https://www.biospace.com/article/1nih-awards-ecohealth-allia...
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...
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-nih-gain-of-functi...
Likely enough not in any meaningful way attached to either president, though.
- China intentionally manufactured the virus and released it (Proven false, virus wasn't engineered)
- China accidentally released the virus while collecting it (Possible, but unlikely given the virus has early evidence away from both collection point and Wuhan Lab)
- China has too many wet markets that allowed the virus to mutate enough for human jump (Current consensus working theory, but also unproven as intermediary animal has not been identified)
But all of these list China as the responsible party, so if you want to call it out as not Xenophobia or Anti-China sentiment then you'd have to show evidence the reporting showed "Joint Sino-American research lab causes..." kind of headlines. Otherwise, you point strengthens that this has at least an under current of anti-china sentiment, as the reporting has not mentioned US involvement at all.
WHO of course have a lot to answer for with regards to ignoring Taiwan because if BS geopolitics when they had the most reliable/believable/compelling evidence of the nature of SARS-Cov2
Thank you. I'm curious ... how many virology labs, like this one, are extant in the world and how many study coronaviruses as they did ?
Is it tens of thousands of virology labs like this one and hundreds that study coronaviruses ?
Or is it hundreds of virology labs like this one and a handful study coronaviruses ?
The most common lab leak hypothesis I've seen is that it was engineered during gain-of-function research and then accidentally leaked.
The fallacy is just that the only reason someone would engineer a virus would be to weaponize it. Gain-of-function research is regularly done to study and combat viruses. So just because it was engineered doesn't imply it was intentionally released.
I’m bothered by the fact that GOF research was banned in the USA, and then the NIH setup funding for it in Wuhan. I think the need and safety of this research should come under serious scrutiny.
So, in other words, there is no evidence that GoF research is "here to protect us"?
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
(Yes it isn’t 100% match, but it’s 100% an ancestor... so not engineered)
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.
1. Direct artificial manipulation of a virus's genetic sequence.
2. Laboratory culture and passaging of a virus, allowing evolution due to natural mutations to proceed under artificial selective constraints.
No one serious is focusing on (1). The people bringing it up most often are either uneducated cranks, or zoonotic origin proponents using it as a strawman to refute.
The serious concern is that SARS-CoV-2 originated due to (2). In that case, since it's a natural evolutionary process, there would be no indication in the virus's genetic sequence of human tampering, because no direct human tampering occurred. The only evidence would be the absence of any animal reservoir of the virus. Perhaps that will eventually be found; but so far--unlike for SARS-CoV or MERS-CoV--it hasn't been.
As I note elsewhere in this thread, the discovery of a proximal animal host would convince me that the virus is probably of natural origin. Is there any evidence short of a direct admission from the people responsible that would convince you it might have escaped from a lab?
Second, are you really saying that if we somehow later confirm that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus sampled and accidentally released by the WIV, we should just shrug and do nothing? Even before the pandemic, there was a debate over whether deliberately seeking out novel pathogens (especially for gain-of-function experiments, but even just for collection and sequencing) brought sufficient benefit to justify the risk. If it turned out that such activity started a pandemic that killed millions of people, wouldn't it perhaps be worth revisiting that tradeoff?
> 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.