141–150 of 244 posts
2007: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2007/08/report-l...
2011: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/countryside-i...
I'd like to ask everyone commenting on this article: who wrote it? Seriously -- what do you know about the author of these words? (There's no "author's bio" anywhere on the page, or even if you click on his name.) So what do any of us know about him? If you look him up on Wikipedia, it lists his occupation as novelist and fiction writer, as well as an "essayist." ("His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in fav…
Your comment is merely an ad hominem against the author, not the content.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Full Text of US State Department Cables Finally Released, Showing Safety In Chinese Lab." https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/07/20/0611205/full-text-o...
After the full text of the cables were released, it proved they'd been heavily (and misleadingly) edited. IT Wire attributed that to political actors trying to create a specific story line. https://www.itwire.com/health/us-leaked-parts-of-cables-to-p...
Other than that one edited, incorrect quote, its only citations are tweets.
The cables are both less immediately damning than the original leaked quotes, and considerably more damning than the article you're linking to claims. Here's a direct excerpt from the cables, downloaded from https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-state-depart... FWIW I'm only citing the last sections of the cables here, which talk about the technician shortages and impact on coronavirus research (the virus shortages are mentioned earlier).
noted that the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory. University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston (UTMB), which has one of several well-established BSL-4 labs in the United States (supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID of NIH)), has scientific collaborations with WIV, which may help alleviate this talent gap over time. Reportedly, researchers from GTMB are helping train technicians who work in the WIV BSL-4 lab. Despite this, they would welcome more help from the U.S. and international organizations as they establish "gold standard" operating procedures and training courses for the first time in China. As China is building more BSL-4 labs, including one in Harbin Veterinary Research Institute subordinated to the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) for veterinary use the training for technicians and investigators working on dangerous pathogens will certainly be in demand.
6. (SBU) The ability of WIV scientists to undertake productive research despite limitations on the use of the new BSL-4 facility is demonstrated by a recent publication on the origin of SARS. Over a five-year study, (and their research team) widely sampled bats in Yunan province with funding support from NIAID/NIH, USAID, and several Chinese funding agencies. The study results were published in PLoS Pathogens online on Nov. 30, 2017 (1), and it demonstrated that a SARS-like coronavirus isolated from horseshoe bats in a single cave contain all the building blocks of the pandemic SARS-coronavirus genome that caused the human outbreak. These results strongly suggest that the highly pathogenic SARS-coronavirus originated in this bat population. Most importantly, researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like disease. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention. WIV scientists are allowed to study the SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from bats while they are precluded from studying human-disease causing SARS coronavirus in their new BSL-4 lab until permission for such work is granted by the NHFCP.
I hadn't actually read the cables until just now, and to be honest they're a bit scarier than I had assumed. Notably, the scientists weren't studying the already-discovered, human SARS, but they were studying SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from bats (where both original SARS and COVID-19 are believed to come from) and their interactions with ACE2, which is the receptor that both original SARS targeted and COVID-19 targets. Now, one might argue: anyone studying SARS would at some point study ACE2, since that's the receptor SARS targeted! And if you weren't allowed to study SARS, you might study coronaviruses you isolated from bats and try to get them to target ACE2, since bats are probably where SARS came from. But... Oof, that the city where the outbreak started had China's first BSL-4 lab ever, and it was studying SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from bats targeting ACE2, and they continued to study SARS-like coronaviruses since 2018 because they weren't allowed to use real SARS due to lack of technicians and investigators able to safely operate a high containment lab? That's... at least a little bit of a scary coincidence.
I think zoonotic origin is still also a fairly plausible and likely scenario, but I'm more suspicious of the lab than I was before. At the very least, studying SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from bats, made to target ACE2, seems to be a complete failure from the perspective of "emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention," which the cables note as the reason the lab exists. A SARS-like coronavirus from bats targeting ACE2 emerged literally under their noses, and they didn't predict or prevent it! Best case this is a pretty bad failure of the purpose of the lab.
Edit (although I've also edited somewhat before this): I just re-read the article after reading the cables, because something about the "sampled bats in Yunan" from the cables tickled my brain. In the article, they mention that "Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology published a paper saying that the novel coronavirus was 96 percent identical to a bat virus, RaTG13, found in Yunnan province in southern China."
That line gets tossed out like a throwaway; like it just so happened to be that WIV had taken a sample from Yunan. But it didn't just so happen to be from Yunan: all of the coronaviruses WIV used in their five-year study on making novel SARS-like coronaviruses from bats target ACE2 receptors were from bats in Yunan. And the closest living relative to COVID-19, a novel SARS-like coronavirus targeting the ACE2 receptor, is also from a bat from Yunan? That's... one hell of a coincidence.
I mean, yes, of course we'd only be able to match against samples we actually have collected. But... WIV has samples from other places too, they just didn't use them in their experiments making bat coronaviruses target ACE2; the article mentions they had also collected samples from Orlando and NYC as well, for example. So it's not entirely selection bias.
We'll probably never really know if it was a lab escape or random mutation in the wild, but that's super spooky.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How often do you get a result so incredibly close to one of the few sites in the world that intentionally collects these things? Very often for organizations like that who have labs and offices over much of the country. Take a look at the CDC locations for instance ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for_Disease_Control_an... ) , if an outbreak were to start anywhere in the US there would be a "suspicious" CDC…
Except China has only 2 BSL4 labs and though both are in big cities by Western standards, neither are near the costal population centers in which the majority of China actually resides.
This is a good, balanced article. I've been of a similar mind for over a year now. The chances of the CCP releasing a self-harming bioweapon in order to harm the US seems silly. But an accident involving a well-intentioned gain-of-function experiment seems quite possible and was something that the US was concerned about with its own gain-of-function research. In any case, this, like so much of this other nonsense aro…
The "likely vector" would be the millions of peasants living near bat caves in rural China (who actually have already been shown to have antibodies to bat viruses). And some of whom traveled to the market. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296... So I would upgrade that quite a bit from "moderate-low." (One of the researchers in this NPR article seems to rate it as an obvious suspect, so I'd ca…
It also presents some reasons why bat viruses on their own were unlikely to become as contagious as COVID, citing the example of RaTG13's discovery.
So the "zoonotic transfer from bats" theory requires an extraordinary new strain (possible!) to travel a thousand miles before spreading enough to be detected.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So why would Covid-19 even need to come from a lab? We (humans) had wet markets filled with animals, including the very bats that carry the base virus. It's the perfect breeding ground to create a pandemic-level virus and probably a few thousand more viruses of lesser impact. The question of how it got to Wuhan all the way from Southern China remains unanswered. There weren't any bats sold on the wet markets, nor h…
>>"The virologists working in Wuhan did travel all the way to Southern China to collect bat coronavirus samples and they did perform gain-of-function experiments. Viruses - even highly pathogenic ones - have escaped labs on numerous occasions. There is a plausible scenario here." Another plausible scenario, in my opinion, is that the virus was brought to Wuhan by the virologists (in the virologist or their helpers) b…
The other recent coronavirus spillovers actually have rather low infectivity that increases with the course of the epidemic through adaptive mutations. But amazingly, with SARS2, it appeared already fully adapted.
The phylogenetic tree makes a clear statement about how long SARS2 has been circulating in humans. At the publication of the genome sequence there were only a handful (~4?) of mutations known and most SARS-CoV-2 genomes were, incredibly, nearly identical. See https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global. If we tend to see one mutation per transmission, that would mean that the spillover happened in October or November 2019, and almost certainly in Wuhan. All SARS-CoV-2 we've observed fits into this single tree, and there is no evidence of any previous progenitor strains. This means that SARS-CoV-2 was fully-adapted from its most-recent common ancestor. What are the odds of that happening directly from a bat?
We're only now seeing, with b1117, a big phenotypic jump related to changes in the spike protein. It has arisen in a context that suggests that it may also be the result of strange environmental conditions for the virus that are capable of accelerating its exploration of the solution space. A widely-considered hypothesis is that it arose in an immunocompromised patient receiving antibody treatment and convalescent plasma, both standard practice in the UK. In this context the virus could have achieved extremely high population (~ many candidate solutions, faster evolutionary computation) and feedback about the immune response of the entire population (to the degree that they would have received multiple donations of plasma).
> There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap But there is so much more opportunity for the zoonotic possibilities. In fact, this is the seventh time we've seen Betacoronavirus cross from bats, through another animal, and then into humans. SARS came via palm civets. MERS came via camels. Four more types cause a mild cold only and so they…
The fact that there is China's first biosaftey level 4 lab in the same town where the virus originated doesn't arouse any suspicion whatsoever?
> There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap But there is so much more opportunity for the zoonotic possibilities. In fact, this is the seventh time we've seen Betacoronavirus cross from bats, through another animal, and then into humans. SARS came via palm civets. MERS came via camels. Four more types cause a mild cold only and so they…
There are thousands of wet markets in China, but very few virus labs. Out of all the wet markets in China, the virus just happened to originate at the one right next to the virus lab? That alone is enough evidence to make the lab escape theory the most likely origin. Though it's far from certain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>"The virologists working in Wuhan did travel all the way to Southern China to collect bat coronavirus samples and they did perform gain-of-function experiments. Viruses - even highly pathogenic ones - have escaped labs on numerous occasions. There is a plausible scenario here." Another plausible scenario, in my opinion, is that the virus was brought to Wuhan by the virologists (in the virologist or their helpers) b…
It's very unlikely that you'd get a one step transfer from a bat that yielded a spike protein with the level of affinity it has for human ACE2. If you look at that protein alone, the most-likely proximal hosts are primates. If we seriously believe in zoonotic transfer, we should be looking at those populations, and understanding how orangutans and bonobos infiltrated Wuhan and transmitted the virus to unwitting human…
I'm not qualified to have an opinion about that, but it seems to me that if we accept that premise, and the primate jump looks improbable, the conclusion is that the virus have to come from a lab where it has been modified.
On the other hand, many experts are saying "we don't know, it's probably natural". So, it seems to me that the scientific consensus is giving different prior probabilities to zoonotic transfer that you gave in that statement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are thousands of wet markets in China, but very few virus labs. Out of all the wet markets in China, the virus just happened to originate at the one right next to the virus lab? That alone is enough evidence to make the lab escape theory the most likely origin. Though it's far from certain.
There are thousands of wet markets in China, but very few provincial capital cities (Wuhan is one). Out of all the wet markets in China, the virus just happened to originate at the one next to the provincial administrative office? That alone is enough evidence to make the provincial administrative office the most likely origin of the virus, right?