Thank you for posting this. WHO-China report found that COVID almost certainly came out of China and the market is just the amplifying venue. It's the racist and xenophobic groups that are trying to incite hatred against China by spreading propaganda.
> And, no, critics of China are not automatically or even likely racist and xenophobic.
Especially since some people refuse to distinguish between people talking about the PRC and people talking about people of Chinese ethnicity. It's an obvious enough tactic once you're looking for it, but damn if it can't throw a smoke grenade into the discussion.
Hard to see lab-leak as intrinsically anti-China giving that it was NIH financing those GoF experiments which produced the coronavirus in Wuhan. That same story for example is pushed in Russia, who is making friends with China, as anti-American. So basically the story is interpreted as anti-something depending on your political orientation.
To be clear - the NIH never financed any GoF experiments in Wuhan. There was a proposal that was never funded, and even in that proposal, the GoF work would happen in Baric's North Carolina lab.
To be clear - during 2014-2019 NIH actually paid $3.6M to EcoHealth Alliance under the grants clearly specifying the coronavirus GoF experiments in Wuhan with the "Human subjects included" checked. EcoHealth naturally kept about 75% of it as "commission/management fee/whatever" because conducting those experiments at BSL2 in Wuhan was much cheaper than the original experiments in US at BSL3+ (in those original experiments they were able to increase virality of the deadly, yet low viral original SARS by inserting spike protein to allow for ACE2 based cell entry - the hallmark of the coronavirus - and after that the research was moved to Wuhan https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...).
It was the 2018 proposal for additional money - EcoHealth naturally trying to double dip - for those GoF experiments in Wuhan to insert very human specific gene sequences into the coronavirus which was rejected as "Hell no, that is too risky!" by .. wait for it ... DARPA. Well as DARPA rejected it was still funded after that by the Fauci's NIAID.
And the rest is history - in November 2019 the coronavirus magically "naturally" jumped onto humans supposedly in the Wuhan market a thousand kilometers from the natural habitat of its closest natural siblings. We are all free to choose our Morpheus' pill, blue or red :)
Aside from he rest of the weird conspiracy insinuation I've come to expect - you should probably know that horseshoe bats are endemic to the caves around Wuhan and were studied by virologists in the hills above the biggest animal trade in Hubei.. So it's probably best if you stop making the silly claim about them being 1,000km away if you want to bolster your case.
“In October 2015, we collected serum samples from 218 residents in four villages in Jinning County, Yunnan province, China (Fig. 1A), located 1.1–6.0 km from two caves (Yanzi and Shitou). We have been conducting longitudinal molecular surveillance of bats for CoVs in these caves since 2011 and have found that they are inhabited by large numbers of bats including Rhinolophus spp., a major reservoir of SARSr-CoVs.
[…]
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.”
The rest of the comment is the same exact meritless insinuation I've replied to 100 other times in this thread. It's tiring replying to people who don't understand the first thing about biology or virology because you have to retrace so much ground just to get them to the point where they can comprehend why they're 'not even wrong'.
But sure, I'll bite. Aside from the completely false claim there aren't horseshoe bats near Wuhan. A small grant (only $1.5M was ever paid) to a lab studying coronaviruses after a huge coronavirus outbreak (SARS) isn't remotely interesting and especially isn't evidence of a lab leak. And the "human subjects" was literally just to run PCRs on people who live near bats to try and catch viruses early.
More to the point, it's not difficult to see whether a virus was engineered or manipulated with GoF research and this one wasn't. So all of the silly distractions about right-wing bogeyman like Peter Daszak secretly funding Chinese bioweapons are irrelevant.
The grant is evidence of research not of the leak.
>And the "human subjects" was literally just to run PCRs on people who live near bats to try and catch viruses early.
we don't really know what was done with the "subjects". The IRB document would probably be a good starting point here. When you're doing GoF by specifically increasing human targeting virality by creating chimera viruses in the lab, the "PCRs on people who live near bats" sounds a bit sideway.
> it's not difficult to see whether a virus was engineered or manipulated with GoF research and this one wasn't.
really depends on how GoF is done. So far such conclusions in this case came from the people coopted and prompted by Daszak while those people weren't aware of the conflict of interest that Daszak has here.
>So all of the silly distractions about right-wing bogeyman like Peter Daszak secretly funding Chinese bioweapons are irrelevant.
that is strawman argument. The facts of Daszak involvement is clearly and widely documented. As to his motivation or final target - it is clearly a matter of interpretation and scale of fantasy of the one doing interpretation, and as i already mentioned in Russia for example, where fantasy these days runs amok and political interests are very specifically directed, it is interpreted in the opposite direction - as US building bioweapons. (Note: in my interpretation i see no bioweapons or the likes, just a somewhat dangerous research performed with a bit of corner cutting (not necessary for the reason of costs, as the speed of research at lower BSL
also improves a lot), and instead of looking into the mistakes and how to make such research safer - i think such research is unavoidable - the issue got highly politicized with no any useful outcome as a result)
Could you please make your substantive points without name-calling and swipes? It's against the site guidelines. It's also not in your interest, since it weakens your case.
If you didn't notice you're pushing the 2021 work by that same Wuhan institute. It is as trustworthy in that matter as that EcoHealth Aliance's owner/PI Daszak's conclusion that the coronavirus wasn't of their making.
Yes, the WIV does indeed study the bats that we're questioning. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make? The claim you're questioning is "There are horseshoe bats near Wuhan".
Do you think they just invented the bats? I mean... they're on video...
>The claim you're questioning is "There are horseshoe bats near Wuhan".
That again is a strawman argument. I didn't say anything about bats. I was talking about the natural siblings of COVID-19, ie. the coronaviruses using ACE2 (like for example WIV1). Those viruses were found in Yunnan (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711), a 1000km from the Wuhan, and weren't found in Wuhan. Given that Yunnan people there have incomparably higher chances to get exposed to those viruses, there are no chances that one of such viruses was brought on a bat/civet from Yunnan to the market in Wuhan and jumped on human for the first time there without such a virus independently infecting significant number of people in Yunnan. On top of that that supposed natural COVID-19 virus supposedly did such a first jump on human in Wuhan market at exactly the same time when the Wuhan lab produced in BSL2 environment (hardly can be called "biosafety" at all, especially for an airborne virus) a chimeric virus by all accounts indistinguishable from COVID-19. It isn't a conspiracy theory. It is probability theory.
If we imagine that an event of such vanishingly small probability did happen, then it would be a crown achievement of human science worth 10 Nobels - just think about it - creating the same virus at the same place at the same time as the supposedly "natural" beginning of the pandemic. EcoHealth and WIV would be doing non-stops victory laps, and we would be putting bronze statues of Daszak on every corner of every public street. Instead all the participants - the WIV, EcoHealth, NIH and China government went total denial and "5th amendment" and started that huge PR campaign to spread that nonsense that thinking that an airborne virus can escape BSL2 makes you a racists conspiracy theorist.
> during 2014-2019 NIH actually paid $3.6M to EcoHealth Alliance under the grants clearly specifying the coronavirus GoF experiments in Wuhan with the "Human subjects included" checked.
From your comment it was unclear to me what the human subjects component was. It appears to have been population surveillance using PCR and antibody testing, with the intent to detect prior infection by previously unrecognized coronaviruses. Which is low-risk.
From the public project details, it is not clear that the scope of the work as described to the NIH included gain of function experiments. Perhaps you were referring to a different project description? And of course EcoHealth Alliance may have done gain of function experiments that were not described in their proposal.
"
Baric had developed a way around that problem—a technique for “reverse genetics” in coronaviruses. Not only did it allow him to bring an actual virus to life from its genetic code, but he could mix and match parts of multiple viruses. He wanted to take the “spike” gene from SHC014 and move it into a genetic copy of the SARS virus he already had in his lab. The spike molecule is what lets a coronavirus open a cell and get inside it. The resulting chimera would demonstrate whether the spike of SHC014 would attach to human cells.
...
In 2014, the NIH awarded a five-year, $3.75 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance to study the risk that more bat-borne coronaviruses would emerge in China, using the same kind of techniques Baric had pioneered. Some of that work was to be subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
...
In 2017, Daszak and Shi followed with another study, also at BSL-2, that one-upped Baric’s work in North Carolina. The WIV had continued to unearth dozens of new SARS-like coronaviruses in bat caves, and it reported making chimeras with eight of them by fusing the spikes of the new viruses to the chassis of WIV1. Two of them replicated well in human cells. They were, for all intents and purposes, brand-new pathogens.
Yep, acknowledgments in the 2017 paper linked by the MIT article check out as referencing the grant I linked, and the paper does describe work with chimeric viruses.
