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The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

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Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#91
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-lab-theory-robert-redfiel...

CBS News, yesterday:

Kristian G. Andersen, director of the infectious disease genomics, translational research institute at Scripps Research, noted that "We know that the first epidemiologically linked cluster of cases came from the Hunan market and we know the virus was found in environmental samples — including animal cages — at the market," he said. "Any 'lab leak' theory would have to account for that scenario — which it simply can't, without invoking a major conspiracy and cover up by Chinese scientists and authorities."

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#92

So, to summarize-the-summary: there are four possible theories: 1. Direct-jump from bat population 2. Started in bats, came to humans through intermediate animal 3. Came from frozen food outside of China 4. Lab accident. I used to think the lab accident theory was crazy, because it sounds like a science fiction movie. Not an impossible theory, just a crazy one. But according to this article, despite a year of investi…

I don't know why (1) is unlikely. We know that a lot of people have weak symptoms. We know that symptoms are similar to other diseases. If it were to start in a remote area you probably wouldn't notice it until it entered a big city.

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#93

So, to summarize-the-summary: there are four possible theories: 1. Direct-jump from bat population 2. Started in bats, came to humans through intermediate animal 3. Came from frozen food outside of China 4. Lab accident. I used to think the lab accident theory was crazy, because it sounds like a science fiction movie. Not an impossible theory, just a crazy one. But according to this article, despite a year of investi…

The lab accident isn't crazy. Happens in the West too, it's just something that will be politically weaponized against China if it were to admit it, although we just got lucky in the US and Europe before. Typical Western hypocrisy would be at play and China has no motivation whatsoever to subject itself to that. Also, SARS-1 escaped twice, in Singapore and Beijing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_…

You forgot about another country, which was not so lucky before, and which had an incident in their 4 level biolab just before the start of epidemic.

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#94

So, to summarize-the-summary: there are four possible theories: 1. Direct-jump from bat population 2. Started in bats, came to humans through intermediate animal 3. Came from frozen food outside of China 4. Lab accident. I used to think the lab accident theory was crazy, because it sounds like a science fiction movie. Not an impossible theory, just a crazy one. But according to this article, despite a year of investi…

2 is not unlikely just because they haven't found the intermediate species.

It took 4 years to find the immediate species in the case of SARS (2002->2006)

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#95

So, to summarize-the-summary: there are four possible theories: 1. Direct-jump from bat population 2. Started in bats, came to humans through intermediate animal 3. Came from frozen food outside of China 4. Lab accident. I used to think the lab accident theory was crazy, because it sounds like a science fiction movie. Not an impossible theory, just a crazy one. But according to this article, despite a year of investi…

I think everyone knows that #4 is a plausible theory. But it's frustrating to see how the media played it as a conspiracy theory, which just discredits the media. Kind of like how they said that masks aren't helpful at first, with the ulterior (but noble) intention of preserving the mask supply for healthcare workers. It just reinforces the idea that misinformation is fine as long as it gets people to behave the "rig…

The media didn't treat #4 as a conspiracy theory. If you mean Tom Cotton's claims, he first implied it was intentional (later walked it back). He also was claiming it was a biological weapons lab. That's not what #4 is. It's always been accepted that #4 was possible.

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#96

So, to summarize-the-summary: there are four possible theories: 1. Direct-jump from bat population 2. Started in bats, came to humans through intermediate animal 3. Came from frozen food outside of China 4. Lab accident. I used to think the lab accident theory was crazy, because it sounds like a science fiction movie. Not an impossible theory, just a crazy one. But according to this article, despite a year of investi…

> we haven't found anyone that interacted with the nearest bat population hundred of miles away

This is simply untrue. People work and live in close proximity to bats throughout much of China and Southeast Asia, including in Yunnan province. The mine workers who got sick in Mojiang in 2012 (where RaTG13 was discovered) were literally cleaning out massive mounds of bat poop.[1] There is research that shows that a non-negligible fraction (up to a few percent) of the population in some areas of Yunnan province have antibodies to novel SARS-related coronaviruses.[2,3] Interestingly, it is not known how the people in these studies were infected, and before they were randomly tested for these studies, they were not aware that they had ever been infected.

> is unlikely because we would have found the intermediate animal by now

There's no reason to expect we'd have found the intermediate species by now. Finding intermediate hosts can be very difficult. For example, it took four decades to identify the likely host species of Ebola, and even so, there's still a huge amount of uncertainty about whether there are multiple host species, and how spillover occurs.[4]

> (3) is unlikely because the first case found was in China

The frozen food hypothesis that the WHO is looking at is that animals that were raised or caught in Yunnan province, slaughtered and frozen, and sent to Wuhan might have been carrying the virus.

Option 4 is unlikely because nobody knew about this virus before it appeared in December 2019. The researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology work closely with international scientists (including in the US, Australia, France and Singapore). They regularly publish identifying RNA fragments of the viruses they discover. The viruses that they have isolated and cultured in the lab are well known, because they've published on them extensively, and because they collaborate with international researchers. They have only isolated three SARS-related coronaviruses (the vast majority of the viruses they discover are only detected as RNA fragments, not "live" virus particles), and those viruses are all much more closely related to the original SARS than they are to SARS-CoV-2. The reason for this is that before this pandemic, researchers focused their attention on viruses that were close to the original SARS (such as WIV-1[5,6]). SARS-CoV-2 and its closely related viruses would have been far less interesting to them. The lab leak theory really is a conspiracy theory, because it requires the scientists at WIV to have discovered a virus that they didn't tell anyone about, including their close collaborators abroad, for them to have secretly isolated it, for it to have escaped from a highly secure laboratory, and then for them to have covered it up. You can assert that all these things happened, but there's precisely zero evidence for it.

The alternative is that one of the millions of people who regularly interact with animals that harbor SARS-related coronaviruses got infected, and that as is usually the case, it takes time and painstaking work to determine how, when and where that happened.

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2951-z

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/

3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259005361...

4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4014719/

5. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711

6. https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#97
The WHO team has already reported new information about their recent investigation. I'm always surprised that that's entirely left out of these conversations.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/health/WHO-covid-daszak-c...

Apparently China's disease-control center had done a great deal of investigating of the Wuhan market, a WHO team member told the New York Times:

They'd actually done over 900 swabs in the end, a huge amount of work. They had been through the sewage system. They'd been into the air ventilation shaft to look for bats. They'd caught animals around the market. They'd caught cats, stray cats, rats, they even caught one weasel. They'd sampled snakes. People had live snakes at the market, live turtles, live frogs. Rabbits were there, rabbit carcasses... Animals were coming into that market that could have carried the coronavirus. They could have been infected by bats somewhere else in China and brought it in. So that's clue No. 1... Some of these are coming from places where we know the nearest relatives of the virus are found. So there's the real red flag...

There were other markets. And we do know that some of the patients had links to other markets.

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#98
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lab accident isn't crazy. Happens in the West too, it's just something that will be politically weaponized against China if it were to admit it, although we just got lucky in the US and Europe before. Typical Western hypocrisy would be at play and China has no motivation whatsoever to subject itself to that. Also, SARS-1 escaped twice, in Singapore and Beijing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_…

You forgot about another country, which was not so lucky before, and which had an incident in their 4 level biolab just before the start of epidemic.

So that is more likely than a level 4 biolab that happened to be IN Wuhan and was being warned about by US State Department officials years before this happened?

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#99

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-lab-theory-robert-redfiel... CBS News, yesterday: Kristian G. Andersen, director of the infectious disease genomics, translational research institute at Scripps Research, noted that "We know that the first epidemiologically linked cluster of cases came from the Hunan market and we know the virus was found in environmental samples — including animal cages — at the market," he said. "…

Is it possible that the virus got there due to it floating around in the air, and not because it originated in animals?

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#100
post #59

> “If this is a man-made catastrophe,” says Miles Yu, an analyst with the conservative Hudson Institute, “I think the world should seek reparations.” That would open an interesting can of worms. 1. It is common under many (most?) legal systems for those harmed by another's negligence to have a duty to mitigate damages. For example, if I'm burning something on my property and an ember from my fire sets something on fi…

Frankly, if this did come from a lab in China, I doubt there would be any repercussions. What would happen, additional tariffs on Chinese products, or sanctions against certain CCP officials? I believe the latter is more likely than the former.
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