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Origin of Covid-19


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1 minute ago, Nivek said:

You volunteering to invade?  Stop buying products from that country?  

I think a reprimand would be a nice start. But buying fewer products and moving manufacturing slowly to other areas would be a good second step. The products are generally crap anyway.

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7 minutes ago, Bevo said:

I think a reprimand would be a nice start. But buying fewer products and moving manufacturing slowly to other areas would be a good second step. The products are generally crap anyway.

Seems to me the first part is short term touchy feely crap.   Long game is to continue to influence China into becoming more economically dependent upon the West to prompt more internal change without firing a shot.   

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We should offset our Covid related costs against the trillions of US debt China holds.  At least negotiate a reduction.  Many say that it would completely screw the US in the credit markets.  Well, don’t release (negligently or otherwise) a global pandemic and you’ve got nothing to worry about.  

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2 hours ago, HouTex said:

We should offset our Covid related costs against the trillions of US debt China holds.  At least negotiate a reduction.  Many say that it would completely screw the US in the credit markets.  Well, don’t release (negligently or otherwise) a global pandemic and you’ve got nothing to worry about.  

I don't disagree with the spirit of your post, but just to clarify, China holds a little less than $1T of US national debt-- around $968B to be more precise  They're the second-largest holder, behind Japan who holds $1.24T.

China's holdings represent about 3% of the total national debt which is not insignificant, but I feel like a lot of people believe China owns far more of the US national debt than it actually does.

But that still doesn't alter the fact there is risk associated with defaulting on some of that debt as some type of reparation or adjustment against COVID expenses.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-3306124#:~:text=The public holds over %2424.29,and holders of savings bonds.

 

 

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11 minutes ago, utee94 said:

I don't disagree with the spirit of your post, but just to clarify, China holds a little less than $1T of US national debt-- around $968B to be more precise  They're the second-largest holder, behind Japan who holds $1.24T.

China's holdings represent about 3% of the total national debt which is not insignificant, but I feel like a lot of people believe China owns far more of the US national debt than it actually does.

But that still doesn't alter the fact there is risk associated with defaulting on some of that debt as some type of reparation or adjustment against COVID expenses.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-3306124#:~:text=The public holds over %2424.29,and holders of savings bonds.

 

 

China is the second-largest FOREIGN holder, I meant to say, behind Japan.  The US holds the majority of its own debt in various ways that we probably shouldn't get into on this thread. :)

 

 

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2 hours ago, HouTex said:

We should offset our Covid related costs against the trillions of US debt China holds.  At least negotiate a reduction.  Many say that it would completely screw the US in the credit markets.  Well, don’t release (negligently or otherwise) a global pandemic and you’ve got nothing to worry about.  

So your justification for the US fucking itself over in the credit markets is that China released a virus? Am I reading that correctly? 

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6 hours ago, utee94 said:

I don't disagree with the spirit of your post, but just to clarify, China holds a little less than $1T of US national debt-- around $968B to be more precise  They're the second-largest holder, behind Japan who holds $1.24T.

China's holdings represent about 3% of the total national debt which is not insignificant, but I feel like a lot of people believe China owns far more of the US national debt than it actually does.

But that still doesn't alter the fact there is risk associated with defaulting on some of that debt as some type of reparation or adjustment against COVID expenses.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-3306124#:~:text=The public holds over %2424.29,and holders of savings bonds.

 

 

I haven’t tracked it recently but when I looked at the amount that China holds early in the pandemic I thought it was in the 3-4 T range.  I could be wrong.  Still, it’s a start. Why pay those assholes anything. 

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6 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

That seems to me to be a partisan political screed as much or more than any serious attempt to address any of this.

Seems the new Congress is off to a great start.  In general I agree there should be as extensive an investigation as feasible into the origins of Covid, but in practice I don’t really see The Lancet / NYT / etc somehow breaking down the walls of communist China to find proof of origin and ‘hold them accountable’.  
 

So…good luck y’all?  Get yourself to Wuhan and start banging on the door of the lab…I’m sure it was just US journalists that needed convincing to really figure it out this time.  

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7 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

That seems to me to be a partisan political screed as much or more than any serious attempt to address any of this.

I saw it last night while dicking around on my phone.  I had a hard time reading it TBH because the PDF renders the text too small on my phone.  Still, I figured it was germane to the topic of this thread.  I looked at the list of people at the end who signed the letter honestly don't know who most of them are.

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On 1/6/2023 at 7:43 PM, HouTex said:

I haven’t tracked it recently but when I looked at the amount that China holds early in the pandemic I thought it was in the 3-4 T range.  I could be wrong.  Still, it’s a start. Why pay those assholes anything. 

Because not doing so will fuck US citizens, Einstein. Jesus, it burns in here.

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On 1/13/2023 at 12:08 PM, Eastwood said:

I think China played the primary role in COVID destroying the world as we know it, but we’ll have to be more patient than the excruciatingly patient Chinese to punish them. China essentially boiled the American frog over the last 4 decades by taking advantage of our “perpetual growth paradox” approach towards business. Substantial year over year growth became the expectation for American businesses and China was a conduit to lower costs, so we started relying heavily on them for manufacturing to the point where even components in critical military equipment and infrastructure are made in China with unknown hardware backdoors that could shut that equipment down if a hot war broke out.  
 

China is our friend as much as a drug dealer is to a junkie. They kept life cheap long enough for us to get addicted. The solution is to use the same “boiled frog” approach toward breaking away from them, but at a quicker pace because the Chinese government is temperamental and prideful. The moment they catch on that significant change is occurring, they’ll turn the screws on us in an attempt to inflict as much damage as possible as quickly as possible. There is no diplomacy, there are no beneficial deals to be done. It’s a deal with the devil every time, so we need to find Jesus, so to speak. The moment we stop playing ball is the moment they turn overtly hostile, economically first. But if we can position ourselves well enough, we mitigate the damage and let them flail until they burn out, much like post-Soviet Russia has been doing. 
 

It needs to be done, but we still lack the willpower, both politically and economically, to do it. To borrow from a popular phrase uttered during the last major global conflict, we’ll do the right thing after exhausting all other options. 

There is no action required here other than to extract what we can while China's own existential demographic issues inexorably play out.  

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There is no action required here other than to extract what we can while China's own existential demographic issues inexorably play out.  

This. It took decades for China to become the particular entity and problem that it is today. It will take decades for them to change materially, to our betterment and their detriment. The demographic crash is coming, and they can’t stop it.
Patience, young bull….let’s WALK down there and screw ALL of them.
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42 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:


This. It took decades for China to become the particular entity and problem that it is today. It will take decades for them to change materially, to our betterment and their detriment. The demographic crash is coming, and they can’t stop it.
Patience, young bull….let’s WALK down there and screw ALL of them.

I dont think it will take decades.  The next 10 years will be rough on them, but do agree with the sentiment.  Almost always better to walk down there and make sure you dont miss any choice meat.

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I dont think it will take decades.  The next 10 years will be rough on them, but do agree with the sentiment.  Almost always better to walk down there and make sure you dont miss any choice meat.

Unwinding major manufacturing and supply chains that took 40+ years to get to this point won’t change in 10 years. Too much capital invested. You have to let that investment depreciate enough on its own (which takes time) before it’s worthwhile to move the next iteration somewhere else.
And don’t think China will LET it go that easily. They need the inflow of $$$. Western reshoring is an actual national security threat to them; they won’t accept it quietly.
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1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:


This. It took decades for China to become the particular entity and problem that it is today. It will take decades for them to change materially, to our betterment and their detriment. The demographic crash is coming, and they can’t stop it.
Patience, young bull….let’s WALK down there and screw ALL of them.

It's all fun and games until that crash causes them to lash out by invading Taiwan or something worse. 

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It's all fun and games until that crash causes them to lash out by invading Taiwan or something worse. 

Correct. Meaning, while it’s fun to bash China, and smart to decouple from them to a degree…you can’t flat-out attack (militarily or economically) a country with a billion+ people and a very large economy without some serious fallout.
Realpolitik should be the order of the day.
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On 12/29/2022 at 1:26 PM, FartingMonk said:

That's why our vaccine was damned near 95 percent effective and everyone else's was shit.  We got lucky right

 

America we're just so fucking smart.

Wh were are you getting the 95% effective data from?

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On 1/8/2023 at 1:10 PM, Samson's Wig said:

 The Mexican border is begging for a 1,951 mile long manufacturing region. 

I mean, I'm a big proponent of moving as much manufacturing as we can to Mexico, but have you ever driven through the border area? From Nuevo Laredo to Monterey there is basically nothing but scrub brush. You need towns and cities full of people to support manufacturing. 

 

As far as the origen of the virus and China goes, I feel like at best they were negligent and were lax in their lab procedures. There needs to be some sort of response from the international community to pressure them to get their crap together or it will be sort of like Russia annexing Crimea. It will only be a matter of time before something else escapes a lab and it could be much worse.

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On 1/6/2023 at 12:55 PM, utee94 said:

I don't disagree with the spirit of your post, but just to clarify, China holds a little less than $1T of US national debt-- around $968B to be more precise  They're the second-largest holder, behind Japan who holds $1.24T.

China's holdings represent about 3% of the total national debt which is not insignificant, but I feel like a lot of people believe China owns far more of the US national debt than it actually does.

But that still doesn't alter the fact there is risk associated with defaulting on some of that debt as some type of reparation or adjustment against COVID expenses.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-3306124#:~:text=The public holds over %2424.29,and holders of savings bonds.

 

 

Not talking about china or default risks but generally With respect to the idea that “US debt load doesn’t matter” idea the categories of holders makes that more evident. The volume of debt held by mutual funds, local governments, and individuals effectively makes the US debt operate like a high yield savings account. That makes the US government and its bonds more like a bank than a debtor. I’ve always kinda known that but until I focused on that break down it didn’t really hit home. 
 

nice share thanks. 

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Alas, finding out will just get harder. A predictable, but unfortunate, development. 

 

WHO abandons plans for crucial second phase of COVID-origins investigation

Text:

Spoiler

The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly shelved the second phase of its much-anticipated scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China, Nature has learned.

Researchers say they are disappointed that the investigation isn’t going ahead, because understanding how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people is important for preventing future outbreaks. But without access to China, there is little that the WHO can do to advance the studies, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. “Their hands are really tied.”

In January 2021, an international team of experts convened by the WHO travelled to Wuhan, China, where the virus that causes COVID-19 was first detected. Together with Chinese researchers, the team reviewed evidence on when and how the virus might have emerged, as part of phase one. The team released a report in March that year outlining four possible scenarios, the most likely being that SARS-CoV-2 spread from bats to people, possibly through an intermediate species. Phase one was designed to lay the groundwork for a second phase of in-depth studies to pin down exactly what happened in China and elsewhere.

But two years since that high-profile trip, the WHO has abandoned its phase-two plans. “There is no phase two,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told Nature. The WHO planned for work to be done in phases, she said, but “that plan has changed”. “The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins,” she said.

Researchers are undertaking some work to pin down a timeline of the virus’s initial spread. This includes efforts to trap bats in regions bordering China in search of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2; experimental studies to help narrow down which animals are susceptible to the virus and could be hosts; and testing of archived wastewater and blood samples collected around the world in late 2019 and early 2020. But researchers say that too much time has passed to gather some of the data needed to pinpoint where the virus originated.

Tense times
Many researchers aren’t surprised the WHO’s plans have been thwarted. In early 2020, members of then US president Donald Trump’s administration made unsubstantiated claims that the virus had originated in a Chinese laboratory, and US intelligence officials later said they had begun investigations. The city of Wuhan is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high-security lab that works on coronaviruses. Chinese officials questioned whether the virus originated inside the country’s borders.

In the midst of simmering hostility between the two superpowers, WHO member states requested in May 2020 that the agency put together a science-led effort to identify how the pandemic started. Although China agreed to the mission, tensions were high by the time the WHO group left for Wuhan, and engagement with China quickly unravelled after the group returned.

In its March 2021 report, the team concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus accidentally escaped from a laboratory. But the inclusion of the lab-incident scenario in the final report was a key point of contention for Chinese researchers and officials, says Dominic Dwyer, a virologist at New South Wales Health Pathology in Sydney, who was a member of the WHO team.

That July, the WHO sent a circular to member states outlining how it planned to advance origins studies. Proposed steps included assessing wild-animal markets in and around Wuhan and the farms that supplied those markets, as well as audits of labs in the area where the first cases were identified.

But Chinese officials rejected the WHO’s plans, taking particular issue with the proposal to investigate lab breaches. Zhao Lijian, the spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, said the WHO proposal was not agreed by all member states, and that the second phase should not focus on pathways the mission report had already deemed extremely unlikely.

In August 2021, members of the original mission team published a Comment piece in Nature urging quick action on the proposed studies to trace the virus’s origins. “We wrote that piece because we were worried phase two might not happen,” says Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and a member of the mission to Wuhan. “I’m sorry to say that that’s indeed what panned out.”

Stalled work
Gerald Keusch, associate director of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory Institute at Boston University in Massachusetts, says the origins investigation was “poorly handled by the global community. It was poorly handled by China. It was poorly handled by the WHO.” The WHO should have been relentless in creating a positive working relationship with the Chinese authorities, says Keusch; if it was being stonewalled, it should have been honest about that.

Van Kerkhove says that the WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has continued to directly engage with Chinese government officials to encourage China to be more open and to share data. And WHO staff have reached out to the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing to try to establish collaborations. “We really, really want to be able to work with our colleagues there,” says Van Kerkhove. “It’s really a deep frustration.”

The Chinese ministry of foreign affairs did not respond to Nature’s e-mailed requests for comment on why the phase-two studies have stalled.

In November 2021, the WHO formed the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) — a permanent team of experts who have since written a proposal for how to conduct origins studies for future outbreaks. SAGO has also evaluated evidence on the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

Blood-donors study
Outside the formal WHO-led process, some studies proposed for phase two have gone ahead. In May last year, researchers in Beijing and Wuhan published the results1 of an analysis of donor blood supplied to the Wuhan Blood Center before December 2019. The researchers were looking for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies that could signify some of the earliest infections in the pandemic. The team screened more than 88,000 plasma samples collected between 1 September and 31 December 2019, but did not find any SARS-CoV-2-blocking antibodies in the samples.

Michael Worobey, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, says the work is an important contribution from Chinese scientists, supporting earlier genomic analyses2 showing that the virus probably had not emerged as early as September and was not widespread in Wuhan in late 2019.

Another study3 by researchers from China, which has not been peer reviewed, reported finding traces of SARS-CoV-2 in January and February 2020 at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, which was visited by many of the earliest known people with COVID-194. Samples were taken from sewage, drains, the surfaces of doors and market stalls, and from the ground, among other places. The researchers concluded that the virus was probably shed by humans, but Rasmussen and others are keen to take a closer look at the raw data, which included swabs from a defeathering machine, to see whether they can identify animal species.

“I still hope that progress will be made,” says Thea Fischer, a public-health virologist at the University of Copenhagen, who was a member of the mission to Wuhan and is part of SAGO.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00283-y

 

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On 1/13/2023 at 7:16 AM, bernorange said:

I saw it last night while dicking around on my phone.  I had a hard time reading it TBH because the PDF renders the text too small on my phone.  Still, I figured it was germane to the topic of this thread.  I looked at the list of people at the end who signed the letter honestly don't know who most of them are.

That's fair.  It's an ostensibly neutral think tank with a conservative bent, not MAGA Q lunacy.  But still.

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1 hour ago, bernorange said:

FWIW:

 

So, he writes several things in there that I've seen disputed, or at least their importance disputed, by multiple sources.

"SARS-CoV-2 has a furin cleavage site (FCS) not found in any other SARS coronavirus."

"In contrast, SARS-CoV-2 contained many highly unusual features most consistent with genetic engineering."

"The FCS has a red-flag of codons optimized for humans, not for bats."

Below I'll provide a few sources that have disputes these statements.

Quote

Harrison and Sachs (1) make a serious accusation against scientists at the University of North Carolina (UNC) and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) based on an eight-amino-acid sequence similarity between the furin cleavage site (FCS) of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Spike and one of the FCSs of human amiloride-sensitive epithelial sodium channel α subunit (ENaC) (2). Both proteins have the sequence RRARSVAS (Fig. 1A). Harrison and Sachs cite work on rat ENaC from UNC (3, 4) and suggest that the UNC and WIV coronavirologists may have mimicked human ENaC FCS to make SARS-CoV-2 more infectious for lung epithelia.

Numerous features of SARS-CoV-2 FCS demonstrate that it was not engineered to mimic human ENaC:

• Alignment of the nucleotide sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike gene with the closest known coronavirus Spike gene from Laotian bat coronavirus BANAL-20-52 (5) clearly shows that four extra amino acids (PRRA), not eight, were added to the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein (Fig. 1B).

• There was an insertion of 12 nucleotides into the Spike gene (Fig. 1B, box) (6). This nucleotide insertion is out of frame (6, 7).

• The insertion adds a proline not present in ENaC.

• Except for one codon (cgu that encodes arginine 685), each of the codons for RRARSVAS is different in human ENaC and SARS-CoV-2 (Fig. 1B).

• Five of eight amino acids (RSVAS; underlined in Fig. 1A, red box in Fig. 1C) in or near the ENaC FCS sequence shared with SARS-Cov-2 Spike are present in Spikes of sarbecoviruses, such as BANAL-20-52. It would be illogical to use the FCS from ENac rather than from a FCS of another coronavirus.

Harrison and Sachs’s (1) claim that alignment of sarbecovirus Spike amino acid sequences illustrates“the unusual nature of the [SARS-CoV-2] FCS” is misleading. FCSs are common in coronaviruses, and present in representatives of four out of five betacoronavirus subgenuses (8). The highly variable nature of the S1/S2 junction is easily ascertained by inspecting a precise alignment of sarbecovirus Spikes (Fig. 1C).

After commenting about the “unusual nature” of the SARS-CoV-2 FCS, Harrison and Sachs (1) then argue the opposite. With regard to our earlier publication (7), they write, “In fact, the assertion that the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 has an unusual, nonstandard amino acid sequence is false.” We made no such assertion. Rather, we noted that the SARS-CoV-2 FCS is “suboptimal.” We also noted, correctly, that placing the insertion out of frame would be “an unusual and needlessly complex feat of genetic engineering.”

The immediate proximal ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 did not come directly from a bat to a human, but first evolved in an intermediate host. Two related lineages of SARS-CoV-2—lineage A and lineage B—first infected humans via the wildlife trade at the Huanan Market in Wuhan (9, 10). For the ENaC hypothesis to be true, UNC or WIV researchers would have had to possess the direct SARS-CoV-2 progenitor isolated from another animal—not a bat.

 

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119

Quote

Similar to the closely related SARS-CoV, the cognate receptor of the SARS-CoV-2 spike is angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2)1,10. While the SARS-CoV S1/S2 junction is well characterized as being cleaved by serine proteases or cathepsins, the SARS-CoV-2 spike, similarly to the more distantly related Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (MERS-CoV), contains a polybasic CS, characterized as being a suboptimal furin CS6,11,12,13. This polybasic CS is absent from the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, although similar polybasic CSs are found in more distantly related coronaviruses

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00908-w

Quote

The spike protein is a focused target of COVID-19, a pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2. A 12-nt insertion at S1/S2 in the spike coding sequence yields a furin cleavage site, which raised controversy views on origin of the virus. Here we analyzed the phylogenetic relationships of coronavirus spike proteins and mapped furin recognition motif on the tree. Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165

Quote

 

Like MERS-CoV (but not SARS-CoV), SARS-CoV-2 was found to carry a furin cleavage site (NSPRRAR↓SV) because of a 12-nucleotide insertion (Coutard et al., 2020; Walls et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2020), which has led to speculation that this cleavage site may be artificial. However, analysis of coronavirus sequences has shown that natural evolution of the furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 S protein is highly probable (Wu and Zhao, 2020). The furin-cleavage motif of SARS-CoV-2 S protein is recognized and cleaved during virus packaging, which can promote viral infectivity as a result of the conformational change required for exposure of the protein’s receptor-binding domain (Wrobel et al., 2020; Peacock et al., 2021). Another study has suggested that co-expression of neuropilin-1 (NRP1), which is known to bind furin-cleaved substrates, with ACE2 and TMPRSS2, can also enhance SARS-CoV-2 infectivity (Daly et al., 2020).

Evidence obtained from both in vivo and in vitro studies has confirmed that the furin cleavage site plays key roles in SARS-CoV-2’s infectivity and pathogenicity. Several studies have shown that the site promotes the S protein’s mediation of virus–cell fusion (Cheng et al., 2020; Hoffmann et al., 2020; Xia et al., 2020). A mutant that lacks the PRRA motif reportedly has higher replication rates than wild-type in Vero E6 cells, but lower rates in a human respiratory cell line (Johnson et al., 2021). In vivo experiments indicate that loss of the furin cleavage site in the S protein considerably attenuates the pathogenesis and infectivity of SARS-CoV-2, by reducing its replication rates in early stages of infection in both hamsters and K18-hACE2 transgenic mice, which express human ACE2 (Johnson et al., 2021). Moreover, Peacock et al. (2021) found that mutant SARS-CoV-2 with a deleted furin cleavage site had low replicability in the upper respiratory tracts of model animals (ferrets) and was not transmitted to cohoused sentinel animals (Peacock et al., 2021). Thus, presence of a furin cleavage site in S protein is crucial for replication (Papa et al., 2021), pathogenesis, and transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (Johnson et al., 2020). This might explain why SARS-CoV-2 has higher transmissibility than SARS-CoV.

 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2021.649314/full

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14 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

So, he writes several things in there that I've seen disputed, or at least their importance disputed, by multiple sources.

 

I agree that those particular aspects have been disputed. Also none of those aspects are really essential to the contrast between the outbreak pattern associated with spillover and a focal lab breach. Those specific items get more to evidence of specific types of lab manipulation, which I think is distracting and non-essential to the lab release origin. Any thoughts on the contrasts made between the H5N1 and SARS-Cov-1 spillover events and the SARS-Cov-2 outbreak in the thread?

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24 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

I agree that those particular aspects have been disputed. Also none of those aspects are really essential to the contrast between the outbreak pattern associated with spillover and a focal lab breach. Those specific items get more to evidence of specific types of lab manipulation, which I think is distracting and non-essential to the lab release origin. Any thoughts on the contrasts made between the H5N1 and SARS-Cov-1 spillover events and the SARS-Cov-2 outbreak in the thread?

I agree with what you say here. Lab release and lab manipulation are two distinct areas of inquiry. It makes sense to not conflate them, even though there may be some overlap. You're much more a subject matter expert than I am, so I'm happy to leave more of the hard science questions to you. The most I can say on the last point is that there does appear to be a lot of evidence consistent with a lab release. It certainly shouldn't be discounted out of hand. But, just like some of the statements above, his statements on spillover have a similar certainty that doesn't seem warranted by the known facts. For instance, he says "These pathogens have to spillover many times before they can get a foothold in a new host population. In contrast, SARS-CoV-2 took off immediately upon entering humans." Given our lack of insight into China during the beginning of the pandemic, it isn't obvious to me that we can know that. There may have been sputtering starts many times in China in 2019 before the real explosion of cases. He may ultimately be right. But right now I view any claims by him with skepticism because it appears he is playing a little loose with the facts. 

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Yeah. I think that bringing up stuff about the cleavage site or the codons is just distracting from what are pretty compelling circumstantial evidence regarding the lab leak. There are reasonable points to be made on both sides of those issues, imo. But I am not an expert in any way on that.  FWIW, I still don't think that we are dealing with bioengineering necessarily here, despite the fact that WIV was proposing exactly the types of research that could result in a SARS-Cov-2 like virus in the years leading up to the outbreak. I still think that the most likely scenario is collection of viruses from nature, some light lab manipulation consistent with culturing and passage, and an accidental lab leak. It is the best fit of all the data points, at least imo.  

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Sorry fellas. We’ve tried everything, and are all out of ideas. 
 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00283-y
 

The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly shelved the second phase of its much-anticipated scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China, Nature has learned.

Researchers say they are disappointed that the investigation isn’t going ahead, because understanding how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people is important for preventing future outbreaks. But without access to China, there is little that the WHO can do to advance the studies, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. “Their hands are really tied.”

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WSJ: Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a?mod=hp_lead_pos1

 

 

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WASHINGTON—The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.

The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.

The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.

The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.

The Energy Department made its judgment with “low confidence,” according to people who have read the classified report.

The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with “moderate confidence” and still holds to this view.

im-731641?width=700&height=466

A nurse cared for a patient at a California intensive-care unit in May 2020 as Covid-19 continued to spread across the U.S.PHOTO: ALLISON ZAUCHA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The FBI employs a cadre of microbiologists, immunologists and other scientists and is supported by the National Bioforensic Analysis Center, which was established at Fort Detrick, Md., in 2004 to analyze anthrax and other possible biological threats.

U.S. officials declined to give details on the fresh intelligence and analysis that led the Energy Department to change its position. They added that while the Energy Department and the FBI each say an unintended lab leak is most likely, they arrived at those conclusions for different reasons.

The updated document underscores how intelligence officials are still putting together the pieces on how Covid-19 emerged. More than one million Americans have died in the pandemic that began more than three years ago.

The National Intelligence Council, which conducts long-term strategic analysis, and four agencies, which officials declined to identify, still assess with “low confidence” that the virus came about through natural transmission from an infected animal, according to the updated report.

The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency that officials wouldn’t name remain undecided between the lab-leak and natural-transmission theories, the people who have read the classified report said.

Despite the agencies’ differing analyses, the update reaffirmed an existing consensus between them that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program, the people who have read the classified report said.

A senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed that the intelligence community had conducted the update, whose existence hasn’t previously been reported. This official added that it was done in light of new intelligence, further study of academic literature and consultation with experts outside government.

The update, which is less than five pages, wasn’t requested by Congress. But lawmakers, particularly House and Senate Republicans, are pursuing their own investigations into the origins of the pandemic and are pressing the Biden administration and the intelligence community for more information.

 
im-731644?width=700&height=466

The updated report was completed by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office earlier this year.PHOTO: JOSE LUIS MAGANA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Officials didn’t say if an unclassified version of the update would be issued.

U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan declined to confirm or deny the Journal’s reporting in an appearance Sunday on CNN. He said President Biden had repeatedly directed every part of the intelligence community to invest in trying to discern as much as possible about the origins of the pandemic. 

“President Biden specifically requested that the national labs, which are part of the Energy Department, be brought into this assessment because he wants to put every tool at use to be able to figure out what happened here,” Mr. Sullivan said.

There are a “variety of views in the intelligence community,” Mr. Sullivan added. “A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information.”

Asked about the Energy Department’s assessment, Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Ala.) said Sunday on NBC that Congress needed to hold extensive hearings concerning the origins of the pandemic, adding that China has sought to intimidate other countries from questioning whether the virus emerged naturally. “This is a country that has no problem coming out and lying to the world,” he said.

The Covid-19 virus first circulated in Wuhan, China, no later than November 2019, according to the U.S. 2021 intelligence report. The pandemic’s origin has been the subject of vigorous, sometimes partisan debate among academics, intelligence experts and lawmakers.

David Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist who has argued for a dispassionate investigation into the pandemic’s beginnings, welcomed word of the updated findings.

“Kudos to those who are willing to set aside their preconceptions and objectively re-examine what we know and don’t know about Covid origins,” said Dr. Relman, who has served on several federal scientific-advisory boards. “My plea is that we not accept an incomplete answer or give up because of political expediency.”

An Energy Department spokesman declined to discuss details of its assessment but wrote in a statement that the agency “continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of COVID-19, as the President directed.”

The FBI declined to comment.

China, which has placed limits on investigations by the World Health Organization, has disputed that the virus could have leaked from one of its labs and has suggested it emerged outside China.

The Chinese government didn’t respond to requests for comment about whether there has been any change in its views on the origins of Covid-19.

Some scientists argue that the virus probably emerged naturally and leapt from an animal to a human, the same pathway for outbreaks of previously unknown pathogens.

Intelligence analysts who have supported that view give weight to “the precedent of past novel infectious disease outbreaks having zoonotic origins,” the flourishing trade in a diverse set of animals that are susceptible to such infections, and their conclusion that Chinese officials didn’t have foreknowledge of the virus, the 2021 report said.

Yet no confirmed animal source for Covid-19 has been identified. The lack of an animal source, and the fact that Wuhan is the center of China’s extensive coronavirus research, has led some scientists and U.S. officials to argue that a lab leak is the best explanation for the pandemic’s beginning.

U.S. State Department cables written in 2018 and internal Chinese documents show that there were persistent concerns about China’s biosafety procedures, which have been cited by proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis.

Wuhan is home to an array of laboratories, many of which were built or expanded as a result of China’s traumatic experience with the initial severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, epidemic beginning in 2002. They include campuses of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, which produces vaccines.

im-731645?width=700&height=466

The Energy Department revised its assessment of the origins of Covid-19, according to an updated U.S. intelligence report.PHOTO: ERIC LEE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

An outbreak at a seafood market in Wuhan had initially been thought to be the source of the virus, but some scientists and Chinese public-health officials now see it as an example of community spread rather than the place where the first human infection occurred, the 2021 intelligence community report said.

In May 2021, President Biden told the intelligence community to step up its efforts to investigate the origins of Covid-19 and directed that the review draw on work by the U.S.’s national laboratories and other agencies. Congress, he said, would be kept informed of that effort.

The October 2021 report said that there was a consensus that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program. But it didn’t settle the debate over whether it resulted from a lab leak or came from an animal, saying that more information was needed from the Chinese authorities.

The U.S. intelligence community is made up of 18 agencies, including offices at the Energy, State and Treasury departments. Eight of them participated in the Covid-origins review, along with the National Intelligence Council.

Before that report, the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory prepared a study in May 2020 concluding that a lab-leak hypothesis was plausible and deserved further investigation.

The debate over whether Covid-19 might have escaped from a laboratory has been fueled by U.S. intelligence that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care.

A House Intelligence Committee report concluded last year that this disclosure didn’t strengthen either the lab-leak or the natural-origin theory as the researchers might have become sick with a seasonal flu. But some former U.S. officials say the sick researchers were involved in coronavirus research.

Lawmakers have sought to find out more about why the FBI assesses a lab leak was likely. In an Aug. 1 letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, requested that the FBI share the records of its investigation and asked if the bureau had briefed Mr. Biden on its findings.

In a Nov. 18 letter, FBI Assistant Director Jill Tyson said the agency couldn’t share those details because of Justice Department policy on preserving “the integrity of ongoing investigations.” She referred the senator to Ms. Haines’s office for information on what briefings were arranged for the president.

Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com

 

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53 minutes ago, Horn of Gabriel said:

WSJ: Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a?mod=hp_lead_pos1

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.

The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.

The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.

The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.

The Energy Department made its judgment with “low confidence,” according to people who have read the classified report.

The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with “moderate confidence” and still holds to this view.

im-731641?width=700&height=466

A nurse cared for a patient at a California intensive-care unit in May 2020 as Covid-19 continued to spread across the U.S.PHOTO: ALLISON ZAUCHA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The FBI employs a cadre of microbiologists, immunologists and other scientists and is supported by the National Bioforensic Analysis Center, which was established at Fort Detrick, Md., in 2004 to analyze anthrax and other possible biological threats.

U.S. officials declined to give details on the fresh intelligence and analysis that led the Energy Department to change its position. They added that while the Energy Department and the FBI each say an unintended lab leak is most likely, they arrived at those conclusions for different reasons.

The updated document underscores how intelligence officials are still putting together the pieces on how Covid-19 emerged. More than one million Americans have died in the pandemic that began more than three years ago.

The National Intelligence Council, which conducts long-term strategic analysis, and four agencies, which officials declined to identify, still assess with “low confidence” that the virus came about through natural transmission from an infected animal, according to the updated report.

The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency that officials wouldn’t name remain undecided between the lab-leak and natural-transmission theories, the people who have read the classified report said.

Despite the agencies’ differing analyses, the update reaffirmed an existing consensus between them that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program, the people who have read the classified report said.

A senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed that the intelligence community had conducted the update, whose existence hasn’t previously been reported. This official added that it was done in light of new intelligence, further study of academic literature and consultation with experts outside government.

The update, which is less than five pages, wasn’t requested by Congress. But lawmakers, particularly House and Senate Republicans, are pursuing their own investigations into the origins of the pandemic and are pressing the Biden administration and the intelligence community for more information.

 
im-731644?width=700&height=466

The updated report was completed by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office earlier this year.PHOTO: JOSE LUIS MAGANA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Officials didn’t say if an unclassified version of the update would be issued.

U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan declined to confirm or deny the Journal’s reporting in an appearance Sunday on CNN. He said President Biden had repeatedly directed every part of the intelligence community to invest in trying to discern as much as possible about the origins of the pandemic. 

“President Biden specifically requested that the national labs, which are part of the Energy Department, be brought into this assessment because he wants to put every tool at use to be able to figure out what happened here,” Mr. Sullivan said.

There are a “variety of views in the intelligence community,” Mr. Sullivan added. “A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information.”

Asked about the Energy Department’s assessment, Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Ala.) said Sunday on NBC that Congress needed to hold extensive hearings concerning the origins of the pandemic, adding that China has sought to intimidate other countries from questioning whether the virus emerged naturally. “This is a country that has no problem coming out and lying to the world,” he said.

The Covid-19 virus first circulated in Wuhan, China, no later than November 2019, according to the U.S. 2021 intelligence report. The pandemic’s origin has been the subject of vigorous, sometimes partisan debate among academics, intelligence experts and lawmakers.

David Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist who has argued for a dispassionate investigation into the pandemic’s beginnings, welcomed word of the updated findings.

“Kudos to those who are willing to set aside their preconceptions and objectively re-examine what we know and don’t know about Covid origins,” said Dr. Relman, who has served on several federal scientific-advisory boards. “My plea is that we not accept an incomplete answer or give up because of political expediency.”

An Energy Department spokesman declined to discuss details of its assessment but wrote in a statement that the agency “continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of COVID-19, as the President directed.”

The FBI declined to comment.

China, which has placed limits on investigations by the World Health Organization, has disputed that the virus could have leaked from one of its labs and has suggested it emerged outside China.

The Chinese government didn’t respond to requests for comment about whether there has been any change in its views on the origins of Covid-19.

Some scientists argue that the virus probably emerged naturally and leapt from an animal to a human, the same pathway for outbreaks of previously unknown pathogens.

Intelligence analysts who have supported that view give weight to “the precedent of past novel infectious disease outbreaks having zoonotic origins,” the flourishing trade in a diverse set of animals that are susceptible to such infections, and their conclusion that Chinese officials didn’t have foreknowledge of the virus, the 2021 report said.

Yet no confirmed animal source for Covid-19 has been identified. The lack of an animal source, and the fact that Wuhan is the center of China’s extensive coronavirus research, has led some scientists and U.S. officials to argue that a lab leak is the best explanation for the pandemic’s beginning.

U.S. State Department cables written in 2018 and internal Chinese documents show that there were persistent concerns about China’s biosafety procedures, which have been cited by proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis.

Wuhan is home to an array of laboratories, many of which were built or expanded as a result of China’s traumatic experience with the initial severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, epidemic beginning in 2002. They include campuses of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, which produces vaccines.

im-731645?width=700&height=466

The Energy Department revised its assessment of the origins of Covid-19, according to an updated U.S. intelligence report.PHOTO: ERIC LEE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

An outbreak at a seafood market in Wuhan had initially been thought to be the source of the virus, but some scientists and Chinese public-health officials now see it as an example of community spread rather than the place where the first human infection occurred, the 2021 intelligence community report said.

In May 2021, President Biden told the intelligence community to step up its efforts to investigate the origins of Covid-19 and directed that the review draw on work by the U.S.’s national laboratories and other agencies. Congress, he said, would be kept informed of that effort.

The October 2021 report said that there was a consensus that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program. But it didn’t settle the debate over whether it resulted from a lab leak or came from an animal, saying that more information was needed from the Chinese authorities.

The U.S. intelligence community is made up of 18 agencies, including offices at the Energy, State and Treasury departments. Eight of them participated in the Covid-origins review, along with the National Intelligence Council.

Before that report, the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory prepared a study in May 2020 concluding that a lab-leak hypothesis was plausible and deserved further investigation.

The debate over whether Covid-19 might have escaped from a laboratory has been fueled by U.S. intelligence that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care.

A House Intelligence Committee report concluded last year that this disclosure didn’t strengthen either the lab-leak or the natural-origin theory as the researchers might have become sick with a seasonal flu. But some former U.S. officials say the sick researchers were involved in coronavirus research.

Lawmakers have sought to find out more about why the FBI assesses a lab leak was likely. In an Aug. 1 letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, requested that the FBI share the records of its investigation and asked if the bureau had briefed Mr. Biden on its findings.

In a Nov. 18 letter, FBI Assistant Director Jill Tyson said the agency couldn’t share those details because of Justice Department policy on preserving “the integrity of ongoing investigations.” She referred the senator to Ms. Haines’s office for information on what briefings were arranged for the president.

Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com

 

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