Lab Leak: The conspiracy theory is shaping up to look like real possibility

[seanD]

Citing the whole text, and it does fit Tweb text limits gives Twebers the option of reading the whole thing, or reading the abstract and introduction and/or the conclusions, which is most of this short article, or just skimming it.

seanD asked a question about specific evidence for the transmission of viruses from animals to humans, I gave him the brief answer, and he was not satisfied, therefore I provided the article. There are actually many articles.

I actually didn't say just "evidence." I was wondering if there was an actual controlled lab study, not theories about it, where they observed a virus (preferably something like influenza) jump from a mammal to a human (obviously someone who had volunteered for the study). I don't understand why that was so difficult to explain. But I'm cool. I lost interest.

[Starlight]

I actually didn't say just "evidence." I was wondering if there was an actual controlled lab study, not theories about it, where they observed a virus (preferably something like influenza) jump from a mammal to a human (obviously someone who had volunteered for the study). I don't understand why that was so difficult to explain. But I'm cool. I lost interest.

What would there be to observe?

I'm currently doing scientific work in the area of improving DNA-testing for diseases in farmed animals, especially those likely to transfer to humans. Most farmers I talk to are very wary of catching diseases from their animals, because they either have in the past or know somebody who has. (These diseases tend to have very specific symptoms, so it's obvious what it is. It's not just like they get a cold and say 'well maybe it came from my pigs'.) Some of the diseases farmers can catch from animals aren't very pleasant ones. The veterinary textbooks I've been reading for this work explain exactly which diseases are known to be transferable, exactly what the symptoms in humans are who catch them and what they are in the animals etc. Fortunately the vast majority are not human-human transferable once the farmer themselves has caught it off the animal. Nothing I've read or heard has implied to me that this is controversial or new - people have been farming animals (and catching animal-contact-specific diseases from them) since forever, it's something all the farmers know about and all the vets know about.

[shunyadragon]

I actually didn't say just "evidence." I was wondering if there was an actual controlled lab study, not theories about it, where they observed a virus (preferably something like influenza) jump from a mammal to a human (obviously someone who had volunteered for the study). I don't understand why that was so difficult to explain. But I'm cool. I lost interest.

They kind of avoid doing controlled lab studies on humans with diseases accept in Hitler's Europe.

[Cow Poke]

They kind of avoid doing controlled lab studies on humans with diseases accept in Hitler's Europe.

Ummm.... Tuskegee syphilis experiment?

[shunyadragon]

Ummm.... Tuskegee syphilis experiment?

We do no have a good history in our past.

[Cow Poke]

We do no have a good history in our past.

Agreed - just pointing out that "we" have done some pretty horrendous things in the name of "research".

[shunyadragon]

Agreed - just pointing out that "we" have done some pretty horrendous things in the name of "research".

There is no evidence of unethical research at the Wuhan lab nor 'leakage' that caused the pandemic.

[Cow Poke]

There is no evidence of unethical research at the Wuhan lab nor 'leakage' that caused the pandemic.

Nor did I claim there was, Shuny. When I said "we", I assumed you still lived in the US of A, and I was speaking of "our" sins, as opposed to "only Hitler".

[Sparko]

I suppose the epithet "jerk" was really needed.

Cowpoke truncated the post. It was dishonest. But since CP is a "good" Christian, it is excused.

It's an old nickname for him. As is "radical strawberry"

[Juvenal]

It's an old nickname for him. As is "radical strawberry"

[simplicio]

It's an old nickname for him. As is "radical strawberry"

Trouble is the epithets fly so freely here.

[Juvenal]

Wuhan lab says there's no way coronavirus originated there. Here's the science.

Just today (April 18), the vice director of WIV Zhiming Yuan CGTN, the Chinese state broadcaster, said "there is no way this virus came from us," NBC News reported. "We have a strict regulatory regime and code of conduct of research, so we are confident."

Covid-19's closest relative is RaTG13, which was being studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab. RaTG13 is extremely close to Covid-19, but the differences are significant.

Edward Holmes, of the Charles Perkins Center and the Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity at the University of Sydney ... added, "the level of genome sequence divergence between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 is equivalent to an average of 50 years (and at least 20 years) of evolutionary change."

Depending on the route across the river, WIV is 10 to 15 miles away from the Wuhan South China Seafood Wholesale Market originally identified as the source of the infection in the Nature article. That's the article published with Zhengli Shi listed as corresponding author. Zhengli Shi is the lead bat coronavirus researcher at WIV.

She's on record being very concerned it might have escaped from her lab. She immediately combed through all their records to satisfy herself that it didn't. She swears it didn't, by her life. I'm not sure how to read that. Is it a sacred vow or a plea for rescue. Forgive the snark, but in China today, there are ER doctors who spoke up about the early cases and haven't been heard from since. Other than the one we know died from Covid-19. And their broadcast news features casual announcements of new capital punishments.

I want to believe her, because it would be a truly terrible thing to be falsely accused of being responsible for millions of deaths. But it's really easy to imagine a scenario where she would lie, forcefully, even if she was willing to sacrifice herself. I'm sure that she would not be allowed to live if she admitted fault, and more, that many of her closest colleagues would then share the same fate.

There are ways to quickly bridge a mutation gap in the lab that would take 50 years to occur in the wild. One could, for instance, culture the virus in lab dishes filled with cells with ACE2 receptors, which is where Covid-19, like SARS before it, enters the cell. In fact, that's a natural place to grow it. But it would also be dangerous. And consistent with the differences between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13.

Nikolai Petrovsky, in the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders [said] "The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus," Petrovsky said in a statement from the Australian Media Center. "Because the mutations are acquired randomly by selection, there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention."

We know this virus originates with bats in Guangdong, a thousand miles away, which is where WIV picked up RaTG13, its closest relative. If the SARS-CoV-2 did not descend from RaTG13, then there must be another virus out in the wild that's even closer to SARS-CoV-2.

Here's the tipping point for me.

That means it also has RaTG13 as its closest relative.

[oxmixmudd]

Wuhan lab says there's no way coronavirus originated there. Here's the science.

Just today (April 18), the vice director of WIV Zhiming Yuan CGTN, the Chinese state broadcaster, said "there is no way this virus came from us," NBC News reported. "We have a strict regulatory regime and code of conduct of research, so we are confident."

Covid-19's closest relative is RaTG13, which was being studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab. RaTG13 is extremely close to Covid-19, but the differences are significant.

Edward Holmes, of the Charles Perkins Center and the Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity at the University of Sydney ... added, "the level of genome sequence divergence between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 is equivalent to an average of 50 years (and at least 20 years) of evolutionary change."

Depending on the route across the river, WIV is 10 to 15 miles away from the Wuhan South China Seafood Wholesale Market originally identified as the source of the infection in the Nature article. That's the article published with Zhengli Shi listed as corresponding author. Zhengli Shi is the lead bat coronavirus researcher at WIV.

She's on record being very concerned it might have escaped from her lab. She immediately combed through all their records to satisfy herself that it didn't. She swears it didn't, by her life. I'm not sure how to read that. Is it a sacred vow or a plea for rescue. Forgive the snark, but in China today, there are ER doctors who spoke up about the early cases and haven't been heard from since. Other than the one we know died from Covid-19. And their broadcast news features casual announcements of new capital punishments.

I want to believe her, because it would be a truly terrible thing to be falsely accused of being responsible for millions of deaths. But it's really easy to imagine a scenario where she would lie, forcefully, even if she was willing to sacrifice herself. I'm sure that she would not be allowed to live if she admitted fault, and more, that many of her closest colleagues would then share the same fate.

There are ways to quickly bridge a mutation gap in the lab that would take 50 years to occur in the wild. One could, for instance, culture the virus in lab dishes filled with cells with ACE2 receptors, which is where Covid-19, like SARS before it, enters the cell. In fact, that's a natural place to grow it. But it would also be dangerous. And consistent with the differences between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13.

Nikolai Petrovsky, in the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders [said] "The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus," Petrovsky said in a statement from the Australian Media Center. "Because the mutations are acquired randomly by selection, there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention."

We know this virus originates with bats in Guangdong, a thousand miles away, which is where WIV picked up RaTG13, its closest relative. If the SARS-CoV-2 did not descend from RaTG13, then there must be another virus out in the wild that's even closer to SARS-CoV-2.

Here's the tipping point for me.

That means it also has RaTG13 as its closest relative.

You mention a tipping point, but fail to define a direction. Which way are you 'tipped' by that statement?

[Juvenal]

Trouble is the epithets fly so freely here.

Why is the taoist such a • Edited by a Moderator •?

The mods asked me how I wanted it edited and I told them to make it a jerk. It went on for hundreds of pages and was mad fun. We turned it into a redneck club. We recruited Thirsty Possum to tend bar. We stole his tips and burned his Britney posters.

That last was wrong.

So is using these epithets with an unkindly spirit.

[Juvenal]

You mention a tipping point, but fail to define a direction. Which way are you 'tipped' by that statement?

I want to avoid stating a conclusion until I've had more time to think about this, but I'm tipping toward the conclusion that the virus escaped from WIV. Available data say the MRCA of RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 must be the MRCA of RaTG13 and the proximal ancestor. That MRCA dates to within the past 50 years or so. It seems to me that says they came from the same cave. Virus from that cave was brought to Wuhan by Zhengli Shi herself. Virus from that cave is the proximal ancestor of SARS-CoV-2.

And then there's this ...

Although RaTG13, sampled from a Rhinolophus affinis bat1, is ~96% identical overall to SARS-CoV-2, its spike diverges in the RBD, which suggests that it may not bind efficiently to human ACE2 (Fig. 1a).

The principle difference between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 is in their RBDs, the spikes where they insert into human cells. The difference is in how efficiently those spikes bind to human ACE2. That points to selection pressure from spreading in humans or human cells. That's from her paper.

So cells in a dish, or a human contagion that percolated undetected in Guangdong before traveling to Wuhan.

I'm wondering if that was what Petrovsky was trying to say.

I'd really like somebody like the Lurch to check me on this.