Seven year coronavirus trail from mine deaths to a Wuhan lab
thetimes.co.uk
thetimes.co.uk
If borders stay open to tourists and business as they were pre-COVID, this will happen again in our lifetimes whatever the source was.
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> Researchers in China have been unable to find any news reports of this new Sars-like coronavirus and the three deaths. There appears to have been a media blackout.
Why on earth would China do this? Surely it is easier to get people to help control a new virus if they know about it.
Yunnan is also about 1,000 miles from southern Guangdong where SARS-1 broke out. The source in both cases is horseshoe bats that live in the Lancang/Mekong River basin. The intermediate hosts are humans that enter the bat roosting caves and the nocturnal arboreal mammals that live where bats perch feed (pangolins, civets, and raccoon dogs).
> Shi and her team had already collected hundreds of samples of the coronavirus — including RaBtCov/4991 — from their work on bats across Yunnan province, and they were running controversial experiments...
This is sloppy. It conflates collecting RNA samples with virus isolates. There is no evidence that gain-of-function experiments were being performed on a variation of a SARS-CoV-2 isolate. It is plausible but very unlikely.
> Evidence seen by The Sunday Times suggests that a virus found in its depths — part of a faecal sample that was frozen and sent to a Chinese laboratory for analysis and storage — is the closest known match to the virus that causes Covid-19.
This has been publicly known for months. It was published in biorRxiv in January and appeared in Nature in early February.[1]
> The virus was a huge discovery. It was a “new strain” of a Sars-type coronavirus that, surprisingly, received only a passing mention in an academic paper.
RaTG13 was one of hundreds of SARS-like coronaviruses discovered in these bat caves. In 2013, it was not considered a major discovery. One reason is that it is only 80% similar to the original SARS. At the time, researchers were much more interested in viruses that were more like 99% similar to SARS. Those viruses were studied much more intensively, and were the subject of numerous papers.
> What happened to the virus in the years between its discovery and the eruption of Covid-19? Why was its existence tucked away in obscure records, and its link to three deaths not mentioned?
The article never provides any evidence that these people became sick from RaTG13. There are hundreds of known SARS-like coronaviruses, and there are estimated to be thousands of as-of-yet undiscovered ones. The author of this article seems to be under the impression that RaTG13 is the only known SARS-like coronavirus.
> These produced a remarkable finding: while none had tested positive for Sars, all four had antibodies against another, unknown Sars-like coronavirus.
There was a study published in 2016 that found that 3% of people tested in a region of the countryside in Yunnan province had antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses.[2] The sorts of spillover events described in this article are probably not uncommon at all. It has always just been a question of when a spillover event would lead to sustained transmission, instead of petering out.
The rest of the article goes on to try to suggest that RaTG13 leaked from a lab. RaTG13 is separated from SARS-CoV-2 by decades of evolution. It's the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, but not its ancestor. It's sad that tabloids are going after the people who have spent decades trying to understand these types of viruses, so that we would be prepared for new outbreaks.
> they were running controversial experiments to find out how they might mutate to become more infectious to humans. This “gain-of-function” work is described in papers released by the WIV between 2015 and 2017, scientists say. Shi’s team combined snippets of different coronaviruses to see if they could be made more transmissible in what they called “virus infectivity experiments”.
> Ebright alleges, however, that the type of work required to create Covid-19 from RaTG13 was “identical” to work the laboratory had done in the past. “The very same techniques, the very same experimental strategies using RaTG13 as the starting point, would yield a virus essentially identical to Sars-Cov-2.”
I also heard this claim from Eric Weinstein on Joe Rogan's podcast but don't know enough about the science or the claim to know if it's plausible.
Eric Weinstein, Bret's brother, as mentioned in a later comment, is the managing director of Thiel Capital. Eric was last on the podcast in April 2020 where there was some discussion of Covid - perhaps he also discussed gain-of-function coronavirus research which is not a new subject and has been the subject of controversy - even leading the NIH to suspend funding for this category of research in 2014 (that policy was reversed in 2017).
It would be nice if they cited the papers, because I think they're actually talking about experiments done in North Carolina, not in Wuhan. For example, there's this paper from 2016,[1] based on work done in Ralph Baric's lab at UNC. The paper described research done on a viral strain discovered by researchers from Wuhan (WIV1 stands for "Wuhan Institute of Virology 1"), but the actual gain-of-function experiments were done in the North Carolina.
> Ebright alleges, however, that the type of work required to create Covid-19 from RaTG13 was “identical” to work the laboratory had done in the past. “The very same techniques, the very same experimental strategies using RaTG13 as the starting point, would yield a virus essentially identical to Sars-Cov-2.”
The gain-of-function research described in paper [1] would not create anything "identical" or even remotely similar to SARS-CoV-2. It created a chimeric virus that is completely different from anything found in the wild. If that virus were to escape, it would be instantly recognizable as something artificial.
Richard Ebright is not a virologist. He's one of the only biologists with any sort of semi-respectable position pushing the lab leak theory. But from discussions with actual virologists, they're pretty disdainful of him. They think he doesn't know what he's talking about, and is taking advantage of the moment to further his crusade against gain-of-function research (he's been arguing against it for years). He's been giving non-stop interviews with news media for months. Basically any article pushing the lab leak theory will quote him. But he has no actual expertise in virology, and the specific claim he's making here about gain-of-function research is false.
- The virology experts have known for decades that "spillovers" from animals to humans happen.
- The virology experts did their research exactly with the goal to learn more about the viruses that could cause the next pandemics.
- Bats were known as the animals in which a lot of different viruses spread that could be with the high potential danger to humans, and it was also known that their viruses reach humans easier than those from many other animals.
- That is exactly the reason immense number of samples were made in the bat caves.
- The importance of this work was known and it was not a Chinese but an international project.
- It was internationally recognized that the more viruses we can collect, catalogue and research, the more chances we could have to avoid the consequences like this pandemics that we live now.
- The people who do their work exactly to be able to prevent the next pandemic are obviously those who are more aware how carefully they should handle the samples and perform the sampling.
- The number of the samples was huge, so much that not all samples were able to be as much analyzed as it was done later, once the similarity with the ongoing epidemic was searched for: there are different processes possible, and some are much more time consuming.
- The sampling was done in many caves, not only some specific.
- The sampling was done in hamzat suits, exactly because it was known that other approaches would be too dangerous.
- The people doing the sampling were not the only ones having the contact with the viruses from bats. Exactly because it was known that the different viruses from bats in different moments "find the way" to the humans, typically those who live close to the caves, it was known that the researching exactly the samples from bats is especially worth doing.
- The SARS-CoV-2 doesn't look like at all like a virus that the experts produce for their experiments. Any virologist who knows how these experiments are exactly done can confirm that -- so the claim that the virus is human made is not something that is supported by any expert.
- Likewise, because the experts know that the research was necessary and how it is performed, they don't believe that the "spillover" resulted from the infected people working with the lab. They know that such events happen all the time in nature.
In short trying to associate the SARS-CoV-2 with the work of the lab is something done by non-experts only, and only by those who have some agenda to create such stories.
Specifically, I've just checked who Eric Weinstein is: "Eric Ross Weinstein" "is the managing director of Thiel Capital, Peter Thiel's investment firm, a position he has held since 2015." says Wikipedia. Not an expert at all, but almost surely somebody who could have an agenda.
The article in The Times manages to give the outbreak an "aura" of the intentional event by "asking questions" tricks ("Ancient Aliens" style "some believe that were aliens, maybe it is true?") and "cherry picking" the details out of the context. The research was done exactly because it was known that the outbreaks happen even if we don't do anything, so it's much better to try to learn as much as it is possible before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab-r0capbzk
Did SARS-Cov-2 start in a Chinese lab?
Potholer54 is an Australian science journalist whoes mission it is to debunk junk science and conspiracy theories. He is very entertaining and very insightful.
One of the craziest aspects of media coverage of the lab leak theory is that a lot of it is based on a video by a vlogger who used to teach English in China.
"Laowhy86" used to make clickbait videos about how to get girls in China, about eating exotic foods, etc. After the pandemic began, he made a video that regurgitated completely evidence-free conspiracy theories that he found on Chinese social media. That video became the primary source for a surprising amount of reports in "serious" publications.
It would be hilarious if this weren't such a serious subject.
Hey don’t look at my problem here, look over there!
We have to be careful of what opinion to share, and how to share.