The science can get kind of technical but one thing that those who oppose the lab leak theory have never been able to answer is how the Pandemic started in Wuhan 1,000 miles away from the bats with SARs-like viruses and wild bats were not being sold in markets there. But they were in WIV...

China's "bat lady" even said she was surprised by the pandemic starting in Wuhan but of course never offered an explanation. No one has ever claimed there are bats near Wuhan that have SARs-like viruses. It ijust somehow happened in Wuhan...no one knows why. Maybe a traveler got bit by a bat or something. Just ridiculous. We just threw common sense out the window...

Peter Daszak and his Ecohealth Alliance is at the center of all this--their collaboration with WIV, their proposal to DARPA to insert furin cleavage sites in a SARs-like coronavirus. Though not funded the concern is that the work might have gone on anyway at WIV/North Carolina at Ralph Baric's lab. An excerpt of an interview of Peter Daszak

"Did EcoHealth Alliance or the Wuhan Institute of Virology, through its partnership with EcoHealth Alliance, ever insert a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus genetic sequence?"

"Of course we did not do that. I really don’t understand how that could be a question at this point — it’s beyond the pale. That’s not in our plans and it’s not any of our reports, so of course we didn’t do that."

"But isn’t it the case that you submitted a grant proposal to DARPA to do so?"

"We did submit a proposal to DARPA. I’ve not checked through the one that’s online that it’s the correct document. What I do know is it was widely reported that DARPA rejected that because there were concerns about safety issues. That is absolutely untrue. The document that allegedly is DARPA’s response, their review of our proposal, I’ve never seen that before. It was never sent to us. I don’t know if it’s real.

DARPA had a process by which people who didn’t get funded could do an interview with them to find out why they didn’t get funded. So I did that. Never once did they mention any concerns or issues around safety; never once did they mention gain-of-function. The reason they told us it was rejected was because the amount we asked for was too much for them. They couldn’t afford it. They actually encouraged us to resubmit in different ways. We then had protracted conversations with them about funding specific parts of it. They liked the proposal."

"Was any of the work described in that proposal completed prior to its submission? We were told by multiple sources that when you submit a grant, that at least some of the work would have been done."

"When you write a grant proposal and propose to do a new line of research, which is what we did, we would not be doing that research before we submit the proposal. That’s not how it works."

"When we asked if you had ever inserted a furin cleavage site to a coronavirus, you responded with outrage. But that is what was described in the DARPA proposal."

"No. What you said is, did we insert a furin cleavage site? And what I said was, of course not! If we had done that work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it would have been published by now. It would have been made public in our reports to the NIH. The DARPA proposal was not funded. Therefore, the work was not done. Simple."

"But you acknowledge that you proposed to DARPA to insert a furin cleavage site?"

"I refute that that was the goal of the DARPA proposal. The idea was not to insert a furin cleavage site in a virus to see what happens. That’s not what was proposed. The proposal was to look for those polybasic cleavage sites in nature because we knew that that was the potential to make a virus more able to infect people and move from person to person. If we found mutations around that polybasic cleavage site that looked like it could be evolvable, the idea was then that Ralph Baric’s lab at UNC would do some work to see how evolvable that site was. So that work never happened. The proposal was not funded."

"Did you find any of these cleavage sites in naturally occurring viruses that you collected?"

"The proposal was not funded so we didn’t do that work. We’ve not found polybasic cleavage sites. However, they are in many coronaviruses from bats. Papers from Europe show mutations around that cleavage site that suggest strongly that that furin cleavage site could evolve very easily in nature. I’m sure there are viruses out there with it. I’m convinced that it could have easily evolved during the first stages of the pandemic, as the virus got from bats, perhaps into an intermediate host in a wildlife farm, or into people."

"Did you resubmit the proposal?"

"We had conversations with them over many months about bits they would like to fund or they wanted to fund. We did not get funded. We did not do the work."

"So you didn’t think the DARPA proposal was relevant to the investigation into the origin of the pandemic?"

"A proposal that was not funded and work that was never done is not relevant to the origins of Covid. Of course not!"

"When asked if you had done this work with the furin cleavage site, you said no."

"For the furin cleavage site, you should really ask Ralph Baric. He wrote that section of the DARPA grant."

"So you’re saying that that would be a good question for Ralph Baric, whether he has done any of these insertions?"

"I don’t know what Ralph Baric has done. But I doubt that he would go ahead and do that work without the funding."

How dare you accuse us inserting a furin cleavage site! This is totally not relevant to Covid which is almost certainly not due to a lab leak Ok, yes we did propose it, maybe you should ask Ralph Baric about it..

I'm so convinced...

https://theintercept.com/2022/03/11/cov ... interview/

More concerning info about the Wuhan lab/Peter Dassak:

https://mobile.twitter.com/Ayjchan/stat ... 6146223105

It's not the lab leak theory, anymore. More like the lab leak proof.

https://mobile.twitter.com/WashburneAle ... 3909432320

Any comment from the Energy Dept report that Covid most likely came from a lab leak? I would post a link, but it is everywhere...

Not sure why everyone is making a particularly big deal of that. It was with a "low degree of confidence" so they and the FBI think it was likely a lab leak, 4 other agencies believe it came from nature and two others are decided. Now, have they found more evidence that changed their mind? That would be more interesting but we don't know that...

True, but it is SUCH a change from a year ago, where some in the media (and here as well!) would denigrate those who would dare espouse such beliefs as this even remotely being a lab created virus. I just wonder how deeply the change is affecting those who could not even consider it being man made.

Well I was the one making such a fuss about it back then so I wouldnt know!

Agreed

So genetic testing of materials from the wet market in Wuhan has produced this finding.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... ak/673390/

Think the "low confidence" findings from the FBI will now reflect this evidence?

Some of the usual suspects (scientists pushing zoonotic origins) at it again. They didn't make their pre-print available-so other scientists could critique it--before throwing this out there...

"Some of the usual suspects (scientists pushing zoonotic origins) at it again."

Sure. These guys are as crazy as Qanon..

The simplest explanation is usually the right explanation. And the simplest thing that could cause this happening was zoonotic transfer.. However It took virus experts more than a dozen years to pinpoint the animal origin of SARS, a related virus.

especially when racoon dogs are involved...

"A virus similar to SARS-CoV was isolated from Himalayan palm civets (Paguma larvata), a raccoon dog, and humans working in a live-animal market in Guangdong, China in May 2003.[33]
Raccoon dogs, as well as masked palm civets, were originally believed to be the natural reservoirs of severe acute respiratory syndrome–related coronavirus. However, genetic analysis has since convinced most experts that bats are the natural hosts.[34] Raccoon dogs were most likely only transient accidental hosts.[35]
According to German virologist Christian Drosten, the raccoon dog is the most likely intermediate host for transmission of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 to humans, as raccoon dogs are bred in China in fur farming.[36][37][38]
An early locus of COVID-19 transmission was the Huanan live animal market, and even before the pandemic, the place was identified as a likely site for zoonosis (diseases hopping to humans from other species). There were over a thousand racoon-dogs for sale in the market, and about nine thousand other animals.[39] Samples collected in the market in early 2020 showed high levels of SARS-CoV-2 and raccoon-dog genetic material (often both in the same samples), especially from a stall ("Stall 29") that kept a cage of racoon-dogs on top of a cage containing poultry, optimum conditions for the virus to hop the species barrier. The existence of such a stall has been contested by Chinese authorities[39][40]; the stall had been photographed in 2014 by Edward C. Holmes, an Australian virologist who visited the market while working with local researchers, and while a guest professor with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) from 2014 to 2020; it had also been filmed by a local in December 2019 and posted on Weibo.[41][42][40] Racoon-dogs are known to be able to catch and spread COVID-19 easily.[42]"

Scientists can have biases due to self-interest financially/professionally. Or even based on their ego. They don't have to be crazy.

Reputable scientists don't release their results to be blown up in the Atlantic before they've even released a preprint so that other scientists can critique their work. That's trying to get a narrative out there.

As has been noted "But it is also possible that humans might have first brought the virus to the market and infected the raccoon dogs, or that infected humans happened to leave traces of the virus near the animals."

In other words, the study doesn't prove anything. They found Covid in a stall in the same place they found raccoon DNA. But that doesn't prove that the Covid came from the raccoons or that the raccoons were the the source of Covid that humans have.

And of course there is no discussion about all the animals China tested in the area and couldn't find any that had Covid...

It is also strange to say the least that China puts this database out there and then suddenly pulls it but some scientist sees it...

"Reputable scientists don't release their results to be blown up in the Atlantic before they've even released a preprint so that other scientists can critique their work. "

And the release of the "findings by the FBI..." Thats not intended to "get a narrative out there".

This is the guy you are snidely suggesting isn't "reputable".

https://www.eeb.uawebhost.arizona.edu/p ... tment-head

Dr. Michael Worobey, Department Head University of Arizona
Louise Foucar Marshall Science Research Professor
Positions and Education:
Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, 2011-present.
Associate Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, 2009-2011.
Assistant Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, 2003-2009.
Postdoctoral researcher, Department of Zoology/St. John’s College, University of Oxford. 2001-2003.
D. Phil., Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. 2001.
B. Sc. (Hons), Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University.
Honors and Awards:
2010: 19th Canadian Association of HIV Researchers Conference, Distinguished Speaker
2009: Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy
2009: Distinguished Alumnus, Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University
2009: 16th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, Distinguished Speaker
2008: National Academy of Science, US Frontiers of Science Kavli Fellow
2006-2011: David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Packard Fellowship
2001: Junior Research Fellowship, St. John’s College, University of Oxford
1999: NSERC postgraduate Scholarship
1997: Rhodes Scholarship

freeman3

In other words, the study doesn't prove anything.

Conclusively. No.

But, it points to the simplest answer, the most likely answer, and the only one that has a body of evidence that is more than conjecture.

In other words, if this research stands up to scrutiny, and it will, its pretty much proven.

Guess what? Dr. Woreby essentially concedes that the study is a nothing burger. From his Twitter account:


"The virus in these samples may not have come from the animals. The possibility that it originated in humans is very real, and we found samples from other stalls that had lots of animal sequences, from, say fish, or cattle, that almost certainly got their virus from humans."

https://mobile.twitter.com/MichaelWorob ... 7175301120

So samples from other stalls had animals who clearly got Covid from humans but because the raccoon dog "could" be an intermediate host we're going to make a big deal out of it?

Regardless of their reputation throwing this out to the media like this was a game changer and then backtracking afterward is not very cool, wouldn't you agree?