Origins of SarsCoV-2 virus, does it matter & why?

[CNT36]

Or were the labs floating around near likely sites of a crossover?

 

[CNT36]

Posted this on the international thread but actually more relevant here. This talk discusses the link between ecological and habitat destruction and fragmentation, and the emergence of pandemics, so talks about that rather than the lableak possbility, but very good listening as a primer on zoonotic diseases.

Planetary Health: approaches to zoonotic spillover, indigenous health, and rainforest conservation

<p>As industrial civilization assaults the worlds remaining rainforests the health and cultural diversity of indigenous peoples is threat...

media.ccc.de

"As industrial civilization assaults the worlds remaining rainforests the health and cultural diversity of indigenous peoples is threatened along with much of the biodiversity of the planet. In turn these human changes to ecosystems, combined with vast expansion of domestic animal populations, cause spillover of zoonotic diseases which threaten the health of people worldwide. As with HIV and Ebola, every death from COVID-19 is an environmental effect."

It's quite likely that some spillover was happening semi-regularly anyway. As well as an impact on ecosystems the way human societies are structured has undergone changes. Whereas at one point a hunter who infected themselves cutting up a carcass may have got sick and maybe a few of their friends and family now it can spread. Those consuming the meat may have been similarly limited but now it could be traded much further.

Looks interesting. I'll try and give it a listen.

 

[l'Otters]

Why has this lab leak theory taken off so comprehensively? Seems pretty clear that it came from bats tbh

For me it was the article in the bulletin, linked by yossarian just above one of your posts, that opened the subject up months after I’d been convinced it was clear cut, animal spillover, humans interfering with wild. That article goes through a lot of what I based my previous conclusions on and puts holes through them. Sort of like all the scientists who said the lab leak wasn’t possible were marking each other’s homework. And points out some vested interests that might motivate some of them to do a cover up. But some of the sources of that bulletin article have since come out and massively rowed back on what they said in it.
It’s put the subject back on the table for discussion though.

 

[l'Otters]

It's quite likely that some spillover was happening semi-regularly anyway. As well as an impact on ecosystems the way human societies are structured has undergone changes. Whereas at one point a hunter who infected themselves cutting up a carcass may have got sick and maybe a few of their friends and family now it can spread. Those consuming the meat may have been similarly limited but now it could be traded much further.

Looks interesting. I'll try and give it a listen.

I read a theory sometime last year that as sars2 has been identified in sewage samples back in early 2019 at various places around the globe, it had made the species jump well before the December 2020 outbreak at the wet market. The wet market conditions having provided it with the circumstances to take off, like adding dry kindling and blowing on it.

 

[CNT36]

I read a theory sometime last year that as sars2 has been identified in sewage samples back in early 2019 at various places around the globe, it had made the species jump well before the December 2020 outbreak at the wet market. The wet market conditions having provided it with the circumstances to take off, like adding dry kindling and blowing on it.

There is some evidence it may have passed back and forth between animals and humans a few times before gaining pandemic potential.

 

[xenon]

Guess we'll never know for sure, what with the CCP being like they are, but it is a bit bloody suspect to have these virus labs in Wuhan, it's not like every city has a couple of the things, they are incredibly rare and it just happens that the virus was first floating around right next to these labs.

Yep. I'm 70% it was an accidental release of a virus studied in one of those labs. There have been subsequent reports of how a US led deligation went to check them out for biosecurity a few years ago and found measures a bit... slack.

The WHO investigation recently seems to have been a bit weak...

I don't believe SarsCOV-2 is a man made virus though.

 

[weltweit]

.. it had made the species jump well before the December 2020 outbreak at the wet market. The wet market conditions having provided it with the circumstances to take off, like adding dry kindling and blowing on it.

December 2019 - by January 2020 it was spreading around the world.

 

[IC3D]

The anti vaxx loons I know are in a tiz about the lab leak theory as presumably doesn't tie in with the truth and weakens the bulshit. So it's got legs as far as I'm conserned

 

[LDC]

The anti vaxx loons I know are in a tiz about the lab leak theory as presumably doesn't tie in with the truth and weakens the bulshit. So it's got legs as far as I'm conserned

Oh, I'd have thought they'd be over the moon and saying how it proved it was some version of the bonkers ideas they have. It leaked before it was perfected for purposeful release or something... although they'd be happier if the lab was in the US. Maybe the anti-imperialist conspiracy wing will claim it's the US covering it up by blaming China.

 

[elbows]

The reason it's taken off recently seems to be based on reports that several Wuhan lab researchers became sick in the autumn of 2019 with symptoms similar to covid, and that at least three ended-up in hospital, basically just before it started taking off in Wuhan.

That was one of the recent things that got it going again, but really the conversation about these possibilities came to life this year because the WHOs first major report into the origins was way too lopsided, which led to push back in the other direction.

A lot of what we are hearing is a much needed rebalancing which has only been required to be so dramatic because the original stance the mainstream took was inappropriately narrow and dismissive of the lab possibility.

Given the currently available evidence, which is very slight, probably the best approach currently in regards 'who to believe' is that any person or article that sounds really confident about one origin possibility over the others needs to be viewed with some doubt, watered down, blended with other positions etc.

 

[elbows]

I read a theory sometime last year that as sars2 has been identified in sewage samples back in early 2019 at various places around the globe, it had made the species jump well before the December 2020 outbreak at the wet market. The wet market conditions having provided it with the circumstances to take off, like adding dry kindling and blowing on it.

Separate from the exact origin theories I was interested in the timing of the disease. There have been a handful of reports about samples being found in people or sewage in various countries the period a little while before the Wuhan outbreak. But I dont think I ever got more info that could build on those claims, and I've also had to treat such research with extra suspicion because China became very interested in pushing the idea that the virus emerged in a country that wasnt China. As a result of this and other factors, I dont currently feel like I possess any confirmed facts that change the origin location or timescale, but am open to anything research and evidence that casts light in this direction.

It would be reasonable to assume that if it was floating around somewhere else first, with an earlier timescale, it probably had weaker transmission potential than the version that caused an explosive outbreak in Wuhan. Not that this offers many clues since we've seen how quickly this virus can gain mutations which confer significantly enhanced ability to transmit between people.

 

[l'Otters]

This is from July 2020: Evidence that the COVID-19 virus existed in March 2019 would be ‘highly surprising’ says expert
I wonder if the preprint study it refers to, the one which identified the virus’s rna in sewage samples in Europe as early as March 2019, has been peer reviewed yet.

 

[Supine]

Interesting study of some bats!

DEFINE_ME

 

[platinumsage]

More on the disappearing sequences from March 2020:

Recovery of deleted deep sequencing data sheds more light on the early Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 epidemic

The origin and early spread of SARS-CoV-2 remains shrouded in mystery. Here I identify a data set containing SARS-CoV-2 sequences from early in the Wuhan epidemic that has been deleted from the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive. I recover the deleted files from the Google Cloud, and reconstruct...

www.biorxiv.org

 

[zahir]

Thread from Zeynep Tufekci. The article itself is behind a paywall.




eta: this link to the article may work

 

[elbows]

Nice to see they explained the 1970s influena pandemic that was probably caused by a lab accident. I do bore on about that one rather a lot.

 

[zahir]

More from Zeynep Tufekci

Surely There's a Better Way

Lack of attention to basics is hampering the lessons we could learn from the origins discussion

www.theinsight.org

It refers to this article:

Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

China emulated US techniques to construct novel coronaviruses in unsafe conditions.

www.technologyreview.com

 

[elbows]

WHO chief:

He said there had been a “premature push” to rule out the theory that the virus might have escaped from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan - undermining WHO's own March report, which concluded that a laboratory leak was “extremely unlikely.”

“I was a lab technician myself, I’m an immunologist, and I have worked in the lab, and lab accidents happen,” Tedros said. “It’s common.”

WHO chief says it was ‘premature’ to rule out Covid lab leak

The head of the World Health Organisation has acknowledged it was premature to rule out a potential link between the COVID-19 pandemic and a laboratory leak

www.independent.co.uk

 

[elbows]

I do not consider the following to be a smoking gun, but it does provide some clues about what sort of experiments were proposed before the pandemic, which institutions were interested and capable of such things etc. So I consider it to be useful background info and a more reliable setter of the scene than those who seek to create a misleading impression that sciences aspirations and capabilities in this field were very limited. Whether anything in the leaked documents will surprise you probably depend on your previous opinion and knowledge of gain-of-function experiments.

The 'oh no its all messy and lets pretend there is a consensus about a natural source' framing in this article is a bit annoying and I'll probably look into certain detail a bit more from other sources, but since this article was my starting point on this development I may as well post it.

The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier

A new leaked document is stirring up another frenzy over the pandemic’s origins. What does it really tell us?

www.theatlantic.com

 

[elbows]

In the somewhat likely event that we never get to the bottom of the source of this outbreak, the positive outcome that may result is that we end up having to act to reduce the risk across all the potential domains. So all the animal-human interfaces and associated industries, as well as the areas where humans try to be too clever for their own good in labs. But I'm sure people expect resistance on all those fronts, and that we'll not find out very much about the shadowiest world of all, bioweapons research.

 

[l'Otters]

This looks like a positive development:

Report: Consumption of Wildlife Drops Almost 30% Over Perceived Links to Pandemics Like COVID-19

Survey and report conducted for WWF by GlobeScan: ‘COVID-19: One Year Later: Public Perceptions about Pandemics and their Links to Nature’

globescan.com

"Consumption of wildlife has dropped by almost 30% across China, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and the USA due to shifting cultural tastes and concerns about COVID-19. Governments are also stepping in, with China banning the consumption of wild animals last year and Vietnam also introducing restrictions."

 

[cupid_stunt]

Interesting article from the Telegraph.

A laboratory leak is now the more likely origin of Covid, MPs have heard, because after two years of searching an animal host has never been found.
Speaking to the Science and Technology Select Committee, Dr Alina Chan, a specialist in gene therapy and cell engineering at MIT and Harvard, said there was also a risk that Covid-19 was an engineered virus.
Dr Chan, said: “I think the lab origin is more likely than not. Right now it’s not safe for people who know about the origin of the pandemic to come forward. But we live in an era where there is so much information being stored that it will eventually come out.

I've busted the paywall, so the full article is here - archive.ph

 

[elbows]

Unclear if we will ever find out the full extent to which Chan who features in that article was right or wrong, but she is certainly my kind of human. I value the gadfly and such things come naturally to me. I doubt she got everything right, and I dont buy into every avenue she explored, but I think she went about it in mostly the right way.

She’d been involved in a whistleblowing complaint about working conditions in a lab at Harvard. (Both Chan and Harvard have declined to comment on the details.) Chan always seemed to be the one who took a stand, even if it didn’t bode well for her career. “I am stupid that way,” she says. “A born shit stirrer.”

They called it a conspiracy theory. But Alina Chan tweeted life into the idea that the virus came from a lab.

The whistleblowing scientist who advanced the lab-leak theory plans to change her name and disappear, but only after a book deal.

www.technologyreview.com

Even if we never get to the bottom of it, remember and learn from how the media originally behaved in regards these issues. And how easily I could have been written off here as a nutty conspiracy theorist if I hadnt already earned some shreds of credibility via my thoughts on other aspects of the pandemic.

 

[Supine]

Interesting article from the Telegraph.



I've busted the paywall, so the full article is here - archive.ph

Here is a counter point to that argument and the weakness of the authors method/conclusion.

These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead they exposed its weaknesses

In 'Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,' Alina Chan and Matt Ridley ignore scientific consensus in favor of specious, dangerous guesswork.

www.latimes.com

 

[elbows]

Despite what I said earlier, I'd still strongly recommend that people beware of anyone who is keen to reach a conclusion. Come to terrms with the uncertainty.

That LA times article is pretty fucking shit too, feeble. 'Scientific consensus' my arse, and the u-turn that the media and authorities had to indulge in a while back was a good demonstration that pathetic calls to back an imaginary scientific consensus are bogus and discredited, a simplistic trick that failed, not up to this task.

 

[elbows]

Give short shrift to those who want to wed themselves to a dull narrative, close ranks, establish a fake degree of certainty and avoid uncomfortable questions about power, their profession and lab safety by masquerading these things as being a 'scientific consensus'.

But on the other side of things, to be quite clear, I expect that if I actually read Chans book I would end up with quite a long list of criticisms. I am a fan of shit-stirring and not buying into the most convenient, simplistic narratives that we are sold, but when trying to counter such things there will almost inevitably be plenty of shit of another variety.

 

[Supine]

I usually avoid these threads that bring out the raving and the conspiraloons. Not sure why I dared post on it tbh

 

[elbows]

Perhaps you missed the bit where the mainstream were forced into retreat, abandoning their previous line. Plus the pathetic smears of the type that you indulge in were found to be entirely insufficient to neatly deal with the complex issues involving the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

Reasonable sounding dullards who dutifully tow the line dont do justice to the truth any more than raving nuts do.

And to be clear my stance is unchanged - it is not possible for me to reasonably determine the origins, I cannot rule either possibility out. I just happen to have a deep disrespect for those who pretend otherwise.

 

[Supine]

Perhaps you missed the bit where the mainstream were forced into retreat, abandoning their previous line. Plus the pathetic smears of the type that you indulge in were found to be entirely insufficient to neatly deal with the complex issues involving the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

Reasonable sounding dullards who dutifully tow the line dont do justice to the truth any more than raving nuts do.

Don’t rant at me. I have you on ignore so take anything personally if you see me post on urban.

Your multi post waffle kinds of confirms my feelings about this thread.

 

[elbows]

I will continue to rant at whatever posts I please. I may be rude about it but I do try to include some actual points that I consider relevant. If you have me on ignore then it shouldnt matter to you.