> Changes in the environment are driving displaced species of animals into new habitats, allowing them to mix with other species or potential hosts.
Outside of reactionary comments about banning eating bats and banning "wet markets", I wish there was more serious discussion about how intensive animal farming in general could lead to another pandemic and what we're going to do about it. We're just going to continue as normal until a pandemic kicks off from cows, pigs or chickens?
On top of just the number of animals treated with antibiotics being kept in close proximity to help a virus mutate, there's also the animal waste produced, the land required and the contributions to climate change that are destroying the environment and displacing species.
There is considerable suspicion that SARS-CoV-2 was enhanced by the Wuhan lab. The simple fact that the species carrying the closest relative of this epidemic was a thousand miles away from Wuhan and was not present at the wet markets in any capacity is sufficient to doubt the narrative.
If we want to safeguard our species from zoonotic pandemics, instead of weaponizing them, then a vaccination effort would be better directed at the source.
Perhaps an international effort to identify dangerous zoonotic pathogens and address them within their natural hosts is preferable to what COVID-19 has forced us to endure.
"Considerable suspicion" is over-selling it in my opinion. The arguments I've heard go along the lines of 'the virus is surprisingly well adapted to humans'. This reasoning, however, is text-book survivor bias:
Given we observe a pandemic, the probability for the virus to be well adapted is very high.
What we do know is:
* There is a highest safety level virus lab in Wuhan.
* Lab escapes do and did happen.
As far as I know we simply do not have evidence if or if not gain of function research played a role.
\edit: formatting. Can somebody please explain the downvotes?
It might be that people are taking issue with the survivorship-bias argument.
The important question here is: Given a virus that is as well adapted to humans as SARS-CoV-2, how likely is it that it emerged spontaneously (without a trace of any intermediate states, afaik) vs. how likely is it that it leaked from a lab that has high safety standards, but was probably producing viruses just like it.
It is indeed not surprising that the virus is well adapted to humans, seeing as we are experiencing a pandemic, but that is disconnected from wondering how it got to be so.
> (without a trace of any intermediate states, afaik)
It's pretty clear that SARS-CoV-2 shares an ancestor with RaTG13 [0]. Their S-proteins, the main factor in human adaptation, are a 97.8% match, which can be explained with about a decade of divergence, putting the common ancestor somewhere in late 2000s.
Why RaTG13 (then called RaBtCoV/4991) research was shelved by China, when it's been one of the suspects of the death of 3 miners with SARS-like symptoms in 2012[1], is the concerning part of it all. The chances of it being lab made/grown/modified are just way too slim.
> As far as I know we simply do not have evidence if or if not gain of function research played a role.
You can examine phylogenetic distance -- the degree of evolutionary drift that the initial virus had from others which are subject to natural (in-the-wild) evolution. COVID is way out there. And even then the closest "natural" virus had its genome published by the Wuhan lab long after the initial outbreak.
The lack of any close relatives suggests that gain-of-function very well may have taken place, as does the heightened vulnerability of typical lab-animals. What there isn't much evidence of is zoonotic transfer.
That's a reasonable argument. But it requires a very high level of understanding of (bat) corona-viruses in general with a majority of corona-viruses that exist having been sequenced etc.
From my (limited) understanding we only know about a fraction of corona-viruses out there, and hence there is great uncertainty in the phylogenetic modelling.
I haven't seen a credible write-up, if you can point me in the right direction, that would be appreciated.
You clearly don't know much about modern farming, but do not a lot about the tropes that the anti-animal agriculture movement have brought out.
Antibiotics are not functional against viruses. They don't make any difference. Where antibiotics are used it must be under qualified medical care, farmers can't just go buy them at the corner store, any more than you can. (15 years ago they could buy them, I don't remember exactly when the laws changed) Even when they are used (never in chickens), there can be not detectable antibiotics in food, and we can detect very tiny amounts.
Animals in close proximity are very isolated. Farmers have strict bio security rules before you can enter the barns.
"This is a growing matter of concern as antibiotic resistance is considered to be a serious future threat to human welfare.[10] Infectious diseases are the third leading cause of death in Europe and a future without effective antibiotics would fundamentally change the way modern medicine is practised.[10][12]"
> Animals in close proximity are very isolated. Farmers have strict bio security rules before you can enter the barns.
So true. A lot of our virus come from birds. Viruses are like most invasive species. If you take them out of their normal habitat, they can thrive in a way that is unexpected and uncontrollable.
I don’t know where you’ve been, but bird flu and swine flu were already epidemics. Do we really have to wait for a cow-related disease to become an epidemic and finish up the trifecta before we’ll consider changing our behavior?
Sorry, what is reactionary about banning wet markets? Not trying to be confrontational, I'm honestly asking. They're banned pretty much everywhere in the west with the exception of fish. There is plenty to object to about Western animal agriculture, but it hasn't created any new diseases on the scale of covid since it industrialised...
The WHO seems to be under Chinese control. Their investigations should not be expected to embarrass China in any way. They'll produce an innocuous conclusion.
Yeah and it’s clear that they are making this stuff too: “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.
>This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli
It's a straightforward although time-consuming exercise to trace through Shi's research from the last 15 years and see that she and her team have clearly been developing a bioweapon based on SARS and gain of function stuff pasted in from bat coronaviruses and elsewhere.
Apparently just a few unanswered questions bar the truth according to the study released by this Dr. Steven Quay. Highly doubt we'll get answers because of the nation that is sitting on the answers.
"A Bayesian analysis concludes beyond a reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural zoonosis but instead is laboratory derived"
when you see the phrases "Bayesian analysis" and "concludes beyond a reasonable doubt" in the same sentence you can be pretty sure it's equine fecal matter being passed off as chocolate energy drink.
Any credibility to the study released by this Dr. Steven Quay? He seems to have uncovered ample evidence, that in the case of COVID19, it was leaked from a lab.
"A Bayesian analysis concludes beyond a reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural zoonosis but instead is laboratory derived"
this looks like quack bullshit - I'd be very careful what to believe. Just look at page 6 that makes some arbitrary calculations and the bold headline. I'd skip that as evidence.
We discussed this in the past. While it is possible it escaped from the lab, his argument that it was not natural is not terribly compelling. That it reads like a sci-fi thriller is kind of a tell.
No credibility. In this poorly written paper the only interesting claim he cites is that some portion of SARS-Cov-2 looks like a "vector" sequence, but it's really just looking like a naturally occurring coronavirus and he confuses plasmid vs a vector. See: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1...
Just because the Chinese government lies a lot, it doesn't mean they are lying about this. There is no need.
> Scientist have long suspected that the rate of new infectious diseases could accelerate, especially in developing countries where human and animal interaction is increasing.
I don't know any "Scientist" making this claim, and I work at a research University. Humans have always lived in direct contact with animals. We evolved from the Natural world living with animals in the forest, desert, and grassland. What has changed is that there are more people and we are more interconnected than ever. So in the past, if someone were exposed to a novel coronavirus, the infection wouldn't leave the village, but now it spreads across the globe in a matter of months.
Wikipedia has some pointers in the right direction in the article on Zoonosis if someone is curious. See section „Causes - Deforestation, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation“.
Maybe we should consider getting rid of esp problematic species of bats that are host to the most pathogens. I personally don't see much value in the species. They are like the mosquitos of the mammal world.
Bats eat mosquitos, which can carry other diseases. Whether yo u see any value in the species doesn't really have a bearing on protecting biodiversity.
I once read that there's something somewhat unique about the immune system of bats (very permissive?) that allows viruses to live in bats relatively undisturbed, allowing them a lot of time to mutate and thrive without affecting the bats much.
Edit: "Several studies have indicated that bats have unique defense mechanisms that allow them to be persistently or latently infected with viruses. Factors leading to an increase in the viral load of persistently infected bats would facilitate shedding of virus." Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6410205/
The question news media and “investigative journalism” if it exists anymore needs to ask is how come this particular outbreak/ transmission from bats didn’t happen before 2019. The “wet markets” exist all over China and people consumed bats before 2019.
Why didn’t the integrated circuit happen before Bob Noyce and his team released it when we had been using all the raw components in some form for a long time?
Things aren’t required to occur 100% of the time just because the raw bits are there. Sometimes these things take time.
It seems that the route of infection is through large amounts of the virus being inhaled. What this article does not explain is how this route of transmission can occur from bats to humans. Did it perhaps start when someone went into a bat cave? Otherwise it seems unlikely to me that an infected bat can transmit this particular virus.
Yes, simply placing the infected tissue in your mouth can infect you.
The exact role of fomite transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is still unclear (in any case we do not eat one another) however we do know it is minor relative to respiratory droplets and aerosols.
beautiful site. but this notion, that covid-19 came from bats is tricky. origin tracing a virus is tricky, specially one year too late. and the wuhan wet market didn't house bats. origins of covid-19 could be from anything whether the virus leaked from a lab, due to lax security policies. some other carrier animal or human we will never figure out etc.
54 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
(70 comments)
Outside of reactionary comments about banning eating bats and banning "wet markets", I wish there was more serious discussion about how intensive animal farming in general could lead to another pandemic and what we're going to do about it. We're just going to continue as normal until a pandemic kicks off from cows, pigs or chickens?
On top of just the number of animals treated with antibiotics being kept in close proximity to help a virus mutate, there's also the animal waste produced, the land required and the contributions to climate change that are destroying the environment and displacing species.
If we want to safeguard our species from zoonotic pandemics, instead of weaponizing them, then a vaccination effort would be better directed at the source.
Perhaps an international effort to identify dangerous zoonotic pathogens and address them within their natural hosts is preferable to what COVID-19 has forced us to endure.
Given we observe a pandemic, the probability for the virus to be well adapted is very high.
What we do know is:
* There is a highest safety level virus lab in Wuhan.
* Lab escapes do and did happen.
As far as I know we simply do not have evidence if or if not gain of function research played a role.
\edit: formatting. Can somebody please explain the downvotes?
The important question here is: Given a virus that is as well adapted to humans as SARS-CoV-2, how likely is it that it emerged spontaneously (without a trace of any intermediate states, afaik) vs. how likely is it that it leaked from a lab that has high safety standards, but was probably producing viruses just like it.
It is indeed not surprising that the virus is well adapted to humans, seeing as we are experiencing a pandemic, but that is disconnected from wondering how it got to be so.
It's pretty clear that SARS-CoV-2 shares an ancestor with RaTG13 [0]. Their S-proteins, the main factor in human adaptation, are a 97.8% match, which can be explained with about a decade of divergence, putting the common ancestor somewhere in late 2000s.
Why RaTG13 (then called RaBtCoV/4991) research was shelved by China, when it's been one of the suspects of the death of 3 miners with SARS-like symptoms in 2012[1], is the concerning part of it all. The chances of it being lab made/grown/modified are just way too slim.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41594-020-0468-7
[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/new-killer-virus-chi...
You can examine phylogenetic distance -- the degree of evolutionary drift that the initial virus had from others which are subject to natural (in-the-wild) evolution. COVID is way out there. And even then the closest "natural" virus had its genome published by the Wuhan lab long after the initial outbreak.
The lack of any close relatives suggests that gain-of-function very well may have taken place, as does the heightened vulnerability of typical lab-animals. What there isn't much evidence of is zoonotic transfer.
From my (limited) understanding we only know about a fraction of corona-viruses out there, and hence there is great uncertainty in the phylogenetic modelling.
I haven't seen a credible write-up, if you can point me in the right direction, that would be appreciated.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952v1....
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MN996532
Some people suspected it [0] and eventually Dr. Shi confirmed it [1] after.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341547726_Understan...
[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6503/487.full
[1] https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/species/bats/bat-watchi...
Antibiotics are not functional against viruses. They don't make any difference. Where antibiotics are used it must be under qualified medical care, farmers can't just go buy them at the corner store, any more than you can. (15 years ago they could buy them, I don't remember exactly when the laws changed) Even when they are used (never in chickens), there can be not detectable antibiotics in food, and we can detect very tiny amounts.
Animals in close proximity are very isolated. Farmers have strict bio security rules before you can enter the barns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#An...
> Animals in close proximity are very isolated. Farmers have strict bio security rules before you can enter the barns.How does this explain the number of outbreaks of swine flu in multiple countries? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H1N1
https://thebulletin.org/2021/02/who-covid-19-didnt-leak-from...
https://www.med.unc.edu/orfeome/files/2018/03/a-sars-like-cl...
another interesting find: 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.
It's a straightforward although time-consuming exercise to trace through Shi's research from the last 15 years and see that she and her team have clearly been developing a bioweapon based on SARS and gain of function stuff pasted in from bat coronaviruses and elsewhere.
"A Bayesian analysis concludes beyond a reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural zoonosis but instead is laboratory derived"
- https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-by-dr-ste...
The first 12 pages of the PDF read like a sci-fy thriller. Link to the PDF (scroll down the page a bit):
- https://zenodo.org/record/4477081
Bascially we don't know and probably won't know. The conflict of interest with the WHO mission is pretty clear.
Beyond any politicization of the issue it's interesting to learn about the possibilities and risks in that research area.
"A Bayesian analysis concludes beyond a reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural zoonosis but instead is laboratory derived"
- https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-by-dr-ste...
The first 12 pages of the PDF read like a sci-fy thriller. Link to the PDF (scroll down the page a bit):
- https://zenodo.org/record/4477081
I don't know any "Scientist" making this claim, and I work at a research University. Humans have always lived in direct contact with animals. We evolved from the Natural world living with animals in the forest, desert, and grassland. What has changed is that there are more people and we are more interconnected than ever. So in the past, if someone were exposed to a novel coronavirus, the infection wouldn't leave the village, but now it spreads across the globe in a matter of months.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis
EDIT: Removed speculation
Edit: "Several studies have indicated that bats have unique defense mechanisms that allow them to be persistently or latently infected with viruses. Factors leading to an increase in the viral load of persistently infected bats would facilitate shedding of virus." Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6410205/
Things aren’t required to occur 100% of the time just because the raw bits are there. Sometimes these things take time.
The exact role of fomite transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is still unclear (in any case we do not eat one another) however we do know it is minor relative to respiratory droplets and aerosols.