable, total propaganda, or perhaps half-truths included). Some are dead ends, some are discounted after further reading, and some lead to more pieces to be explored. Minds are changed and things evolve in time as more research is done. That is how it goes for me and I enjoy learning. YMMV.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Sherkeu

Why do some here seem so against skeptics exploring and looking at various information (reliable, total propaganda, or perhaps half-truths included). Some are dead ends, some are discounted after further reading, and some lead to more pieces to be explored. Minds are changed and things evolve in time as more research is done. That is how it goes for me and I enjoy learning. YMMV.

Who is against what you are in favour of?

[angrysoba]

There seems to be a view among many virologists that the types of spillover events that result in sudden outbreaks of Ebola, Hendra, Nipah and now with Covid 19, may actually be far more frequent than are recorded.

So here is a segment of Daszak talking on TWiV with some other virologists about the research that EcoHealth Alliance was doing in southeast Asia, and Daszak argues that there are probably a lot of outbreaks in rural areas of SARS and coronaviruses that don't get properly recorded or studied.

https://youtu.be/Et3CHcteWNw?list=WL&t=2347

Could it be that these types of outbreaks in humans and perhaps through a process of anthroponosis to wildlife or domestic animals could have led somewhere to a refinement of the virus's ability to adapt to humans?

Interestingly Daszak himself does not believe SARS Cov2 needs an intermediate host, but rather that it likely increases the exposure to humans.

[Orphia Nay]

SG, I haven't been following the whole conversation and just jumped in, casually and posted this in a non-judgemental way.

Originally Posted by Orphia Nay

I looked up Dr Steven Quay, and he's a breast cancer doctor with a company trying to make money on COVID-19 nasal sprays and inhalers.

Please don't think I'm trying to shame you for any lack of immunological expertise.

I'm just here for a discussion.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Right now the evidence is very strong for a lab accident.

First, it was the location.
Second, the source has not been found.
Third, Quay makes a good case that the virus was too perfect when it emerged.

As opposed to SARS 1 which wasn't.

Fourth, the lab has denied live bat research but the evidence is very strong they were doing research on live bats. And there's a lot more evidence what they were doing could have resulted in the kind of genetic recombinant event that would have resulted in COVID.
Fifth, it's undeniable China is restricting access to an investigation and an audit of the lab.
And finally, given the WHO team cannot say where the virus jumped, how are they so quick to say 'but it wasn't the lab'?


I'm probably missing something.

Just discussing why it might be "a lab accident".

Location: Unknown. Evidence at blood banks has appeared that it was in Italy and France in November.
https://link.springer.com/article/10...54-020-00716-2
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/2/20-4632_article
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10....00891620974755


Source: The source has not been found, yes, I agree.

And I think if there is any conspiracy, it's a mutual agreement between the WHO and relevant countries to protect Patient Zero in a kind manner.

Can you imagine being that person and being doxed?

So I don't think they should reveal the source.


Quay saying the virus is "too perfect"? Can you explain what you mean or just point me to your post saying that?

Do you mean a petri dish type lab accident?


My theory at present is that it happened in a lab by a wild farmed animal (bought at the Hunan market for medical testing) biting a scientist and giving them the virus.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Who is against what you are in favour of?

You accuse me of confirmation bias for the lab leak hypothesis and then you post blatant, it's all a CT snark, and when looking at the strongest evidence (location) you dismiss that, using all sorts of rationalizing and excuses, and then you take one of the strongest scientific papers in this thread to date and suddenly you are incapable of assessing its validity yourself, not even a cursory assessment.

So riddle me this, how is it you dismiss all the evidence that the WHO team and WIV laboratory scientists have reasons not to be forthcoming? How is that not confirmation bias?

WSJ Op Ed: Who Are the Covid Investigators? - Members of a WHO origin probe have conflicts of interest.

Quote:

The world needs to learn all it can about the origins of the novel coronarivus, and the World Health Organization has been investigating. But there’s increasing reason to question the effort due to China’s lack of cooperation and conflicts of interest on the WHO team.

A Beijing-approved WHO delegation recently concluded a 12-day visit to Wuhan, where the virus emerged more than a year ago. The group visited local hospitals and sites like the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and Huanan Seafood Market. But such field trips aren’t very helpful without unhindered access to raw data. The Chinese government, which controls research into Covid-19’s origin, has limited WHO access to such information.

(Part of the article is paywalled.)


Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (the guys with the Doomsday Clock): WHO: COVID-19 didn’t leak from a lab. Also WHO: Maybe it did

Quote:

Ben Embarek said the team had dismissed the idea that a lab-leak hypothesis as “extremely unlikely” and said it wouldn’t be pursued any further.

But days after the presser, the remarks by Ben Embarek and the team were undercut when World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said no hypotheses had been ruled out: “I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open and require further study.” Where the WHO investigators go from here remains to be seen.

I posted this upthread:

Quote:

Yet, what makes the investigative team so certain of this? Not everything that is researched in labs is published. And from the published record, we know that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of the labs in Wuhan that researched bat coronaviruses, had renamed viruses with sequences closely resembling SARS-CoV-2 in an apparent attempt to obfuscate their previous work with these viruses before the pandemic. Then there’s the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s virus database was taken offline at the beginning of 2020 for “security reasons.” Did the investigative team have access to the database? Did they scrutinize other lab records?

But I wanted to post this from a link in that paragraph to a blog: Matt Ridley, Rational Optimist*

Quote:

However, the public scientific consensus had been slowly shifting even before the announcement. A growing number of top experts including (ordered alphabetically by last name) Drs Francois Balloux, Ralph S. Baric, Trevor Bedford, Jesse Bloom, Bruno Canard, Etienne Decroly, Richard H. Ebright, Michael B. Eisen, Gareth Jones, Filippa Lentsoz, Michael Z. Lin, Marc Lipsitch, Stuart A. Newman, Rasmus Nielsen, Megan Palmer, Nikolai Petrovsky, Angela Rasmussen, and David A. Relman have stated publicly (several in early 2020) that a lab leak remains a plausible scientific hypothesis to be investigated, regardless of how likely or unlikely. We informed and obtained consent from each expert for their inclusion in this list.

Information about what went on in the WIV laboratories remains scarce. Given that, as Dr David Relman of Stanford University points out, it has the world’s largest repository of bat coronaviruses, the lack of transparency and openness about their research, and inconsistencies in the information that has been released are bound to fuel speculation. This now includes whether there are clues to an accident in 2019 or to changes in bio-safety procedures. Meanwhile, in contrast to SARS, the anticipated evidence for the natural origin hypothesis has failed to materialise over an entire year.

Does that sound like there are no virologists questioning the WHO investigation?

Does everyone agree with the pangolin hypothesis?

Quote:

The pangolin connection was put to the test when one of us (Chan, alongside a highly skilled collaborator, Dr Shing Hei Zhan of the University of British Columbia) discovered that for the pangolin viruses that most resembled SARS-CoV-2 in the key section of its spike protein, all four studies used the same dataset from a single batch of pangolins intercepted in Guangdong in March 2019. The journal Nature has since attached an editor’s note to one of the papers to alert readers that “concerns have been raised about the identity of the pangolin samples reported in this paper and their relationship to previously published pangolin samples.”

Dr Linfa Wang of the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, one of the scientists who discovered that bats were the natural reservoir of SARS viruses, told the Associated Press that “the search for the coronavirus in pangolins did not appear to be ‘scientifically driven.'” Dr Angela Rasmussen, of the Georgetown Center for Global Health Science and Security, said simply “the pangolin samples are a mess and likely not relevant.”

Do those not sound like virologists?


And corroborating a key piece of Quay's paper:

Quote:

Furthermore, when one of us (Chan, in collaboration with Zhan) scrutinized the evolution of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 in the early months of their respective epidemics, the former was observed to have mutated rapidly in early human cases as the virus adapted to its new host, while the latter had not. "The virus was well adapted to human transmission from the moment it was first detected," the World Health Organization's global study on the origins of the virus commented in November.

You could, you know, join us delving into the science here instead of trying to drag this thread over to the CT forum. Come on over to the light side, angrysoba.


*http://www.mattridley.co.uk/biography/

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

You accuse me of confirmation bias for the lab leak hypothesis and then you post blatant, it's all a CT snark, and when looking at the strongest evidence (location) you dismiss that, using all sorts of rationalizing and excuses, and then you take one of the strongest scientific papers in this thread to date and suddenly you are incapable of assessing its validity yourself, not even a cursory assessment.

Of course I am not capable of assessing it. For me, the evidence against is the evidence of the dog that didn't bark. Where are the experts who are in favour of this paper?

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

So riddle me this, how is it you dismiss all the evidence that the WHO team and WIV laboratory scientists have reasons not to be forthcoming? How is that not confirmation bias?

I've given a standard for how I will accept it. I am not going to go out on a limb on a paper that apparently no serious virologist takes seriously.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

WSJ Op Ed: Who Are the Covid Investigators? - Members of a WHO origin probe have conflicts of interest.(Part of the article is paywalled.)

Yes, I know all of this. I have even said it myself. I get. I know. I know.

But not all the virologists are compromised. That's my point! That's why I asked about those other ones.


[quote=Skeptic Ginger;13412070]Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (the guys with the Doomsday Clock): WHO: COVID-19 didn’t leak from a lab. Also WHO: Maybe it did
Yep, okay, so here are the hypotheses that the WHO team is investigating then...

Quote:

At the Feb. 9 briefing, the co-heads of the mission, Peter Ben Embarek and Liang Wannian, laid out the four origin hypotheses that formed the basis of the mission’s investigation:

The novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, jumped directly from an animal species to humans.
The virus leapt from one animal species to an intermediary animal host in which the virus adapted more before jumping to people.
The virus was introduced to Wuhan via the food chain, for example from frozen products.
The virus was accidentally released through a lab-related incident.

What's the issue? I have said it can not be categorically ruled out. But almost all the experts agree it is unlikely, as opposed to Dr Quay who apparently is 999999999.999999999999999999999999999% sure it was a lab.

I posted this upthread:

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

But I wanted to post this from a link in that paragraph to a blog: Matt Ridley, Rational Optimist*Does that sound like there are no virologists questioning the WHO investigation?

You have shifted the goalposts. I am not saying "nobody questions the WHO investigation".

I said:

Quote:

Who are the virologists who argue that it was a lab leak?

Do you have anyone?

The ones you quote only say it needs to be among the possibilities. That is hugely different from what I asked you. Who supports the theory?

I have gone through a few of them. Many say something like "plausible, and worth investigating, but unlikely", including Angela Rasmussen who Dr Quay sent his paper to.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Does everyone agree with the pangolin hypothesis?

No. They don't. So?

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

And corroborating a key piece of Quay's paper:

Quote:

Furthermore, when one of us (Chan, in collaboration with Zhan) scrutinized the evolution of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 in the early months of their respective epidemics, the former was observed to have mutated rapidly in early human cases as the virus adapted to its new host, while the latter had not. "The virus was well adapted to human transmission from the moment it was first detected," the World Health Organization's global study on the origins of the virus commented in November.

I need to point out, again, that this was already very well known about the virus. It doesn't "corroborate" what Dr Quay says. Papers had already been published. Like this one...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

I posted that before, and you ignored it.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

You could, you know, join us delving into the science here instead of trying to drag this thread over to the CT forum. Come on over to the light side, angrysoba.

Thanks. I have already posted science stuff. See above.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by Orphia Nay

SG, I haven't been following the whole conversation and just jumped in, casually and posted this in a non-judgemental way.

Please don't think I'm trying to shame you for any lack of immunological expertise.

I'm just here for a discussion.

I was trying to say I understood what you were pointing out. I'd have done the same thing if the first link I had gone to on Dr Quay was his webpage. I mean really, there's a picture of Bannon on one of the pages. And his little book is for sale on every page.

But he's a pathologist, not a breast cancer doctor per se though he's done a lot of research in the breast cancer field. And the pharmaceutical corporation he's the CEO of has done a lot of work in intranasal administration of meds. The ones for COVID are not anything one can buy as a lay consumer.

Originally Posted by Orphia Nay

Just discussing why it might be "a lab accident".

Location: Unknown. Evidence at blood banks has appeared that it was in Italy and France in November.
https://link.springer.com/article/10...54-020-00716-2
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/2/20-4632_article
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10....00891620974755

Source: The source has not been found, yes, I agree.

And I think if there is any conspiracy, it's a mutual agreement between the WHO and relevant countries to protect Patient Zero in a kind manner.

Can you imagine being that person and being doxed?

That's not an issue here. I'm not sure the single patient zero can ever be found now after more than a year has gone by.

By source we mean the animal the virus jumped from into the human population. And that is detected genetically.

Originally Posted by Orphia Nay

Quay saying the virus is "too perfect"? Can you explain what you mean or just point me to your post saying that?

When viruses jump species they are not perfectly adapted to the new host. The cells in the new species are never a perfect match to the cells of the originating species so the virus can't as efficiently enter the new host cells.

Take COVID, from humans it has jumped to minks, cats, dogs and zoo primates. It's well adapted to minks but it has also gone through some rapid genetic changes in that species. It's not well adapted to dogs so we are seeing infections but not enough viral replication to make them a source of human infections. Cats seem to be an in between match. Jumping from humans to non-human primates has been an issue. For most primate tissues they are going to be a close match across species.

We see the human cases of COVID have very little genetic diversity. That means the infection hasn't been in humans very long. Notice now after a year we are hearing about mutations. You can take the genetic differences in viruses and pretty much roll back the clock to see when those strains diverged.

What we see in COVID is a brand new pathogen in humans, it hasn't been percolating much more than a year. If it had, we would see a much greater diversity than we are seeing.

What Quay's paper looked at and what was also mentioned in my post above corroborating his hypothesis was how perfect COVID was for human cells when it jumped compared to how not perfect SARS was when it jumped from palm civet cats into humans. It took time and multiple mutations that were subject to selection pressures (natural selection) before SARS settled in as adapted to human cells.

How is it COVID came prepackaged as a perfect fit while SARS had to work its way to get there?

Going back to the SARS epidemic, it was being reported by medical professionals emailing other medical professionals several months before it was spread to Hong Kong. It had plenty of time to adapt to humans during that time. And we can see the adaptations by looking at the genetic diversity even if we don't have samples from the first patients in Guangdong. And we can look at the SARS in palm civet cats and see what the initial viral genome looked like before it jumped species.

Even taking bat viruses and pangolin viruses and merging them through a recombinant event (when two viruses mix) you don't get COVID. You get some pieces of it, including important genetic pieces. But you don't get a perfect match right out of the gate.

I've seen this with influenza. H5N1 looked really bad for a while. A few people had gotten infected in Hong Kong and there was a high fatality rate. And genetic research suggested it was only a couple of the right mutations away from being able to efficient multiply in human respiratory cells. But so far that hasn't happened. So a few people get infected but they don't pass it on very efficiently. Thus no flu pandemic yet. No perfect match right out of the gate.

Originally Posted by Orphia Nay

Do you mean a petri dish type lab accident?

There are many ways a lab accident can happen from a puncture of your pressurized suit letting contaminated air in to an animal bite. Improper disposal of animal waste is another way.

Originally Posted by Orphia Nay

My theory at present is that it happened in a lab by a wild farmed animal (bought at the Hunan market for medical testing) biting a scientist and giving them the virus.

There were no animals going back and forth between the lab and local markets.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

... I am not going to go out on a limb on a paper that apparently no serious virologist takes seriously.

That is blatantly false.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

.. But not all the virologists are compromised. That's my point! That's why I asked about those other ones.

[snip]
What's the issue? I have said it can not be categorically ruled out. But almost all the experts agree it is unlikely, as opposed to Dr Quay who apparently is 999999999.999999999999999999999999999% sure it was a lab.

No they don't! Good grief!

Originally Posted by angrysoba

...
The ones you quote only say it needs to be among the possibilities. That is hugely different from what I asked you. Who supports the theory?

I have gone through a few of them. Many say something like "plausible, and worth investigating, but unlikely", including Angela Rasmussen who Dr Quay sent his paper to.

You checked a couple? A few? Plausible but you have no confirmation bias.

You don't understand how Rasmussen corroborates Quay's premise that he based his analysis on?

Originally Posted by angrysoba

.. .
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

I posted that before, and you ignored it.

I didn't ignore that Nature citation. Do you not understand the discussion that followed? You seem to think that one paper proves the source has been determined. Why do you not know the pangolin/bat coronavirus is part of the ongoing discussion here?

I don't see how you can have even a cursory understanding of Quay's paper and think the pangolin source isn't part of the discussion.

And what goalpost? You mean my asking for the next step: If it came from a pangolin/bat recombination event, why are there no papers declaring eureka? We're done here, we know the origin.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

I didn't ignore that Nature citation. Do you not understand the discussion that followed? You seem to think that one paper proves the source has been determined. Why do you not know the pangolin/bat coronavirus is part of the ongoing discussion here? [

That's a complete lie. The paper doesn't say where it came from. The point is that

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

I don't see how you can have even a cursory understanding of Quay's paper and think the pangolin source isn't part of the discussion.

And what goalpost? You mean my asking for the next step: If it came from a pangolin/bat recombination event, why are there no papers declaring eureka? We're done here, we know the origin.

You seem to think that Quay is the first person to notice that the virus is adaptive to humans and then all the other virologists are "corroborating his findings"

Bwahahahaha!

No expert has concluded it is from a pangolin. Nobody is saying that. Jesus! Talk about a strawman!

I even posted above a video of Daszak saying that SARS Cov2 might not need an intermediate host.

[angrysoba]

Skeptic Ginger, honestly some of your arguments are appalling.

False dichotomies!
Strawman arguments!
Moving the goalposts!
Reliance on far-right sources!

[angrysoba]

Until anyone takes Quay's paper seriously, I think we can just assume there is nothing to it.

Ask some experts. Use Twitter if you have to. Find someone, anyone, who takes it seriously.

See if it can actually get peer-reviewed and published somehwere. Otherwise, why would anyone take it seriously?

[Samson]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Skeptic Ginger, honestly some of your arguments are appalling.

False dichotomies!
Strawman arguments!
Moving the goalposts!
Reliance on far-right sources!

Looks like laboratory escape, and if anything SG is the open to all evidence one.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Samson

Looks like laboratory escape, and if anything SG is the open to all evidence one.

Okay, so what is the evidence?

[Samson]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Okay, so what is the evidence?

If the virus jumped from Wuhan bats the dna evidence would be clear.
If the virus jumped from the Wuhan lab the Chinese government would punish any country that asked them to investigate by punishing that country's wine industry.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Samson

If the virus jumped from Wuhan bats the dna evidence would be clear.
If the virus jumped from the Wuhan lab the Chinese government would punish any country that asked them to investigate by punishing that country's wine industry.

That's ... brilliant.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

T
You don't understand how Rasmussen corroborates Quay's premise that he based his analysis on?

Here's Rasumussen's response to Quay.

https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/...44530285293569

[Orphia Nay]

How do we know the virus wasn't perfect when it jumped if we don't know the source / what it jumped from?

How do we know there was no transport of farmed wild animals from the market to the lab if we don't know the location of the outbreak?

[Orphia Nay]

Have they looked at a primate in China being the source for a lab bite?

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by Orphia Nay

How do we know the virus wasn't perfect when it jumped if we don't know the source / what it jumped from?

How do we know there was no transport of farmed wild animals from the market to the lab if we don't know the location of the outbreak?

We know the location of the outbreak: In Wuhan near the lab. It wasn't the market where the first cases occurred because earlier cases were found that had no connection to the market.

It is thought now that the market was the location of a super spreader event and that brought the outbreak to people's attention.

The researchers in the lab collected specimens from southern China. There wasn't anything at the seafood/wet market they would have been interested in collecting.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Re Rasmussen, she says this:

Quote:

LOL yes. Based on at least 5 things in this screen shot. Can you guess what they are?

Well no actually, I cannot guess what they are and scrolling down I don't find her answer.

Some other idiot replies in the comment that

Quote:

Dude wrote a paper. Paid to have it published. An opinion piece? On the side it says the article wasn’t written by them.

Reminds me of people in this forum (not necessarily in the thread) that have one or two pony tricks about assessing published literature and they can't see past those tricks.

Whether he (or his company) paid to have PR Newswire post about the paper, it was published in an open access site user community at Zenodo on OpenAIRE

Quote:

Coronavirus Disease Research Community - COVID-19
This community collects research outputs that may be relevant to the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) or the SARS-CoV-2. Scientists are encouraged to upload their outcome in this collection to facilitate sharing and discovery of information. Although Open Access articles and datasets are recommended, also closed and restricted access material are accepted. All types of research outputs can be included in this Community (Publication, Poster, Presentation, Dataset, Image, Video/Audio, Software, Lesson, Other).

I would like to know what her issues were if anyone finds it.

My point in citing her was specifically about corroborating an underlying premise in the paper, not necessarily the paper itself.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

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

You were the one arguing "more evolution was needed" earlier in the thread. I told you several pages back that because we now know the spike from the Pangolin virus is ALREADY efficient at attaching to human ACE2 bindings that the resulting virus would be very infectious to humans as soon as the recombination event occurred.

The argument that this is a natural event is that this spike stricture was unknown prior to research into Covid-19 so no one knew it could infect humans until mid 2020. No researcher could have been working with it in 2019, and even if they were they would have had zero reason to expect it would help create a more infectious version of a bat virus.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Right now the evidence is very strong for a lab accident.

First, it was the location.

This isn’t evidence. Take almost any notable event and there will inevitably be coincidences surrounding it. Homing in on these coincidences is the bread and butter of conspiracy theories.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Second, the source has not been found.

An unknown source makes it unlikely that the Covid-19 virus was ever in a lab prior to the outbreak. This is evidence AGAINST a laboratory origin.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Third, Quay makes a good case that the virus was too perfect when it emerged.

This isn’t an argument for escaping from a lab it’s an attempt to argue that Covid-19 was genetically engineered, something that had been rejected repeatedly by mainstream science.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Fourth, the lab has denied live bat research but the evidence is very strong they were doing research on live bats. And there's a lot more evidence what they were doing could have resulted in the kind of genetic recombinant event that would have resulted in COVID.

Lots of allegations with very little evidence behind them.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Fifth, it's undeniable China is restricting access to an investigation and an audit of the lab.

Do you think The US or any other western country is going to give Chinese Scientists unrestricted access to their own BSK-4 labs? Such refusals means absolutely nothing because this type of access was never going to be granted under any circumstances.

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

And finally, given the WHO team cannot say where the virus jumped, how are they so quick to say 'but it wasn't the lab'?

There is enough know about the virus to indicate process that are perfectly normal and common in nature, but would literally make no sense as any form of research.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by Sherkeu

Why do some here seem so against skeptics exploring and looking at various information (reliable, total propaganda, or perhaps half-truths included). Some are dead ends, some are discounted after further reading, and some lead to more pieces to be explored. Minds are changed and things evolve in time as more research is done. That is how it goes for me and I enjoy learning. YMMV.

Minds are changes by published results, not the insistence that we need to be “skeptical” of the results that have already been published.

Much harm is done by purveyors of pseudo-science claiming to simply be "skeptics exploring and looking at various information". Climate science deniers, anti-vaxers, truthers, birthers and flat earthers would all describe themselves as "skeptics" who are just looking for reliable explanations.