1/4 Peter Daszak blocked me. He never did reply to my questions about his outrageous claim that zoonotic jumps “occur every day”.
2/4 I mean, he extrapolated rather weak results from their study (where 6 out of 218 farmers had antibodies to a bat CoV present in bats that lived nearby) to “1-7 million people per year exposed to bat origin SARS-related CoVs“.
3/4 The extrapolation from 6 to 1-7M notwithstanding, the study itself was weak. First, antibody levels were pretty low. Here’s the antibody graph from their study: compare the farmers’ levels (panel B, leftmost) with those of 2 SARS patients (rightmost):
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29500691
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29500691
4/4 2nd, the CoV they used as a proxy doesn’t even bind to human ACE2, as they showed previously. But here’s the main flaw: the presence of antibodies, doesn’t mean the virus could infect cells. You could have antibodies to a banana :)
