To all the virologists and journalists asking for evidence that the pandemic virus may have been engineered in a lab, I think you missed this revelation in September 2021: theintercept.com/2021/09/23/cor…
“Let’s look at the big picture: A novel SARS coronavirus emerges in Wuhan with a novel cleavage site in it. We now have evidence that, in early 2018, they had pitched inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab.”
Put it this way, it is as if these scientists proposed to put horns on horses and 2 years later a unicorn shows up in their town. When they discover this unicorn and describe it to the public, they talk about every other feature except for the horn. ayjchan.medium.com/the-evidence-f…
If we want to know whether it was scientists or nature that put the horn on the unicorn that emerged in Wuhan and was sighted at its wet market, the only way is to properly investigate both natural and lab hypotheses.
We are entitled to have our own opinion as to which is more likely. But it would be unscientific to claim there is sufficient evidence to be confident of the #OriginOfCovid
This takes the 🍰 @Nature reporter asks Peter Daszak what he thinks of the cleavage site in the pandemic virus.
He says it enhances pathogenicity. Doesn't mention that he & Wuhan collaborators proposed putting these sites into SARS-like viruses in the lab. usrtk.org/wp-content/upl…
@Nature On @TheLancet letter that condemned all conspiracy theories suggesting the virus did not have a natural origin... looks like the support from the chief editor was too strong and several of the authors did not manage to declare their COIs before the letter was published.
@Nature@TheLancet As early as May 2020 Daszak and friends had worried about being FOIA'ed and sought to evade it by using personal gmail addresses.
h/t @Rebecca21951651
It's difficult to bet on whether the next pandemic will come from nature or a lab when you don't know what experiments are ongoing or will be carried out in hundreds of labs around the world.
It's difficult enough trying to find out what was happening in 1 lab in Wuhan #OriginOfCovid
Try scaling that to 100s of labs and predicting when and where lab-based outbreaks will occur.
Pathogen research today is very different than it was decades ago. Scientists are actively looking for pandemic potential pathogens and genetically modifying these live pathogens in the lab - labs often based in large metropolitan cities (and sometimes they have wet markets!).
Zoonosis #OriginOfCovid proponents: "The virus was well adapted for not *just* human but tons of other animals!"
I'm not sure how this makes it any less likely that the virus came from a lab where bat viruses are pushed through primate & human cells, humanized mice & civets.
Dec 2017, virologist director of an OIE reference lab in China wanted to see scientists demonstrate in the lab that the human SARS strain can jump from bats to another animal, such as a civet. "If this could have been done, the evidence would be perfect.” nature.com/articles/d4158…
Before the pandemic, Wuhan Institute of Virology: "We performed in vivo experiments in transgenic (human ACE2 expressing) mice and civets in 2018 and 2019 in the Institute’s biosafety laboratory. The viruses we used were bat SARSr-CoV close to SARS-CoV." science.org/pb-assets/PDF/…
“adaptation within humans was not needed for SARS-CoV-2 to spread”
- Proximal Origin & Friends, 2022, @ScienceMagazine
In other words, the pandemic virus was well adapted for humans.
@ScienceMagazine Proximal Origin & Friends also claim that the virus is well adapted for spreading in multiple species.
Yet, such a powerful virus left zero trace of its path and emerged in Wuhan out of all the hundreds of other cities in China and Southeast Asia.
@ScienceMagazine The scenario where the virus picked up its pandemic powers and immediately got on a non-stop high-speed train to Wuhan via an infected person or animal so as to leave no trace of its origin or journey is not impossible, but it makes for a very unlikely story.
It would be a huge letdown if the coming US-based #OriginOfCovid investigation does not ultimately lead to more insight into how the pandemic started.
Finding the origin requires looking into places where evidence is likely to exist, not just people who pushed a nature origin.
Finding the #OriginOfCovid is challenging enough without dealing with the sideshow of some scientists who squashed public discussion of the lab leak theory. Honestly, it would only help them to paint the investigation as anti-science if they become the focus of the investigation.
An investigation should spend as much of their efforts as possible on gathering incontrovertible #OriginOfCovid evidence.
Without that, the chances of holding people accountable for trying to rule out a lab leak prematurely are low because they will keep insisting "no evidence".
The methods by which some scientists culture or isolate novel viruses from nature can accidentally adapt these viruses for primate or human infection and transmission.
You don't know what viruses are in each sample but you can encourage them to grow in cells in the lab.
In VIRAL (paperback p120), we describe an instance of this by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. After 5 passages (serial passaging) in primate cells, a pig virus finally became sufficiently adept at causing cell death. nature.com/articles/s4158…
There are other unorthodox methods to grow a novel virus in the lab, such as injecting them directly into live animals instead of passaging in cells. This can also inadvertently select for viruses with the ability to jump from species to species.