If we look at final report of Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic:
COVID-19 ORIGIN: COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The FIVE strongest arguments in favor of the “lab leak” theory include:
1) The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
Yes.
2) Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.
Yes.
3) Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.
Other biolabs can match this description too.
4) Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
Covid-like virus is not a Covid-19.
5) By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced.
Yes.
So, yes, it realy looks like a leak from a biolab or a deliberate spreading of the virus in preparation to a war or a trade war.
Right and it's not necessarily a causal relationship between that and censorship, but ONCE you see how coordinated it was, it starts looking like part of a bigger effort (David Martin for example has talked about some of this)
Otherwise I might not be so gung ho about it. I would have accepted "sorry, it got out, it's our fault". Accidents happen, but not when you coerce, censor, and make illegal (certain early treatment drugs) tools in the toolkit to fight the virus
That's not a counterargument. Suppose a truck's brakes go out and it gets in a crash. The fact that other trucks also have bad brakes doesn't mean this didn't cause the crash.
I think many of those points are pretty flimsy. But even if they weren't I don't know how you get to your conclusion.
That part of the world has a biolab doing gain of function research on that kind of virus because that part of the world has had problems with that kind of virus in the past. It receives finding from other countries because now that we know the source of the threat it makes sense to study it on the correct side of the world.
Zoonotic diseases are ecosystems' hedge against diversity loss and Chinas rapid growth in the last 50y has put a strain on local species such that it has activated twice before. They'd be negligent not to be attempting to prepare for a third event. Maybe they went too far in their strategy, maybe they screwed up in their containment practices, but 99-100% of this this is a nature-made weapon.
Maybe a lab managed to carve their initials into it somewhere. But we're never going to get good information about whether that's the case. Yet we're still all amped about that maybe-1% even though there's a lot of other things we could learn from here--things which nobody has any reason to spread misinformation about, and which could prevent a lot of hardship.
I cited the US congress commission report[1]. It further explained in full report[2].
In short:
1) WIV proposed to modify CoV virus to infect humans in same way as SARS CoV2 using BSL-2 lab to save costs (see screenshot). BSL-2 means that protective masks are not required.
2) No such variation of CoV virus is found in nature.
3) Paper written by Dr. Baric and Dr. Shi which describes how to perform that insertion of furin cleavage sites into SARS CoV.
So, arguments in favor of accidental leak from Chines WIH lab are strong.
However, I'm biased against Russia (it saves lot of time), so I see few more arguments in favor of accidental leak from Chinese «Vector» lab in Koltsevo (Novosibirsk), which then transferred to Wuhan by Wuhan military police after shared military training with Russian military police in Koltsevo, because «Vector» BSL-4 lab had major incident (small bang and fire which broke windows, then doors are broken and equipment is stolen by Russian military looking for a fire) few weeks before that training. Paper with instructions was published, so it was open knowledge, so Russians may tried to reproduce it in preparation to the war.
The trouble with the "not found in nature" business is that we have found far less than 1% of of the viral features that exist in nature. If you go pick a random subset of a randomly selected viral genome and determine its function, you're virtually guaranteed to have found something in nature which--until then--was not found in nature. We only bother doing that kind of research after a virus has started making people sick because it's expensive.
It's called a spillover event and not a spillover status quo because it's new to us. To argue that it's manmade because we didn't see it coming is a gross overestimation of man's ability to make such things and of his ability to anticipate them. Even if we can glue things together that we found in nature, the threatening part is not the glue.
The rest appears to be politics and has no bearing on what science might learn from COVID. Especially the first link, which reads more like a bunch of people patting their boss on the back in hopes that they don't get fired and nothing like the result of any kind of research. Nevermind their conflict of interest, what would congresspeople know about it in the first place?
Some may release viruses of surprising structure on purpose or by accident, and nature does it also. That makes it relevant to understand ways to prevent and mitigate the impact of such events, but the nationalities of the people involved just doesn't impact the science in any way.
I would be interested in reading the paper about the furin cleavage. Are you sure your link 3 is going to the right place?
This article https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7836551/ has good explanation about furin cleavage site. Basically, it just fragment of genetic code, which allows virus to fuse with human cells much more easily.
It more interesting HOW this fragment get there. Recombination with an other virus is ruled out, so only 3 options are left: 1) virus evolved in an animal (none found), 2) virus evolved in a human (none found), 3) virus created in a lab (paper exists with exact instruction how to do it).
Yes, third link is not correct. It just catches my attention, because if Russians did it (accidentally or not) then general Kirilov must be responsible for it, so the link between Kellog (Trump) and Kirilov (Putin) surprised me.
Figure 6 shows that the emergence of the site has also occurred in many of SARS-COV-2's relatives, and their positions in the family tree indicate that these were independent evolutions, not a trait passed on ancestor-wise.
Do you suppose that the other such cases happened in a lab also? Or could it be that evolution favors the adaptation because it makes for a fitter virus?
Of course, it can be evolution of the virus like in all cases before SARS CoV2, but no animal reservoir, where this evolution happened, is found.
Viruses are not alive, so evolution cannot be performed without a chain (tree) of host animals and/or humans. However, in this case, it looks like it was jump, not evolution. At one point of time we see the virus in wild without ability to easily infect humans, then at another point in time we see the almost same virus, but perfectly adapted to infect humans, and nothing between them.
If this was an evolution in the wild, then thousands, maybe millions, of "almost SARS CoV2" cases should surface after years of search. They are not found, thus evolution happened in a closed environment, like a secret cave or a biolab.
> If this was an evolution in the wild, then thousands, maybe millions, of "almost SARS CoV2" cases should surface after years of search
I question that assumption. Evolution happens in tiny bursts (founder organisms, population bottlenecks, etc) in between which are relatively long periods of Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (i.e. periods where evolution is not happening). That's why when we look into the fossil record we're (typically) able classify our findings as one of several stable species, rather than some sort of smooth spectrum in which everything is equally represented a transitional state to something else.
There's a very strong sampling bias where you're much more likely to find an organism in equilibrium and not an individual that was part of whatever transition you're interested in. If this were not the case, the existence of evolution would've been a no-brainer rather than a discovery that biologists had to fight to establish.
In the last 4 years there have been 20 variants of concern, but currently there are only two (https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/variants-concern). So on average these populations only last something like six months before they're outcompeted by a new variant--and that's six months for populations in equilibrium. If you're looking to collect a sample in a non-equilibrium state, it seems likely to me that your window for doing so might only last a few weeks.
So they're looking for the missing link, and they haven't found it yet. But it's not clear how likely they are to ever find it, so the jump from "they haven't found it" to "it was never in nature" is not warranted.
One experiment that could be done, which I think would shed light on the situation, would be sample modern humans in an attempt to find the first variant (discovered in 2019). If we find it easily, maybe we should expect to find its ancestors relatively easily, supposing they're out there (never mind that animals are harder to work with than humans). Then again, it may be extinct, in which case we should probably not hold our breaths about finding its ancestor either.
But sequencing experiments cost on the order of $100-$1000 to do, so neither my proposed experiment nor the quest to find the reservoir species are likely to happen at a scale of
> thousands, maybe millions, of ... cases
Sure, you might get more than one virus per sample, but typically the way to sort that out is to align the reads (typically 100-200 nucleotides long) to a reference genome. It works well when your sample came from one individual with genetically identical cells. I'm not sure how quickly things get murky when you've got a pile of reads from a sample with hundreds or thousands of genetically dissimilar viral particles, plus whatever non-viral DNA ended up in the sample, but I'd be surprised if you could get more than 10 or 20 reliable alignments out of it. Eventually your error bars are going to get too big and you're not going to know which data goes which which sites. I haven't worked with an assay like that before but I'm positive that there are going to be limits to how much you can squeeze out of a single run.
Viruses are evolving at somewhat constant rate, because constant rate of mutations is required to bypass immune system. Viruses must mutate or they will be eliminated by immune system of their hosts. So, we can multiple the rate of mutations by number of hosts to get average speed of evolution.
By looking at genome of virus strain and knowing rate of mutations and number of hosts, we can calculate the time passed between them. By testing immune response for variants of the virus, we can find the person, who was infected first, AKA «patient zero», then look for a nearby cave and find the animal, which started the infection.
So, by prediction, the infection in humans started at Sep-Oct 2019. First known patient in China was infected in Nov 2019: too late for the «patient zero». It means that infection, most likely, originated outside of China, where original bat virus was found. So, we will NEVER find a cave in China with pre-covid19 virus, because infection started outside of China. 0
The cave with pre-covid virus is in China, but infection started outside of China. WTF?
Explosion at «Vector» lab, Koltsevo, Novosibirsk, Siberia, Russia was at Sep 16 2019, so we have match here. +1
Joint training of Chinese from Wuhan and Russian military police was started at Oct 11, 2019. They cannot bring infection from China to Russia because first case in China was in November, but Chinese police can be infected in Russia and return to China with infection in late October-November. +1
First report in media about sudden increase in cases of atypical pneumonia (start of infection) in Krasnoyark Krai, Siberia (700 cases per week) was at Oct 16, 2019. +1
So, we have 0 points in favor of animal origin, and 3 points in favor of lab origin.
That really just looks like 0 points on either side to me. I find it quite plausible that it started outside of China, because why not, but if there was some kind of foul play involved I don't see why we should expect to be able to unravel the misinformation without having been personally involved.
Basically none of the reporting on it was accurate. I had it two weeks prior to the first reported case in my state and was told that "everybody who needs a test can get one" and was unable to get a test because I wasn't sick enough to justify it (which is fine, but if that's how your surveillance works then your data is useless).
It's a big cloud of lies and I just don't see the utility of peering into it and trying to assign blame when that same energy could be put towards being prepared for next time.
COVID-19 ORIGIN: COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The FIVE strongest arguments in favor of the “lab leak” theory include:
1) The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
Yes.
2) Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.
Yes.
3) Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.
Other biolabs can match this description too.
4) Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
Covid-like virus is not a Covid-19.
5) By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced.
Yes.
So, yes, it realy looks like a leak from a biolab or a deliberate spreading of the virus in preparation to a war or a trade war.