Closest known relatives of virus behind Covid-19 found in Laos

We may have to wait for the fall of chinese communism to know what happened though, like for Katyn. Might take a few decades.

And assuming the chinese haven't destroyed the relevant Wuhan lab samples. That's what I would do in their place. Better never know than take the risk that a technician leak such sensitive information.

I'm still surprised very few sources are talking about the third possible origin - WIV scientist(s) contracted COVID19 when doing research in/near bat caves with insufficient PPE. You see researchers wearing what look like surgical masks, which is likely insufficient. And this is post-Covid Chinese media, so it's probably sugar coated. I remember reading a translated article (sadly can't find it at the moment) which reported lab techs in Yunnan working in terrible conditions, getting bat urine and blood on them trying to catch bats, with barely adequate masks and goggles.

https://algulf.net/2021/06/09/2019-video-shows-wuhan-scienti...

>What's weird is that nobody talks about WHY Shi Zheng-Li/"Bat Woman" was digging around random caves in Yunnan.

She is an expert on SARS-like viruses, and her research focus is on the threat of zoonotic spillover from bats. One would expect her to be involved in the investigation of an apparent zoonotic spillover from bats that causes SARS-like symptoms. Hell, it would be weird if she wasn't part of the investigation.

>WIV is fairly far from the neighborhood where things got going.

Still closer than Southeast Asia, though.

WIV, the seafood market, and the airport are all on the same subway line. The topology of disease spread in cities is only approximated by physical distance.

"Someone" else...

Pretending that everything you state is true (a seemingly unsubstantiated conclusion), why does it matter?

If a lab did in fact accidentally leak the virus, what more can we gain at this point? Isn’t the cat out of the bag? We all agree that gain of function research is a bad idea. What’s so interesting about this beside some rather bland historical footnote?

There is no proof that anyone else funded it yet.

But it's the first piece of concrete evidence that people were in fact doing what has been claimed.

Also remember that there are two virus labs in Wuhan. One is WIV, but the other is across the street from the wet-market (as I understand it).

Excellent question. For viruses, 95% is VERY similar. To give you some calibration, SARS-COV-1 and SARS-COV-2 are like 79% similar.

Let me give you the scope of the problem.

The genetic code is a redudant code, small difference in the code can still yield the same information. There are 64 triplets, start is one and stop are 2 and there are 20 coded amino acids coded with the rest. So 22 out of 64.

There is a direct similarity and a similarity of information. For redudant code the former is useless. You can have a direct similarity of 30% and a similarity of information of 100%. (Considering a 1:3 redundant code at its worst, DNA performs much better)

There is also a third layer of redundancy, that is still under investigation, where certain sequences of triplets can be permuted and still yield the same result. The order of assembly is redundant for some big projects also, allowing for the code to be permuted in chunks as well.

So we are looking for the similarity of a redundant code that allows for permutations on two scales.

Without considering how the measure of similarity is taken, something being X percent identical means absolute BUNK. It can not be a direct comparison of the code.

SARS COV2 ~ 30000 pairs HIV ~ 10000 pairs Spike ~ 4000 pairs

The SARS COV 2 virus has 3 times the code of HIV. You are also dealing with different sizes.

But one can cut everything between start and stop, translate it to amino acids and permute the result into oblivion. Whatever is left can be compared by a huge variety of measures.

But when working with it, you just sequence your stuff, feed it into the commerical software and click compare.

It is not equivalent tho is it? There’s a large difference between actually capturing a bat and extracting its saliva, and obtaining bat guano via an industrial process. We know that covid jumps from humans to cats and dogs simply by being in proximity with them - so actually capturing bats is going to be vastly more risky.

We know there is a huge downside risk. Dismissing that with non-equivalent whataboutism doesn’t change that. What is the benefit of this research that justifies a non-zero chance of sparking pandemic 2.0?

A blame game is only sad if it was a true accident. If both the US and China were actually trying to develop such a virus and one of them accidentally released it, neither will be able to tolerate transparency because it would lead to international blame and desire for revenge.

If it was a natural virus it is way, way more likely that it would have infected locals (farming bat guano for instance) than it would be discovered by a researcher, then brought back to Wuhan, then leaked there.

We also have no idea where the outbreak started, only where the first hotspot was.

That is your opinion. From my point of view, what I have seen is consistent with both natural and lab leak hypothesis. One can argue how much indirect indications tilt the scales one way or another (from my point of view not much), but at least in my book the original question is still open. That's why I think more data is good.

first of all, you're agreeing with me, I said I'd want to see proof, and you're saying what the proof would need to consist of.

However, you are not addressing that there has been zero natural origin evidence, but they've all along been saying it's the likeliest, despite the Wuhan lab, and they've not been considering gain of function even though the US has been funding it in China at that lab.

Idk. The parent post shouldn't have been voted down imho. The problem is such a long time has elapsed everything is getting murky.

Just to take one example: researchers are finding zoo animals in the US are testing positive for COVID:

https://zooatlanta.org/update-on-zoo-atlanta-gorilla-populat...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/bears-bab...

https://nationalzoo.si.edu/news/update-covid-19-positive-gre...

In other words, now SARS-CoV-2 is being passed from humans back to other animals. Who's to say what direction things went in at this point? Wouldn't bats be even more susceptible than, say, lions?

I assume you could maybe tease some of this out with molecular phylogenetics but who knows at this point.

HIV was a very different context and isn't remotely comparable to SARS2. It took many decades for HIV to spread to a consequential base of infected persons, from which it was then able to explode across the globe (due in part to the difference in travel then vs now of course). The reason it took so long to find the animal source, was because it wasn't perceived to be a critically important virus to deal with - it wasn't a priority - in the early decades due to the very low number of cases and related deaths. Depending on which origin theory you believe, it took anywhere from ~20 years to ~60 years, for HIV to go from a small number of cases to being globally threatening. SARS2 did that in a matter of months, so the priority is far different. SARS2 has killed 5+ million people in under two years, it took many decades for HIV/AIDS to do that. The US is still seeing more annualized Covid deaths than the world had total HIV/AIDS deaths annually circa 1990/1991, and that's with 64% of the US population having taken at least one vaccine dose.

The reason we haven't tracked SARS2 back to a starting animal source, is likely because there isn't one in that it didn't spread directly from an animal to humans without modification (they sampled it from bats, then they modified the virus, from which it was able to more easily infect humans); and if there were one, China aggressively blocked all efforts to discover the origins there (including destroying vital early data about the virus), which is beyond incriminating.

And bear in mind, TWIV is also very tightly connected to two of the principles in this story - Beric and Dasak. I say this as a long time listener - but a lot of their basic statements have been incorrect. They still insist that Delta is not more contagious or virulent then alpha. They insisted that masks were not needed at the start of the outbreak, and clearly didn't think it would be a big deal.

But I think the story is starting to become clear. EcoHealth wanted to do gain of function research. DARPA shut them down. (Can you imagine the story if DARPA hadn't and it came out? US research scientists deliberately release virus in bats to infect all of china?).

EcoHealth also has a partnership w/ WIV in china, which was also doing this type of research (which is notably dual-use - so something the Chinese government might be very interested in doing).

I've been very skeptical on the idea of a human modified virus being at the heart of covid. I think it's still far more likely that this was a escape/mutation of a virus from the Wuhan CDC which is next-door to the wet market.

But this certainly raises the specter that we (as in humanity) may have just created the biggest pandemic in a effort to figure out how to avoid a pandemic.

What’s a campaign lab? Like a vaccination campaign? Those don’t have a live virus afaik?