Lab Leak: The conspiracy theory is shaping up to look like real possibility

[Sparko]

What do you propose - trying to get blood out of a turnip? Yeah - we don't try to punish them because every nation has made massive mistakes dealing with this virus. The fingers we point have just as many pointing back. So we try to work together rather than just make things even worse playing the blame game.

And we especially don't allow Trump's ego, inability to face his failures, and his re-election ambitions drive that blame game!

You didn't answer any of my questions. How was WW1 & 2 key causes "trade wars?" and what do you propose to stop China from doing something like this again? The last three new and dangerous diseases came from China. And why should we continue to trade with a country that steals our intellectual property, sells us children's toys with lead paint on them, lies to our faces, and even tried to blame US for the virus? China isn't our friend, Ox. They are just taking advantage of our greed to sell us cheap goods at the expense of basically the slave labor of their own people.

[oxmixmudd]

You didn't answer any of my questions. How was WW1 & 2 key causes "trade wars?" and what do you propose to stop China from doing something like this again? The last three new and dangerous diseases came from China. And why should we continue to trade with a country that steals our intellectual property, sells us children's toys with lead paint on them, lies to our faces, and even tried to blame US for the virus? China isn't our friend, Ox. They are just taking advantage of our greed to sell us cheap goods at the expense of basically the slave labor of their own people.

I am well aware of the fact China is not our friend Sparko - but you are moving the goalposts. I am talking about the attempt to scapegoat blame away from Trump's mistakes and onto China's WRT covid-19. The stealing of intellectual property, children's toys with lead etc are indeed serious issue's and must be dealt with, but they are not the topic of my posts on this issue. Indeed, we could also talk about our own government's willingness to allow critical infrastructure to be sold off to China, or moved in part or in whole to the Chinese mainland. There is a lot to toss in here Sparko, but I'm talking about Trump scapegoating China to avoid facing his own failures in handling the pandemic and the specific shortsightedness of doing that when what we need from China is not an escalation but cooperation.

The point is why are we supporting Trump trying to cover up his mistakes by trying to turn the focus on China?

[Sparko]

I am well aware of the fact China is not our friend Sparko - but you are moving the goalposts. I am talking about the attempt to scapegoat blame away from Trump's mistakes and onto China's WRT covid-19. The stealing of intellectual property, children's toys with lead etc are indeed serious issue's and must be dealt with, but they are not the topic of my posts on this issue. Indeed, we could also talk about our own government's willingness to allow critical infrastructure to be sold off to China, or moved in part or in whole to the Chinese mainland. There is a lot to toss in here Sparko, but I'm talking about Trump scapegoating China to avoid facing his own failures in handling the pandemic and the specific shortsightedness of doing that when what we need from China is not an escalation but cooperation.

The point is why are we supporting Trump trying to cover up his mistakes by trying to turn the focus on China?

still didn't answer my questions. And we are drifting into a Trump argument and I don't want to go there. I am talking about what to do about China to stop them from doing this again. How do we make them more transparent? A friend to the world instead of an enemy?

And still wondering how "trade wars" were the key cause of WW1 and 2

[shunyadragon]

The problem is the virus itself could have been in the lab from a natural source and escaped from there. So there are really four questions

1) Was the the new virus human created in the lab (almost surely not - everyone agrees)

2) Was the new virus a natural result of experiments in the lab (that also appears not to be the case, but can be debated?)

3) Was the virus in the lab from imported wild samples but escaped through a mistake in handling (that is one of the viable options)

4) was the virus never in the lab at all but simply in the bats/pangolins in the wuhan market (that is the other viable option)

I'm not sure how to distinguish between 3 and 4 without detailed tracing of the initial cases. And I'm still a little confused over whether Juvenal is arguing most forcefully for 2 or for 3 - but I think it is 2*? And I'm not sure Fauci considers 3 vs 4 worthy of debate.

*This is mostly probably my own fault for skimming rather than carefully reading his more in depth replies ...

The problem with sorting out your options is that I prefer the simplist opton that is parallel to all the pandemics and epidemics for zoonotic viruses in history. The conclusion of all the sources I could find including Fauci is that it was most likely a naturally evolved coronavirus. Fauci is an immunologist, and I believe is completely up on the literature. To say the things he does goes to the wall against Trump and Pompeo at the risk of loosing his job, which he is often on the ledge.

The difference between a naturally evolved coronavirus that infected people in Wuhan at the market or elsewhere, and a naturally evolved coronavirus escaping from the lab where the lab that got it from wild animal sources is what? The conclusions of all the epidemiologists and other scientists nersus versus a convenient rallying cry by the Trump/Pompeo duo to blame China as the scapegoat. Pomeo says there is a 'great deal of evidence,' but none is forthcoming.

I will go with the academic sources I cited and Fauci is the best expert in this field with a public voice, and agrees with all the references I cited. As far as I am concerned I do not need to appeal to Occam's Razor to make the choice.

[shunyadragon]

Source: https://scitechdaily.com/infection-researchers-identify-how-coronaviruses-from-animals-need-to-change-to-spread-to-humans/

Infection Researchers Identify How Coronaviruses From Animals Need to Change to Spread to Humans

TOPICS:Cell BiologyCOVID-19Infectious DiseasesMolecular BiologyVaccineVirology
By DEUTSCHES PRIMATENZENTRUM (DPZ)/GERMAN PRIMATE CENTER MAY 6, 2020

SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Activated Schematic
(A) Schematic representation of SARS-CoV-2, the viral spike protein and the cleavage sites for furin (green, S1/S2 position; the cleavage sequence is shown below the protein structure) and TMPRSS2 (orange, S2′ position). (B) First, in already infected cells, the enzyme furin cuts the spike protein at the S1/S2 site. The spike protein then mediates viral attachment to a new host cell. In order to efficiently enter the cell, the spike protein still needs to be activated by the enzyme TMPRSS2. Activation by TMPRSS2 is only possible if the spike protein has previously been cleaved by furin. Credit: Markus Hoffmann

Infection researchers from the German Primate Center identify starting points for vaccine development and therapy.

The SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infects lung cells and is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. The viral spike protein mediates entry of the virus into host cells and harbors an unusual activation sequence. The Infection Biology Unit of the German Primate Center (DPZ) – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research has now shown that this sequence is cleaved by the cellular enzyme furin and that the cleavage is important for the infection of lung cells. These results define new starting points for therapy and vaccine research. In addition, they provide information on how coronaviruses from animals need to change in order to be able to spread in the human population (Molecular Cell).

The new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has been transmitted from animals to humans and is spreading worldwide. It causes the new lung disease COVID-19, which has already killed over 200,000 people. The spike protein on the virus surface serves as a key for the virus to enter host cells. It facilitates viral attachment to cells and fuses the viral with a cellular membrane, thereby allowing the virus to deliver its genome into the cell, which is essential for viral replication. For this, activation sequences of the spike protein need to be cleaved by cellular enzymes, called proteases. The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 carries an activation sequence at the so-called S1/S2 cleavage site, which is similar to those observed in highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses, but which has so far not been found in viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2. The importance of this sequence for the virus was so far unknown.

In their current study, the infection biologists of the German Primate Center led by Markus Hoffmann and Stefan Pöhlmann were able to show that the S1/S2 activation sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is cleaved by the cellular protease furin and that this cleavage event is essential for the infection of lung cells. It is also important for the fusion of infected cells with non-infected cells, which might allow the virus to spread in the body without leaving the host cell.

“Our results suggest that inhibition of furin should block the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the lung,” says Stefan Pöhlmann, head of the Infection Biology Unit at DPZ. “Furthermore, our present study and previous work demonstrate that the virus uses a two-step activation mechanism: In infected cells, the spike protein has to be cleaved by the protease furin so that newly formed viruses can then use the protease TMPRSS2 for further cleavage of the spike protein, which is important for the entry into lung cells.”

Development of live attenuated vaccines

For a live attenuated vaccine to trigger a strong immune response, it has to be able to replicate in the body to a limited extent, for example locally at the site of injection. “SARS-CoV-2 variants, in which the activation sequence for furin has been removed, could be used as a basis for the development of such live attenuated vaccines, since the lack of cleavage of the spike protein should greatly limit the spread of the virus in the body. A sufficiently attenuated virus would no longer be able to cause disease, but would still enable the immune system to react to the pathogen and, for example, produce neutralizing antibodies,” says Markus Hoffmann, first author of the study.

Risk assessment

In wildlife, especially bats, a large number of coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 has been discovered over the past 20 years. However, so far an S1/S2 activation sequence that can be cleaved by furin has only been detected in SARS-CoV-2. “Wildlife sampling and the targeted search for coronaviruses with a focus on the S1/S2 activation sequence is necessary to identify those viruses that have the potential to infect and efficiently spread in humans. In addition, in the case of potential future coronavirus outbreaks, we should specifically analyze the S1/S2 cleavage site as it might serve as a marker for human-to-human transmissibility,” says Markus Hoffmann.

Reference: “A Multibasic Cleavage Site in the Spike Protein of SARS-CoV-2 Is Essential for Infection of Human Lung Cells” by Markus Hoffmann,
Hannah Kleine-Weber and Stefan Pöhlmann, 1 May 2020, Molecular Cell.
DOI: 10.1016/j.molcel.2020.04.022

© Copyright Original Source

[Juvenal]

The problem is the virus itself could have been in the lab from a natural source and escaped from there. So there are really four questions

1) Was the the new virus human created in the lab (almost surely not - everyone agrees)

That's not right.

Everyone agrees it wasn't constructed or engineered. That is, recombination tools were not used to create the virus. In particular, we know it wasn't created as a weapon. It's an open question whether it was created in the lab by experiment. It should be stressed there is no evidence of such an experiment. That's what everyone is saying. We don't have evidence.

It should be noted that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In the absence of direct evidence, there is circumstantial evidence to be considered. That's what I'm looking at.

2) Was the new virus a natural result of experiments in the lab (that also appears not to be the case, but can be debated?)

Experiments are unnatural, by definition, even if they're only assisting natural selection. I'm especially interested in the possibility of a gain of function experiment gone awry through carelessness. In 2018, staffing issues at WIV concerned U.S. scientific observers and diplomats enough to ask for more U.S. personnel to be sent to the lab. The administration declined to provide that support. There's an argument to be made that if it CoV-2 escaped from WIV, we knew enough about the risk to have prevented it.

But a gain of function experiment is not strictly necessary according to a Live Science article I excerpted earlier in thread. Here's a fuller passage.

Though no scientists have come forth with even a speck of evidence that humans knowingly manipulated a virus using some sort of genetic engineering, a researcher at Flinders University in South Australia lays out another scenario that involves human intervention. Bat coronaviruses can be cultured in lab dishes with cells that have the human ACE2 receptor; over time, the virus will gain adaptations that let it efficiently bind to those receptors. Along the way, that virus would pick up random genetic mutations that pop up but don't do anything noticeable, said Nikolai Petrovsky, in the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders.

"The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus," Petrovsky said in a statement from the Australian Media Center. "Because the mutations are acquired randomly by selection, there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention."

If that virus infected a staff member and that person then traveled to the nearby seafood market, the virus could have spread from there, he said. Or, he added, an "inappropriate disposal of waste from the facility" could have infected humans directly or from a susceptible intermediary, such as a stray cat.

3) Was the virus in the lab from imported wild samples but escaped through a mistake in handling (that is one of the viable options)

If it was collected, they'd know. That's what they do.

4) was the virus never in the lab at all but simply in the bats/pangolins in the wuhan market (that is the other viable option)

A significant proportion of the earliest cases had no connection to the market. The market is out.

I'm not sure how to distinguish between 3 and 4 without detailed tracing of the initial cases. And I'm still a little confused over whether Juvenal is arguing most forcefully for 2 or for 3 - but I think it is 2*? And I'm not sure Fauci considers 3 vs 4 worthy of debate.

*This is mostly probably my own fault for skimming rather than carefully reading his more in depth replies ...

And here I am again, writing an extended response.

*sigh*

Maybe if I made it look like a challenge. Jim, brum is paying closer to my detailed posts than you are. Ya gonna let him beat you like that?

If CoV-2 didn't come from RaTG13, it came from a relative that was similarly close to RaTG13. That means it most likely came from the same cave as RaTG13 in Pu'er City, a thousand miles from Wuhan. On the way to Wuhan, it picked up changes that point to interaction with the ACE2 receptor found in our lung cells.

There's a long list of mammals with orthologs to our ACE2. Rhinolophus affinis, whence "Ra" in RaTG13, is not among them.

For what it's worth, a close relative, Rhinolophus ferrumequinum, is. So is the house mouse, Mus musculus, and the Norway rat, Rattus norvegicus. And the Malayan pangolin, Manis javanica.

The point being RaTG13 didn't pick up its affinity for ACE2 from its Ra host. It picked it up from humans or from an animal that's close enough to humans in its Angiotensin-converting enzymes to provide selection pressure. If it acquired that affinity in humans, I'd expect that to happen near Pu'er City. That didn't happen. Pu'er was never an epicenter.

If it acquired it by infecting another animal, and that animal wasn't in the Wuhan South China Seafood Wholesale Market, in my estimation, WIV is the most likely suspect. They had the means, the motive, and the opportunity.

[Sparko]

Experiments are unnatural, by definition, even if they're only assisting natural selection. I'm especially interested in the possibility of a gain of function experiment gone awry through carelessness. In 2018, staffing issues at WIV concerned U.S. scientific observers and diplomats enough to ask for more U.S. personnel to be sent to the lab. The administration declined to provide that support. There's an argument to be made that if it CoV-2 escaped from WIV, we knew enough about the risk to have prevented it.

But a gain of function experiment is not strictly necessary according to a Live Science article I excerpted earlier in thread. Here's a fuller passage.

Though no scientists have come forth with even a speck of evidence that humans knowingly manipulated a virus using some sort of genetic engineering, a researcher at Flinders University in South Australia lays out another scenario that involves human intervention. Bat coronaviruses can be cultured in lab dishes with cells that have the human ACE2 receptor; over time, the virus will gain adaptations that let it efficiently bind to those receptors. Along the way, that virus would pick up random genetic mutations that pop up but don't do anything noticeable, said Nikolai Petrovsky, in the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders.

"The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus," Petrovsky said in a statement from the Australian Media Center. "Because the mutations are acquired randomly by selection, there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention."

If that virus infected a staff member and that person then traveled to the nearby seafood market, the virus could have spread from there, he said. Or, he added, an "inappropriate disposal of waste from the facility" could have infected humans directly or from a susceptible intermediary, such as a stray cat.

^That is what I have been trying to say I think happened. Thanks.

[Cerebrum123]

That's not right.

Everyone agrees it wasn't constructed or engineered. That is, recombination tools were not used to create the virus. In particular, we know it wasn't created as a weapon. It's an open question whether it was created in the lab by experiment. It should be stressed there is no evidence of such an experiment. That's what everyone is saying. We don't have evidence.

It should be noted that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In the absence of direct evidence, there is circumstantial evidence to be considered. That's what I'm looking at.



Experiments are unnatural, by definition, even if they're only assisting natural selection. I'm especially interested in the possibility of a gain of function experiment gone awry through carelessness. In 2018, staffing issues at WIV concerned U.S. scientific observers and diplomats enough to ask for more U.S. personnel to be sent to the lab. The administration declined to provide that support. There's an argument to be made that if it CoV-2 escaped from WIV, we knew enough about the risk to have prevented it.

But a gain of function experiment is not strictly necessary according to a Live Science article I excerpted earlier in thread. Here's a fuller passage.

Though no scientists have come forth with even a speck of evidence that humans knowingly manipulated a virus using some sort of genetic engineering, a researcher at Flinders University in South Australia lays out another scenario that involves human intervention. Bat coronaviruses can be cultured in lab dishes with cells that have the human ACE2 receptor; over time, the virus will gain adaptations that let it efficiently bind to those receptors. Along the way, that virus would pick up random genetic mutations that pop up but don't do anything noticeable, said Nikolai Petrovsky, in the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders.

"The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus," Petrovsky said in a statement from the Australian Media Center. "Because the mutations are acquired randomly by selection, there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention."

If that virus infected a staff member and that person then traveled to the nearby seafood market, the virus could have spread from there, he said. Or, he added, an "inappropriate disposal of waste from the facility" could have infected humans directly or from a susceptible intermediary, such as a stray cat.

If it was collected, they'd know. That's what they do.



A significant proportion of the earliest cases had no connection to the market. The market is out.



And here I am again, writing an extended response.

*sigh*

Maybe if I made it look like a challenge. Jim, brum is paying closer attention to my detailed posts than you are. Ya gonna let him beat you like that?

If CoV-2 didn't come from RaTG13, it came from a relative that was similarly close to RaTG13. That means it most likely came from the same cave as RaTG13 in Pu'er City, a thousand miles from Wuhan. On the way to Wuhan, it picked up changes that point to interaction with the ACE2 receptor found in our lung cells.

There's a long list of mammals with orthologs to our ACE2. Rhinolophus affinis, whence "Ra" in RaTG13, is not among them.

For what it's worth, a close relative, Rhinolophus ferrumequinum, is. So is the house mouse, Mus musculus, and the Norway rat, Rattus norvegicus. And the Malayan pangolin, Manis javanica.

The point being RaTG13 didn't pick up its affinity for ACE2 from its Ra host. It picked it up from humans or from an animal that's close enough to humans in its Angiotensin-converting enzymes to provide selection pressure. If it acquired that affinity in humans, I'd expect that to happen near Pu'er City. That didn't happen. Pu'er was never an epicenter.

If it acquired it by infecting another animal, and that animal wasn't in the Wuhan South China Seafood Wholesale Market, in my estimation, WIV is the most likely suspect. They had the means, the motive, and the opportunity.

Bolded and underlined is something you forgot to put in the original. Looks like ox isn't the only one I'm beating when it comes to paying attention.

[oxmixmudd]

Thanks for taking the time Juvenal, I'll try not to waste any more of it. That is, I am going to try to spend the proper time to give you a reasonable response to this post. You are posting on a different level than most here, and I apologize for not taking the time required to give you something useful to work with.

That's not right.

Everyone agrees it wasn't constructed or engineered. That is, recombination tools were not used to create the virus. In particular, we know it wasn't created as a weapon. It's an open question whether it was created in the lab by experiment. It should be stressed there is no evidence of such an experiment. That's what everyone is saying. We don't have evidence.

It should be noted that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In the absence of direct evidence, there is circumstantial evidence to be considered. That's what I'm looking at.

I agree with your distinction and understand how you can say 'that is not right', but it is more because my categories are broad and I did not spend much time explaining what might be the boundaries I had in mind.

The 4 categories I made were loosely defined to be evaluated against the known data, with 1 and 2 targeting an in lab origin for the virus itself, and 3 and 4 describing an in the wild origin with the two potential vectors for infection given that patient 0 was in the Wuhan Area. They are not meant to be exhaustive either, just broad categories taylored to speculating about whether the infection began as a result of accidental release from the lab whatever it's origin, or an initial outside the lab transference from an animal in the wuhan area.

In category 1 'human created in a lab' should be distinguished from 'happened in a lab', at least in terms of the very rough boundaries I had in mind when I wrote them. I know there is ambiguity in what human created could mean, but my primary connotation would be 'purposefully created', as in a weapon or with a goal, a purpose in mind, which would tend to imply some sort of tool to manipulate the genome. Hence category 1 being different from category 2, which is the other side of it coming to be in the lab - that is, number 2 is 'it came to be in the lab, but it was not by design but rather it evolved as a result of things done in the lab as part of learning about it or experimenting with it.

Experiments are unnatural, by definition, even if they're only assisting natural selection. I'm especially interested in the possibility of a gain of function experiment gone awry through carelessness. In 2018, staffing issues at WIV concerned U.S. scientific observers and diplomats enough to ask for more U.S. personnel to be sent to the lab. The administration declined to provide that support. There's an argument to be made that if it CoV-2 escaped from WIV, we knew enough about the risk to have prevented it.

We agree.

But a gain of function experiment is not strictly necessary according to a Live Science article I excerpted earlier in thread. Here's a fuller passage.

Though no scientists have come forth with even a speck of evidence that humans knowingly manipulated a virus using some sort of genetic engineering, a researcher at Flinders University in South Australia lays out another scenario that involves human intervention. Bat coronaviruses can be cultured in lab dishes with cells that have the human ACE2 receptor; over time, the virus will gain adaptations that let it efficiently bind to those receptors. Along the way, that virus would pick up random genetic mutations that pop up but don't do anything noticeable, said Nikolai Petrovsky, in the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders.

Yes. It makes sense that it is possible a mechanism that would create an environment that would hasten evolution to a human transmissible form could have been used to hide any tool related artifacts. If it evolved through normal means in a lab environment that simulated years or decades of interaction with a human host, I do not have any idea how that could be distinguished from more normal 'in the wild' interactions with humans. There might indeed be a way, but I'm not anywhere near well versed enough in this topic to know.

"The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus," Petrovsky said in a statement from the Australian Media Center. "Because the mutations are acquired randomly by selection, there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention."

If that virus infected a staff member and that person then traveled to the nearby seafood market, the virus could have spread from there, he said. Or, he added, an "inappropriate disposal of waste from the facility" could have infected humans directly or from a susceptible intermediary, such as a stray cat.

Sounds reasonable to me. And he adds a fifth category, it made it out of the lab back into the animal population and then over to a human.

If it was collected, they'd know. That's what they do.

They might know, but would they tell us is the question there. Assuming they are embarrassed by their carelessness, purging all records of the discovery of the virus in the wild would make it impossible to know if that is what happened.

A significant proportion of the earliest cases had no connection to the market. The market is out.

That would depend on the accuracy of 'no connection to the market'. Maybe a stray cat was involved ...

And here I am again, writing an extended response.

*sigh*

again - sorry.

Maybe if I made it look like a challenge. Jim, brum is paying closer to my detailed posts than you are. Ya gonna let him beat you like that?

If CoV-2 didn't come from RaTG13, it came from a relative that was similarly close to RaTG13. That means it most likely came from the same cave as RaTG13 in Pu'er City, a thousand miles from Wuhan. On the way to Wuhan, it picked up changes that point to interaction with the ACE2 receptor found in our lung cells.

There's a long list of mammals with orthologs to our ACE2. Rhinolophus affinis, whence "Ra" in RaTG13, is not among them.

For what it's worth, a close relative, Rhinolophus ferrumequinum, is. So is the house mouse, Mus musculus, and the Norway rat, Rattus norvegicus. And the Malayan pangolin, Manis javanica.

The point being RaTG13 didn't pick up its affinity for ACE2 from its Ra host. It picked it up from humans or from an animal that's close enough to humans in its Angiotensin-converting enzymes to provide selection pressure. If it acquired that affinity in humans, I'd expect that to happen near Pu'er City. That didn't happen. Pu'er was never an epicenter.

If it acquired it by infecting another animal, and that animal wasn't in the Wuhan South China Seafood Wholesale Market, in my estimation, WIV is the most likely suspect. They had the means, the motive, and the opportunity.

You reasoning is sound as best I can tell. The issue for me is that others with a Ph.D in the field have not arrived at the same conclusion, and my background is Mathematics and Comp Sci - not biology. In fact, of the major sciences i have some familiarity with (astronomy, physics, paleantology, climatology, geology, chemistry, biology) biology is by far the weakest. So the fact your reasoning seems sound to me is not sufficient for me to decide that what you have concluded is more sensible that what they have concluded.


But what you have outlined does pose questions I'd like to see answered by those that have reached a different conclusion. Not that any public, non-scientific discussion of this would ever drill down to that sort of detail.

Thanks again for you time and effort pulling these posts together and drilling into the paper(s) in question.

[Cerebrum123]

^That is what I have been trying to say I think happened. Thanks.

Same. I get Fauci is busy with everything, but his dismissal of such a scenario as "circular reasoning" seems a bit too flippant IMO. The evidence for a lab leak didn't seem to be getting a fair look. I don't really care which one it turns out to be in the end.

[oxmixmudd]

The problem with sorting out your options is that I prefer the simplist opton that is parallel to all the pandemics and epidemics for zoonotic viruses in history. The conclusion of all the sources I could find including Fauci is that it was most likely a naturally evolved coronavirus. Fauci is an immunologist, and I believe is completely up on the literature. To say the things he does goes to the wall against Trump and Pompeo at the risk of loosing his job, which he is often on the ledge.

The difference between a naturally evolved coronavirus that infected people in Wuhan at the market or elsewhere, and a naturally evolved coronavirus escaping from the lab where the lab that got it from wild animal sources is what? The conclusions of all the epidemiologists and other scientists nersus versus a convenient rallying cry by the Trump/Pompeo duo to blame China as the scapegoat. Pomeo says there is a 'great deal of evidence,' but none is forthcoming.

I will go with the academic sources I cited and Fauci is the best expert in this field with a public voice, and agrees with all the references I cited. As far as I am concerned I do not need to appeal to Occam's Razor to make the choice.

I think we agree that the Trump/Pompeo show on this is just that - a show. So for now I'm going to move away from that and just follow this thread to the extent it drills down on the most likely origin scenario. The politics of it is that Trump and his supporters want a scapegoat to cover his past and continuing mistakes dealing with this virus. And a WIV origin they believe gives them that. OTOH, I believe we should focus on other issues with china WRT correction, and try to work with them WRT the pandemic as we will all benefit from that, and it might just give us more credibility when/if we try to address more aggressively issues like intellectual property theft.

[Sparko]

The WHO is now defending wet markets and saying the virus might not have even originated there. But they are NOT saying it came from a lab. They want their cake and eat it to.


----------
The World Health Organisation has said markets selling live animals should not be forced to closed down - despite acknowledging they can cause epidemics in humans.

Officials said the markets were critical in providing food and jobs to millions of people across the globe and should be allowed to continue operating, even though the outbreak of coronavirus is believed to have spread from a Wuhan wet market.
...
He said it is still unclear whether the market in Wuhan linked to the first several dozens of coronavirus cases in China was the actual source of the virus or if it instead played a role in spreading the disease further.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...an-market.html

The more the WHO pontificates about this virus, the less I trust them. They seem to be in China's pocket.

[Juvenal]

Did coronavirus accidentally escape from a Wuhan lab? It’s doubtful. | The Fact Checker
April 30, 2020 | 8:11 PM EDT

In the absence of crucial information on how the novel coronavirus began many theories have flourished — one is that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. The Fact Checker investigates if any evidence supports that origin story.

The multimedia journalists are Sarah Cahlan and Meg Kelly.

I watched this in pause and google mode. It's captioned, but not very well. All transcriptions are mine.

Meg Kelly: The viruses most similar to the new coronavirus that causes Covid-19 are from bats that live in caves a thousand miles away.

That's something that confused me early on because I didn't know the geography. The original SARS-CoV outbreak was in Guangdong Province, six hundred miles southeast of Wuhan. But the original SARS-CoV virus itself, like its cousin SARS-CoV-2, came from Yunnan Province, southwest of Wuhan. From a journal paper, I've gleaned the caves are in or near Pu'er City, where Zhengli Shi takes her field trips.

Notably, a virus made its way from that cave to Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, creating the first SARS epidemic. And now it's made its way to Wuhan, creating a SARS pandemic.

The video features interviews with Daniel Lucey, Georgetown University Infections Disease Specialist and Milton Leitenberg, University of Maryland Chemical Weapons Expert. Also interviewed are Adam Lauring, University of Michigan Medical School Professor, Angela Rasmussen, Columbia University Virologist, New York, and Peter Daszak, Ecohealth Alliance, New York.

Kelly: As of late April, experts don't have all the information they need to say where the virus started.

Milton Leitenberg, University of Maryland Chemical Weapons Expert: If the Chinese know evidence, of course they're not telling us or anyone else.

That's significant because that evidence would normally come from WIV, which had previously been remarkably open to outsiders. They're not even available for interviews now. That runs counter to what I'd expect if they had good evidence CoV-2 didn't come from their labs, and were at a loss on where the virus originated. I'd expect they'd be asking for help before it was offered.

It's not enough to say the government has the researchers gagged. It's necessary to ask why the researchers are gagged.

There's a biosafety level 2 lab close to the market, but that doesn't handle the really dangerous viruses. That's biosafety level 4; that's WIV. WIV was set up specifically to study coronaviruses.

Leitenberg: BL-4 is the ones you will see in films with people in a suit and an air hose attached behind them. They’re completely enclosed and protected.

Creating the WIV was a point of national pride for China. Questioning WIV makes China lose face.

Kelly: When China first brought the lab online, it was with the explicit goal of studying coronaviruses. Sarah Cahlan: China wanted to set up its own laboratory after the SARS outbreak to study SARS-relevant pathogens so that they could do that on their own territory without having to rely on the international system.

That's not a divorce from the international system.

Peter Daszak, Ecohealth Alliance President: The work we do with the Wuhan Institute of Virology is to look for viruses in bats that we think could be the next pandemic.

Daszak goes on to compliment them on how open they've been, but it's not clear whether he means prior to the pandemic or since. Daszak is listed on a 2017 paper with Zhengli Shi featured in the video. I'd guess that's how he came to the attention of Cahlan and Kelly. That's how I'd have looked for sources.

The WIV has had safety issues, like all BL-4 labs.

Angela Rasmussen, Columbia University Virologist: Without fail, every single BSL-4 lab in the US gets some type of safety violation, some type of, you know, something the could do better and that’s the purpose of doing those inspections is to make sure that biosafety is as tight and secure as it can possibly be.

China still maintains the pandemic began in the wet market.

Daniel Lucey, Georgetown University Infections Disease Specialist: As of today, to the best of my knowledge, and I look for this every single day for 112 days, China has not divulged any information about what animals they tested from the market when they closed it, and, of course, what the results of any of those tests were.

Yes, there are doubts, important doubts, about a lab leak, but the official story doesn't hold up. What else is there but to look at alternatives China might not want to see investigated.


Selected references from the video.

State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses

Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus Notable authors include Zhengli Shi and Peter Daszak.

How early signs of the coronavirus were spotted, spread and throttled in China

[Sparko]

We need to nuke those bat caves.

[Juvenal]

The more the WHO pontificates about this virus, the less I trust them. They seem to be in China's pocket.

Keep your crazy away from the machinery we need to tackle the crisis, please.

And never, ever, cite the Daily Fail in a serious discussion. What the hell, Sparko?


The WHO depends upon cooperation to get their data from their members. China is a member. So are we. Suggestions that the WHO should be pounding on the table or otherwise acting like idiots burning bridges we're going to need might fill some primal emotional need but they're just plain crazy.

Or more gently, unhelpful. Very unhelpful.