1535 replies to this topic

[gamesguru]

Isn't it a strange journey we've been on for the last four years?

 

In 2020/2021 saying out loud that covid-19 probably came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was enough to get you kicked off of every single major social media platform, labeled a "right-wing conspiracy theory MAGA kook", and possibly lose you your job and professional career if you were in the medical industry.

 

Now no less than the New York Times publishes "Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points".

 

Great, I'm glad they've come around in their thinking. But where is the mea culpa? Where is the "We're so sorry we canceled you and tried to ruin your life, please accept our apologies".

 

Do you mean the same article that was "widely disputed by other scientists"?

 

The attempted connection between what authors at the NY Times write and the general motif of censorship may involve a bit of a slippery slope. It could be influenced by seeing patterns that might not exist (agency detection). The same people who write for the NY Times are not necessarily the ones suppressing books on Amazon or working in the White House.

 

 

What happened was this:

 

- A majority of opinions expressed skepticism toward the idea of a lab leak or vaccine-associated deaths. Private companies (with a known liberal bias) and some officials suppressed information to the contrary.

 

- Members who disagreed with the general opinion expressed dissatisfaction and raised concerns about how narratives were shaped or controlled.

 

- A scientist who dissents from popular opinion published a piece in the NY Times with an alternative perspective.

 

- You then made this post, discussing censorship motifs, claiming that some group of entities (possibly the "deep state") uniformly tried to "cancel" your narrative and that the expressed opinion of one "Alina Chan" proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the virus originated in a lab.

 

 

When viewed from that perspective, this interpretation might appear overstated. Would you agree?

 

There are multiple compelling reasons to believe in the zoonotic origin of COVID:

 

- The genetic diversity observed in early COVID strains supports the idea that the virus originated from various animal reservoirs and was not the result of a lab incident or genetic engineering [Pekar, et al. (2022)]. The genetic variation among early strains of COVID suggests multiple recombination and spillover events from animals to humans rather than a single introduction event. The high genetic diversity of early COVID strains is inconsistent with a lab-based release, which would likely show less variation.

 

- The pattern of initial cases, their geographical distribution, and the presence of infected animals at the Wuhan wet market strongly support the hypothesis [Pekar, et al. (2022)]. Many of the initial COVID cases had connections to the market, which suggests that the virus might have spilled over from animals to humans at this site [Worobey, et al. (2022)].

[Mind]

We have a different thread for the origins of COVID for this type of info - where you can read about how a very small cadre of scientists unscientifically pushed the zoonotic theory to the exclusion of everything else. According to recent testimony and reversals of opinion by many top scientists, hardly anyone believes in the zoonotic theory anymore.

[gamesguru]

Which top scientists have reversed their opinion? According to a February 2024 survey of top professionals in the annex report on the origins of COVID,

 

On average, respondents assigned a 77% probability to a zoonosis, 21% to the lab-leak scenario, and 2% to the “other” category. One-quarter of respondents seemed to be very sure about a zoonotic origin, giving it a probability between 96% and 100%.

 

That hardly means respondents believe the matter is settled, however. One in five researchers gave a probability of 50% or more to a scenario other than a natural zoonosis.

 

I understand some of the initial research was done by a few leading figures, but how was their analysis "unscientific"?

I reviewed the original post and the last few pages of the thread. Nothing in it is wildly incompatible with the zoonotic hypothesis. What pieces of evidence would you most like me to consider?

[Daniel Cooper]

Which top scientists have reversed their opinion? According to a February 2024 survey of top professionals in the annex report on the origins of COVID,

 

 

I understand some of the initial research was done by a few leading figures, but how was their analysis "unscientific"?

I reviewed the original post and the last few pages of the thread. Nothing in it is wildly incompatible with the zoonotic hypothesis. What pieces of evidence would you most like me to consider?

 

The unscientific part was that the lab leak theory was ridiculed and pronounced to be a conspiracy theory by various scientists in the public media.

 

It was never any such thing. It was always a rational possibility that sars-cov-2 had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It was known that WIV had been experimenting on and modifying various bat derived coronaviruses. They had published a 2015 paper that detailed their work in this area that while that work had not directly produced sars-cov-2 (they published the genome and it did not match) it did show that they were doing work that would logically lead to a cov-2 type virus. And, they were known to have had leaks out of that lab previously.

 

Furthermore - anytime you have a zoonotically produced virus in almost all cases you will find that the people that work around the proposed origin species show evidence of antibodies to the new virus in their system. They typically get exposed to the earliest versions of the virus which aren't as successful in the new human host and normally they end up with antibodies that confer immunity once it successfully jumps the species barrier. No such antibodies were ever found in the workers of the notorious wet market. And, no animals in the wet market were discovered to be carrying sar-cov-2.

 

So you have a new virus that appears de novo well adapted to human hosts, that is highly transmissible, and doesn't seem to go through a transitory stage where its ability to infect the new host is low and then rises as time progresses. That's not what you'd expect from a true zoonotic origin but is exactly what you'd expect if the virus was constructed in a lab and was either purposely designed to infect humans or had been passed generation after generation through lab animals with humanized immune systems and it some how escaped.

 

Now we know that WIV/Eco Health Alliance had floated a research proposal in front of DARA that almost exactly describes the virus that causes covid. Of course, Dr. Fauci was well aware of that proposal because he had seen it.

 

So given all the above - did it ever make more sense to say it was zoonotic as opposed to a leak? Was it ever scientifically valid to ridicule the idea that sar-cov-2 had leaked from WIV as a "kook conspiracy theory"?

[gamesguru]

Furthermore - anytime you have a zoonotically produced virus in almost all cases you will find that the people that work around the proposed origin species show evidence of antibodies to the new virus in their system. They typically get exposed to the earliest versions of the virus which aren't as successful in the new human host and normally they end up with antibodies that confer immunity once it successfully jumps the species barrier. No such antibodies were ever found in the workers of the notorious wet market. And, no animals in the wet market were discovered to be carrying sar-cov-2.

 

So you have a new virus that appears de novo well adapted to human hosts, that is highly transmissible, and doesn't seem to go through a transitory stage where its ability to infect the new host is low and then rises as time progresses. That's not what you'd expect from a true zoonotic origin but is exactly what you'd expect if the virus was constructed in a lab and was either purposely designed to infect humans or had been passed generation after generation through lab animals with humanized immune systems and it some how escaped.

 

I think calling the lab leak a conspiracy is a bit unfair. But I wouldn't call researchers who confirmed the zoonotic hypothesis "unscientific."  It's still the leading and accepted hypothesis.  It could get turned on its head, but I haven't seen enough evidence for that yet.

 

Can you point to specific evidence establishing proto-MERS or proto-SARS from prior outbreaks?  I wasn't able to find any.  As far as I can discern, they jumped to humans in a relatively "final form."  Camels are the likely intermediate host for MERS, but I haven't seen any evidence of the claim that MERS evolved "through a transitory stage where its ability to infect the new host is low and then rises as time progresses."  It's challenging to discover antibodies to long-gone "intermediate viruses."  The absence of such observations doesn't mean intermediates didn't occur; it just means we failed to detect them.  Researchers did detect proper COVID antibodies in members of the Hunan wet market, including domestic cats[1].

 

There was also evidence between 2015 and 2018 that suspected early COVID recombination events in Yunnan caves led to a prototype virus in an intermediate host and was already starting to infect humans (see below quote block).  These antibodies are not incompatible with the idea that the virus underwent serial passage (as hypothesized for MERS in the below figure[2]) before successfully jumping to humans.  There is additional evidence to support this view[3].  Also, we know of other viruses that lack a known intermediate host or prototypical form, i.e., Ebola and Zika.  Yet no one thinks these were lab-made.  The proximity of the WIV to the wet market and the fact that they were doing coronavirus research is cause for reasonable suspicion but not probable cause.  They could have set up shop there (for research) due to the proximity to caves and easy access to bat coronavirus cultures.

 

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Serological Evidence of Bat SARS-Related Coronavirus Infection in Humans, China - PMC

https://www.ncbi.nlm...les/PMC6178078/

 

In this study, we performed serological surveillance on people who live in close proximity to caves where bats that carry diverse SARSr-CoVs roost. In October 2015, we collected serum samples from 218 residents in four villages in Jinning County, Yunnan province, China (Fig. 1A), located 1.1–6.0 km from two caves (Yanzi and Shitou).

 

As a control, we also collected 240 serum samples from random blood donors in 2015 in Wuhan, Hubei Province more than 1000 km away from Jinning (Fig. 1A) and where inhabitants have a much lower likelihood of contact with bats due to its urban setting. None of the donors had knowledge of prior SARS infection or known contact with SARS patients.

 

Our study provides the first serological evidence of likely human infection by bat SARSr-CoVs or, potentially, related viruses. The lack of prior exposure to SARS patients by the people surveyed, their lack of prior travel to areas heavily affected by SARS during the outbreak, and the rapid decline of detectable antibodies to SARS-CoV in recovered patients within 2–3 years after infection strongly suggests that positive serology obtained in this study is not due to prior infection with SARS-CoV (Wu et al. 2007).

 

Coronaviruses are known to have a high mutation rate during replication and are prone to recombination if different viruses infect the same individual (Knipe et al. 2013). From our previous studies of bat SARSr-CoVs in the two caves near these villages, we have found genetically highly diverse bat SARSr-CoVs and evidence of frequent coinfection of two or more different SARSr-CoVs in the same bat (Ge et al. 2013). Our current study suggests that our surveillance is not exhaustive, as one would have expected, and that further, more extensive surveillance in this region is warranted.

 

 

References

[1] SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing serum antibodies in cats: a serological investigation | bioRxiv https://www.biorxiv....1196v1.abstract

[2] Adaptive Evolution of MERS-CoV to Species Variation in DPP4: Cell Reports https://www.cell.com...1247(18)31148-3

[3] SARS-CoV-2 mutations acquired during serial passage in human cell lines are consistent with several of those found in recent natural SARS-CoV-2 variants - ScienceDirect https://www.scienced...001037022001398

[Mind]

No more posts about the origins in this thread - post in this other thread dedicated to the topic.