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First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

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Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#301

Post by randomperson01 »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #156
stainablesteel wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It misleading presents that the furin cleavage site had to come from gain of function it did. this isn't debatable anymore. there's literally grants written by american scientists proposing this pre-covid, the lab in wuhan was doing the legwork.

They are also already present in wild coronoviruses and the initial cluster don't support a lab leak theory, even if they were sloppily working on gain of function via that mechanism. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119 "Harrison and Sachs’s (1) claim that alignment of sarbecovirus Spike amino acid sequences illustrates“the unusual nature of the [SARS-CoV-2] FCS” is misleading. FCSs are common in coronav…

Sure its evolutionarily possible to insert 12nt. Inserts are not common though. Whats key is that the insert -in a 30kbp sequence was at exactly a position that would give it functional properties to allow the virus much higher tropism for human tissues. Furin cleavage site appear to selected against in bats.

There is no known source from where it came from, coronaviruses often recombine, but there is no other known sarbecovirus from where the fcs could have come from.

Bob Garry tries to explain away his documented "I cant think of a plausible natural scenario for how this 12nt insert occurred" in an interview here.

https://youtu.be/4-FhwghrSLs

What is often totally ignored by virologists and evolutionary biologists with potential funding to loose if a kab origin is proven is that the WIV was partner in a proposal to insert exactly the sort of furin cleavage site we see in SARS-CoV-2

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...

Then like magic (a unicorn as Bob Garry says) a SARS-related CoV appears, appears down the road from the lab, that is highly infectious to humans, with the first ever furin cleavage site in a sarbecovirus, which even Zhengli Shi says was a recent inroduction to humans: "almost identical sequences of this virus in different patients imply a probably recent introduction in humans"

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952v1

Lab escape through a lab acquired infection with a SARS related virus is by far the most likely scenario and should be the default hypothesis to disprove.

Natural origin scenario requires a series of events to occur, each very unlikely.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#302

Post by lmm »

ozr wrote: post #162
this_user wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How and why would they have that kind of data available if the virus only existed in the lab? At most they could have had computer simulations, but no real data. The only information they would have had is the DNA sequence, but that was rapidly sequenced anyway, and design of the original vaccines followed in short order. What took time was testing and manufacturing the vaccines, but none of this would have been acce…

> How and why would they have that kind of data available if the virus only existed in the lab? At most they could have had computer simulations, but no real data. I'm not a virologist, but this doesn't make sense to me. If we work under the assumption that this was a lab-made virus that leaked, then they plainly must have actually created it. What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate…

> If we work under the assumption that this was a lab-made virus that leaked, then they plainly must have actually created it. What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?

Assuming experiments had been completed by then they'd have, what, some figures for how infectious it was in humanized mice. Maybe months down the line they'd've written a paper showing that this splice made it 40% +/-25% more infectious than the strain it was derived from or whatever. So yes, there would be data, but it's hard to imagine it would be a meaningful data compared to what was already being measured with a) humans rather than mice, and more importantly b) orders of magnitude larger sample sizes.

> This isn't true. They would have information on how it was created,

The how would be that they ran up that DNA sequence and inserted it into a blank virus. There's nothing that knowing "how it was created" tells you that you don't already know from the DNA sequence.

> any work that they had done to devise a vaccine for it

They weren't working on that.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#303

Post by mensetmanusman »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #265
letmevoteplease wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't have to wait long for confirmation. The Director of National Intelligence will be required by law to declassify information about the infected researchers on June 18th, including their names, symptoms, date of onset and role at WIV.[1] [1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619...

>You won't have to wait long for confirmation. Confirmation that they were sick. Not confirmation of what they were sick with.

Roll an N-sided die representing all possible locations for possible human/bat human/animal interactions.

What percentage of those facets are city centers near level 4 bio labs that research these types of viruses?

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#304

Post by yk »

> Next week, the Directorate of National Intelligence is expected to release previously classified material, which may include the names of the three WIV scientists who were the likely among the first to be sickened by SARS-CoV-2.

Why publish speculation now, instead of publishing when there is actually something to report?

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#305

Post by wavefunction »

Reason077 wrote: post #286
ZoomerCretin wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You won't have to wait long for confirmation. Confirmation that they were sick. Not confirmation of what they were sick with.

Given the location, the timing, the symptoms, the severity of the illness (it's unusual for 'flu to put healthy young adults in hospital) I think we can be pretty confident in our guess.

My Aunt was killed by the flu. She had a pre-existing unknown heart-condition and despite her healthy lifestyle the flu weakened her heart enough that she needed a heart-transplant in her early 20s. She died at age 27.

I tell this story whenever it is possible, to educate people about what the flu is capable of doing, whenever someone says the flu is "no big deal." Statistically, perhaps not. Unless you're the statistic that is.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#306

Post by kcplate »

taeric wrote: post #248
ipqk wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a bunch of NYCers that swore they got covid in Jan 2020, but it's both mathematically impossible for all of them to have had it based on the circulating numbers at the time, and then when they actually got Covid in the coming months/years they changed their tune.

Oddly, I assumed I had it early in the waves. Never got a positive test, as folks weren't testing back then. Finally had our first positive test this year. And whatever I had at the start was way way worse than when I had covid. Such that I can understand a lot of folks being very confused on all of this.

I didn’t have anything early (I’ve never caught it despite multiple direct exposures, but I rarely get sick from anything anyway), but both my wife and son-in-law came back from separate business trips in late January/early Feb 2020 with all the classic symptoms. Both subsequently caught Covid in 2022 and both described the experience as very similar to their 2020 experiences.

No way to know for sure if it was Covid in 2020 since no testing at the time of their illness, but I would not be willing to bet against the possibility despite all the “it would have been impossible due to…” theorizing some folks have said on this thread.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#307

Post by dekhn »

baja_blast wrote: post #253
hwillis wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wet market was one of the less densely trafficked areas of the city: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/... Check out the other figures in that paper. The epicenter was the wet market itself.

Here is a thread explaining the flaws in Worobey's paper https://twitter.com/danwalker9999/status/1595653898572042240

.... written by a geoscientist. There are limits on the ability to transfer knowledge between domains (although this doesn't mean the geoscientist is necessarily wrong, and often even amateurs can find big problems with papers that got through peer review).

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#308

Post by pests »

INTPenis wrote: post #247
hwillis wrote: post #16

Note that this is NOT the Wuhan CDC, which is the building across the river from the wet market. They did not do any research there. This building is ~10 miles south, well outside the main city. https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Wuhan_Ins... The fact that researchers were sick with flu-like symptoms has been openly stated by the US for a long time. This was put out in the state department Jan 2021, 2…

>became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses I was in Thailand in february 2019 and came down with SARS-like symptoms that were very similar to Covid-19 once that became known. SARS-like viruses have been going around for a while, meaning they affect the respiratory system. Doesn't mean it was covid-19, what ev…

Covid-19 is the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

From [0]:

> Through DivErsity pArtitioning by hieRarchical Clustering-based analyses,5 the newly emerged coronavirus was deemed not sufficiently novel but is a sister virus to SARS-CoV, the primary viral isolate defining the species. The SARS-CoV species includes viruses such as SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV_PC4-227, and SARSr-CoV-btKY72. SARS-CoV-2 is the newest member of this viral species. The use of SARS in naming SARS-CoV-2 does not derive from the name of the SARS disease but is a natural extension of the taxonomic practice for viruses in the SARS species. The use of SARS for viruses in this species mainly refers to their taxonomic relationship to the founding virus of this species, SARS-CoV. In other words, viruses in this species can be named SARS regardless of whether or not they cause SARS-like diseases.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7133598

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#309

Post by kneebonian »

stubybubs wrote: post #181
TechBro8615 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had personally decided by April 2020 that there was sufficient information for me to believe that Covid was a lab-enhanced pathogen that was accidentally released by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. My "source" was mainly common sense (the simplest solution is usually the right one, and guilty people doth protest too much), an understanding of probability (there is a lab studying the pathogen right n…

> My "source" was mainly common sense (the simplest solution is usually the right one https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html 75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. Isn't the simplest solution that COVID also came from animals? Just because it was a bad one doesn't make it less likely. Where did smallpox come from? Polio? Spanish flu? Is it strange that the lab was near the wet mark…

[flagged]

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#310

Post by tap-snap-or-nap »

nidhalbt wrote: post #37

There's a problem, covid was in Italy as early as September 2019. (see Dr John Campbell's video on this) Cases in November 2019 aren't early, it started probably six months earlier.

Tricks Dr John Campbell uses to spread DISINFORMATION on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQC0tTECvQ
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