Nevertheless, the gain of function research with coronaviruses has been documented in the peer-reviewed literature.
The lack of new information from the Wuhan Institute, despite its longstanding research activities, is probably the most compelling evidence in support of the lab escape hypothesis.
If the evidence pointed elsewhere, it would be released. The most likely explanation is that the Institute's fingerprints are all over this thing.
The second most compelling evidence is that to date the reservoir species has not been found.
or it's just china being 100% opaque about an accident that has already damaged their international reputation, and they're controlling the narrative hard at this point. you know, like they do.
I don't know exactly what information you would want. Every single paper about virology research from the institute was published with western authors. Had there been something wrong in the raw data or safety logs those authors would have said so.
Instead they say that everything is normal.
There is a weird double standard here of ignoring data that goes against this hypothesis and interpreting things that happened for every single other zoonosis in the world to be indicative of a lab escape. Such as, for example, three people out of six hundred presenting with symptoms of seasonal illnesses in the appropriate season.
- Our SOP should be better to analyze the information.
- Given the magnitude of the problem, more eyes should be on it
- tools and technologies should be better
It may still take longer, but all things being equal, we should not justify anything based on the past track record.
Your other point is valid though: if 3 people showed up in 1, 2 or 3 hospitals with severe flu, I would not think much of it, no one would.
The main peer reviewed gain of function research cited is https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 done in 2015 in the US with one of the researchers being Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan lab.
I'm not sure there are any papers on gain of function research done in Wuhan?
Or, they thought then that the precautions were sufficient and the risks were acceptable, and they were wrong, and now would like to just look ahead and move on.
Not sure how you reached that conclusion. Collaborators from different institutions collaborate on research papers all the time while having no access to each others' 'safety logs'. Why would that be shared?
>Instead they say that everything is normal.
Which they obviously have no way of knowing, given that they are not on site, the research institute is in a secretive authoritarian country, and the implications for being 'responsible' for such a lab leak are monumental for such a regime.
>There is a weird double standard here of ignoring data that goes against this hypothesis and interpreting things that happened for every single other zoonosis in the world to be indicative of a lab escape. Such as, for example, three people out of six hundred presenting with symptoms of seasonal illnesses in the appropriate season.
The double standard is the exact opposite - flippantly dismissing the lab leak hypothesis without examination, on one side; a call to treat it on par with the purely zoonotic hypothesis and a recognition that neither hypothesis is close to being definitively proven, on the other.
Instead, nothing. In their perfect moment of glory and justification, they prefer you didn't notice their work.
You might want to check that. Afaik, it is 4 months .
(read comments below, I may or may not be correct. Sars1 has been found in Civets, bats and humans. We do not yet know the order of transmission and if civets were indeed the intermediate source.)
It took less than 4 months (feb 2003 -> May 2003) from identifying SARS1 as a novel virus to finding the intermediate animal (civet cats) [1] . It took 10 months to identify that for MERS. (Sept 2012 -> August 2013)
Given that we know it originated in Wuhan, have dedicated order of magnitude more funding to it and all the usual suspects have come up as a negative, the lab escape hypothesis does look increasingly more likely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_syndro...
You might want to check THAT out.
They found other species could be infected with SARS-CoV-1 after 4 months and hypothesized that civet cats were the intermediate species, but that still hasn't been proven yet.
After the discovery of SARS-like WIV1 in bats in Yunnan in 2013 it was determined in 2016 that WIV1 or a very closely related virus may have jumped directly to humans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_SARS-like_coronavirus_WIV1
And specifically reference 4:
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048
"Both full-length and chimeric WIV1-CoV readily replicated efficiently in human airway cultures and in vivo, suggesting capability of direct transmission to humans."
So we STILL don't quite understand the origin of SARS1 and if it used an intermediate species or not.
There's still a very similar mystery as to how the closest animal coronavirus is found in a bat in Yunnan, but it showed up in humans in Guangdong roughly 700 miles away (but since it was in 2003 and there's no biological lab in Guangdong there's no competing lab-leak hypothesis over SARS1, even though the observation is exactly the same).
Researchers from WIV collaborated with UNC Chapel Hill in 2015 to do that kind of research on SARS-1-related viruses, and that happened in the US.
That gain of function experiment in mice was also to gain function in mice, it would reduce its ability to infect humans.
And if you took RaTG13 and spliced in the surface protein of SARS-1 so it bound to ACE and then ran it through mice you'd still not wind up with SARS-CoV-2. The original virus is too far distant (only 96% homology) and running it through mice would produce a virus that was poorly adapted to humans. And the spike protein would look more like SARS-CoV-1.
So if I understand right. While SARS1 was found in civets within 4 months of it being discovered, we have recently (2017) also found it in Bats. Current Phylogenetic studies indicate that the Bats are more likely to have been the original reservoir.
And we found it in civets but that doesn't prove that humans caught it from civets, it could be the other way around, just like SARS-CoV-2 and the minks in Denmark.
The fact that WIV1 seems to infect humans also doesn't rule out the possibility that there might still be an intermediate animal like civets. It is suggestive that there's no need for an intermediate animal, but that doesn't prove anything either way.
So we found a similar virus in civets in 2003 and jumped to a conclusion very fast. We have also found that SARS-CoV-2 infects all kinds of other animals and have found it in them, but we assume most of them caught SARS-CoV-2 from humans due to the massive pandemic going on this time. The few viruses we found in e.g. pangolins don't seem to be similar enough to have passed from pangolins to humans or vice versa. The bat coronavirus we already knew about (RaTG13) is somewhat close but would have needed a decade or two to mutate into SARS-CoV-2.
So we can't say that much for certain about either SARS-1 or SARS-2 at this point, even though we're 18 years or so past SARS-1 we still don't have all the answers.
As an uninformed reader, some possibilities I can come up with are the following:
1. Despite zoonotic origin, China feels its stature in the world is much greater than in 2002-2003, so it no longer feels obliged to allow international investigation into origins of the pandemic in spite of political pressure. For example, Wikipedia says: "After intense pressure, Chinese officials allowed international officials to investigate the situation there."
2. Despite zoonotic origin, COVID-19 has much higher death toll so CPC wants to save face by either hiding evidence or preventing investigations into a potential reservoir species. OTOH, SARS had lower death toll, so they didn't have reason to hide anything.
3. Despite zoonotic origin, Xi Jinping's regime is less transparent than that of Hu Jintao which was in power for SARS, so this time they want to either hide evidence or prevent investigations into a potential reservoir species.
4. Despite zoonotic origin and best efforts of Chinese scientists, a reservoir species has not been identified yet. Is it possible that it may take longer this time around?
5. Lab leak hypothesis: there is no natural, reservoir species to be found.
Personally, I think Reasons 1, 2 and 3 are strongest, because CPC feels like it has to play to its domestic audience and letting international investigators in may feel like a loss of face. However, this doesn't add up, because they already let WHO investigator in, albeit with very stringent limits and not letting them access raw data. I'd be much obliged if a learned person in this topic could tell me what kind of prior they'd put on each of these possible explanations.
[1] First human case of SARS was in Nov 2002, and scientists were able to isolate SARS in civets in late May 2003, so a reservoir species was identified in 6 months. It took 10 months to identify that for MERS (Sept 2012 -> August 2013).
SARS was a very big deal in China and the Chinese government allocated a lot of resources to research. As far as points one and two, that means no real improvement, as it was already in the diminishing return phase.
Because of this I don't actually see why it would be any faster. SARS wasn't the first virus where finding a reservoir was tried, far from it, and the limiting factor in the search for the source is still the same. Because of this I don't expect it should be much easier this time than last time.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...