Wuhan Lab Might be COVID Origin

[Washington Resistance Army]

Realistic take: you can't, China has all the cards.

Oh, and you think we cannot get enough pissed off countries to join a coalition? Xi and the CCP can’t act like this and get away with this!

Your coalition will mean fuck all when the global economy has a complete meltdown and collapses.

[North Washington Republic]

Oh, and you think we cannot get enough pissed off countries to join a coalition? Xi and the CCP can’t act like this and get away with this!

Your coalition will mean fuck all when the global economy has a complete meltdown and collapses.

So, we should do nothing and let them get away with it?

[Washington Resistance Army]

Your coalition will mean fuck all when the global economy has a complete meltdown and collapses.

So, we should do nothing and let them get away with it?

There's functionally nothing we can do. China is too vital to the global capitalist economy to ever take serious action against. Plus you have to factor in the ramifications domestically, look at the state of America right now and ask yourself if we'd survive another 2008. It'd be chaos.

[Imarssia]

This was pretty clear possibility the whole time but thanks to China, China's funding of the WHO, and the media being terrified of mentioning it for whatever reason, it's only just being considered now.

Why was it a clear possibility? The lab wasn't far from the wet market that COVID was originally reported from, basically down a major road. That same lab had screwed up in accidentally releasing a strain of SARS in 2004 too. I'm not saying it was "intentional" as China probably wouldn't release it on itself, but no one is immune from accidents, especially China.

[Nilokeras]

The closest known coronavirus to COVID is RaTG13, which diverged from the lineage that produced COVID 20+ years ago based on molecular evidence. And again this is the closest known coronavirus, based on an extremely limited sample of coronaviruses. The actual wild ancestors of COVID are still unknown.

Which feels kinda weird, given collecting bats around Wuhan with traps likely would have been one of the very first steps to take back in... well, early last year anyway.

You mean when everything was in lockdown in China and virologists there probably had more important things to do than sampling bats? I can almost guarantee you those studies are now in progress and we'll probably find the wild ancestors in the next year or so.

[Bombadil]

Which feels kinda weird, given collecting bats around Wuhan with traps likely would have been one of the very first steps to take back in... well, early last year anyway.

You mean when everything was in lockdown in China and virologists there probably had more important things to do than sampling bats? I can almost guarantee you those studies are now in progress and we'll probably find the wild ancestors in the next year or so.

Not necessarily so fast, it took some years to isolate civets for SARS, and I don't think China's in much hurry to expose, say, the mass slaughter and illegal trade in pangolins any time soon..

[Galloism]

Which feels kinda weird, given collecting bats around Wuhan with traps likely would have been one of the very first steps to take back in... well, early last year anyway.

You mean when everything was in lockdown in China and virologists there probably had more important things to do than sampling bats? I can almost guarantee you those studies are now in progress and we'll probably find the wild ancestors in the next year or so.

We'll see.

And just so you know, when fighting a pandemic, finding the source - patient zero or the animal the disease comes from - is very very important to do very quickly.

As we learned during the ebola epidemic:

https://www.livescience.com/48285-ebola ... -zero.html

It's quite interesting what it talks about with the ebola epidemic.

Suffice to say, we missed a golden opportunity on covid by NOT doing the work you don't think is important. Arguably, one of the most important things we could have done after the pandemic started.

But we didn't.

[Nilokeras]

You mean when everything was in lockdown in China and virologists there probably had more important things to do than sampling bats? I can almost guarantee you those studies are now in progress and we'll probably find the wild ancestors in the next year or so.

Not necessarily so fast, it took some years to isolate civets for SARS, and I don't think China's in much hurry to expose, say, the mass slaughter and illegal trade in pangolins any time soon..

Researchers’ first started looking at the virus’s genome to see whether they could match it to pathogens found in other animals. In late January, a few weeks after researchers sequenced the SARS-CoV-2 genome, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology posted online the entire sequence of a coronavirus that had been stored in their lab since being discovered in intermediate horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus affinis) in Yunnan province in 2013. That genome, named RATG13, was 96% identical to SARS-CoV-2, making it the closest known relative and strongly suggesting the new virus originated in bats.

...

Pangolins were among the first animals suspected of being the intermediate. Two teams in China reported that they’d found similarities between SARS-CoV-2 and coronaviruses isolated from tissue of Malayan pangolins (Manis javanica) that had been confiscated. Trading pangolins is illegal in China.

The pangolin coronaviruses turned out to be too distant to be direct ancestors of SARS-CoV-2, but the fact that they are the only wild mammals besides bats known so far to be living with coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 suggests they can’t be ruled out as an intermediate source

And just so you know, when fighting a pandemic, finding the source - patient zero or the animal the disease comes from - is very very important to do very quickly. As we learned during the ebola epidemic: (https://www.livescience.com/48285-ebola ... -zero.html)

When you're dealing with an outbreak it's important to find patient zero. By the time people had an inkling something was going on it was already far, far too late to find the individual person - it was epidemic in Wuhan already by the time the first investigations happened. This wasn't eight miners who worked in a cave who came down with the same illness simultaneously, it was a bubbling up of anomalous flu-like symptoms and pneumonia over a busy winter that did not trigger investigation until it was widely circulating and people put the pieces together.

It's quite interesting what it talks about with the ebola epidemic. Suffice to say, we missed a golden opportunity on covid by NOT doing the work you don't think is important. Arguably, one of the most important things we could have done after the pandemic started. But we didn't.

It was less important than you think given the timeframes involved. But broadly everywhere in the world is awful at viral surveillance, and it was just China's bad luck it happened here. That paper I highlighted shows that Australia/Indonesia and maritime Southeast Asia is another viral hotspot, as is tropical South America. There are probably outbreaks there too that we just never hear about in the same way we never heard about those 17% of testees in rural Southern China who had SARS-like symptoms in the testing period.

[Galloism]

it was just China's bad luck it happened here.

Aha.

I understand now.

[Nilokeras]

it was just China's bad luck it happened here.

Aha.

I understand now.

There, not 'here'. If you honestly think that I'm some sort of wumao from a single typo then you were never really interested in an honest examination to begin with. All that nonsense about being a good investigator was just hot air.

[Galloism]

Aha.

I understand now.

There, not 'here'. If you honestly think that I'm some sort of wumao from a single typo then you were never really interested in an honest examination to begin with. All that nonsense about being a good investigator was just hot air.

I mean, the constant deflections and "maybes" and "supposes" to try and distract from the evidence and suggest no investigation is needed make more sense now.

It's ok. I won't press it. Don't want to get anyone in trouble. Consider this a concession of the discussion, if you prefer.

[Diarcesia]

This was pretty clear possibility the whole time but thanks to China, China's funding of the WHO, and the media being terrified of mentioning it for whatever reason, it's only just being considered now.

Why was it a clear possibility? The lab wasn't far from the wet market that COVID was originally reported from, basically down a major road. That same lab had screwed up in accidentally releasing a strain of SARS in 2004 too. I'm not saying it was "intentional" as China probably wouldn't release it on itself, but no one is immune from accidents, especially China.

It was only considered now because it's only now that there's stronger evidence than "China bad".

[Nilokeras]

There, not 'here'. If you honestly think that I'm some sort of wumao from a single typo then you were never really interested in an honest examination to begin with. All that nonsense about being a good investigator was just hot air.

I mean, the constant deflections and "maybes" and "supposes" to try and distract from the evidence and suggest no investigation is needed make more sense now.

It's ok. I won't press it. Don't want to get anyone in trouble. Consider this a concession of the discussion, if you prefer.

lol okay. Whatever lets you slink not-so-gracefully away from the evidence.

[Albrenia]

At the moment China is too vital to the global economy, sadly. That's why I earlier said about disentangling our own economies from theirs, which would likely take time but I don't think it would be impossible.

Just suddenly ending all trade with them would likely send everyone into a financial crisis of epic proportions, and possibly war.

[Galloism]

I mean, the constant deflections and "maybes" and "supposes" to try and distract from the evidence and suggest no investigation is needed make more sense now.

It's ok. I won't press it. Don't want to get anyone in trouble. Consider this a concession of the discussion, if you prefer.

lol okay. Whatever lets you slink not-so-gracefully away from the evidence.

The only one who provided evidence showing a possible link was me. You provided evidence that coronaviruses are common in nature - including that when analyzing the viruses in nature they found the closest relative was over 2000km away from the outbreak.

Which isn't really evidence of much in particular.

But you do you. Deflect and equivocate with irrelevancies if you like.

[Nilokeras]

The only one who provided evidence showing a possible link was me. You provided evidence that coronaviruses are common in nature - including that when analyzing the viruses in nature they found the closest relative was over 2000km away from the outbreak.Which isn't really evidence of much in particular.

As has been noted, sampling effort has not been great. But the pattern is obvious if you think ecologically. Bats in Yunnan are not likely to be in close contact with bats in Wuhan because of the distances - their viruses are therefore likely to diverge over time as the populations stay isolated. If coronaviruses that cause SARS-like illnesses in neighbouring provinces are closely related to but not the same as the progenitor of COVID, it stands to reason that the viruses still in bats in Wuhan, where COVID emerged, are the most closely related to COVID. People do phylogenetic analyses of speciation like this all the time as a way of helping to identify novel sub-populations for conservation or cryptic species. It's not a new or controversial technique.

But you do you. Deflect and equivocate with irrelevancies if you like.

That's a little rich coming from a person who just accused me of being a Chinese agent completely out of the blue.

[Albrenia]

It's kind of weird that some people think that China is this innocent country which the big mean West keeps lying about.

[Galloism]

The only one who provided evidence showing a possible link was me. You provided evidence that coronaviruses are common in nature - including that when analyzing the viruses in nature they found the closest relative was over 2000km away from the outbreak.Which isn't really evidence of much in particular.

As has been noted, sampling effort has not been great. But the pattern is obvious if you think ecologically. Bats in Yunnan are not likely to be in close contact with bats in Wuhan because of the distances - their viruses are therefore likely to diverge over time as the populations stay isolated. If coronaviruses that cause SARS-like illnesses are closely related to but not the same as the progenitor of COVID, it stands to reason that the viruses still in bats in Wuhan, where COVID emerged, are the most closely related to COVID. People do phylogenetic analyses of speciation like this all the time as a way of helping to identify novel sub-populations for conservation or cryptic species. It's not a new or controversial technique.

And given they were doing gain of function work on coronaviruses for years, that doesn't really prove much regarding either possibility. A virus that diverges from a lineage in a lab under a gain of function experiment is not significantly different than a virus that diverges from a lineage in nature.

And, what is interesting, is the evidence suggests that COVID-19 is actually very poorly capable of surviving in bats, and showed no recombination history like it jumped an intermediate species (IE, the aforementioned pangolins) and recombined with another virus for its mutations.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.10 ... lZl_oKryOw

To link directly to the conclusion:

The low binding affinity of SARS-CoV-2 to bat ACE2 studied to date does not support Chiroptera as a direct zoonotic agent. Furthermore, the reliance on pangolin coronavirus receptor binding domain (RBD) similarity to SARS-CoV-2 as evidence for natural zoonotic spillover is flawed, as pangolins are unlikely to play a role in SARS-CoV-2′s origin and recombination is not supported by recent analysis. At the same time, genomic analyses pointed out that SARS-CoV-2 exhibits multiple peculiar characteristics not found in other Sarbecoviruses. A novel multibasic furin cleavage site (FCS) confers numerous pathogenetically advantageous capabilities, the existence of which is difficult to explain though natural evolution; SARS-CoV-2 to human ACE2 binding is far stronger than SARS-CoV, yet there is no indication of amount of evolutionary adaptation that SARS-CoV or MERS-CoV underwent. The flat topography of the ganglioside-binding domain (GBD) in the N-terminal domain (NTD) of SARS-CoV-2 does not conform with typical host evasion evolutionary measures exhibited by other human coronaviruses. The combination of binding strength, human and mouse peptide mimicry, as well as high adaptation for human infection and transmission from the earliest strains might suggest the use of humanized mice for the development of SARS-CoV-2 in a laboratory environment. The application of mouse strains expressing human ACE2 for SARS-CoV-related research is well documented (Ren et al. 2008; Hou et al. 2010; Menachery et al. 2015; Cockrell et al. 2018; Jiang et al. 2020). Additionally, culturing and adapting coronaviruses to different cell lines, including human airway epithelial cells, has been experimentally conducted in various laboratories (Tse et al. 2014; Menachery et al. 2015; Zeng et al. 2016; Jiang et al. 2020). While a natural origin is still possible and the search for a potential host in nature should continue, the amount of peculiar genetic features identified in SARS-CoV-2′s genome does not rule out a possible gain-of-function origin, which should be therefore discussed in an open scientific debate.

Now that's not proof, but given the genetic structure of COVID-19 is suspicious in nature, unlikely to appear in nature, shows little evidence of host evasion evolutionary measures, doesn't work well in the alleged origin species, and there's lots of funkyness surrounding the location and site.....

Yeah, we want more investigation.

But you do you. Deflect and equivocate with irrelevancies if you like.

That's a little rich coming from a person who just accused me of being a Chinese agent completely out of the blue.

I did no such thing.

I suggested you might not have freedom of speech because you're living under an oppressive regime that controls and monitors anything you say - based on what you said. If that's not true, that you are not a victim of an oppressive government controlling your speech and what you're allowed to say, I apologize - but lots of people are victims of such things.

Over a billion in China alone, in point of fact.

[Bombadil]

When you're dealing with an outbreak it's important to find patient zero. By the time people had an inkling something was going on it was already far, far too late to find the individual person - it was epidemic in Wuhan already by the time the first investigations happened. This wasn't eight miners who worked in a cave who came down with the same illness simultaneously, it was a bubbling up of anomalous flu-like symptoms and pneumonia over a busy winter that did not trigger investigation until it was widely circulating and people put the pieces together.

Well it certainly didn't help that they wiped the seafood market completely clean of any evidence, that's not to say it was the location of patient zero but it was an important link in the chain that has been bleached of evidence. It also doesn't help that warning signs were there but suppressed, doctors had noted patients with SARS like symptoms but this wasn't allowed to filter up, then evidence of human to human transmission was denied while at the same time the mayor of Wuhan was looking to break the world's largest outdoor dining record.

Not to blame the Wuhan mayor, there's no autonomy for mayors or doctors to spread concerns until such concerns are approved at the central government level. That takes time, time in which it's natural for those concerned to wipe as much evidence as possible to avoid blame.

It's a shitty centrally controlled system that is not designed to share important news quickly and transparently.

[South Welford]

As has been noted, sampling effort has not been great. But the pattern is obvious if you think ecologically. Bats in Yunnan are not likely to be in close contact with bats in Wuhan because of the distances - their viruses are therefore likely to diverge over time as the populations stay isolated. If coronaviruses that cause SARS-like illnesses are closely related to but not the same as the progenitor of COVID, it stands to reason that the viruses still in bats in Wuhan, where COVID emerged, are the most closely related to COVID. People do phylogenetic analyses of speciation like this all the time as a way of helping to identify novel sub-populations for conservation or cryptic species. It's not a new or controversial technique.

And given they were doing gain of function work on coronaviruses for years, that doesn't really prove much regarding either possibility. A virus that diverges from a lineage in a lab under a gain of function experiment is not significantly different than a virus that diverges from a lineage in nature.

And, what is interesting, is the evidence suggests that COVID-19 is actually very poorly capable of surviving in bats, and showed no recombination history like it jumped an intermediate species (IE, the aforementioned pangolins) and recombined with another virus for its mutations.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.10 ... lZl_oKryOw

To link directly to the conclusion:

The low binding affinity of SARS-CoV-2 to bat ACE2 studied to date does not support Chiroptera as a direct zoonotic agent. Furthermore, the reliance on pangolin coronavirus receptor binding domain (RBD) similarity to SARS-CoV-2 as evidence for natural zoonotic spillover is flawed, as pangolins are unlikely to play a role in SARS-CoV-2′s origin and recombination is not supported by recent analysis. At the same time, genomic analyses pointed out that SARS-CoV-2 exhibits multiple peculiar characteristics not found in other Sarbecoviruses. A novel multibasic furin cleavage site (FCS) confers numerous pathogenetically advantageous capabilities, the existence of which is difficult to explain though natural evolution; SARS-CoV-2 to human ACE2 binding is far stronger than SARS-CoV, yet there is no indication of amount of evolutionary adaptation that SARS-CoV or MERS-CoV underwent. The flat topography of the ganglioside-binding domain (GBD) in the N-terminal domain (NTD) of SARS-CoV-2 does not conform with typical host evasion evolutionary measures exhibited by other human coronaviruses. The combination of binding strength, human and mouse peptide mimicry, as well as high adaptation for human infection and transmission from the earliest strains might suggest the use of humanized mice for the development of SARS-CoV-2 in a laboratory environment. The application of mouse strains expressing human ACE2 for SARS-CoV-related research is well documented (Ren et al. 2008; Hou et al. 2010; Menachery et al. 2015; Cockrell et al. 2018; Jiang et al. 2020). Additionally, culturing and adapting coronaviruses to different cell lines, including human airway epithelial cells, has been experimentally conducted in various laboratories (Tse et al. 2014; Menachery et al. 2015; Zeng et al. 2016; Jiang et al. 2020). While a natural origin is still possible and the search for a potential host in nature should continue, the amount of peculiar genetic features identified in SARS-CoV-2′s genome does not rule out a possible gain-of-function origin, which should be therefore discussed in an open scientific debate.

Now that's not proof, but given the genetic structure of COVID-19 is suspicious in nature, unlikely to appear in nature, doesn't work well in the alleged origin species, and there's lots of funkyness surrounding the location and site.....

Yeah, we want more investigation.

That's a little rich coming from a person who just accused me of being a Chinese agent completely out of the blue.

I did no such thing.

I suggested you might not have freedom of speech because you're living under an oppressive regime that controls and monitors anything you say - based on what you said. If that's not true, that you are not a victim of an oppressive government controlling your speech and what you're allowed to say, I apologize - but lots of people are victims of such things.

Over a billion in China alone, in point of fact.

A golden opportunity for you to share your take on this topic either way. It seems well agreed that the specific sourcing of COVID-19 and its early spread among nations will be a worthy devotion of an open and impartial international cooperation that should help a ton for the future - hopefully resolving vulnerabilities that both main theories on its origin tend to emphasize.

[Galloism]

A golden opportunity for you to share your take on this topic either way. It seems well agreed that the specific sourcing of COVID-19 and its early spread among nations will be a worthy devotion of an open and impartial international cooperation that should help a ton for the future - hopefully resolving vulnerabilities that both main theories on its origin tend to propagate.

*snort*

[South Welford]

A golden opportunity for you to share your take on this topic either way. It seems well agreed that the specific sourcing of COVID-19 and its early spread among nations will be a worthy devotion of an open and impartial international cooperation that should help a ton for the future - hopefully resolving vulnerabilities that both main theories on its origin tend to propagate.

*snort*

I mean, you defeat yourself.

[Galloism]

*snort*

I mean, you defeat yourself.

It's not that. It sounds great what you said.

I just have no illusions that "open and impartial international cooperation" is going to occur in my lifetime on this subject or almost any other.

[Nilokeras]

And given they were doing gain of function work on coronaviruses for years, that doesn't really prove much regarding either possibility. A virus that diverges from a lineage in a lab under a gain of function experiment is not significantly different than a virus that diverges from a lineage in nature.

See that's not actually true:

Let’s start with Nicholas Wade, a former NYT writer who once wrote a book on race and genetics that was so problematic that it was openly denounced by 143 scientists, including ones who said he misrepresented their research…

Wade recently penned an op-ed in @BulletinAtomic where he made two central claims about why SARS-CoV-2 could be bioengineered or involve gain of function research. Both are unsupported, but the second on “serial passage” is objectively incorrect... Serial passage is a lab method of growing a germ. Take a virus, drop it into a petri dish/beaker with some cells and let the germ infect/multiply.

Wade says this could have been done to breed SARS-CoV-2 without leaving a sign—a point opposed by multiple studies of the virus. The takeaway is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus mutates in predictable ways when you remove it from a body and put it into a petri dish.

These changes include genetic deletions that make the coronavirus less likely to infect humans. Wade’s OpEd, along with almost every “lab-leak” article, omits this research even though these studies have existed since last summer. These findings should surprise no one. A common thread in biology is that if you move an organism from one environment to another, it changes. There is no way to bioengineer a virus without serial passage. The germ would need to be grown and isolated, over and over. There is no gain of function research without this first step. But SARS-CoV-2 is so highly adapted to being inside living mammals, that once you move it into a petri dish, it leaves a trail of evidence. Other evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 being naturally derived after adaptation to an immune system.

But it’s fairly heady, so I’ll just mention these four studies...(again, more evidence of natural origins)...and move on...

The second, dubious claim involves the idea that SARS-CoV-2 is too unique to be natural. By now, people are familiar with SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein... The SARS-CoV-2 spike carries a feature called the furin cleavage site (FCS), which is required for the virus to infect our cells.

The lab-leak crew says this FCS is unusual...too unusual... which again is not supported. See thread by [immunologist] @K_G_Andersen Or this thread by [virologist] @wanderer_jasnah. I raise these threads because again they offer just a sliver of indirect evidence that supports the natural origins of SARS-CoV-2.

Each post that I've transcribed links to papers supporting their argument.

It's also worth noting that the piece you linked to is an editorial - it was not peer reviewed. It's also in Environmental Chemistry Letters, which is not a virology, immunology or genomics journal.

I did no such thing.

I suggested you might not have freedom of speech because you're living under an oppressive regime that controls and monitors anything you say - based on what you said. If that's not true, that you are not a victim of an oppressive government controlling your speech and what you're allowed to say, I apologize - but lots of people are victims of such things.

Over a billion, in point of fact.

lol if you feel like it you can go search through my posts in the Canadian politics thread. This is just becoming less and less graceful though.

[South Welford]

I mean, you defeat yourself.

It's not that. It sounds great what you said.

I just have no illusions that "open and impartial international cooperation" is going to occur in my lifetime on this subject or almost any other.

Fair enough.