And there it is.
You have asserted that "a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus" is a fact, and provided one study that says "we can't rule it out" and one study that is non-peer reviewed, with a collection of other works cited.
Your best evidence put forward (https://www.researchgate.net/publica...virus_Pandemic) didn't really cite any peer-reviewed evidence for this either. Read through it, and best typified by pg 97 of the pdf showing the peer-reviewed citations for his work. None of them address this hypothesis directly.
I find a hard time seeing how you have concluded this is a "fact" on so little peer-reviewed science.
Last edited by RandomGuy; 03-21-2023 at 11:53 AM. Reason: cleaned it up to make it more clear.
The only thing I really see is another example of how conspiracy theories and their proponents argue.
What should be a scientific hypothesis is presented as an ironclad "fact", and little to no peer-reviewed science is presented.
If it is that clear, the evidence should be overwhelming. Real science is heavily probabilistic. "likely" "probable" "almost certainly". very rarely do we get to "100%".
Extra-ordinary claim, requiring extra-ordinary evidence.
Until then, Occama razor applies.
You'll have to ask pgardn about that claim that was from his source. Sorry I had been attributing that quote to him previously and forgot to put it in a quote box this time.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sci...ak-11622995184
You mean like this?
This is a solid read that makes the case for a lab leak.
https://alexwasburne.substack.com/p/...origin-of-sars
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there had been 7 recorded SARS coronavirus outbreaks, including SARS-CoV-1. While SARS-CoV-1 provided a very clear and consilient picture of an animal trade outbreak across many lines of evidence, the other 6 out of 7 outbreaks were caused by laboratory accidents, most of them in China. The laboratory outbreaks of SARS coronaviruses all lacked the geographic trail of the SARS-CoV-1 animal trade outbreak; they caused singular outbreaks far from wildlife hotspots and in cities like Beijing, right next to labs studying coronaviruses. SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan and nowhere else, next to one of the largest coronavirus research labs in the world, leaving no geographic trail of infections consistent with an animal trade outbreak and emerging in a country where the majority of recorded SARS outbreaks have been lab-related.
https://alexwasburne.substack.com/p/...origin-of-sars
"Approximately 1.67 million undescribed viruses are thought to exist in mammals and birds, up to half of which are estimated to have the potential to spill over into humans,"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8053939/
Prior to SARS-CoV-2, a furin cleavage site had never before been observed in a SARS coronavirus. We had sampled hundreds of SARS CoVs around SE Asia and found nothing. When we reconstruct the SARS-CoV evolutionary tree, we can see over 1,000 years of evolutionary time where lineages branched off from one-another and, at every point in evolutionary time, they had every opportunity to acquire a furin cleavage site. Yet, they did not, at least not in all ~80 SARS CoVs we had discovered prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. In that entire millennium of SARS CoV evolution, there is not a single furin cleavage site, except for that found in Wuhan 2 years after researchers proposed to insert a furin cleavage site in Wuhan.
https://alexwasburne.substack.com/p/...origin-of-sars
Prior to SARS-CoV-2, a furin cleavage site had never before been observed in a SARS coronavirus. We had sampled hundreds of SARS CoVs around SE Asia and found nothing. When we reconstruct the SARS-CoV evolutionary tree, we can see over 1,000 years of evolutionary time where lineages branched off from one-another and, at every point in evolutionary time, they had every opportunity to acquire a furin cleavage site. Yet, they did not, at least not in all ~80 SARS CoVs we had discovered prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. In that entire millennium of SARS CoV evolution, there is not a single furin cleavage site, except for that found in Wuhan 2 years after researchers proposed to insert a furin cleavage site in Wuhan.
https://alexwasburne.substack.com/p/...origin-of-sars
Peter Daszak authoring
That's an opinion article (light in facts as well).
Here's another fact:
Zoonoses can be caused by a range of disease pathogens such as emergent viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites; of 1,415 pathogens known to infect humans, 61% were zoonotic. Most human diseases originated in non-humans; however, only diseases that routinely involve non-human to human transmission, such as rabies, are considered direct zoonoses.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1088493/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/...4.2004.00078.x
Again, zoonosis is what you expect from pretty much any disease.
There are 12 authors to that study. Feel free to write your rebuttal to it. Probably will require more than an emoticon tho.
Of course its light in facts (very light, actually, which is probably why ended up in a substack instead of an actual paper).
It's one giant rant with very few links to any reputable studies.
Peter Dasak's DEFUSE proposal at WIV
https://s3.do entcloud.org/do en...e-proposal.pdf
We’ve gone over the geographic and genomic evidence that makes SARS-CoV-2 highly unusual among other SARS coronaviruses. SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan in 2019 far from the hotspots of wildlife coronavirus diversity, right next door to world leading labs studying wildlife coronaviruses, and it emerged with a human-specific furin cleavage site and the restriction map of an infectious clone.
Less than 1.5 years earlier, researchers at the Wuhan Ins ute of Virology and elsewhere proposed to insert a human-specific furin cleavage site in a SARS coronavirus in Wuhan.
Read those last two paragraphs again.
The DEFUSE proposal is where researchers laid out their intentions to make a virus shockingly similar to SARS-CoV-2 in all of the ways in which SARS-CoV-2 is glaringly different from wildlife SARS coronaviruses.
The DEFUSE proposal was a grant proposal written by Peter Daszak at EcoHealth Alliance in NYC (EHA), Zheng-Li Shi at the Wuhan Ins ute of Virology (WIV), Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Linfa Wang at Duke-NUS Singapore, and others. The proposal was submitted to DARPA’s PREEMPT call, a grant call looking for innovative ideas to preempt pathogen spillover before it occurs.
The DEFUSE proposal contained many specific aims: catching bats, sending samples from bats to labs, looking for viruses in the samples, studying and modifying the viruses in labs, developing raccoon poxvirus vaccines to boost immunity & protect bats against the viruses, testing the viruses + immune-boosting in bats, forecasting where spillover is most likely to occur, and deploying vaccines in wild bats to preempt spillover.
If you look on page 11 of the main do ent, page 13 of the online PDF above, under the section labelled “S2 proteolytic cleavage and glycosylation sites”, you can find the most important passage in this do ent.
The researchers propose to scan SARS-CoV genomes for potential furin cleavage sites and, where none exist, they propose to insert the appropriate cleavage sites. Specifically, they say:
”… we will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in Vero and HAE cells”
In other words, a major aim of the DEFUSE proposal was to study furin cleavage sites, features never before do ented in SARS CoVs. They would look for furin cleavage sites that might exist and, where none existed, they will introduce human-specific cleavage sites to create a virus not found in nature but hypothesized- for good mechanistic reasons based on our knowledge of furin cleavage sites - to have higher transmissibility in people and, consequently, a higher risk of causing a pandemic like the COVID-19 pandemic. Where none existed, researchers proposed to insert human-specific furin cleavage sites in viruses, and study whether or not their poxvirus vaccine protects bats from these unnatural coronaviruses they designed. Studies of the infectivity of high-risk strains in bats, and whether or not the immune boosting methods at Duke-NUS protected bats from high-risk strains, was proposed to take place at the Wuhan Ins ute of Virology.
The DEFUSE grant was not funded, but that doesn’t mean the research didn’t continue. Scientists are often like actors: the show must go on. EcoHealth Alliance had many sources of funding, and the proposed research inserting a human-specific FCS in a bat SARS-CoV is relatively inexpensive. In fact, three PIs of DEFUSE - Peter Daszak, Lin-Fa Wang, and Zheng-Li Shi, had created a chimeric bat coronavirus in 2016 without the involvement of UNC. Peter Daszak had a grant at NIAID - Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence - that funded a collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance and Chinese researchers, including Zheng-Li Shi at the Wuhan Ins ute of Virology, to study bat coronaviruses in China (Ralph Baric was missing from both the 2016 paper and, apparently, the NIAID grant). The NIAID grant was listed in the acknowledgements for their construction of a recombinant bat SARS CoV in the 2016 paper. Researchers in China also had access to alternative lines of funding. The researchers had ample means to follow through with their intentions spelled out in DEFUSE, especially relatively inexpensive work but exciting work such as inserting human-specific furin cleavage sites in SARS CoV infectious clones.
In 2018, researchers indisputably proposed to insert human-specific furin cleavage sites in bat SARS-CoVs in a collaboration involving the Wuhan Ins ute of Virology. Their prior work creating recombinant CoVs used a particular method to construct infectious clones of viruses using reverse genetics systems.
In late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged with a human-specific furin cleavage site in what otherwise looked like a bat SARS-CoV right outside the Wuhan Ins ute of Virology. This virus is anomalous among wild coronaviruses in just how consistent it is with reverse genetic systems, all the way down to silent mutations significantly concentrated in restriction sites.
Every single anomalous feature of SARS-CoV-2 that leads us to suspect a lab origin, features not seen in over 1,000 years of evolutionary time, was spelled out in a grant just over 1 year prior to the emergence of the virus. That grant did not propose to do its work in Atlanta nor Athens nor Cape Town nor Milan nor Buenos Aires. It proposed to do this work in Wuhan.
The virus with this lab-looking genome was not found in animals in the wet market. It was equally likely to be found underneath animal traders as vegetable traders. It did not cause a geographically widespread outbreak consistent with an animal trade outbreak. Simply put, it did not look zoonotic in ways that are easily explained by a lab origin, and it has a genome that looks exactly like a research product from a proposal to make recombinant bat coronaviruses in Wuhan.
https://alexwasburne.substack.com/p/...origin-of-sars
This thing isn't a matter of "faith" (I used to believe this, now I believe that), this is why these opinions are just that, opinion.
There's been no irrefutable, conclusive evidence that COVID came from one place or another. Better odds are it's zoonotic by virtue of the fact that the vast (60%+) majority of pathogens that infect humans come from there, but that's also not conclusive.
What is indeed very problematic is China's outright refusal to collaborate with investigations on this.
There's no counterpoint there to the paper I posted. Again, opinions are just opinions.
Not saying you seem to buy into conspiracies all the time, but if it walks like a duck...
There is extremely convincing evidence it came from a lab. I've yet to see any convincing evidence it was zoonotic and I'm waiting for someone to post it.
Link to actual studies on that? Not somebody's personal blog, thanks.
You must've missed "Most human diseases originated in non-humans" and the linked study supporting that (which predates COVID, BTW).
I just think you don't understand what zoonotic means. You just been told it's the new word to hate.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...10.18.512756v1
Your study predating COVID doesn't help your case, BTW.
I didn't miss that most human diseases originated in non-humans. A genetically modified virus could still have originated in non-humans.
I just don't think you understand the importance of a furin cleavage site never being observed in any prior SARS CoVs.
bioRxiv posts many COVID19-related papers. A reminder: they have not been formally peer-reviewed and should not guide health-related behavior or be reported in the press as conclusive.
Hmmm.
Is there a right wing conspiracy theory TSA didn't buy into?
That's a preprint, but thanks for sharing.
Of course it helps my case that zoonotic is as old as humans, and not a matter of politics du jour. Again, that doesn't mean it's conclusive, irrefutable evidence, but that's basically the default origin for most every disease known to man.
The bar to claim something is zoonotic is very low because that's how most human diseases came to be, even before there was any type of gene manipulation available.
Conversely, the bar is high when it comes to making claims of not being zoonotic, for the same exact reason.
It doesn't help your case as the authors of the paper had never seen a virus with the genetic make up of covid-19 when it was written. Well...maybe one of the authors had seen it as it's highly likely he helped fund and create it.
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