Chinese Virologist post report claiming virus made in Wuhan lab

https://www.politifact.com/li-meng-yan-fact-check/

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-man-made-491053

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/05/the-stakes-of-finding-covid-19s-origins

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/an-engineered-doomsday.html

https://www.propublica.org/article/...esearchers-had-with-lab-created-coronaviruses

 

Here is 2 hours of virologists talking SARS-CoV-2 with long discussions about the lab leak possibilities:



I have not watched yet but ...

@Sweet Lou 4 2 be prepared to be informed!!! @Agent94 be prepared to be vindicated!!!

 

15 minutes in and they are talking about the relationship between the scientists who wrote the proximal origins paper. It seems like a small community that has a clear conflict of interest based on research dollars and personal friendships. The weak arguments made in the paper that have been dismantled by other scientists seem to confirm this ... a few more minutes in and he is repeating these arguments as if they are definitive.

 

30 minutes into this video and their contempt of Trump is palpable. We know that anti-Trump sentiment had a lot to do with the media coverage of the lab leak debate, but this make me think it tainted the scientific debate too. And this actually makes some sense now that I think about it. They had to have some built up anger with how poorly the Trump administration handled Covid and treated their friend Fauci.

 

Absolutely it tainted the scientific debate. Anyone interested in the truth of how the lab-leak theory was panned as conspiracy theory would do well to read Vanity Fair's article on the lab leak theory and how it has been revealed that all along there were reputable scientists that were doubtful that the lab-leak theory was not probable:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/202...inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins

https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/w...or-of-vanity-fair-lab-leak-story-114324037669

The article is a fascinating read. I found it fascinating how much stench within the government and scientific community (virology in particular) there has been. But it makes sense if you consider how the entire world has been affected, and over 3.5 million people have lost their lives. A huge price to pay if a smoking gun is found (and it seems like there will be).

To me it's pretty becoming apparent that this was a lab accident. The only question is how does the world move on from China. The entire world really made a mistake in allowing pretty much all manufacturing supply chains to run through the country. And because so many companies stand to lose if they go elsewhere, they are in a bind. I hope profit and greed don't trump moral imperative going forward.

 

OK, I've listened to the whole thing and it got cringey at times. Really there was not much new mentioned, Dr Garry reasserted the arguments that they made in the proximal origins paper. I don't doubt his sincerity after listening to this, but their bias was readily apparent. They called the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory over and over while at other times they begrudgingly admitted that it is technically possible, but would require a massive cover up. One of the guys compared the lab leak hypothesis to stop the steal.

One interesting point in the video they mention the theory that the virus was brought to China in frozen food. One guy thought it was plausible. Dr Garry then said he thought that it had as much credibility as the lab leak - meaning zero. The fact one of them will believe the virus traveled to China in frozen food, but a lab leak is impossible, is telling.

At one point Dr Garry said that I've been doing this for 40 years and we basically trained all the Chinese scientist and he trusts them. They don't want to believe that their close colleagues would make a mistake and lie to them about it.

It was mentioned how people are calling for an end to this type of research and they called that insane. They don't want to even think about the consequences of the research they are doing. Admitting a lab leak is possible would be admitting that their work led to a global pandemic. It would also stop the flow of funds to their research.

Finally, I will restate again that neither side has any scientific proof. I feel that anyone speaking with certainty is showing their bias and that includes the Chinese woman in the OP. There is only circumstantial evidence at this point. The only way this gets settled is if an animal origin is found. If the lab leak is true, all the evidence has been destroyed or cleaned up, so this could drag on for a very long time.

 

Covid is temporary; wutang on the other hand...

 

Been avoiding this D and D like the China virus lately. Hey, just checking, does anyone here actually still think it didn't come from the lab?

 

now see here all along I thought that movie was about poo flingers in the D&D

 

Strangely, I agree 100% with this.

I do not discount out of hand any of the origin possibilities except maybe the UFO aliens wanting to thin the herd of the anti-vaxers.

 

Man, I do love those HBO documentaries.

 

I just watched the 60 Minutes piece on the possible origins of the COVID-19. They did a pretty good job with having proponents of the lab leak idea and a WHO official who downplayed it. The piece does raise more compelling evidence that COVID-19 could've been a leak from the Wuhan Virology lab but even as some of the proponents said there isn't a smoking gun and the evidence is circumstantial.

At the same time there is no direct link yet established from a zoonotic source to COVID-19. The argument presented by the the WHO official is very plausible and matches my personal experience with Wuhan and the PRC. That an infected animal or person could very easily have come from rural areas to the Wuhan seafood market.

The biggest problem though is that the PRC has not been open, been covering things up and from the report even the WHO recognizes that the PRC isn't completely open. As it is the PRC themselves in their desire to control the message might've destroyed direct evidence from a zoonotic source. So even if this can be definitively proven that it came from a zoonotic source the PRC's lack of transparency makes it harder for them to prove that.

 

"The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak":

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-science-suggests-a-wuhan-lab-leak-11622995184?mod=hp_opin_pos_2

The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak
The Covid-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus.

By Steven Quay and Richard Muller
June 6, 2021 11:59 am ET

The possibility that the pandemic began with an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is attracting fresh attention. President Biden has asked the national intelligence community to redouble efforts to investigate.

Much of the public discussion has focused on circumstantial evidence: mysterious illnesses in late 2019; the lab’s work intentionally supercharging viruses to increase lethality (known as “gain of function” research). The Chinese Communist Party has been reluctant to release relevant information. Reports based on U.S. intelligence have suggested the lab collaborated on projects with the Chinese military.

But the most compelling reason to favor the lab leak hypothesis is firmly based in science. In particular, consider the genetic fingerprint of CoV-2, the novel coronavirus responsible for the disease Covid-19.

In gain-of-function research, a microbiologist can increase the lethality of a coronavirus enormously by splicing a special sequence into its genome at a prime location. Doing this leaves no trace of manipulation. But it alters the virus spike protein, rendering it easier for the virus to inject genetic material into the victim cell. Since 1992 there have been at least 11 separate experiments adding a special sequence to the same location. The end result has always been supercharged viruses.

A genome is a blueprint for the factory of a cell to make proteins. The language is made up of three-letter “words,” 64 in total, that represent the 20 different amino acids. For example, there are six different words for the amino acid arginine, the one that is often used in supercharging viruses. Every cell has a different preference for which word it likes to use most.

In the case of the gain-of-function supercharge, other sequences could have been spliced into this same site. Instead of a CGG-CGG (known as “double CGG”) that tells the protein factory to make two arginine amino acids in a row, you’ll obtain equal lethality by splicing any one of 35 of the other two-word combinations for double arginine. If the insertion takes place naturally, say through recombination, then one of those 35 other sequences is far more likely to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.

In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus.

Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.

Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?

Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.

When the lab’s Shi Zhengli and colleagues published a paper in February 2020 with the virus’s partial genome, they omitted any mention of the special sequence that supercharges the virus or the rare double CGG section. Yet the fingerprint is easily identified in the data that accompanied the paper. Was it omitted in the hope that nobody would notice this evidence of the gain-of-function origin?

But in a matter of weeks virologists Bruno Coutard and colleagues published their discovery of the sequence in CoV-2 and its novel supercharged site. Double CGG is there; you only have to look. They comment in their paper that the protein that held it “may provide a gain-of-function” capability to the virus, “for efficient spreading” to humans.

There is additional scientific evidence that points to CoV-2’s gain-of-function origin. The most compelling is the dramatic differences in the genetic diversity of CoV-2, compared with the coronaviruses responsible for SARS and MERS.

Both of those were confirmed to have a natural origin; the viruses evolved rapidly as they spread through the human population, until the most contagious forms dominated. Covid-19 didn’t work that way. It appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version. No serious viral “improvement” took place until a minor variation occurred many months later in England.

Such early optimization is unprecedented, and it suggests a long period of adaptation that predated its public spread. Science knows of only one way that could be achieved: simulated natural evolution, growing the virus on human cells until the optimum is achieved. That is precisely what is done in gain-of-function research. Mice that are genetically modified to have the same coronavirus receptor as humans, called “humanized mice,” are repeatedly exposed to the virus to encourage adaptation.

The presence of the double CGG sequence is strong evidence of gene splicing, and the absence of diversity in the public outbreak suggests gain-of-function acceleration. The scientific evidence points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory.

Dr. Quay is founder of Atossa Therapeutics and author of “Stay Safe: A Physician’s Guide to Survive Coronavirus.” Mr. Muller is an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California Berkeley and a former senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
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