BEIJING — China is rejecting allegations that the coronavirus pandemic may have originated in a laboratory near the city of Wuhan where contagious samples were being stored.
We will never know, and it doesnt really matter. Cats out of the bag.
More probably, “the shit is out of the [crazy] bat.”
Trump now owns the IC. I don’t accept without proof a word they say anymore. And the rest of the world has great scientists to keep them honest. This is QAnon crap.
But then the researchers compared SARS-CoV-2 with other coronaviruses recently found in nature, including in bats and pangolins. “It looks like SARS-CoV-2 could be a mix of bat and pangolin viruses,” Garry says.
Viruses, especially RNA viruses such as coronaviruses, often swap genes in nature. Finding genes related to the pangolin viruses was especially reassuring because those viruses’ genetic makeup wasn’t known until after SARS-CoV-2’s discovery, making it unlikely anyone was working with them in a lab, he says.
Coronaviruses that infect pangolins gave researchers important clues that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is natural.
In particular, pangolins also have the amino acids that cause the tight binding of the spike protein to ACE2, the team found. “So clearly, this is something that can happen in nature,” Andersen says. “I thought that was very important little clue. It shows there’s no mystery about its tighter binding to the human [protein] because pangolins do it, too.”
The sugar-attachment sites were another clue that the virus is natural, Andersen says. The sugars create a “mucin shield” that protects the virus from an immune system attack. But lab tissue culture dishes don’t have immune systems, making it unlikely that such an adaptation would arise from growing the virus in a lab. “That sort of explained away the tissue-culture hypothesis,” he says.
Similarity of SARS-CoV-2 to bat and pangolin viruses is some of the best evidence that the virus is natural, Hodcroft says. “This was just another animal spillover into humans,” she says. “It’s really the most simple explanation for what we see.” Researchers still aren’t sure exactly which animal was the source.
If anyone’s interested in the science behind comparative virology, I recommend a piece in Current Biology from 10 days ago:
Probable Pangolin Origin of SARS-CoV-2 Associated with the COVID-19 Outbreak
Best way to eradicate the DrumpfenVirus 16 is to shelter it in place until it burns itself out. I would suggest the same for the Epstein/Barr virus, as half of that was eradicated through isolation from the public.
Also, any offspring viruses must be dealt with to make sure they don’t create a secondary infection after the host is gone.
Is this really a discussion we need to have right now? What’s that? We do, for the excuses? Well, carry on then.
That’s the beauty of science and investigation. We will. We already know that the State Department was sending cables about the lab in 2018 and their studies of coronaviruses in bats…
It does. Because the next time that there’s an accident at the lab, we could see a totally new and deadlier strain come out.
Apparently the Chinese CDC lab in Wuhan where various wild viruses were being analyzed was located a few hundred yards from the Wuhan ‘wet market’ so even if an exact ground-zero vector cannot be identified, we can get pretty close. Closer still because the Chinese suppressed initial reports and under-reported early cases. Close enough for government work as the saying goes.
No matter what or where science traces it back to, there will always be enough out there for the conspiracy theorists to push their garbage. At best: China handled this badly. They are going to get the garbage thrown at them because they killed their own credibility to begin with.
Digging deep into the national squirrel reserve.
And according to the WaPo the other day, that “wet market” didn’t sell bats.
The concern expressed in the conveniently-leaked State Department memos is that it was using inadequate safety procedures while studying transmission of naturally-occurring coronaviruses. That’s entirely consistent with a natural origin for this particular strain. And where/how it went from the wild to human matters for the obvious reason that the world needs to take steps from prevent such transmission in the future.
That said, it was probably the wet market.
If it was the wet market, we’d see these things happening on a lot more regular basis. Wherever they’re harvesting their stuff from would have the same contaminants all along.
And the Chinese government wouldn’t have worked so hard at the beginning to cover up that anything was happening until they couldn’t control it anymore.
These things – wildlife to human transmission of coronaviruses – are relatively rare events because the viruses are not evolutionarily designed to reside and transmit in humans. But it’s beyond obvious that humans are exposed to wild viruses at those wet markets all the damn time.
ETA:
This is a good reason to suspect the lab as the source, but far from the only reason that the government went into clampdown mode. First of all, it’s obvious that they didn’t have any real idea what they were dealing with for the better part of a month. Second, even when they figured out that it was spreading through human-to-human contact, they didn’t know how transmissible it was. Third, they didn’t want to overreact by shutting down everything all at once. Fourth, they didn’t want to play up their responsibility – wet market or lab, whatever, it still came from China being sloppy – for a disease that might end up killing a bunch of people elsewhere. Fifth, they probably were hoping it would burn itself out somehow, a la the Orangen Drumpfenfuhrer.
RNA testing has already disproved this racist/nationalist conspiracy theory being pushed by Trump Acolytes as a blatant attempt to give him “cover” for his inept, arrogant, and ignorantly self-centered response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
This was not an “engineered” virus, nor one cultured in a lab. It jumped from animals (apparently Bats) to Humans sometime around November 2019 and percolated for several months before exploding in a classic Pandemic manner in and around Wuhan China.
Considering the way and ease with which people travel internationally around the planet (Air Travel especially) it was inevitable that this would happen eventually with some new virus, making the Orange ShitGibbon’s selfish decision to shut down the entire NSC’s Pandemic Response Team in 2018 (simply because Obama created it) even more obscene.
Wild viruses are grown in labs all the time. This was unquestionably a wild virus that came from a wild animal, almost certainly a wild horseshoe bat. The question is whether that bat, and its accompanying viruses, was being studied in a lab. Also, you can’t “culture” a virus. They don’t grow in petri dishes.
The possibility that the virus escaped from a lab and is of natural origin are not mutually exclusive. The lab was involved in isolating viruses from the wild. I’m not saying this happened, but it should not be dismissed out of hand.
One way to look at it. But then, why send around the special police to make a doctor shut up about a new virus he was seeing? If it was totally on the up-and-up and from the wild, no reasons to take that action.
Every step they took could be their authoritarian norm, or it could be read as exactly the sort of steps that a government would take when they know exactly what is going on and they’re trying to stamp it out quietly before anyone finds out.
See my enumerated list of reasons above.
ETA: Studying coronavirus in bats tells you nothing of what the virus’s effects in humans would be. So even if you think the first transmission came via the lab, the doctors are all going to be clueless when the first patient shows up with a fever, persistent cough, and breathing trouble. That’s why they couldn’t possibly have known what they were dealing with for some time.