Controversial for what? The lab should be backed, and has been backed, and was funded by many governments around the world. Funding should be tripled so we can find these viruses before they become pandemics (the reason for their research).
Did you read the full article? They give a detailed explanation of why the project is controversial.
You might agree, you might disagree, you might want to sit on either side of the controversy, but the article substantiates quite well the usage of the adjective "controversial" in the title.
Yes, and I don't see how they're linking the lab to GoF. The GoF component of the research has been cancelled, and I would presume (due to its association with Peter Daszak) that it was cancelled due to lack of funding from American budget cuts or from safety concerns about the virus. I could be wrong on the reasons for cancellation, though.
>Many scientists have criticized gain of function research, which involves manipulating viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans, because it creates a risk of starting a pandemic from accidental release.
>More than 200 scientists called for the work to be halted. The problem, they said, is that it increased the likelihood that a pandemic would occur through a laboratory accident.
The controversy is explicitly described in the article:
>The work in question was a type of gain-of-function research that involved taking wild viruses and passing them through live animals until they mutate into a form that could pose a pandemic threat. Scientists used it to take a virus that was poorly transmitted among humans and make it into one that was highly transmissible—a hallmark of a pandemic virus. This work was done by infecting a series of ferrets, allowing the virus to mutate until a ferret that hadn't been deliberately infected contracted the disease.
>The work entailed risks that worried even seasoned researchers. More than 200 scientists called for the work to be halted. The problem, they said, is that it increased the likelihood that a pandemic would occur through a laboratory accident.
When you set these concerns next to 2018 diplomatic cables describing safety problems at the biolab in question [0], perhaps the accidental-release theory does seem worthy of investigation.
I wish we could read the diplomatic cables, but we can't, and all we have is a conservative opinion columnist's characterization of the cables. The columnist, Josh Rogin, has refused to publish the cables.
But I strongly suspect that Rogin is mischaracterizing the cables. He claims that they express alarm over a lack of trained staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Staff from the WIV are trained at a US national lab in Galveston. I think it's highly likely that the directors of the WIV told US diplomats that that support was important, and asked for it to be increased. US diplomats then wrote that the lab needed more trained staff, and that the US should increase support. Someone in the Trump administration then found this cable and "leaked" it to a friendly commentator, Rogin. Rogin then characterized it as pointing out severe problems in the lab, without letting anyone see what the cable actually says.
I'd bet the reason Rogin won't publish the cable is that on the whole, it probably doesn't support the characterization he's trying to make.
"(At this point most scientists say it's possible—but not likely—that the pandemic virus was engineered or manipulated.)"
It seems as if they're confusing the 'possibility' of the manipulation theory with the 'possibility' of the lab escape theory (which is technically possible, but very, very unlikely).
Of course the theoretical possiblity cannot be excluded. I think you're right, this can be the cause for confusion. It can also be used to promote certain agendas and spin. It even gives a certain degree of credibility, as there will be scientist that cam be quoted verbatim. I think this article falls in the agenda category, and not the confusion onr.
I agree that the link to Dr.Fauci is only "click bait" but, after reading another linked article, I have changed my mind and now I think that the Wuhan lab theory deserves some consideration.
This is the more interesting article in my opinion:
Same source, so same potential agenda. If some other new outlet, preferably multiple, are confirming the facts, that would be different. All I heard about the Wuhan lab story was CT stuff back in January and February, until it popped up again recently after Trump, allegedly, pushed US intel to dig into it. And now this, at it's core, anti Fauci piece.
My reasoning has been: new viruses jump from other animals all the time, it has happened in the past, we don't have any reason to think that is not the case this time. It's not surprising at all that it appear in the most populated country in the world.
But after learning about that lab, I have to think: that a new corona-virus appears in the wild a few kilometers out of one of the few labs specialized in corona-virus have to be explained.
Personally, I can't just disregard that because it's not politically convenient.
Numbers favour other sources than labs, as a comment pointed out above. Just apllying logic, it is more likely that the virus jumped from bats to humans in the "wild".
Political convenience aside, the question whther the SARS-Cov-2 escaped from a lab or not doesn't seem to be that important in finding a solution / cure / vaccine. All it does is playing the blame game and distract from the real problems.
Could be. Could also be "they" know exactly what happened, and are to blame for having others rediscovering the wheel (solution) again, because politics, saving face, whatever...
My basic issue with the lab escape theory: if SARS-CoV2 is a natural strain (and there is at this point no evidence that it isn't), then why assume some researcher was patient zero, when millions of other people catch bat coronaviruses each year? The following interview (from [1]) puts it succinctly:
>“If you do the math on this, it’s very straightforward. ... We have hundreds of millions of bats in Southeast Asia and about 10 percent of bats in some colonies have viruses at any one time. So that’s hundreds of thousands of bats every night with viruses,” Daszak says. “We also find tens of thousands of people in the wildlife trade, hunting and killing wildlife in China and Southeast Asia, and millions of people living in rural populations in Southeast Asia near bat caves.”
>Next, he says, consider the data he’s collected on people near bat caves getting exposed to viruses: “We went out and surveyed a population in Yunnan, China — we’d been to bat caves and found viruses that we thought could be high risk. So we sample people nearby, and 3 percent had antibodies to those viruses,” he says. “So between the last two and three years, those people were exposed to bat coronaviruses. If you extrapolate that population across the whole of Southeast Asia, it’s 1 million to 7 million people a year getting infected by bat viruses.”
>Compare that, he says, to what we know about the labs: “If you look at the labs in Southeast Asia that have any coronaviruses in culture, there are probably two or three and they’re in high security. The Wuhan Institute of Virology does have a small number of bat coronaviruses in culture. But they’re not [the new coronavirus], SARS-CoV-2. There are probably half a dozen people that do work in those labs. So let’s compare 1 million to 7 million people a year to half a dozen people; it’s just not logical.”
Thanks for this. It really change the priors, reading those numbers. I will read all the article.
Weighting against the lab theory also, it seems that there is not record of the "animal passage" technique was being used in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That seems like something necessary.
There are so many thing that I don't understand in all this, that I'm probably not qualified to have a strong opinion yet (or maybe never). For instance, I don't understand why bats are so prone to be source of viruses instead of other mammals.
* variable body temperature (they heat when they fly)
* many species roost very closely in large numbers
* weird immune system traits (they have very fast metabolisms, so they present an odd environment for pathogens)
How many of those 1 to 7 million people live near the lab? The reason the lab escape theory has gained so much traction is that the lab is a few blocks from the reported ground zero for this outbreak.
Of course that doesn't mean that the infection of patient zero happened inside the lab. If I remember correctly, then the researcher, that some have theorized to be patient zero, had recently returned from a field study. So, it's just as likely that they were infected in the field and brought it back with them. The important part is that the infection then spread from the lab and not from the wet market.
>[...] the lab is a few blocks from the reported ground zero for this outbreak.
The Wuhan Institute for Virology (BSL-4 lab) is actually 13 km away. People mixed it up with the unrelated Wuhan Center for Disease Control (BSL-2 lab).
Does that change anything, if workers from the lab frequent that market, because it's a popular central location to go to shop, eat, meet, whatever, while sloppy safety practices led to at least one of them being infected, and sneeze or cough while wandering around?
First, understand who Daszak is: yes, he's definitely an expert, but he is also not a disinterested observer. He is the PI on grants from the NIH that funded Bat Coronavirus research in Shi Zhengli's lab at the WIV. He's also stated that he's friends with Shi Zhengli.
The sequence of the virus strongly resembles RaTG13-CoV, a bat coronavirus discovered by WIV. The sequence is almost identical, except for the spike protein. The spike protein strongly resembles a Pangolin CoV also discovered by the WIV. Shi Zhengli and another researcher from WIV are authors on a paper from 2015 where they transplanted the spike protein from one Coronavirus onto the remaining parts of SARS-CoV. They've also done "serial passage" experiments, where they infect either cell cultures or live animals, so that a virus becomes more adapted to that host. One of the animals that they used for these experiments were ferrets, for which SARS-CoV-2's spike shows extremely high affinity.
Now, it's possible that two viruses recombined naturally, but then why did the virus first show up in Wuhan? Wuhan is a thousand miles from the bat caves where they found these viruses in Yunnan. As far as we know, they did not exist in Wuhan, except in the WIV's freezer.
I'd like to hear more about the info in your second paragraph. Is there any reading material (articles, papers, etc) you suggest? It sounds quite interesting, and I had not heard about the spike affinity wrt ferrets.
1) It was man-made, and biologically engineered in a lab. It escaped containment.
2) It came into being because the Chinese eat bats. So China should shut down the wet markets.
Because it cannot be both.
The Trump Regime is lying and talking out of their asses, to cover up their own incompetence. And they are saying that it is both. And the American public are so gullible, that they’re believing everything Trump’s henchmen are saying (or at least his supporters are).
Perhaps a more plausible theory, is that it really did emerge naturally from some random mutation in nature. And the Chinese were the first to detect it.
The Lancet published back in January [1], a theory that the virus had no connection to the Wuhan Seafood Market, this was just coincidence that some early patients had gone there.
Thus, the virus existed, before it got to the seafood market.
The interesting new info, is that the French are now saying that they detected their first case back in December 27, 2019, after reviewing old case files [2]. This was 4 days before China published to the W.H.O. about the possibility of a new novel coronavirus.
How is this even possible? Did the virus just magically hop on a plane in December?
Just a note: a call to stop the sale of "bush meat" in wet markets is not dependent on how this outbreak started. AFAIK the practice has been considered a disease risk for some time. While obviously the pressure to do something is much stronger now, that pressure would remain even if the outbreak was conclusively shown to be unrelated, given public awareness of just how disastrous a pandemic really is.
>The Trump Regime is lying and talking out of their asses, to cover up their own incompetence. And they are saying that it is both. And the American public are so gullible, that they’re believing everything Trump’s henchmen are saying (or at least his supporters are).
Please limit the partisanship. The point you're making can be expressed in a way that is less vitriolic and more open to meeting of minds.
Have you read http://chinamediaproject.org/2020/01/27/dramatic-actions/ ? Given the long incubation time, and large number of asymptomatic carriers, and global flights for all sorts of reasons i see no contradiction in the timeline.
What got diagnosed early on was just the tip of the iceberg, from some cases developing serious symptoms.
Furthermore: 1st case/patient zero=Stall operator from the seafood market...
Does anybody know WHICH sort of stall he operated? Maybe he delivered test animals (in)to the lab, and got infected that way?
36 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 78.2 ms ] threadControversial for what? The lab should be backed, and has been backed, and was funded by many governments around the world. Funding should be tripled so we can find these viruses before they become pandemics (the reason for their research).
You might agree, you might disagree, you might want to sit on either side of the controversy, but the article substantiates quite well the usage of the adjective "controversial" in the title.
>The work in question was a type of gain-of-function research that involved taking wild viruses and passing them through live animals until they mutate into a form that could pose a pandemic threat. Scientists used it to take a virus that was poorly transmitted among humans and make it into one that was highly transmissible—a hallmark of a pandemic virus. This work was done by infecting a series of ferrets, allowing the virus to mutate until a ferret that hadn't been deliberately infected contracted the disease.
>The work entailed risks that worried even seasoned researchers. More than 200 scientists called for the work to be halted. The problem, they said, is that it increased the likelihood that a pandemic would occur through a laboratory accident.
When you set these concerns next to 2018 diplomatic cables describing safety problems at the biolab in question [0], perhaps the accidental-release theory does seem worthy of investigation.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
But I strongly suspect that Rogin is mischaracterizing the cables. He claims that they express alarm over a lack of trained staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Staff from the WIV are trained at a US national lab in Galveston. I think it's highly likely that the directors of the WIV told US diplomats that that support was important, and asked for it to be increased. US diplomats then wrote that the lab needed more trained staff, and that the US should increase support. Someone in the Trump administration then found this cable and "leaked" it to a friendly commentator, Rogin. Rogin then characterized it as pointing out severe problems in the lab, without letting anyone see what the cable actually says.
I'd bet the reason Rogin won't publish the cable is that on the whole, it probably doesn't support the characterization he's trying to make.
According to the article Fauci is cited as writing, that research took place in Europe and the United States. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-wor...
That being said, I have two issues with this article:
- it makes the Wuhan lab story sound credible, while it is just another conspiracy theory
- it paints Dr. Fauci in a bad light by linking him to that lab and the theory
The factually true info is the kind of research and the fact that it was cofunded by the Fauci org. Everything else is just spin.
It seems as if they're confusing the 'possibility' of the manipulation theory with the 'possibility' of the lab escape theory (which is technically possible, but very, very unlikely).
This is the more interesting article in my opinion:
https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments...
My reasoning has been: new viruses jump from other animals all the time, it has happened in the past, we don't have any reason to think that is not the case this time. It's not surprising at all that it appear in the most populated country in the world.
But after learning about that lab, I have to think: that a new corona-virus appears in the wild a few kilometers out of one of the few labs specialized in corona-virus have to be explained.
Personally, I can't just disregard that because it's not politically convenient.
Political convenience aside, the question whther the SARS-Cov-2 escaped from a lab or not doesn't seem to be that important in finding a solution / cure / vaccine. All it does is playing the blame game and distract from the real problems.
>“If you do the math on this, it’s very straightforward. ... We have hundreds of millions of bats in Southeast Asia and about 10 percent of bats in some colonies have viruses at any one time. So that’s hundreds of thousands of bats every night with viruses,” Daszak says. “We also find tens of thousands of people in the wildlife trade, hunting and killing wildlife in China and Southeast Asia, and millions of people living in rural populations in Southeast Asia near bat caves.”
>Next, he says, consider the data he’s collected on people near bat caves getting exposed to viruses: “We went out and surveyed a population in Yunnan, China — we’d been to bat caves and found viruses that we thought could be high risk. So we sample people nearby, and 3 percent had antibodies to those viruses,” he says. “So between the last two and three years, those people were exposed to bat coronaviruses. If you extrapolate that population across the whole of Southeast Asia, it’s 1 million to 7 million people a year getting infected by bat viruses.”
>Compare that, he says, to what we know about the labs: “If you look at the labs in Southeast Asia that have any coronaviruses in culture, there are probably two or three and they’re in high security. The Wuhan Institute of Virology does have a small number of bat coronaviruses in culture. But they’re not [the new coronavirus], SARS-CoV-2. There are probably half a dozen people that do work in those labs. So let’s compare 1 million to 7 million people a year to half a dozen people; it’s just not logical.”
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/23/21226484/wuhan-lab-coronavirus...
Weighting against the lab theory also, it seems that there is not record of the "animal passage" technique was being used in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That seems like something necessary.
There are so many thing that I don't understand in all this, that I'm probably not qualified to have a strong opinion yet (or maybe never). For instance, I don't understand why bats are so prone to be source of viruses instead of other mammals.
* variable body temperature (they heat when they fly) * many species roost very closely in large numbers * weird immune system traits (they have very fast metabolisms, so they present an odd environment for pathogens)
Of course that doesn't mean that the infection of patient zero happened inside the lab. If I remember correctly, then the researcher, that some have theorized to be patient zero, had recently returned from a field study. So, it's just as likely that they were infected in the field and brought it back with them. The important part is that the infection then spread from the lab and not from the wet market.
The Wuhan Institute for Virology (BSL-4 lab) is actually 13 km away. People mixed it up with the unrelated Wuhan Center for Disease Control (BSL-2 lab).
The sequence of the virus strongly resembles RaTG13-CoV, a bat coronavirus discovered by WIV. The sequence is almost identical, except for the spike protein. The spike protein strongly resembles a Pangolin CoV also discovered by the WIV. Shi Zhengli and another researcher from WIV are authors on a paper from 2015 where they transplanted the spike protein from one Coronavirus onto the remaining parts of SARS-CoV. They've also done "serial passage" experiments, where they infect either cell cultures or live animals, so that a virus becomes more adapted to that host. One of the animals that they used for these experiments were ferrets, for which SARS-CoV-2's spike shows extremely high affinity.
Now, it's possible that two viruses recombined naturally, but then why did the virus first show up in Wuhan? Wuhan is a thousand miles from the bat caves where they found these viruses in Yunnan. As far as we know, they did not exist in Wuhan, except in the WIV's freezer.
1) It was man-made, and biologically engineered in a lab. It escaped containment.
2) It came into being because the Chinese eat bats. So China should shut down the wet markets.
Because it cannot be both.
The Trump Regime is lying and talking out of their asses, to cover up their own incompetence. And they are saying that it is both. And the American public are so gullible, that they’re believing everything Trump’s henchmen are saying (or at least his supporters are).
Perhaps a more plausible theory, is that it really did emerge naturally from some random mutation in nature. And the Chinese were the first to detect it.
The Lancet published back in January [1], a theory that the virus had no connection to the Wuhan Seafood Market, this was just coincidence that some early patients had gone there.
Thus, the virus existed, before it got to the seafood market.
The interesting new info, is that the French are now saying that they detected their first case back in December 27, 2019, after reviewing old case files [2]. This was 4 days before China published to the W.H.O. about the possibility of a new novel coronavirus.
How is this even possible? Did the virus just magically hop on a plane in December?
[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market...
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/03/french-politicia...
Edit: If you’re going to downvote me, then provide some counter evidence to prove me wrong.
>The Trump Regime is lying and talking out of their asses, to cover up their own incompetence. And they are saying that it is both. And the American public are so gullible, that they’re believing everything Trump’s henchmen are saying (or at least his supporters are).
Please limit the partisanship. The point you're making can be expressed in a way that is less vitriolic and more open to meeting of minds.
What got diagnosed early on was just the tip of the iceberg, from some cases developing serious symptoms.
Furthermore: 1st case/patient zero=Stall operator from the seafood market... Does anybody know WHICH sort of stall he operated? Maybe he delivered test animals (in)to the lab, and got infected that way?