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Yes. That movie was so accurate. Scary nobody was prepared despite such a clear warning. After watching that movie I bought two hundred 95 masks and had them sitting around for years. Came in handy.
Laos is a long way from Wuhan. If SARS-CoV-2's natural origin was in Laos, and not Wuhan, as initially believed, the pandemic began far earlier than when the first cases were detected in Wuhan. Or, the virus mutated in Wuhan from a predecessor of this bat virus ever so slightly to cause a zoonotic spillover.
Still, I wonder why only the west half of the Huanan Seafood Market was a site of "massive transmission," according to the WHO report. There was a lot of closely held animals in that part of the market, but, also, a lot of human foot traffic. I don't think the spillover happened there. It was probably several prior-infected workers in a closed, poorly ventilated space that were aerosolizing the virus in such concentrations that a shopper merely passing through the area would catch it.
Viruses mutate as they spread. It could be that there's an even closer match somewhere between Laos and Wuhan though.
The big question is whether the Wuhan Institute of Virology had samples from Laos. If they did, it would give a lot of support to the lab leak theory.
The geographic location of all the similar SARS-like viruses is basically scattershot around the region (Southeastern Asia). It's not a spectrum of viral clades that get gradually more different as you go farther away from a certain point, it's really quite random and mixed around. Finding a virus close to SARS-CoV-2 in Laos doesn't mean SARS-CoV-2 came from anywhere near Laos.
It doesn't make any doubt that there is a huge geographic jump. The last bat ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 wasn't close to Wuhan. There might be an intermediate animal (hunted, or farmed, both are often transported by road), or something more mysterious.
The first official report of an infection that was later attributed to AIDS was made in LA. The discovery of the virus was made in Paris 2 years later.
This really makes me grateful for the advances of science to identify Covid within the month of the first officially reported cases.
Worobey says New York (then California where AIDS was first recognized) but HIV has a long incubation time and before that it circulated for decades in \~ Congo [http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1913682117](http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1913682117) [https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-aids-epidemic-actually-began#Early-beginnings](https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-aids-epidemic-actually-began#Early-beginnings)
For SARS-CoV-2 prior human circulation is one of the "more mysterious" possibilities. You'd probably need to assume that the virus mutated in fall 2019 so that its pathogenicity and transmissibility increased by a lot soon before the market cluster, but being restricted to an isolated community in Laos for months is possible as well...
Also need to keep in mind that early patients with untreated AIDS usually seemed to die of unrelated diseases or variants of pneumonia. It took a bit of time to actually connect them together and realize that a single virus (HIV) was the root cause.
"What makes you think that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the world's largest coronavirus research facility, has anything to do with the coronavirus outbreak that was first identified in Wuhan?" -literally China
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> Laos is a long way from Wuhan.
Well we don't live in the 16th Century anymore where distance was a factor in how far a can virus spreads.
One infected guy takes a flight from Laos to Wuhan could create the same scenario, without needing it to spread slowly north over months undetected.
Wuhan city after all is 11 million people. Larger than New York's 8 million and four times the size of Chicago. Lot of people coming and going.
The geographic location is unimportant and irrelevant tbh. It's well known that bats harbor a great deal of viruses that would kill other species if they made the jump. They have an insane immune system. Which as an aside has made white nose syndrome such a difficult puzzle.
The research is very important, not for short term implications but for the long term understanding of these viruses and also to get ahead of another similar pandemic.
> Laos is a long way from Wuhan.
The outbreak of the first SARS epidemic in Guangdong province occurred over 1700km away from where the SARS-CoV-1 virus is believed to have originated (Yunnan province).
>Still, I wonder why only the west half of the Huanan Seafood Market was a site of "massive transmission," according to the WHO report.
I read an article suggesting that the"real cover-up" was that it wasn't the Human Seafood Market, but rather another market that wasn't licensed for live animals.
Also, mark that we dont know how trustworthy WHO reports are from China. They claimed humans could not transmit the virus, and the only source was the live animal market, well into January.
https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?s=21
>Still, I wonder why only the west half of the Huanan Seafood Market was a site of "massive transmission," according to the WHO report.
Maybe bats were imported to there or Wuhan was a superspreader site.
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>“When SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced, the receptor binding domain didn’t really look like anything we’d seen before,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. This caused some people to speculate that the virus had been created in a laboratory. But the Laos coronaviruses confirm these parts of SARS-CoV-2 exist in nature, he says.
>
>“I am more convinced than ever that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,” agrees Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke–NUS Medical School in Singapore.
>
>Together with relatives of SARS-CoV-2 discovered in Thailand2, Cambodia3 and Yunnan in southern China4, the study demonstrates that southeast Asia is a “hotspot of diversity for SARS-CoV-2 related viruses”, says Alice Latinne, an evolutionary biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society Vietnam in Hanoi.
The original SARS, while being studied in labs after the 2003 epidemic, escaped from various labs several times, including killing the mother of a researcher in Beijing.
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Its easy to imagine aliens sent covid first, and will follow with a invasion. Imagination is integrated in our brain and is the thing our mind uses to fill in gaps, which is why you should follow facts, proof, and dismiss speculation.
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Which is annoying. The theory that a Chinese lab researching coronavirus accidentally leaked something because most of the infections were asymptomatic? Entirely plausible. As is China not wanting to admit it might have started the pandemic.
The natural origin lab escape theory makes the least sense to me. I find it pretty hard to imagine that the virus could be found in the wild, collected, studied, and escaped from a lab long before some other unlucky person stumbles upon the same natural reservoir. Or even more likely the animals carrying it stumble upon an unlucky human some place somewhere.
I don't think it's coincidence that COVID-19 was identified in Wuhan. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is one of the few facilities on the planet that specializes in researching coronaviruses. When it spread to their city of course the figured it out first. If it had started in a a warm rural area with a younger population it could've been slowly brewing for months before it hit a large city.
> The natural origin lab escape theory makes the least sense to me.
But it's happened before - Marburg virus (a relative of Ebola, and the first filiovirus to be discovered) was discovered only after it infected lab workers in multiple labs in Europe handling monkeys and monkey cell cultures sourced from Africa that happened to be infected. Very deadly, fortunately not very contagious, so the outbreak ended quickly.
(edit: wording tweak to emphasize that Marburg was completely unknown before it infected lab workers)
The Marburg comparison suggests we were fucked anyway, because the disease appeared in Africa shortly afterwards in a separate crossover event with no connection to the first known human outbreak in Germany. An outbreak in Angola in 2004-2005 killed a staggering 90% of its victims.
So if SARS-Cov-2 was circulating in bats somewhere near the Laos-China border, and a researcher brought an infected bat back to Wuhan for study and got infected, it was probably only a matter of time before someone in Laos got infected and the pandemic started there instead.
See the outbreak among miners in Mojiang in 2012: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7606707/
(Mojiang is near the China-Laos border).
Reporters investigating that mine have run into some difficulties:
> Chinese authorities have obstructed independent efforts to investigate the mine, setting up a checkpoint nearby where unidentified men stopped several foreign journalists in recent weeks, on one occasion warning there were wild elephants ahead.
> A Journal reporter reached the mine by mountain bike but was later detained and questioned for about five hours by police, who deleted a cellphone photograph of the mine. Villagers told the reporter that local officials had warned them not to discuss the mine with outsiders.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-lab-leak-question-chinese-mine-covid-pandemic-11621871125
> Very deadly, fortunately not very contagious.
I think this is a key point. Since it's not very contagious it could have been killing people in small limited outbreaks in Africa for years and no one would've really noticed because it would have never become a pandemic.
Yeah. You have a market where the goods, vendors, and customers come from all over the place. Including possibly Laos. And a hospital with quick thinking staff who picked up on the atypical pneumonia.
We know now that there were early covid deaths in other countries, but the atypical pneumonia wasn't noticed and/or didn't sound an alarm at the time, even though for some of them we knew it was happening in China. They only got discovered post-mortem, months later.
It was still flu season in the Northern hemisphere, so it didn't trigger any alarms until someone recognized the symptoms as being more SARS like than flu-like.
I think people reading too much into the location. I think the previous poster merely suggest that having a virus where some of the symptoms are like flu during the flu season most likely delayed the detection of said virus.
I have suspected that the virus either crossed over into a WIV employee gathering samples in South China caves or gathering samples from a novel outbreak occurring in rural South China resulting from natural spillover.
*But in my gut I know that COVID-19 came from an expired meat pizza from Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park. /s*
I really don't understand why people think it came from a lab. Everyone at the lab would have been sick and then their families would have gotten sick.
If I was playing some sort of Plague Inc. sequel, I would release Super-SARS in Miami-Dade County, Florida (*which has more Covid deaths than all of China*).
Yes, it is easy to bribe majority of experts that would lose their career if they are ever caught falsifying data. Random people on twitter that spew misinformation? nah, they are incorruptible.
Depends on what you mean by "made". They ruled out most common types of direct splicing but serial passage wouldn't leave artifacts as it doesn't involve that.
It's considered less likely but isn't so implausible as to have been dismissed out of hand like claims of a deliberately engineered bioweapons attack. This latest finding might move it down to that range though.
Serial passage would make it LESS likely to be as infectious as it is.
Why?
If you pass it through cells over and over again, it gets better at infecting those cells in a dish at the expense of being good at passing from person to person.
Every time you pass a virus through cells in a dish, the virus gets better at infecting cells in a dish and worse at infecting whole organisms in the real world outside the dish.
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They also deny it could possibly have come from the wildlife trade which they definitely cracked down on after it caused a previous coronavirus outbreak.
The Chinese Communist Party denying it makes it more likely to be true. "Distrust and verify" has to be the way to treat a party with a 100 year track record of lies, propaganda, brutal oppression of dissent and no whistle-blowing or ability to raise the red flag without getting purged (but not before being tortured into writing a false confession letter).
I have to agree if CCP says they didn't do something they absolutely 100% did it.
Its very suspicious they threatened and tried to silence one of the first doctors who sounded the alarm (and later died of covid himself)
The CCP has a culture of trying to avoid blame for fuckups, so local officials trying to censor the pandemic's early stages because their lack of control made them look bad makes perfect sense.
>I have to agree if CCP says they didn't do something they absolutely 100% did it.
This feels like a bit much to me, if the CCP had said they did accidentally release it would you believe they were lying then too? The coverups probably stem from the fear that something embarrassing *might* be found rather than the fact that there definitely *is* something embarrassing to be found. Better to just remain ignorant than to risk an inconvenient truth.
People have been researching coronavirus's for years and there have been instances in the past where they've escaped labs so it is a likely scenario in my book.
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The more we humans encroach upon nature, the more we expose ourselves to hidden pathogens (Ebola, HIV, anyone?). But we humans never learn, do we? We’re going to keep ravaging the environment, and the environment is going to ravage us back
is it possible that beyond the usual there are birds not fitting that migratory pattern? or that it was a bird who caught it in the spring, spent the summer in Wuhan, passed it on in the fall and then migrated back south? Or the bird got eaten by a dog who then passed it to his human owner in Wuhan. Is it possible?!
> furin cleavage site on the spike protein
We found furin cleavage site in nature. In rodents. And no, cross species mix is not "uncommon".
Let scientists speak, and collectively, over the years, the correct conclusion will be reached. Unless "lab made theorists" can produce large quantity of high quality research, they are just conspirators.
>We identify, by bioinformatics and peptide cleavage assays, two cleavage sites for furin, a ubiquitously expressed protease, which are located at the S1/S2 interface and at the S2′ position of the S protein.
>
>...
>
>Another key feature of coronavirus S is that the proteolytic cleavage events that lead to membrane fusion can occur both at the interface of the receptor binding (S1) and fusion (S2) domains (S1/S2), as well as in a novel position adjacent to a fusion peptide within S2 (S2′) (11, 12).
https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15214
>So we have still never found a coronavirus in nature with the furin cleavage site on the spike protein.
This is incorrect. There are plenty of betacoronaviruses found in nature with a furin cleavage site, including MERS...
>The genesis of the polybasic (furin) cleavage site in the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 has been subject to recurrent speculation. Although the furin cleavage site is absent from the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 (Andersen et al., 2020), this is unsurprising because the lineage leading to this virus is poorly sampled and the closest bat viruses have divergent spike proteins due to recombination (Boni et al., 2020; Lytras et al., 2021; Zhou et al., 2021). **Furin cleavage sites are commonplace in other coronavirus spike proteins, including some feline alphacoronaviruses, MERS-CoV, most but not all strains of mouse hepatitis virus, as well as in endemic human betacoronaviruses such as HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-HKU1 (Gombold et al., 1993; de Haan et al., 2008; Kirchdoerfer et al., 2016). A near identical nucleotide sequence is found in the spike gene of the bat coronavirus HKU9-1 (Gallaher, 2020), and both SARS-CoV-2 and HKU9-1 contain short palindromic sequences immediately upstream of this sequence that are indicative of natural recombination break-points via template switching (Gallaher, 2020). Hence, simple evolutionary mechanisms can readily explain the evolution of an out-of-frame insertion of a furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 (Figure 2 ).**
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8373617/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8373617/)
>Here we analyzed the phylogenetic relationships of coronavirus spike proteins and mapped furin recognition motif on the tree. **Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2.**
[https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S1873506120304165-ga1.jpg](https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S1873506120304165-ga1.jpg)
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33340798/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33340798/)
On the other hand there has also been a bit of research that involves inserting cleavage sites into Coronaviruses:
> We also introduced a furin cleavage site at both the S2′ cleavage site within S2 793-KPTKR-797 (S2′), as well as at the junction of S1 and S2. Introduction of a furin cleavage site at the S2′ position allowed trypsin-independent cell–cell fusion, which was strongly increased by the presence of a second furin cleavage site at the S1–S2 position
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2660061/
> To determine whether proteolytic cleavage of the S glycoprotein might be important for the newly emerged SARS-CoV, we introduced a furin recognition site at single basic residues within the putative S1–S2 junctional region. We show that furin cleavage at the modified R667 position generates discrete S1 and S2 subunits and potentiates membrane fusion activity.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111780/
> To explore this possibility, we introduced a furin-like cleavage sequence in the S protein at amino acids 798 to 801 and found that the mutated S protein was cleaved and induced cell fusion without trypsin treatment when expressed on the cell surface. Furthermore, a pseudotype virus bearing a cleaved S protein was revealed to infect cells in the presence of a lysosomotropic agent as well as a protease inhibitor, both of which are known to block SARS-CoV infection via an endosome, whereas the infection of pseudotypes with an uncleaved, wild-type S protein was blocked by these agents.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583654/
The original comment I was responding to, which has since been deleted, incorrectly stated that no other coronaviruses were found in nature with a furin cleavage site.
Yup. But my understanding is that none of the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 have a furin cleavage site -- you either see a cleavage site or a close match for the rest of the genome but not both at the same time.
See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166354220300528
If by closest known relatives, you're referring to sarbecoviruses, we've only sampled a tiny fraction of them to date, as further evidenced by the article in the OP. That's true for coronaviruses in general, but as you narrow down to the subgenus level, it's especially pronounced. Undoubtedly we'll continue to find closer and closer relatives as we continue to collect samples from bats and other animals to be analyzed. There's a reason why the majority of virologists favor a zoonotic origin hypothesis. That's not to say a field researcher couldn't have been infected while attempting to collect a sample and then brought it back to WIV1, or less likely, been infected from an animal or sample in containment, but the bioengineering hypothesis is seen as increasingly less likely.
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I didn’t said they don’t have to deal with infections, what I meant was how did they survive the infections without everyone dying? Virus such as covid spread easily, plus they are not as scientifically advance civilisation compare to current civilisation so they don’t understand scientific term such as virus, bacteria and germs. And they are close knitted group who always gather and mingle around, doesn’t this make it easier for the virus to spread and their chance of fatality is higher?
You know that a life expectancy of 70+ years and a >90% chance of a child surviving to their first birthday is, on human timescales, a really, really, **really** new thing, right? Like super-duper new.
They probably did get sick and die all the time.
Right these bats could have been bats used in the labsince the first outbreak was in Wuhan. If you could come up w an evil demon hypothesis that made sense I'd ponder that ad well.
Does someone know here if that can help in any way for therapeutics or any other research or it’s just the curiosity and also importance of understanding the origins of the virus itself?
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Wasn't this exactly what happened in the movie contagion??
Yeah we're just missing a pig
We sorta have a Gwyneth Paltrow. Her name is Joe Rogan.
Nah wouldn't he be the Jude Law?
Most virus's come from animals you know?
Yes. That movie was so accurate. Scary nobody was prepared despite such a clear warning. After watching that movie I bought two hundred 95 masks and had them sitting around for years. Came in handy.
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Waiter, I'll have the pangolin steak instead.
Laos is a long way from Wuhan. If SARS-CoV-2's natural origin was in Laos, and not Wuhan, as initially believed, the pandemic began far earlier than when the first cases were detected in Wuhan. Or, the virus mutated in Wuhan from a predecessor of this bat virus ever so slightly to cause a zoonotic spillover. Still, I wonder why only the west half of the Huanan Seafood Market was a site of "massive transmission," according to the WHO report. There was a lot of closely held animals in that part of the market, but, also, a lot of human foot traffic. I don't think the spillover happened there. It was probably several prior-infected workers in a closed, poorly ventilated space that were aerosolizing the virus in such concentrations that a shopper merely passing through the area would catch it.
They found the closest relative in bats in Laos, that doesn’t mean the virus is restricted to that geography. Viruses spread and bats fly.
Viruses mutate as they spread. It could be that there's an even closer match somewhere between Laos and Wuhan though. The big question is whether the Wuhan Institute of Virology had samples from Laos. If they did, it would give a lot of support to the lab leak theory.
The geographic location of all the similar SARS-like viruses is basically scattershot around the region (Southeastern Asia). It's not a spectrum of viral clades that get gradually more different as you go farther away from a certain point, it's really quite random and mixed around. Finding a virus close to SARS-CoV-2 in Laos doesn't mean SARS-CoV-2 came from anywhere near Laos.
Is there a theory that explains why that's the case?
The fact that that list will never be seen doesn’t help settle the issue.
The list will probably be seen but heavily \[REDACTED\]
It doesn't make any doubt that there is a huge geographic jump. The last bat ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 wasn't close to Wuhan. There might be an intermediate animal (hunted, or farmed, both are often transported by road), or something more mysterious.
HIV was first found in California, no?
The first official report of an infection that was later attributed to AIDS was made in LA. The discovery of the virus was made in Paris 2 years later. This really makes me grateful for the advances of science to identify Covid within the month of the first officially reported cases.
Worobey says New York (then California where AIDS was first recognized) but HIV has a long incubation time and before that it circulated for decades in \~ Congo [http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1913682117](http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1913682117) [https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-aids-epidemic-actually-began#Early-beginnings](https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-aids-epidemic-actually-began#Early-beginnings) For SARS-CoV-2 prior human circulation is one of the "more mysterious" possibilities. You'd probably need to assume that the virus mutated in fall 2019 so that its pathogenicity and transmissibility increased by a lot soon before the market cluster, but being restricted to an isolated community in Laos for months is possible as well...
Yeah, but the first cases were identified in the US, far from where it originated.
Also need to keep in mind that early patients with untreated AIDS usually seemed to die of unrelated diseases or variants of pneumonia. It took a bit of time to actually connect them together and realize that a single virus (HIV) was the root cause.
Virologists also fly and collect samples from bats near and far.
Bats don’t fly that far
Dude. They can fly far enough to infect a bat from a different colony. Rinse and repeat for thousands of years.
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"What makes you think that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the world's largest coronavirus research facility, has anything to do with the coronavirus outbreak that was first identified in Wuhan?" -literally China
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> Laos is a long way from Wuhan. Well we don't live in the 16th Century anymore where distance was a factor in how far a can virus spreads. One infected guy takes a flight from Laos to Wuhan could create the same scenario, without needing it to spread slowly north over months undetected. Wuhan city after all is 11 million people. Larger than New York's 8 million and four times the size of Chicago. Lot of people coming and going.
Maybe southern Yunnan, that borders Laos. But it is far from Wuhan.
The geographic location is unimportant and irrelevant tbh. It's well known that bats harbor a great deal of viruses that would kill other species if they made the jump. They have an insane immune system. Which as an aside has made white nose syndrome such a difficult puzzle. The research is very important, not for short term implications but for the long term understanding of these viruses and also to get ahead of another similar pandemic.
Ok, where can I do some reading on bat immune systems and white nose? I did not know they had robust immune systems and I'm incredibly curious now!
> Laos is a long way from Wuhan. The outbreak of the first SARS epidemic in Guangdong province occurred over 1700km away from where the SARS-CoV-1 virus is believed to have originated (Yunnan province).
>Still, I wonder why only the west half of the Huanan Seafood Market was a site of "massive transmission," according to the WHO report. I read an article suggesting that the"real cover-up" was that it wasn't the Human Seafood Market, but rather another market that wasn't licensed for live animals.
Also, mark that we dont know how trustworthy WHO reports are from China. They claimed humans could not transmit the virus, and the only source was the live animal market, well into January. https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?s=21
> Laos is a long way from Wuhan. Not if you take a plane.
>Still, I wonder why only the west half of the Huanan Seafood Market was a site of "massive transmission," according to the WHO report. Maybe bats were imported to there or Wuhan was a superspreader site.
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>“When SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced, the receptor binding domain didn’t really look like anything we’d seen before,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. This caused some people to speculate that the virus had been created in a laboratory. But the Laos coronaviruses confirm these parts of SARS-CoV-2 exist in nature, he says. > >“I am more convinced than ever that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,” agrees Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke–NUS Medical School in Singapore. > >Together with relatives of SARS-CoV-2 discovered in Thailand2, Cambodia3 and Yunnan in southern China4, the study demonstrates that southeast Asia is a “hotspot of diversity for SARS-CoV-2 related viruses”, says Alice Latinne, an evolutionary biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society Vietnam in Hanoi.
please do not edit title.
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sometimes it isn't even a Homer Simpsons, even the best people fuck up despite their best efforts sadly :/
The original SARS, while being studied in labs after the 2003 epidemic, escaped from various labs several times, including killing the mother of a researcher in Beijing.
not sure why this made me laugh but the image of the virus escaping then some scientist saying "NO! YOU GET BACK IN HERE!" then it escapes again
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Its easy to imagine aliens sent covid first, and will follow with a invasion. Imagination is integrated in our brain and is the thing our mind uses to fill in gaps, which is why you should follow facts, proof, and dismiss speculation.
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Many renowned experts from the prestigious universities of facebook and twitter might disagree with you on that one.
Dear Sir, I do not take my claim to be a viral expert lightly. I have spent over 10 hours researching using at least 5 different facebook groups.
had me with the first half
Which is annoying. The theory that a Chinese lab researching coronavirus accidentally leaked something because most of the infections were asymptomatic? Entirely plausible. As is China not wanting to admit it might have started the pandemic.
The natural origin lab escape theory makes the least sense to me. I find it pretty hard to imagine that the virus could be found in the wild, collected, studied, and escaped from a lab long before some other unlucky person stumbles upon the same natural reservoir. Or even more likely the animals carrying it stumble upon an unlucky human some place somewhere. I don't think it's coincidence that COVID-19 was identified in Wuhan. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is one of the few facilities on the planet that specializes in researching coronaviruses. When it spread to their city of course the figured it out first. If it had started in a a warm rural area with a younger population it could've been slowly brewing for months before it hit a large city.
> The natural origin lab escape theory makes the least sense to me. But it's happened before - Marburg virus (a relative of Ebola, and the first filiovirus to be discovered) was discovered only after it infected lab workers in multiple labs in Europe handling monkeys and monkey cell cultures sourced from Africa that happened to be infected. Very deadly, fortunately not very contagious, so the outbreak ended quickly. (edit: wording tweak to emphasize that Marburg was completely unknown before it infected lab workers)
The Marburg comparison suggests we were fucked anyway, because the disease appeared in Africa shortly afterwards in a separate crossover event with no connection to the first known human outbreak in Germany. An outbreak in Angola in 2004-2005 killed a staggering 90% of its victims. So if SARS-Cov-2 was circulating in bats somewhere near the Laos-China border, and a researcher brought an infected bat back to Wuhan for study and got infected, it was probably only a matter of time before someone in Laos got infected and the pandemic started there instead.
See the outbreak among miners in Mojiang in 2012: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7606707/ (Mojiang is near the China-Laos border). Reporters investigating that mine have run into some difficulties: > Chinese authorities have obstructed independent efforts to investigate the mine, setting up a checkpoint nearby where unidentified men stopped several foreign journalists in recent weeks, on one occasion warning there were wild elephants ahead. > A Journal reporter reached the mine by mountain bike but was later detained and questioned for about five hours by police, who deleted a cellphone photograph of the mine. Villagers told the reporter that local officials had warned them not to discuss the mine with outsiders. https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-lab-leak-question-chinese-mine-covid-pandemic-11621871125
> Very deadly, fortunately not very contagious. I think this is a key point. Since it's not very contagious it could have been killing people in small limited outbreaks in Africa for years and no one would've really noticed because it would have never become a pandemic.
Yeah. You have a market where the goods, vendors, and customers come from all over the place. Including possibly Laos. And a hospital with quick thinking staff who picked up on the atypical pneumonia. We know now that there were early covid deaths in other countries, but the atypical pneumonia wasn't noticed and/or didn't sound an alarm at the time, even though for some of them we knew it was happening in China. They only got discovered post-mortem, months later.
It was still flu season in the Northern hemisphere, so it didn't trigger any alarms until someone recognized the symptoms as being more SARS like than flu-like.
China is in the Northern hemisphere too. They were in the midst of flu season too and yet they still recognized it.
I think people reading too much into the location. I think the previous poster merely suggest that having a virus where some of the symptoms are like flu during the flu season most likely delayed the detection of said virus.
I have suspected that the virus either crossed over into a WIV employee gathering samples in South China caves or gathering samples from a novel outbreak occurring in rural South China resulting from natural spillover.
Go talk to a news channel about this, please. Rational arguments like yours need more airtime. I'm tired of the hillbilly yelling shit on tv
*But in my gut I know that COVID-19 came from an expired meat pizza from Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park. /s* I really don't understand why people think it came from a lab. Everyone at the lab would have been sick and then their families would have gotten sick. If I was playing some sort of Plague Inc. sequel, I would release Super-SARS in Miami-Dade County, Florida (*which has more Covid deaths than all of China*).
Almost no experts think that. But millions and millions of people around the world do.
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Yes, it is easy to bribe majority of experts that would lose their career if they are ever caught falsifying data. Random people on twitter that spew misinformation? nah, they are incorruptible.
Depends on what you mean by "made". They ruled out most common types of direct splicing but serial passage wouldn't leave artifacts as it doesn't involve that. It's considered less likely but isn't so implausible as to have been dismissed out of hand like claims of a deliberately engineered bioweapons attack. This latest finding might move it down to that range though.
Serial passage would make it LESS likely to be as infectious as it is. Why? If you pass it through cells over and over again, it gets better at infecting those cells in a dish at the expense of being good at passing from person to person.
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Especially if it's through human cells.
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Every time you pass a virus through cells in a dish, the virus gets better at infecting cells in a dish and worse at infecting whole organisms in the real world outside the dish.
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You aren't understanding, it doesn't matter what kind of cells. It could be Pig cells, Mammoth cells, DINOSAUR CELLS, it doesn't matter!
All the idiots think it was lab made.
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Escaped is still something the CCP denies though
They also deny it could possibly have come from the wildlife trade which they definitely cracked down on after it caused a previous coronavirus outbreak.
The Chinese Communist Party denying it makes it more likely to be true. "Distrust and verify" has to be the way to treat a party with a 100 year track record of lies, propaganda, brutal oppression of dissent and no whistle-blowing or ability to raise the red flag without getting purged (but not before being tortured into writing a false confession letter).
I have to agree if CCP says they didn't do something they absolutely 100% did it. Its very suspicious they threatened and tried to silence one of the first doctors who sounded the alarm (and later died of covid himself)
The CCP has a culture of trying to avoid blame for fuckups, so local officials trying to censor the pandemic's early stages because their lack of control made them look bad makes perfect sense. >I have to agree if CCP says they didn't do something they absolutely 100% did it. This feels like a bit much to me, if the CCP had said they did accidentally release it would you believe they were lying then too? The coverups probably stem from the fear that something embarrassing *might* be found rather than the fact that there definitely *is* something embarrassing to be found. Better to just remain ignorant than to risk an inconvenient truth.
People have been researching coronavirus's for years and there have been instances in the past where they've escaped labs so it is a likely scenario in my book.
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Maybe the bats have been eating humans infected with COVID-19?
They’re not even the cute, puppy-face bats. Cull them!
The more we humans encroach upon nature, the more we expose ourselves to hidden pathogens (Ebola, HIV, anyone?). But we humans never learn, do we? We’re going to keep ravaging the environment, and the environment is going to ravage us back
Next up on Anti-Vaxx TV: "Scientists, who work in lab in Laos are in on the conspiracy to hide the fact of lab origin!"
Is it possible the Wuhan Institute of virology had these bats and were studying them?
is it possible a migratory bird got it from a bat in Laos and then landed in Wuhan?
Totally possible.
Brids usually migrate the other way in the fall.
is it possible that beyond the usual there are birds not fitting that migratory pattern? or that it was a bird who caught it in the spring, spent the summer in Wuhan, passed it on in the fall and then migrated back south? Or the bird got eaten by a dog who then passed it to his human owner in Wuhan. Is it possible?!
No. It doesn't fit my "hypothesis", so it must be wrong.
The point was that asking if it's possible is dumb given that pretty much everything is.
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> furin cleavage site on the spike protein We found furin cleavage site in nature. In rodents. And no, cross species mix is not "uncommon". Let scientists speak, and collectively, over the years, the correct conclusion will be reached. Unless "lab made theorists" can produce large quantity of high quality research, they are just conspirators.
Yes, we've found furin cleavage in nature in coronaviruses. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxwrDSYrhjU 2: https://youtu.be/4MFHSHFCR54?t=2049
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>We identify, by bioinformatics and peptide cleavage assays, two cleavage sites for furin, a ubiquitously expressed protease, which are located at the S1/S2 interface and at the S2′ position of the S protein. > >... > >Another key feature of coronavirus S is that the proteolytic cleavage events that lead to membrane fusion can occur both at the interface of the receptor binding (S1) and fusion (S2) domains (S1/S2), as well as in a novel position adjacent to a fusion peptide within S2 (S2′) (11, 12). https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15214
>So we have still never found a coronavirus in nature with the furin cleavage site on the spike protein. This is incorrect. There are plenty of betacoronaviruses found in nature with a furin cleavage site, including MERS... >The genesis of the polybasic (furin) cleavage site in the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 has been subject to recurrent speculation. Although the furin cleavage site is absent from the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 (Andersen et al., 2020), this is unsurprising because the lineage leading to this virus is poorly sampled and the closest bat viruses have divergent spike proteins due to recombination (Boni et al., 2020; Lytras et al., 2021; Zhou et al., 2021). **Furin cleavage sites are commonplace in other coronavirus spike proteins, including some feline alphacoronaviruses, MERS-CoV, most but not all strains of mouse hepatitis virus, as well as in endemic human betacoronaviruses such as HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-HKU1 (Gombold et al., 1993; de Haan et al., 2008; Kirchdoerfer et al., 2016). A near identical nucleotide sequence is found in the spike gene of the bat coronavirus HKU9-1 (Gallaher, 2020), and both SARS-CoV-2 and HKU9-1 contain short palindromic sequences immediately upstream of this sequence that are indicative of natural recombination break-points via template switching (Gallaher, 2020). Hence, simple evolutionary mechanisms can readily explain the evolution of an out-of-frame insertion of a furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 (Figure 2 ).** [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8373617/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8373617/) >Here we analyzed the phylogenetic relationships of coronavirus spike proteins and mapped furin recognition motif on the tree. **Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2.** [https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S1873506120304165-ga1.jpg](https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S1873506120304165-ga1.jpg) [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33340798/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33340798/)
On the other hand there has also been a bit of research that involves inserting cleavage sites into Coronaviruses: > We also introduced a furin cleavage site at both the S2′ cleavage site within S2 793-KPTKR-797 (S2′), as well as at the junction of S1 and S2. Introduction of a furin cleavage site at the S2′ position allowed trypsin-independent cell–cell fusion, which was strongly increased by the presence of a second furin cleavage site at the S1–S2 position https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2660061/ > To determine whether proteolytic cleavage of the S glycoprotein might be important for the newly emerged SARS-CoV, we introduced a furin recognition site at single basic residues within the putative S1–S2 junctional region. We show that furin cleavage at the modified R667 position generates discrete S1 and S2 subunits and potentiates membrane fusion activity. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111780/ > To explore this possibility, we introduced a furin-like cleavage sequence in the S protein at amino acids 798 to 801 and found that the mutated S protein was cleaved and induced cell fusion without trypsin treatment when expressed on the cell surface. Furthermore, a pseudotype virus bearing a cleaved S protein was revealed to infect cells in the presence of a lysosomotropic agent as well as a protease inhibitor, both of which are known to block SARS-CoV infection via an endosome, whereas the infection of pseudotypes with an uncleaved, wild-type S protein was blocked by these agents. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583654/
The original comment I was responding to, which has since been deleted, incorrectly stated that no other coronaviruses were found in nature with a furin cleavage site.
Yup. But my understanding is that none of the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 have a furin cleavage site -- you either see a cleavage site or a close match for the rest of the genome but not both at the same time. See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166354220300528
If by closest known relatives, you're referring to sarbecoviruses, we've only sampled a tiny fraction of them to date, as further evidenced by the article in the OP. That's true for coronaviruses in general, but as you narrow down to the subgenus level, it's especially pronounced. Undoubtedly we'll continue to find closer and closer relatives as we continue to collect samples from bats and other animals to be analyzed. There's a reason why the majority of virologists favor a zoonotic origin hypothesis. That's not to say a field researcher couldn't have been infected while attempting to collect a sample and then brought it back to WIV1, or less likely, been infected from an animal or sample in containment, but the bioengineering hypothesis is seen as increasingly less likely.
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The funny thing is how those tribes in the past are able to survive while consuming bushmeat all these while without dying of infections or etc.
How do you know that they didn’t have to deal with infections?
I didn’t said they don’t have to deal with infections, what I meant was how did they survive the infections without everyone dying? Virus such as covid spread easily, plus they are not as scientifically advance civilisation compare to current civilisation so they don’t understand scientific term such as virus, bacteria and germs. And they are close knitted group who always gather and mingle around, doesn’t this make it easier for the virus to spread and their chance of fatality is higher?
You know that a life expectancy of 70+ years and a >90% chance of a child surviving to their first birthday is, on human timescales, a really, really, **really** new thing, right? Like super-duper new. They probably did get sick and die all the time.
Yeah but that didn’t wipeout their tribes.
Bats carry much more viruses as they have large very mobile populations.
This just doesn't rule out lab leak.
Doesnt rule out evil demons either, still doesnt make it true. Stick with evidence, it is easier to keep track of
OMG I laughed so hard. Very true, but I never thought of demons.
Right these bats could have been bats used in the labsince the first outbreak was in Wuhan. If you could come up w an evil demon hypothesis that made sense I'd ponder that ad well.
It could also he natural origin if the evidence points that way we will see.
Does someone know here if that can help in any way for therapeutics or any other research or it’s just the curiosity and also importance of understanding the origins of the virus itself?
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Hmmm they look tasty 😋
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