Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

But, if I'm understanding it correctly, "very common" cuts both ways here? Namely, zillions of "wet markets" and virus jumps and "evolution" takes care of killing the other viruses as well?

> a spillover animal

"Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 on mink farms between humans and mink and back to humans"

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe5901

Not what you meant?

How long did it take to definitively identify a natural reservoir for the 2002 SARS outbreak?

"Bats as Animal Reservoirs for the SARS Coronavirus: Hypothesis Proved After 10 Years of Virus Hunting"

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258204548_Bats_as_a...

The spillover animals (aka intermediate hosts) for SARS-1 were rapidly identified as civets in a wet market, in less than a year. The animal reservoir that infected the civets were the horseshoe bats, and yes, that took a few years to confirm.

No intermediate host was ever identified as the source of infection in Wuhan. The article you posted regarding minks has absolutely nothing to do with an original source of spillover. It's simply documenting the common pandemic phenomenon of humans infecting mammals with covid, and, wow, the minks infecting humans with the same virus that is already evolved to infect human ACE2 receptors.

You started with an absurd, inverse hypothesis. The lab that studies bat-borne coronaviruses had absolutely nothing to do with the bat-borne coronavirus that broke out a kilometer away, despite:

Location is 1000km away from the known horseshoe bat populations in Yunnan that are SARS reservoirs. Emergence was during late autumn/early winter when local bats are already hibernating. Emergence was in the middle of a cosmopolitan metropolis where the locals don't eat bats. Chinese Communist Party immediately blocked any investigations and never even pretended to want to restore records that were deleted, despite the prospect of being vindicated by a zoonotic origin being found. CCP currently, rather than attempt to continue to claim a non-existent zoonotic origin, has now claimed a US-based lab leak is at fault. Multiple NIH grants specifically mention humanized mouse models with human ACE2 receptors lining air passages, and conducting serial passage of wild-type bat-borne SARS in research being conducted by grant recipient in Wuhan lab. (There was an intermediate host, it was a genetically modified mouse model, and long since disposed of.)

Humanized mouse models can be purchased from any reputable bio supplier: https://www.criver.com/products-services/research-models-ser...

> The spillover animals (aka intermediate hosts) for SARS-1 were rapidly identified as civets in a wet market…

I'll take your word for it. (A long "few years" — "The virus originally came from horseshoe bats, though that wasn’t conclusively determined until 2017".)

"No intermediate host was ever identified as the source of infection in Wuhan" likely because —

"Unlike with SARS, however, there were no opportunities to sample the markets to look for animals infected with SARS-CoV-2. Chinese authorities closed and cleared out the markets soon after the epidemic started, citing public-health concerns, and banned all wildlife trade on 26 January 2020. Eating and trading wild animals were permanently banned in February 2020. Samples at the market to test for SARS-CoV-2 were not taken until months later. The virus was found in the drains of the market, but there were no live animals to test."

"The tick study that documented the sale of illegal animals in the Huanan market observed, however, that the sellers were not too concerned about law enforcement, and that plainly illegal animals were openly sold. It is unclear whether any of the animal traders engaged in illegal wildlife commerce have been since found, fined or punished. The swift clear-out of the market may have been intended to protect them as well as the law-enforcement officers and local politicians who had looked the other way."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.2...

Commonplace criminality or sinister super secret science scandal?

I don't think much of the "takedown" so far. Interested to discuss specifics if I'm not getting something.

Cadhla (who works for EcoHealth alliance BTW) points out that it was Wuhan University who registered the rice sequence bioproject PRJNA601977 - which is not hugely relevant since the source of the contamination could be from anywhere (that happened to have a HKU4 reverse genetics system...).

Andreas points to incomplete sequence coverage (not unusual in a contamination scenario) and claims it might be "not dangerous work" because the sequence gap leaves open the possibility that the missing bit was non-functional. True but weak. It's 33 NTs of highly conserved sequence, what does he really think was in that gap? I know what Fat Tony would say.

Flo's comments seem to be claiming that https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 is plagiarizing https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr353109 (the team's earlier paper which included a similar finding).

Her claim that a reverse genetics systems for HKU4-like COVs was previously disclosed seems weird since AFAIK it was this team that had previously disclosed it. It's possible I am not understanding what she is saying as it makes no sense to me.