Did somebody tell you that in a Youtube video or a post on a suspicious $messenger/$platform? Better get your tinfoil hat ready!
edit, seriously: After about a year of all of this Corona shit, I'm just tired of people spouting conspiracy theories, denying scientific evidence and whatnot. This is probably the biggest crisis after WW2, but lots of people still rather believe in something that "YourDave69" told them on a messenger instead of taking good advise from scientists around the world and working together to get rid of this epidemic.
> Who came up with the idea that the WHO is "chinese controlled"?
Indeed, this only is the case because the US chose to withdrew funding from the WHO (it hasn't really paid what it has underwritten before), while China simply continued to pay its membership dues. https://www.devex.com/news/us-says-it-will-cut-who-funding-w...
China supplies 0.88% of the WHO budget [1]. The idea that they somehow control the organization is ridiculous and was spread by certain politicians that needed someone to blame for their failures.
It's actually over 11%, as stated on your link, isn't it? The US was the biggest contributor with 20% (on paper, it didn't actually wire all this money to the WHO, only signed the contracts), which is now zero.
I abhor the low-information manipulating, cognitive-bias exploiting, self-serving, anti-scientific YouTube conspiracy charlatans as much as the next rational, reasonable person.
That said - if you believe that there's no chance the Wuhan Institute of Virology had anything to do with this, then you'll believe anything. It's the largest virus bank in Asia and we know it was doing Coronavirus research. This is not tin foil. The Chinese government is not remotely accountable to the truth as Western governments are and should not be trusted an inch. Plenty of educated people are very concerned.
Nevertheless I find it much more likely that we really see a case of zoonosis here, given the fact that Chinese food culture has "little respect" for anything.
Also: If this came from an institute for virology, that must be the WORST of its kind of all times. That is making mistakes on the Resident Evil level.
It's not even necessarily linked to "Chinese food culture" (which seems to be a somewhat racist trope more often than not).
Bats interact with cattle, from drinking points to barns. It is believed that MERS jumped from bats to camels to humans, yet we hardly read any criticism of the Middle Eastern "food culture", do we?
When camels were implicated as a MERS reservoir, one indeed did see offensive comments on social media about traditional Middle Eastern culture or the warped stereotypes based thereupon.
If we didn’t hear more of that talk, and it eventually died out, that is only because MERS never managed to spread beyond a limited part of the Middle East, unlike COVID.
The point stands that this is really thinly veiled (or not veiled at all) racism more than anything, be it against Chinese or Arabs. And apparently it's not even OK to point this out judging by the reactions to this comment and my previous one.
But I also think that the targeting of China is something that is let to happen because it fits some agendas.
> If this came from an institute for virology, that must be the WORST of its kind of all times.
Not really. SARS escaped from laboratories (at least) 3 times. Once in Singapore, twice in Beijing. SARS doesn't have the long asymptomatic but still contagious period that SARS-CoV-2 has, so the lab escapes were much easier to contain before they spread widely.
There's definitely a non-zero chance of the Wuhan Institute of Virology being involved somehow, but unless there's actual evidence to support the claim, it's just speculation.
That being said, there's plenty of reasons to keep looking; if nothing else, it would be very nice to have solid evidence of the origin of the virus, regardless if it was from a wild bat or not.
How can we reasonably expect evidence when journalists were suppressed early on, domestic research into virus origins was censored/state controlled, and site visits from external organizations were prevented for an entire year? Clearly all of this is tampering with evidence and highly suspicious, and I feel like the label of “speculation” is misleading or missing context at best.
The issue here is that if it was related to the WIV, which, i'll be honest - common sense tells me is likely, then the evidence will never see the light of day - because of the Chinese regime.
They honestly want us to believe that it was brought in on frozen fish at the market around the corner - that it never even originated in China. This is what we're dealing with. It's gaslighting in the extreme.
Well, do you expect any country would honestly say that they are responsible for global disaster like this? Even if it really was an 'industrial accident', the consequences are so severe that any country admitting it would open themselves to future lawsuits, embargo and who knows what else. And I'm not even mentioning 'losing face' which is a big deal in Asia.
Yes. The people of many countries would demand it. Do not underestimate the transparency that democratic accountability provides. Western democracy is little short of a miracle in this respect. It is incomparable to China's unaccountable one-party dictatorship.
Did I miss the /s tag? This cheerleading needs to calm down a bit, I'm not sure this bashathon should be used to tighten our own wools. Different systems can both be bad.
Let's relax with flexing our elite 'Western accountability'. It's all talk.
In the context of public inquiries into industrial accidents, I'm sorry but no - it absolutely is not "all talk". We are worlds apart from China in this respect. It's not cheerleading, it's just true.
Seriously? Have you ever heard about state secrets? Some information are locked for decades, even centuries, some never made public. Are you sure that there were never any accidents in USA related to manufacturing of VX or similar nerve agents?
I don't think this is a good place or medium for this discussion, to be honest, there's too much room for interpretation. I'm not saying that the West is perfect or without its share of scandal, I'm trying to push back on this notion that it's all the same - that it's no better or worse than totalitarian systems like China when it comes to transparency and accountability. Because it's just so obviously not true. And that really matters.
This is why I feel the international community should somehow come together to agree to indemnify China against all types of future sanctions or prosecutions etc re Covid-19.
The critically important thing is to establish exactly what happened in order to prevent SARS 3, SARS 4, etc. Absolutely everything else is of secondary importance. In the absence of malicious intent - and I think everyone agrees on that - we should have no interest in appointing blame.
There is no direct evidence of zoonotic origin either. An entire year on and we don't even know the intermediate species, let alone where crossover occurred. With the original SARS this was worked out in a couple of weeks.
Also I've yet to see any slightly convincing explanation as to why SARS-Cov-2 emerged from the wild spectacularly well-adapted to human ACE2.
It took 15 years to find the origin of the original SARS, but indeed it took a few months to pinpoint the intermediary species (civets). Now I don't know about SARS but many people infected with SARS-Cov-2 have no symptoms or mild symptoms, which means the virus might circulate for a while before it hits a major population centre and blows up, which would make finding the source more difficult.
They have already found virii in bats in Yunnan that are 96% similar to SARS-Cov-2 so it seems probable that the origin will be similar to the origin of SARS.
Certainly the consensus is that the virus is natural despite you and others implying that it might not, which is nothing but FUD at this point.
SARS origin:
"Around late 2017, Chinese scientists traced the virus through the intermediary of Asian palm civets to cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Xiyang Yi Ethnic Township, Yunnan" [1]
Wuhan lab is not unique. Virus can be leaked from any other lab. For example, Vector lab in Novosibirsk had a major breach just before the epidemic: equipment was stolen from the lab by first responders after a blast and fire.
> Dwyer [member of the WHO team visiting Wuhan in 2021] says that the team didn’t see anything during its visits to suggest a lab accident. “Now, whether we were shown everything? You can never know. The group wasn’t designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practice.”
Clearly China is not helping their case. And the international community, including the WHO, has not been holding them accountable on the possibility of a lab leak.
Do you really think this would be in any way different for any western country? Especially given that those labs might not only be doing "influenza research" but research for biological weapons, too.
You’re changing the topic. We aren’t talking about western countries. We’re talking about China’s ruling government, the CCP. And what we saw is that they took virtually every possible action to prevent legitimate investigations by suppressing information and tampering with evidence. The only reasonable motivation to do so is to hide origins that lays blame at their feet - such as a lab leak.
I'm not changing the topic, I'm just saying that this isn't something only China would do. I would expect the exactly same behaviour from any Western country.
It's ridiculous to believe this would have played out the same way if the lab was based in Denmark. Or Sweden, New Zealand, Switzerland, or any number of other Western countries. They would have welcomed the inspection and it would have happened very close to the beginning of the outbreak.
do you have any evidence to dispute that theory? that's the basis of the scientific method, proving hypothesis wrong, not assuming them right from the start.
doesn't seem like there is a clear explanation of the origins yet (see outcome of latest who investigation). supposedly all options are valid until proven otherwise
It's always difficult to prove a negative... When you put forward a farfetched 'theory' it is for you to provide evidence.
Otherwise, following your logic, everything and every conspiracy theory should be assumed valid until proven wrong, which is ridiculous.
Example: The Novichok poisoning in the UK happened about 7 miles from the only lab in the country that works on these things. The UK government is actually behind it and they are framing the Russians for it. Prove me wrong.
Now, seriously, considering that bats gave us SARS and MERS, and that they harbour other coronavirii extremely similar to Covid-19 all over Southern China and down to Thailand, the overwhelmingly most probable theory is that the origin of Covid-19 will be bats, somewhere in Southern China. If you think that's not the case then it is for you to support your hypothesis.
Re. Novichok, if there wasn't video evidence of two known Russian agents the Porton Down theory might be more plausible. But Porton Down says they have nothing to do with it and we should just accept their word as fact, just as we have to accept the word of the Wuhan Institute of Virology that there was no possibility of lab leak there.
Or maybe given the global significance of Covid-19, and the obvious conflict of interest for WIV, and especially given that the original SARS escaped labs at least 6 times, maybe some independent auditing and investigation should be done?
> Re. Novichok, if there wasn't video evidence of two known Russian agents
Well, it's expected that Russia try to spy on strategic facilities of other countries and on former agents who flipped, isn't it? (I'm making a point here)
My point being, if we go down the rabbit hole of "everything is valid until proven wrong" as the person I replied to said then we just lose sanity, in my view.
lots of people still rather believe in something that "YourDave69" told them on a messenger instead of taking good advise from scientists around the world and working together to get rid of this epidemic.
You are right, but why do you think that is the case? Unfortunately it takes a very few (or even a single one) proven conspiracies to lose all trust and god knows we have plenty. Fool me once and all that. Can you really blame them?
> You are right, but why do you think that is the case?
People seek for easy answers in a world that is getting more and more complex.
"It's from a Chinese lab!" is obviously a lot easier than understanding how "everything" (more people need more food, want more meat, meat needs land, this leads to invasions/contacts with more wildlife, this leads to higher risk of zoonosis and so on and so on) comes together.
We can see the same thing with lots of other fields.
In general I do not think that is true. However I do think official narratives are usually the easiest to digest, people would need to be crazy to believe otherwise.
In this particular case I don't think "It's from a bat" is any more complex than "It's from a lab" either btw.
In my experience the "easy answer" here is the one that excludes the lab. Most of the people advocating the lab leak hypothesis are also saying it originally came from wildlife, i.e. understanding their position requires understanding zoonosis as well. The reverse is not true.
I want to appreciate how well the infographic article is designed/presented. It is layperson friendly, effective to inform people of a slightly technical knowledge.
The map of which species have spread viruses to other animals is awesome. Also, the restraint in only including 5 data graphics (two of which are illustrations for comparing size, which is as natural as you can get) is commendable. Graphics can be easier to understand than numbers in text, but text is easier to skim while reading.
The only nitpick I'd have is the use of log scale for the body mass to longevity chart. It spreads out the data points, but complicates comparisons. And log scales aren't well understood by most people who don't make charts for a living.
meta: wow the colors are so pleasing to the eye. I wish there was a firefox plugin to turn all sites to that (safari reader sepia doesn't quite cut it).
The Acme editor color scheme. It was influenced by some color research being done, Rob Pike mentioned this in an old 9fan email. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Acme.png
I often wonder if it's in the best interest of humans to exterminate bats. Seems like it's only a matter of time until the next horrendous virus, created by bats, wreaks havoc.
> Maybe exterminating fruit-eating bats wouldn't be as bad
Maybe not as bad but still bad because they are pollinators and spread seeds. The article says:
> Bats provide many beneficial ecosystem services. Some bats play important roles such as plant pollination and seed dispersal. Bats can pollinate more than 500 species of plants including avocados, bananas, dates and mangoes.
> In Southeast Asia, durian, a highly valued crop, can be effectively pollinated only by the Dawn Bat. In this sense, bats are important economically for people. Some bats can also play critical roles in spreading seeds and regrowing forests.
Yeah that'll probably turn out as well as when the Chinese tried to kill off the sparrows leading to huge insect swarms. (Also Bats are also pollinators that you would've noticed if you'd read the article).
The article never mentions the gain of function research being done internationally where viruses are enhanced with abilities not found in the wild.
This Newsweek article, from almost a year, ago discusses the possibility that this kind of research that was being done at the Wuhan lab was responsible for the outbreak.
I think that the article is very well put together and informative, and has the merit of stirring well clear of 'hypotheses' and other FUD stories like the one you mention in order to stay focussed on facts.
SARS was traced to bats, MERS is probably from bats as well, they've already found bats that harbour virii 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2, and the overwhelming consensus is that SARS-CoV-2 is natural, so it seems logical and prudent to stick to that unless or until factual evidence of the contrary surface. The kind or research carried out at the lab in Wuhan is neither here nor there, really.
My concern is should we, the US and China, be doing gain of function research at all. This research investigates the possible routes/mutations that viruses can use to infect a different species. However, the results of this research are new variants of viruses that are capable of jumping from an animal to a human host. Is it possible to handle these new viruses safely, maybe not considering the worldwide devastation that might be released though a mistake in handling these invisible pathogens.
I understand that the research does aid our understanding of how a virus might perform the difficult act of jumping between host species in the wild; this is important because it does (rarely) happen on its own. Should we be taking chances by creating zoonotic viruses in light of millions of deaths due to this one (regardless of whether it was a lab mistake or a bat sold at a market).
“Utilizing the SARS-CoV infectious clone, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse adapted SARS-CoV backbone”
The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.
Accidental infections in labs have caused several previous virus outbreaks in China and elsewhere, including a 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing that infected nine people, killing one.
The CCP has prevented independent journalists, investigators, and global health authorities from interviewing researchers at the WIV, including those who were ill in the fall of 2019.
Any credible inquiry into the origin of the virus must include interviews with these researchers and a full accounting of their previously unreported illness.
The most prominent virologists - Daszak, Rasmussen, Andersen, block themselves and consequently their followings from (non-trolling) scientific inquiry:
This is a really nice, unbiased and short article to how virus spreads across species and why bats in particular have a higher chance of spreading viruses they carry.
The website also has an article titled, "Die Virusexistenzbehauptungen von SARS-CoV-2 sind eindeutig widerlegt," which translates to, "The claims of the existence of the virus SARS-CoV-2 are definitively disproved."
The person running that website and making these demands is not in the field. If you want to get a glimpse of a bizarre alternate reality, just take a look at the other articles on that website or scroll through his Twitter feed.
Virology is not my field, but I understand enough to follow the papers I linked to above. They describe the isolation of live/active virus from patient samples. There is active research with cultured SARS-CoV-2 virus in BSL-3 labs around the world. It's just bizarre that there are people who believe the virus doesn't exist, or that it doesn't cause CoVID-19.
This (or a similar project) came up in a discussion i've had last week. After a bit of research my conclusion is that their definition of "publications that scientifically prove the process of isolation of SARS-CoV-2" isn't the same as the one used in academic publishing as there are multiple publications that do that. A german one [1] literally has a section titled "Isolation of an infectious SARS‐CoV‐2 virus".
The one I read required a double blind controlled study that injects the isolated alive virus into multiple humans/at least primates which then have to develop symptoms. I guess if somebody did that they would move the goal posts again.
On your page I can't even find a definition of what they would accept as "scientifically prove the process of isolation".
A bat conservationist thinks bats are blamed for viruses because they're sampled more often than other mammals:
"Since 2005, when coronaviruses in horseshoe bats were first hypothesized to be the ancestors of the coronavirus that caused SARS, bats have received far more scrutiny than any other group of animals. For example, in the study on which the scariest headlines were based, researchers sampled nearly twice as many bats as rodents, shrews, and nonhuman primates combined and didn’t even include carnivores or ungulates."
Bats are believed to be the reservoir species for a number of nasty viruses, though. As the abstract of the above paper says, bats are the "reservoir hosts for some of the world's most highly pathogenic viruses, including Nipah, Hendra, Ebola, and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)."
I haven't heard any virologists who study bats call for the eradication of bats. In fact, the Ecohealth Alliance, which coordinates a lot of the fieldwork to gather data on viruses in bat populations, says that conservation measures would help reduce the risk of spillover.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadedit, seriously: After about a year of all of this Corona shit, I'm just tired of people spouting conspiracy theories, denying scientific evidence and whatnot. This is probably the biggest crisis after WW2, but lots of people still rather believe in something that "YourDave69" told them on a messenger instead of taking good advise from scientists around the world and working together to get rid of this epidemic.
> As the World Health Organization reaches its findings...
Why would you believe a largely Chinese controlled organization when we KNOW that China censors negative news about itself?
Scientists all over the world.
> Why would you believe a largely Chinese controlled organization [...]
Who came up with the idea that the WHO is "chinese controlled"? The orange guy?
Maybe the current leadership of the WHO is leaned towards China, that should be tackled as it's not suited for something as important as the WHO.
Also countries should probably "invest" more in the WHO to make it financially (and therefore politically) more independent.
Nevertheless I don't think that the WHO as a whole is "controlled by china" and we should not trust in their findings.
Indeed, this only is the case because the US chose to withdrew funding from the WHO (it hasn't really paid what it has underwritten before), while China simply continued to pay its membership dues. https://www.devex.com/news/us-says-it-will-cut-who-funding-w...
[1] http://open.who.int/2020-21/contributors/contributor
That said - if you believe that there's no chance the Wuhan Institute of Virology had anything to do with this, then you'll believe anything. It's the largest virus bank in Asia and we know it was doing Coronavirus research. This is not tin foil. The Chinese government is not remotely accountable to the truth as Western governments are and should not be trusted an inch. Plenty of educated people are very concerned.
Nevertheless I find it much more likely that we really see a case of zoonosis here, given the fact that Chinese food culture has "little respect" for anything.
Also: If this came from an institute for virology, that must be the WORST of its kind of all times. That is making mistakes on the Resident Evil level.
Bats interact with cattle, from drinking points to barns. It is believed that MERS jumped from bats to camels to humans, yet we hardly read any criticism of the Middle Eastern "food culture", do we?
If we didn’t hear more of that talk, and it eventually died out, that is only because MERS never managed to spread beyond a limited part of the Middle East, unlike COVID.
But I also think that the targeting of China is something that is let to happen because it fits some agendas.
Not really. SARS escaped from laboratories (at least) 3 times. Once in Singapore, twice in Beijing. SARS doesn't have the long asymptomatic but still contagious period that SARS-CoV-2 has, so the lab escapes were much easier to contain before they spread widely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
That being said, there's plenty of reasons to keep looking; if nothing else, it would be very nice to have solid evidence of the origin of the virus, regardless if it was from a wild bat or not.
Lab leaks are also not uncommon. There’s a reason why the Obama administration paused gain of function research - with risk of SARS research specifically called out - after numerous incidents (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/10/17/doing-d...). With SARS (the first one), there were literally multiple lab leaks from the Beijing institute of virology, including one leak tied to deaths (https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20040423/china-sars-death).
They honestly want us to believe that it was brought in on frozen fish at the market around the corner - that it never even originated in China. This is what we're dealing with. It's gaslighting in the extreme.
Let's relax with flexing our elite 'Western accountability'. It's all talk.
The critically important thing is to establish exactly what happened in order to prevent SARS 3, SARS 4, etc. Absolutely everything else is of secondary importance. In the absence of malicious intent - and I think everyone agrees on that - we should have no interest in appointing blame.
Also I've yet to see any slightly convincing explanation as to why SARS-Cov-2 emerged from the wild spectacularly well-adapted to human ACE2.
They have already found virii in bats in Yunnan that are 96% similar to SARS-Cov-2 so it seems probable that the origin will be similar to the origin of SARS.
Certainly the consensus is that the virus is natural despite you and others implying that it might not, which is nothing but FUD at this point.
SARS origin:
"Around late 2017, Chinese scientists traced the virus through the intermediary of Asian palm civets to cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Xiyang Yi Ethnic Township, Yunnan" [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
https://thebulletin.org/2019/11/what-happened-after-an-explo...
It was the job of the Wuhan Virus Lab to study bat viruses, and they published papers on it.
The scientist in early 2020 "debunking" that behind the scenes was both an associate of the lab, and of WHO.
NTD media has also covered this extensively.
Nobody is seriously eliminating the lab as the corona source at this point. They have eliminated the wet market.
As for the WHO’s findings - from https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00375-7:
> Dwyer [member of the WHO team visiting Wuhan in 2021] says that the team didn’t see anything during its visits to suggest a lab accident. “Now, whether we were shown everything? You can never know. The group wasn’t designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practice.”
Clearly China is not helping their case. And the international community, including the WHO, has not been holding them accountable on the possibility of a lab leak.
Do you really think this would be in any way different for any western country? Especially given that those labs might not only be doing "influenza research" but research for biological weapons, too.
doesn't seem like there is a clear explanation of the origins yet (see outcome of latest who investigation). supposedly all options are valid until proven otherwise
Otherwise, following your logic, everything and every conspiracy theory should be assumed valid until proven wrong, which is ridiculous.
Example: The Novichok poisoning in the UK happened about 7 miles from the only lab in the country that works on these things. The UK government is actually behind it and they are framing the Russians for it. Prove me wrong.
Now, seriously, considering that bats gave us SARS and MERS, and that they harbour other coronavirii extremely similar to Covid-19 all over Southern China and down to Thailand, the overwhelmingly most probable theory is that the origin of Covid-19 will be bats, somewhere in Southern China. If you think that's not the case then it is for you to support your hypothesis.
Or maybe given the global significance of Covid-19, and the obvious conflict of interest for WIV, and especially given that the original SARS escaped labs at least 6 times, maybe some independent auditing and investigation should be done?
Well, it's expected that Russia try to spy on strategic facilities of other countries and on former agents who flipped, isn't it? (I'm making a point here)
My point being, if we go down the rabbit hole of "everything is valid until proven wrong" as the person I replied to said then we just lose sanity, in my view.
You are right, but why do you think that is the case? Unfortunately it takes a very few (or even a single one) proven conspiracies to lose all trust and god knows we have plenty. Fool me once and all that. Can you really blame them?
People seek for easy answers in a world that is getting more and more complex.
"It's from a Chinese lab!" is obviously a lot easier than understanding how "everything" (more people need more food, want more meat, meat needs land, this leads to invasions/contacts with more wildlife, this leads to higher risk of zoonosis and so on and so on) comes together.
We can see the same thing with lots of other fields.
In this particular case I don't think "It's from a bat" is any more complex than "It's from a lab" either btw.
With the flip-flops in messaging over the past year+, it's easier to trust someone starting from zero than a known entity currently in the negatives.
The only nitpick I'd have is the use of log scale for the body mass to longevity chart. It spreads out the data points, but complicates comparisons. And log scales aren't well understood by most people who don't make charts for a living.
https://darkreader.org/
Maybe exterminating fruit-eating bats wouldn't be as bad, but why not improve human hygiene practices instead?
Maybe not as bad but still bad because they are pollinators and spread seeds. The article says:
> Bats provide many beneficial ecosystem services. Some bats play important roles such as plant pollination and seed dispersal. Bats can pollinate more than 500 species of plants including avocados, bananas, dates and mangoes.
> In Southeast Asia, durian, a highly valued crop, can be effectively pollinated only by the Dawn Bat. In this sense, bats are important economically for people. Some bats can also play critical roles in spreading seeds and regrowing forests.
(In the UK which is one of the worst hit countries the death toll is about the same as 2003. https://oronu.wordpress.com/2021/01/29/mortality-statistics/)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
This Newsweek article, from almost a year, ago discusses the possibility that this kind of research that was being done at the Wuhan lab was responsible for the outbreak.
https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments...
SARS was traced to bats, MERS is probably from bats as well, they've already found bats that harbour virii 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2, and the overwhelming consensus is that SARS-CoV-2 is natural, so it seems logical and prudent to stick to that unless or until factual evidence of the contrary surface. The kind or research carried out at the lab in Wuhan is neither here nor there, really.
I understand that the research does aid our understanding of how a virus might perform the difficult act of jumping between host species in the wild; this is important because it does (rarely) happen on its own. Should we be taking chances by creating zoonotic viruses in light of millions of deaths due to this one (regardless of whether it was a lab mistake or a bat sold at a market).
https://www.med.unc.edu/orfeome/files/2018/03/a-sars-like-cl...
and speaking of Wuhan...
http://ge.usembassy.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-ins...
The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.
Accidental infections in labs have caused several previous virus outbreaks in China and elsewhere, including a 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing that infected nine people, killing one.
The CCP has prevented independent journalists, investigators, and global health authorities from interviewing researchers at the WIV, including those who were ill in the fall of 2019.
Any credible inquiry into the origin of the virus must include interviews with these researchers and a full accounting of their previously unreported illness.
This assertion is from FOIA's, not in dispute, and not speculation: 1) https://usrtk.org/biohazards-blog/scientist-with-conflict-of...
and worse, the overt optics-management on same: 2) https://usrtk.org/biohazards-blog/no-need-for-you-to-sign-th...
The most prominent virologists - Daszak, Rasmussen, Andersen, block themselves and consequently their followings from (non-trolling) scientific inquiry:
https://twitter.com/blockedvirology
Please don't conflate a desire to avoid making waves with an intention to determine accurate reality.
Good read.
https://www.samueleckert.net/isolat-truth-fund/
* "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 from Patient with Coronavirus Disease, United States": https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2606.200516
* "Isolation and characterization of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 in Turkey": https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238614
The website also has an article titled, "Die Virusexistenzbehauptungen von SARS-CoV-2 sind eindeutig widerlegt," which translates to, "The claims of the existence of the virus SARS-CoV-2 are definitively disproved."
Typical pseudo-scientific conspiracy theory FUD.
Virology is not my field, but I understand enough to follow the papers I linked to above. They describe the isolation of live/active virus from patient samples. There is active research with cultured SARS-CoV-2 virus in BSL-3 labs around the world. It's just bizarre that there are people who believe the virus doesn't exist, or that it doesn't cause CoVID-19.
The one I read required a double blind controlled study that injects the isolated alive virus into multiple humans/at least primates which then have to develop symptoms. I guess if somebody did that they would move the goal posts again.
On your page I can't even find a definition of what they would accept as "scientifically prove the process of isolation".
[1] https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embj.2020106230
"Since 2005, when coronaviruses in horseshoe bats were first hypothesized to be the ancestors of the coronavirus that caused SARS, bats have received far more scrutiny than any other group of animals. For example, in the study on which the scariest headlines were based, researchers sampled nearly twice as many bats as rodents, shrews, and nonhuman primates combined and didn’t even include carnivores or ungulates."
https://issues.org/a-viral-witch-hunt-bats/
* "Comparative Analysis of Bat Genomes Provides Insight into the Evolution of Flight and Immunity": https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1230835
Bats are believed to be the reservoir species for a number of nasty viruses, though. As the abstract of the above paper says, bats are the "reservoir hosts for some of the world's most highly pathogenic viruses, including Nipah, Hendra, Ebola, and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)."
I haven't heard any virologists who study bats call for the eradication of bats. In fact, the Ecohealth Alliance, which coordinates a lot of the fieldwork to gather data on viruses in bat populations, says that conservation measures would help reduce the risk of spillover.