Thread by @Ayjchan

Got a clue for the #OriginsofCOVID #PopsicleOrigins hypothesis:
At the 15:00 min mark Peter Daszak says they’ve got really good cold chain from remote sampling sites back to the labs - at least 16,000 bat samples collected.

Finally found a source of the myth going around that 3% of people in Yunnan have SARS antibodies and millions of people are getting bat viruses each year. This is a miscommunication. See the actual paper only surveying people living close to caves where SARS detected...

In contrast to the interview, the paper says “2.7% seropositivity for the high risk group of residents living in close proximity to bat colonies suggests that spillover is a relatively rare event” albeit some sero(+) could’ve faded in this high risk group.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Have to keep pointing this out. In the same study, they tested hundreds of people from Wuhan city as a negative control - zero had SARSrCoV antibodies.

The folks saying Wuhan is a SARS spillover zone might want to consider that they’re accidentally spreading misinformation.

“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.”

Once they broadened the survey to people living a tad further out, but still proximal to caves where SARSrCoVs had been found, still in rural populations in South China, that SARS sero(+) dropped to 0.6%. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

This September 2019 paper by the WIV and Ecohealth: "The low seroprevalence observed in this study suggests that bat coronavirus spillover is a rare event."

They're still talking about rural residents in South China living close to bat caves where SARS viruses had been found.

Somehow the paper still concludes "this represents a clear and present danger to our biosafety and public health."

This claim cites 3 papers studying recombinant SARS viruses.

Ok 1:07:00 mark we get to the good part. Daszak says "there is no evidence that it escaped from a lab.. this is a classic conspiracy theory" and that this ultimately resulted in the loss of their funding from the US government.

There. He said lab escape is a conspiracy theory.

Now, based on this TWIV interview of Daszak in the summer of 2020, I'm going to start a thread getting into the TWIV interview released today.