https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-ch...
"The scientific community applauded President Joe Biden's decision to rejoin the World Health Organization and other global efforts designed to stop and prevent COVID-19."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/01/22/scient...
It's amazing so many people will just take CCP's narrative at face value, there are still many that think it came from the seafood market.
Nature has lied to protect the CCP before:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/world/asia/china-springer...
> Dwyer says that the team didn’t see anything during its visits to suggest a lab accident. “Now, whether we were shown everything? You can never know. The group wasn’t designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practice.”
From https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/world/asia/china-who-wuha...
> Even in the best of circumstances, a full inquiry could take months, if not longer. The team must also navigate attempts by China to politicize the inquiry.
And yet a few days ago the WHO pushed out a hasty judgment that it was very unlikely the virus leaked from the lab. And in the last day they’ve already started backtracking after intense skepticism from the world - see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-12/who-backs... titled “ WHO Backs Away From Outright Rejection of Virus Lab-Leak Theory”.
It also seems that now the virus may have been reported even earlier than we thought. From https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/world/asia/china-world-he...:
> The Chinese scientists also acknowledged they had discovered that 92 people were hospitalized in Wuhan as early as October 2019 with symptoms such as fever and coughing. The Chinese experts said they had found no trace of Covid-19 in those people, but the tests were incomplete. The W.H.O. team members said more research was needed.
Between the CCP’s early suppression of journalism and social media reporting on the virus, the fact that Taiwan was the first to warn the world, China’s repeated denials and delays in letting an outside team to visit the site, and their purge of all the coronavirus studies originating from this lab (https://www.the-sun.com/news/2113876/covid-cover-up-china-wu...), there is very little reason to trust the claim that a lab leak can be ruled out. If anything it only seems more likely that a massive coverup is in progress, and the WHO is the willing mouthpiece for it.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-praises-xi-for-han...
It’s precisely the vacuum created by the US’s voluntary defanging of itself in multilateral institutions that has allowed China to resist these institutions and even take control of some of them. The answer to that isn’t to continue unilaterally reducing its own power.
>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/world/asia/china-springer...
Your article does not support your claim. "One of the world’s largest academic publishers was criticized on Wednesday for bowing to pressure from the Chinese government to block access to hundreds of articles on its Chinese website."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Now maybe the virus mutated from those initial 174 cases but that's unlikely.
China does have a narrative that covid19 reinfections are coming from imported frozen foods though so I'm not sure why they are pushing that angle. It's probably an economic one and to save face. But maybe it's real.. if it is we are screwed.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...
Edit: removed incorrect conclusion
The truth probably is that they know it originated (from animals) in China, and don't want the WHO to officially reach that conclusion. That's not particularly damaging to most countries, but in a communist country with tightly controlled information flow, the citizenry isn't shown a government making mistakes.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-pled...
- Virus infects human ACE2 suboptimally, therefore it's not lab grown. Why? Because a virus engineer is always going for maximizing spread rate? Seems plausible that less-than-ideal infection rates of humans could be a feature rather than a bug.
- A polybasic clevage site was not seen in SARS-CoV... but it's function is not known. Okay?
- The virus backbone was "0day" and not previously known to researchers. Seems like a feature that a covert bio warfare lab would desire.
The rest of the speculation seems to ride on the assumption that the virus originated in China (despite evidence showing otherwise[1][2]), and their discovery seems biased toward any data to support that conclusion.
1. https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...
2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2
https://www.biospace.com/article/1nih-awards-ecohealth-allia...
> Mask early
Are we living in the same timeline?
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1243972193169616898 https://twitter.com/UNGeneva/status/1244661916535930886 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234095938555260929 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234871709091667969 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234619007841525764
After a few different US lab leaks involving anthrax, smallpox, and avian flu in 2014 the Obama administration put a ban on the fuding of gain of function research.[2]
The ban was eventually overturned in 2018.[3]
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-wor...
[2]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-anthrax-labs-analysis...
[3]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Yet for some reason the West seemed intent on pursuing lockdowns, demonising countries like Sweden and Belarus which didn't.
Hospitals have never been overloaded (apart from places like New York where symptomatic patients were sent back into nursing homes - or Italy, with generally inadequate pandemic preparations) and in places like Sweden deaths in 2020 are up only single-digits against 2018:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
As soon as we realised we were over-intubating patients, and that proning and oxygen treatment were sufficient for serious admissions, and that Vitamin D and C (and other cheap and generic treatments) were enough for the general population, the potential for hospital overload (beyond what flu waves incur anyway) was also eliminated.
And yet we still persist with lockdowns despite them causing a greater amount of harm than the virus itself due to factors like interrupted education, mental damage, and interrupted regular medical treatment.
There were political games afoot in both China and the West in terms of this virus. The fact that the American economy was booming just before the re-election of a non-mainstream, anti-China president, and that pandemic responses justified mail-in voting on an unprecedent scale is too coincidental to ignore.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/who-says...
https://project-evidence.github.io/
https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-origins-genome-analy...
Who was really behind this, and the whole history of it, is something surely we won't know for know.
"When war is declared, truth is the first casualty"
The 1977 Russian Flu pandemic was genetically near-identical to a strain from 1950, without the expected mutations that should have appeared after 27 years of undetected circulation among humans or animals. It's been widely suspected in mainstream literature to have escaped from a research or vaccine manufacturing accident, to the point that the NEJM casually wrote:
> The reemergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322
But at the time, the WHO said:
> Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul...
And it's absolutely bizarre to me that people are asking why the origin even matters. After thousands of people died in Bhopal, did it matter whether better chemical safety standards could have prevented that? So with millions dead now, how could you possibly not wonder whether our current standards for the sampling and manipulation of poorly-understood pandemic-candidate viruses are adequate?
You are correct. There is both gain of function and loss of function happening in these types of experiments.
I am fairly certain that the US government reversed itself on masks before the WHO did (Wikipedia says WHO changed its advice in June).
Did it have to do with a lack of evidence, or was it a cynical ploy to preserve mask stocks for medical professionals? I recall it being the latter: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
It turns out we've been doing "serial passage" research for some time, which is where we leverage natural selection to do our genetic engineering for us, rather than manually editing genes. This is how we engineer viruses to jump species - on purpose.
> They did it using serial passaging: repeatedly dosing a mixed solution of mouse cells and hamster cells with mouse-hepatitis virus, while each time decreasing the number of mouse cells and upping the concentration of hamster cells. At first, predictably, the mouse-hepatitis virus couldn’t do much with the hamster cells, which were left almost free of infection, floating in their world of fetal-calf serum. But by the end of the experiment, after dozens of passages through cell cultures, the virus had mutated: It had mastered the trick of parasitizing an unfamiliar rodent.
In fact, "we" (meaning humanity) have even been experimenting with serial passage into humans.
> A few years later, in a further round of “interspecies transfer” experimentation, Baric’s scientists introduced their mouse coronavirus into flasks that held a suspension of African-green-monkey cells, human cells, and pig-testicle cells. Then, in 2002, they announced something even more impressive: They’d found a way to create a full-length infectious clone of the entire mouse-hepatitis genome. Their “infectious construct” replicated itself just like the real thing, they wrote.
The whole article is really worth a read.
A random virus, no. This one, we do.
We can't build a virus from scratch. But we can combine pieces of different viruses to build a new one. The same thing also happens naturally when an animal is sick with 2 viruses at once. If both get into the same cell, you get various mixes created and sometimes a mixture will turn out to be a better virus than either parent.
This virus looks like a combination of apparently unrelated viruses. See https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-origins-genome-analy... for confirmation. That happens to be something that can happen either naturally or artificially.
Where conspiracy theorists get going is that a few years ago there were papers from the lab near Wuhan suggesting that a combination much like COVID-19's actual combination should be particularly effective in humans. So this looks like an extension of a known line of research from a lab involved in military work. Combine that with the local coverup and you can see how people go down the rabbit hole.
WHO changed its position on masks as late as June 2020. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200608/who-changes-stance-...
The US government changed its stance by April: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/public-health/2020/04/08/why...
In much of the world, people who wore masks were subject to ridicule, especially on social media because of the cynical public health messaging, which seemed to be about preserving stocks of masks for healthcare workers by telling the public that “masks don’t work” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...).
The New York Times op-ed above, and efforts from the Czech Republic made discussing public masking more acceptable in the US, and then the rest of the world.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-needs-a-real-investig...
There's also been a string of academic preprints and articles, like
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2102/2102.03910.pdf
The authors tend to be kind of fringe, not surprisingly given the reputational cost (and given that if a lab origin is ever confirmed, many of the techniques that top researchers have spent their lives mastering will probably become illegal). A lot of very senior virologists are on the record as open to the possibility of a lab escape, though, for example:
> Baric said he still thought the virus came from bats in southern China, perhaps directly, or possibly via an intermediate host, although the smuggled pangolins, in his view, were a red herring. The disease evolved in humans over time without being noticed, he suspected, becoming gradually more infectious, and eventually a person carried it to Wuhan “and the pandemic took off.” Then he said, “Can you rule out a laboratory escape? The answer in this case is probably not.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
I don't recommend that article in general; the author uses his talents as a novelist to paint a more vivid picture than I believe the evidence justifies. I do trust him to faithfully print the quote, though.
See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/ for one of their previous lines of research that look similar to the actual COVID-19 virus.
https://mobile.twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/13605511085659...
https://mobile.twitter.com/TheaKFischer/status/1360590441817...
https://elifesciences.org/articles/31257
For the original SARS, it's palm civets, identified in less than a year. (The link to bats wasn't discovered until much later, by Shi Zhengli; but the intermediate host is enough to feel pretty confident it's natural-origin.)
For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting for that intermediate host. That's the significance of the early pangolin papers; but as Alina Chan and many others have noted, those papers have significant data quality issues, and even the Chinese have pretty much abandoned the pangolins.
Look at raw gdp growth data and that was without major tax cuts. Nothing proves that the previous US president did anything more than "ride the wave".
Also, debts were greatly increased even before covid and the current president will have to fix that, again...
Additionally, lockdowns have an additional reason, namely to not overload healthcare so the situation doesn't get out of control. While rural areas can play denial, that's not an option for bigger and more dense areas/cities. A lot of hospitals were running on the edge, where >90% of capacity was for covid and delaying all other ( even urgent) surgeries.
Ps. Sweden has a very low population density. Not everything there applies elsewhere.
They even admitted they were wrong with having no lockdowns.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-nih-gain-of-functi...
Likely enough not in any meaningful way attached to either president, though.
Does anyone know whether this story (including video and photos is credible?
https://project-evidence.github.io/
Summary (IIRC): The most likely explanation of its origins is a person who collected bats for a lab in Wuhan contracted the disease in the cave where bats were collected.
I don't think there is a lot of evidence for malice, but there is definitely evidence worthy of contemplation:
https://project-evidence.github.io/
Here is a study from 2007: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/
> In this study, we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat.
That is literally building of viruses in a lab.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/article/othe...
The PCR Pandemic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LToSnpz8A4
Fuck these lone doctors and fuck Youtube for spreading their unfounded theories through the general population, putting millions of lives at risk.
> Peter Daszak, is a zoologist and bat-virus sample collector and the head of a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance — a group that [...] has channeled money from the National Institutes of Health to Shi Zhengli’s laboratory in Wuhan, allowing the lab to carry on recombinant research into diseases of bats and humans.
> [...]
> Daszak, for his part, seems to have viewed his bat quests as part of an epic, quasi-religious death match. In a paper from 2008, Daszak and a co-author described Bruegel’s painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels and compared it to the contemporary human biological condition. The fallen angels could be seen as pathogenic organisms that had descended “through an evolutionary (not spiritual) pathway that takes them to a netherworld where they can feed only on our genes, our cells, our flesh,” Daszak wrote. “Will we succumb to the multitudinous horde? Are we to be cast downward into chthonic chaos represented here by the heaped up gibbering phantasmagory against which we rail and struggle?”
There's much more in there; it's clear that he's good friends and business partners with the WIV and it would be deeply his interest to suppress any consideration of the lab-escape hypothesis.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/world-h...
Earlier in March, Zhao Lijian, an outspoken Chinese diplomat, raised a suspicion on his personal Twitter account that it might have been the US army representatives to the Military World Games who brought the novel coronavirus to Wuhan in October 2019, after a top US health official admitted detecting coronavirus infections on some deceased flu patients. Zhao urged the US to disclose further information, exercise transparency on coronavirus cases and provide an explanation to the public.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...
Kept searching for followups, didn’t see anything till this:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...
That’s from 21 January 2021 and says:
“So far unpublished data, analysing retained wastewater samples from Barcelona, Spain, taken in March 2019 showed positive RT-qPCR results for SARS-CoV-2 (Chavarria-Miró et al., 2020). The authors conclude that the virus was introduced to the Barcelona population due to global travel and remained undetected.”
So as of then, still unpublished.
It's also disingenuous and lazy to ignore a century or more of empirical evidence.
>There are very obvious differences in how the world’s governments operate.
Are there?
https://www.amazon.com/All-Governments-Lie-Times-Journalist/...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...
If the penalty for lying and being caught is the same league as screwing up, people are going to cover up problems.
As a general rule, I don't take this kind of analysis via repeated repeated repeated repeated repeated repeated repeated application of Bayes' Rule with somewhat-to-completely arbitrary probabilities at each step very seriously. At all.
It's a kind of gish gallop [1] with additional window dressing purporting to wrap it all up into one easy number. From a probabilistic point of view it ignores any dependency between observed facts, which is a serious issue but not necessarily the most damning one.
This particular case is even worse than usual. According to a quick Ctrl-F-aided skim of the document, the author doesn't identify a single fact that increases the probability of zoonotic origin, which is extremely suspicious. If every single available fact in a complicated issue points to the same conclusion that's probably because you are messing with your facts, not because that's how things actually are.
After noticing the one-sided-ness of the Bayesian updates I rolled my eyes and closed the tab.
Again, they didn't (or failed to) sequence the virus to prove it was in the samples, and their antibody data (fig 1) doesn't make any sense. IgM antibodies are acute and IgG longer-lasting, so they should appear more like a cumulative distribution if there was a real outbreak. They didn't test their antibody assay for cross-reactivity to seasonal coronaviruses, so that's probably what's going on here.
Same story for the American study (https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...), though Forbes was at least minimally competent enough to quote a scientist's tweet pointing out the limitations, and the authors even address "potential cross reactivity with human common coronavirus infection". Only 1 sample, from 10 Jan 2020, was positive across all their antibody tests, and no samples were sequenced! These studies all fail to properly account for the false positive rate of their assays, and then pretend that all the positive hits are SARS-CoV-2 without any orthogonal verification.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/24/birx-says-someone-was-giving...
Dr. Deborah Birx, the Trump White House coronavirus response coordinator, said in a CBS interview released on Sunday that former President Donald Trump had been reviewing “parallel” data sets on the coronavirus pandemic from someone inside the administration.
"Rebekah Jones, the data scientist who helped create Florida's COVID-19 dashboard, has turned herself in to police, in response to an arrest warrant issued by the state. " https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...
Japan's deputy prime minister calls the WHO the "Chinese Health Organization": https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/04/29/commentary/w...
> are we saying that the international group that entered china were some how in league with the CCP?
There may be reason to expect that they or their superiors are ... biased.
They were even demanding reparations too! If the Chinese didn’t have ICBM nukes to defend themselves, then you can bet that the western nations would’ve mounted a multi-country alliance to attack China by now.
Read up Jack London’s The Unparalled Invasion from 1910. The Grand Master Plan is all laid out right there for you. It’s disgusting. You’ll want to throw up after you read it. But yet, this is how the white people of the western world sees China.
"Lipsitch’s activists (calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group) sent around a strong statement on the perils of research with “Potential Pandemic Pathogens,” signed by more than a hundred scientists. The work might “trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control,” the signers said. Fauci reconsidered, and the White House in 2014 announced that there would be a “pause” in the funding of new influenza, SARS, and MERS gain-of-function research." [0]
In December 2017, the US began funding gain-of-function research on these deadly diseases again. This research creates deadly diseases that may not have existed otherwise.
This pandemic has been enough for me to strongly believe that there should be a global ban on gain-of-function experiments on deadly viruses and bacteria. I'd like to help prevent a future pandemic, and that's one clear way we can help.
[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
[1] https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/editorials/wendy-m...
The only article that I can find that actually tries to levy complaints of obstruction is this one from the NYT[0]. However, several of the WHO investigators quoted have gone on Twitter accusing the NYT of twisting their words[1]. Makes me pretty doubtful that there was any obstruction.
On one side we have a country with half a million cases that has since December been accusing China with "coverups" without materializing much evidence, despite document leaks and now an international investigation. On the other side we have a country with orders of magnitude fewer total and per capita cases, whose case demographics have matched up with numbers from other countries, and whose export numbers in neighboring countries has also been consistent with their reported numbers. At this point if there was some sort of obstruction or coverup the Whitehouse would have a smoking gun by now.
Other comments here talking about the "lab origin" theory pretty much hinge on theological logic. "Well it could come from a lab, and there's no proof yet that it didn't, so I have faith". It isn't Bayesian reasoning if you don't bring up rigorous statistics to prove your point.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/world/asia/china-world-he...
[1] https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/02/caught-in-the-act-new-...
No, it tended to be called the Spanish Flu because Spanish newspapers simply reported more about the epidemic:
>...Spain was not involved in the war, having remained neutral, and had not imposed wartime censorship.[17][18] Newspapers were therefore free to report the epidemic's effects, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these widely-spread stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit.
Some theorize it might have first originated in Kansas:
>...The first confirmed cases originated in the United States. Historian Alfred W. Crosby stated in 2003 that the flu originated in Kansas,[61] and popular author John M. Barry described a January 1918 outbreak in Haskell County, Kansas, as the point of origin in his 2004 article.
But then again:
>...A 2018 study of tissue slides and medical reports led by evolutionary biology professor Michael Worobey found evidence against the disease originating from Kansas, as those cases were milder and had fewer deaths compared to the infections in New York City in the same period. The study did find evidence through phylogenetic analyses that the virus likely had a North American origin, though it was not conclusive. In addition, the haemagglutinin glycoproteins of the virus suggest that it originated long before 1918, and other studies suggest that the reassortment of the H1N1 virus likely occurred in or around 1915.
Some theorize it might have first originated in Europe:
>...The major UK troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples in France has been theorized by virologist John Oxford as being at the center of the Spanish flu.[63] His study found that in late 1916 the Étaples camp was hit by the onset of a new disease with high mortality that caused symptoms similar to the flu.[64][63] According to Oxford, a similar outbreak occurred in March 1917 at army barracks in Aldershot,[65] and military pathologists later recognized these early outbreaks as the same disease as the Spanish flu.[66][63] The overcrowded camp and hospital at Etaples was an ideal environment for the spread of a respiratory virus.
>...A report published in 2016 in the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association found evidence that the 1918 virus had been circulating in the European armies for months and possibly years before the 1918 pandemic.[67] Political scientist Andrew Price-Smith published data from the Austrian archives suggesting the influenza began in Austria in early 1917.
But then again:
>...A 2009 study in Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses found that Spanish flu mortality simultaneously peaked within the two-month period of October and November 1918 in all fourteen European countries analyzed, which is inconsistent with the pattern that researchers would expect if the virus had originated somewhere in Europe and then spread outwards.
Some theorize it was China:
>...In 1993, Claude Hannoun, the leading expert on the Spanish flu at the Pasteur Institute, asserted the precursor virus was likely to have come from China and then mutated in the United States near Boston and from there spread to Brest, France, Europe's battlefields, the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world, with Allied soldiers and sailors as the main disseminators.[70] Hannoun considered several alternative hypotheses of origin, such as Spain, Kansas, and Brest, as being possible, but not likely.[70] In 2014, historian Mark Humphries argued that the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese laborers to work behind the British and French lines might have been the source of the pandemic. Humphries, of the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, based his conclusions on newly unearthed records. He found archival evidence that a respiratory illness that struck northern China (where the laborers came from) in November 1917 was identified a year later by Chinese health officials as identical to the Spanish flu.
On the other hand:
>...A report published in 2016 in the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association found no evidence that the 1918 virus was imported to Europe via Chinese and Southeast Asian soldiers and workers and instead found evidence of its circulation in Europe before the pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
So far the historical and epidemiological data cannot identify the geographic origin of the Spanish flu.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03008916209747...
Also, if you look closely, notice that the reason we have no earlier samples then september is, because we have no earlier samples. Can't test one from august, if you don't have one from august.
To answer your question: If NYC had a virus lab that actively mutated bat coronaviruses so that they could become infectious in humans, and then one day a human-infecting virus with 96% similarity to a bat coronavirus started popping up in New York City with no known origin… Yes, people would start asking questions about that lab.
Check out this commentary from 2015. This type of research was being subcontracted out to the Wuhan lab, despite public concerns that safety wasn’t tight enough there.
https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...
I get that people don’t want to discriminate against China, but this is very clearly a hypothesis worth investigating further.
Presumably someone in the Chinese government ordered Google to lie about the institute's location. Why would the Chinese government do that if the institute was uninvolved?
Investigators ought to ask China who ordered it, and why. And ask Google the same thing.
I do feel a bit sorry for Google employees who'd be caught in the middle if this actually happens.
US government to Google: "Tell us about how China ordered Google Maps to help with the coverup. If you lie to the investigators, we'll send you to jail."
China government to Google: "When the US asks about the Google Maps coverup, lie. If you don't lie to the investigators, we'll send you to jail."
"Based on the available information there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission."
"Additional investigation is needed to ascertain the presence of human-to-human transmission, modes of transmission, common source of exposure and the presence of asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases that are undetected. It is critical to review all available information to fully understand the potential transmissibility among humans."
"Data collected through detailed epidemiological investigation and through the deployment of the new test kit nationally suggests that human-to-human transmission is taking place in Wuhan. More analysis of the epidemiological data is needed to understand the full extent of human-to-human transmission."
In my small European countries, no public measures were taken based on all this info until early March (more than 2 weeks after Northern Italy was overwhelmed, while our countrymen had been traveling all over Europe), because there were no confirmed cases in our country yet. The only initial measures in early March were advices to "wash your hands", "don't shake hands" and "sneeze in your elbows".
So I don't think the WHO confirming human transmission on 14 Jan instead of 22 Jan would have changed a thing. People only take painful measures when bad things happen to people they know, and politicians only when bad things happen to people in their own country. Trying to shift the blame on the WHO or China is not very common amongst politicians here (though anecdotally it's not rare among citizens), that seems to be mostly an American (specifically, Republican party) thing.
[1] https://www.who.int/csr/don/14-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...
[2] https://www.who.int/china/news/detail/22-01-2020-field-visit...
That doesn't disprove xenophobia at all. The Spanish press reported on it first because every nation involved in WWI very aggressively censored any mention of the flu. After the war, they had every incentive to play into people's natural xenophobia rather admit to covering up the disease. Here you see the Spanish Flu depicted as a flamenco lady:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/G386J3/the-spanish-flu-epidemic-ov...
Perhaps people noticed it when it hit Wuhan and freaked out because of the Research Institute thinking “oh shit, is this what they’re playing with?”
“ Though the US paid $446.5m in 2019 compared with China’s $43m, the bulk of American funding was voluntary; the organization only receives 17% of its funding through “assessed” contributions, AKA country membership dues. The bulk of its budget is funded through voluntary donations, for which countries can earmark specific use, because President Ronald Reagan passed a “zero-growth policy” for WHO funding in the 1980s. With the assessed dues frozen at 1990s levels, the WHO has been forced to increasingly rely on donated funds.”
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/oct/19/john-oliver-...
A US intelligence contractor that collects location data from apps on phones made a presentation that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was shut down from October 7 to 24, 2019. This was reported in the popular US press [1]. You probably missed that in the nightmare flood of last year. I did when it was first reported...
Thus far, the earliest-detected SARS-CoV-2 in the EU has been in November. I would bet that no evidence is ever found for it globally before late October, 2019. We may look for a long time.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/report-sa...
Very interesting. Does that mean Covid was in Europe 3 months before the supposed patient zero in Wuhan (December 8?)
> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the Institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[11][12]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology
You make a good point. The wet market is only 20km from the lab, so if this one is lab-based (and not a bizarre coincidence) it seems much more likely to be an accident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debat...
It was actually remarkably stable in the early days suggesting it was used to reproducing in human cells. Or so Professor Petrovsky says https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8356751/How-COVID-1...
As how that could have happened lab wise here's Daszak saying they routinely infect human cells with coronavirus in the lab https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1701&v=IdYDL_RK--w&feature=y...
Or maybe it was in humans a bit before it took off. I see Daszak's kind of changed his tune a bit these days to not mention anything like that lab stuff.
https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1360551108565999619
https://twitter.com/TheaKFischer/status/1360590441817772034
https://twitter.com/LiuXininBeijing/status/13607416005072691...
And people wonder why I complain about propaganda in the western world :/
Recall how much the situation changed in 2020 between the beginning of January and the end of March...
Even if we just had an handful of cases at the beginning of October, by the end of December we would have got massive clusters of cases, tens of thousands of people hospitalized with the same symptoms
And then suddenly, when we started to look for it in January/February, we found only a few clusters and the disease grew (again?) From almost nothing
Covid19 is not something that you can keep hidden:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...
https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ani/taiwan-wa...
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3904054
Please note that the WHO confirmation statement on 22nd Jan came about after independent confirmation of human to human transmission and only after China's health ministry itself confirmed human to human transmission on Jan 20th. Just a mere week after strong denial, the casualties could not be hidden anymore after several whistleblowers spoke up and China was forced to backtrack.
The WHO merely acknowledged what China stated with a wishy-washy "more data is needed". I suspect if China hadn't itself come clean they would have simply followed what the CCP stated well into the future!
If the WHO had chosen to acknowledge Taiwan's concern in December, performed the most minimum of followups and raised the alarm early, this disaster could have been nipped in the bud. A lot of second and third-world nations put faith in the WHO and outside the EU and the US, the anger at the WHO is palpable.
Now go and check (it contains a story about FOIA requests to the UK government on Assange's case)
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/11/18/signs-of-u-k-misconduc...
It is the 6th (!) year that the litigation to obtain the information goes on.
Is there a reliable reference that the US is no longer researching biochemical weapons?
Wikipedia claims: "Both the U.S. bio-weapons ban and the Biological Weapons Convention restricted any work in the area of biological warfare to defensive in nature. In reality, this gives BWC member-states wide latitude to conduct biological weapons research because the BWC contains no provisions for monitoring or enforcement.[74][75] The treaty, essentially, is a gentlemen's agreement amongst members backed by the long-prevailing thought that biological warfare should not be used in battle.[74]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_biological_weapo...
The French study has just been published last week [0]. It is based on a vast cohort study in which serum samples were collected regularly. They tested older samples and found some anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. The article also mentions an Italian study with similar results [1].
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0300891620974755
https://www.wired.com/2014/07/cdc-found-pox/ https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/blog/scab-story
Being skeptical is necessary when considering China's terrible past track record. The SARS epidemic also started with a denial and cover-up by China.
There are many other news sources apart from Taiwan News. You can check out the FT. You can check out Reuters. (Decrying Taiwan News as comprising of anti-Chinese nationalists is rather strange considering the CCP's stance against Taiwan)
https://archive.is/nqiKV https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-taiwan...
Please note that even in Feb, the WHO chief was saying travel bans. are not needed https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN1...
"The head of the World Health Organization said on Monday there was no need for measures that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade” in trying to halt the spread of a coronavirus that has killed 361 people in China, and he lauded China’s efforts to contain it." (real figure as we learnt later was already >10x by that time)
“It’s no reason to really panic now,” he said. “The chances of getting this going to anywhere outside China is very low, and even in China, when you go to other provinces, it’s very low.”
"The WHO continues to advise against the application of travel or trade restrictions to countries experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Detrick#2019_closure_and_...
To me it seems like the lab escape story has only developed because of journalist brain. It's convenient if you'll only accept a narrative that involves blaming a human and not a natural system.
Anyway, the story doesn't seem to be developing in that direction:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/14/health/who-mission-china-intl...
I like how the WHO investigator calls the original patient "dull and normal".
"Mislabeled SRA entry is one thing but - it’s clear that it’s impossible (in my hands at least with a -very good- pipeline) to assemble the reference that is in GenBank from the data in SRA"
https://apnews.com/article/a0b22f45f0cbc8e83e7d496dd2e09556
China cracked down harshly and sufficiently that countries that immediately listened to WHOs advice to test/trace/isolate managed to contain the virus well because very few cases ever made it abroad as seen in import cases statistics from many countries. Expatriation flights meant leakage was inevitable, but screening procedures were mostly theatre, temperature checks instead of 14day quarantines. The problem is very few countries listened to WHO's advice, and still don't.
This was the significance of the pangolins, which were initially proposed to be the proximal animal host. But while it initially seemed that multiple infected pangolins from different sources had been found, it later turned out multiple seemingly independent papers had been written based on the same pangolins[2]. This means it's much more likely that something else infected those pangolins, in the same way e.g. that some housecats have been infected by their owners.
Nature has added an editor's note[3] to one of the pangolin papers, and even Daszak and the Chinese have pretty much abandoned the pangolins. So for now, there's no known animal host for SARS-CoV-2, unlike for the original SARS-CoV (palm civets) or MERS-CoV-2 (camels). Perhaps the animal reservoir just hasn't been found yet; but it's also possible that animal reservoir doesn't exist, because SARS-CoV-2 originated from serial passaging in a WIV lab. That's just natural evolution under unusually fast selective pressure, so any arguments that SARS-CoV-2 shows no evidence of genetic engineering are inapplicable to that theory.
1. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/12/20-2308_article
2. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2
Here's an article mentioning this hypothesis: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/coronavir...
SARS-CoV-2 has not yet been found in bats or any other animal. Relatives have been found, but relatives with key differences. It certainly could be found, and if it's correct then it'll still probably be very difficult to find due to being a needle in a haystack, but so far it hasn't been found.
I'm certainly not arguing it's true and the zoonotic origin is false (and I have no clue where to allocate the confidence values, myself), but your repeated insistence that it's "100% zoonotic" is puzzling because that hasn't even been claimed by any experts yet. The jury is still out.
Sure, the ultimate origin of the virus - tracing its full lineage - will have been from an animal no matter what. But if it were substantially modified by deliberate RNA manipulation in the lab after being collected from an animal, potentially increasing its lethality or contagiousness in the process and resulting in the pathogen we now call SARS-CoV-2, that would mean this particular virus isn't zoonotic. If true, it would totally change the discussion into one about the safety of such gain-of-function research and this particular lab.
Almost any engineered pathogen of any kind (protozoon, bacterium, virus) in any scenario will likely ultimately have been derived from something already living. But once the pathogen is experimentally modified to add, remove, or alter its functioning, it's no longer accurate to describe the modified pathogen as being zoonotic. By that logic, even engineered bioweapons would be considered zoonotic (and no one is claiming in this case it's a bioweapon; the lab leak hypothesis posits benign gain-of-function research and an accidental escape). Frankenstein's monster is no longer just some guy.
It's like saying the origin of the domestic dog is 100% natural because, look, you find its close ancestor the wolf everywhere in the wild. It omits the hypothesis that some wolves were taken and deliberately shaped and molded by humans to produce something new.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
Note, these nations are listed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
Note Lord Acton (also from a state listed there) states the meaning of that list in the context of the UN system:
“All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Now, what has the WHO done wrong vs what is outside the abilities of any part of the UN to address?
I will summarize my very simple position again:
The WHO did a good write-up, if you want to look beyond what a UN organization is allowed to do then do your own inference.
You seem to be implying the WHO should do something else that is consistent with its position and the fact that choices by China and the US are beyond its control. Maybe you can elaborate on what that is?
If you are suggesting a reform to allow a UN organization to force these nations to not be a global threat in every area, including health, then I'm happy to hear it.
> We adapted the SARS-CoV (Urbani strain) by serial passage in the respiratory tract of young BALB/c mice. Fifteen passages resulted in a virus (MA15) that is lethal for mice following intranasal inoculation.
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
So it doesn't seem implausible to me that the WIV would bring up a similar program. The lack of any public record doesn't seem like it requires any conspiracy to me, just for them not to have published yet (especially since they only got the BSL-4 lab where they'd likely be doing that work in 2018).
I think I probably understated the plausibility of a genetically-engineered origin in my comment above, too. I've just re-read Andersen's reasoning in the Nature article, and it's based heavily on the dissimilarity of SARS-CoV-2 from previously-known viruses. But we know the WIV had a private database--for example, RaTG13 was allegedly collected in 2013, but not published until after the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.
Honestly this whole area of research seems terrifying to me. Regardless of whether it's eventually shown to have caused this pandemic or not, I see no indication that this work is delivering any benefit commensurate to its risk. Many prominent epidemiologists vocally opposed the lifting of the 2018 ban on funding of gain-of-function research (e.g., Marc Lipsitch at Harvard), and I agree with them.
