Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.
By Zeynep Tufekci, 6/25/21, New York Times

There were curious characteristics about the H1N1 flu
pandemic of 1977-78, which emerged from northeastern Asia
& killed an estimated 700,000 people around the world.
For one, it almost exclusively affected people in their
mid-20s or younger. Scientists discovered another oddity
that could explain the first: It was virtually identical to
a strain that circulated in the 50s. People born before that
had immunity that protected them, & younger people didn’t.

But how on earth had it remained so steady genetically,
since viruses continually mutate? Scientists guessed that it
had been frozen in a lab. It was often found to be sensitive
to temperature, something expected for viruses used in
vaccine research.

It was only in 2004 that a prominent virologist, Peter
Palese, wrote that Chi-Ming Chu, a respected virologist &
a former member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told him
that “the intro of this 1977 H1N1 virus” was indeed thought
to be due to vaccine trials involving “the challenge of
several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus.”
For the first time, science itself seemed to have caused
a pandemic while trying to prepare for it.

Now, for the 2nd time in 50 years, there are questions about
whether we are dealing with a pandemic caused by scientific
research. While the Chinese govt’s obstruction may keep us
from knowing for sure whether the virus, SARS-CoV-2, came
from the wild directly or thru a lab in Wuhan or if genetic
experimentation was involved, what we know already is
troubling.

Years of research on the dangers of coronas, & the broader
history of lab accidents & errors around the world, provided
scientists with plenty of reasons to proceed with caution
as they investigated this class of pathogens. But troubling
safety practices persisted. Worse, researchers’ success at
uncovering new threats didn't always translate into
preparedness.

Even if the corona jumped from animal to human without the
involvement of research activities, the groundwork for a
potential disaster had been laid for years, and learning
its lessons is essential to preventing others.

Until the SARS outbreak, coronas were considered fairly
benign, causing only minor to moderate colds. Even 5 months
after SARS emerged in south China in Nov 2002, the Chinese
govt was covering up details about its threat, while the
disease was spreading to other countries. By summer 2003,
it had been contained, but not before infecting over 8,000
people & killing 774. Officials were able to suppress SARS
because infected people spread it when visibly sick, making
it easier to identify & isolate people. But it was a close
call, & that roughly 10% case fatality rate raised alarms.
Preventing the next corona pandemic became a scientific
priority.

By 2005, researchers — including Dr. Shi Zhengli, a
virologist at the Wuhan Inst. of Virology — had ID'ed
horseshoe bats as the likely primary host animal from which
SARS had emerged. In the years that followed, scientists
pursued bat coronas in the field & studied them in the lab.

It is often assumed that SARS was spread to humans by palm
civets, an adorable small mammal sometimes sold at wildlife
markets, though by 2008, it was suspected that bat coronas
could directly infect human lung cells without needing an
intermediary animal. By 2013, Shi’s lab experiments showed
this could happen. Still, scientists sometimes worked
with bats, bat samples & bat viruses under conditions
that have since raised eyebrows.

It is in the nature of viruses to continually mutate, with
random accidents altering, adding or removing parts of its
genome or bits of genetic code being exchanged with other
viruses — recombination. This constant trial & error
enables the emergence of features that can allow viruses
to infect a new species.

In order to anticipate these jumps, humans have tried to
steer this process. In what is sometimes called gain-of-
function research, they genetically manipulate viruses
to see how they can become more dangerous.

In an article in Nature Medicine in 2015, researchers
from two of the major corona labs in the world — Dr. Shi;
Ralph Baric, a prof at UNC Chapel Hill; and others — wrote
that they had bioengineered a coronavirus. The work was
carried out in Baric’s lab at UNC. They took a spike
protein, the “key” that coronas use to unlock & infect
cells, from a horseshoe bat virus & combined it with a human
SARS virus adapted for mice. They reported that this
“chimeric” virus could infect human cells, suggesting some
bat viruses may be “capable of infecting humans without
mutation or adaptation.” This was the 2nd time since
Shi’s 2013 experiments that a SARS-like bat corona showed
the ability in the lab to directly infect human airway cells.

This kind of genetic manipulation had already raised
concerns, esp. after labs in the Netherlands & the US
announced in 2011 that they had created strains of flu
viruses using genetic material from the H5N1 flu A virus,
which is very deadly but generally can’t yet spread among
people. These new strains could spread by air among ferrets,
which have humanlike lungs. The uproar had been immediate.

In defense of the 2015 corona experiment by Shi & her
colleagues, Peter Daszak, whose org, EcoHealth Alliance,
has worked closely with her & has been granted tens of
millions of dollars in the last decade from the U.S. govt,
said the findings would allow scientists to focus on the
greatest risk because it would “move this virus from a
candidate emerging pathogen to a clear & present danger.”

Others were more worried. “If the virus escaped, nobody
could predict the trajectory,” said Simon Wain-Hobson, a
virologist at the Pasteur Inst. in Paris.

Recent history provided plenty of reason for such concern.
Nearly every SARS case since the original epidemic has
been due to lab leaks — 6 incidents in 3 countries, incl.
twice in a single month from a lab in Beijing. In one
instance, the mother of a lab worker died.

In 2007, foot-&-mouth disease, which can devastate live-
stock & caused a massive crisis in Britain in 2001, escaped
from a drainage pipe leak at an English lab with the
highest biosafety rating, BSL-4. Even the last known
person who died of smallpox was someone infected because
of a lab incident in Britain in 1978.

In its first published survey of the reporting systems in
American labs working with dangerous pathogens, the CDC
in 2012 reported 11 laboratory-acquired infections across
six years, often in BSL-3 labs — the category of safety
reserved for pathogens like TB. In each instance, the
exposure was not realized or reported until lab workers
became infected.

In Jan 2014, the C.D.C. contaminated a benign flu virus
sample with deadly A(H5N1) but didn’t discover the danger
until months later. And in June 2014, it mistakenly sent
improperly deactivated anthrax bacteria to labs, poten-
tially exposing at least 62 C.D.C. employees who worked
with the samples without protective gear. One month later,
vials of live smallpox virus were found in a storage room
at the NIH.

In Oct 2014, after that string of high-profile incidents,
the US paused its funding of new gain-of-function research,
with few exceptions. The moratorium was lifted in 2017.

Far more serious questions about scientific safety would
soon arise. On Dec. 30, 2019, a public email list run by
the Int'l Society for Infectious Diseases warned that an
“unexplained pneumonia” had appeared in Wuhan, China, &
reports connected the first cases to the city’s Huanan
seafood market. On Jan 10 2020, a Chinese scientist posted
the genome of the virus — soon to be named SARS-CoV-2 — on
an open internet depository, confirming that it was a
corona. The Chinese govt denied that the virus was spreading
among humans until Jan. 19, 2020; 3 days later, it announced
a complete lockdown of Wuhan, a city of 11 million people.

About a week after the lockdown, Chinese scientists
published a paper in The Lancet that ID'ed bats as the
likely source of the virus. The authors noted that the
outbreak happened during local bat hibernation season &
“no bats were sold or found at the Huanan seafood market,”
so they reasoned that it may have been transmitted by an
intermediary animal.

Outbreaks can occur far from their source. The 2002 SARS
outbreak started in Guangdong, about 1000 km from the caves
in Yunnan with the horseshoe bats from which SARS is
believed to have emerged. Masked palm civets, farmed &
traded across China, often in cramped, unsanitary conditions
making them prone to outbreaks, were cited as the vehicle
that SARS probably used to travel from Yunnan to Guangdong.
Since SARS-CoV-2 was first detected at a market where live
wild animals may have been sold, the wildlife trade was
immediately suspected.

On Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 8:04:37 PM UTC, David P. wrote:
> Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.
> By Zeynep Tufekci, 6/25/21, New York Times
>
> There were curious characteristics about the H1N1 flu
> pandemic of 1977-78, which emerged from northeastern Asia
> & killed an estimated 700,000 people around the world.
> For one, it almost exclusively affected people in their
> mid-20s or younger. Scientists discovered another oddity
> that could explain the first: It was virtually identical to
> a strain that circulated in the 50s. People born before that
> had immunity that protected them, & younger people didn’t.
>
> But how on earth had it remained so steady genetically,
> since viruses continually mutate? Scientists guessed that it
> had been frozen in a lab. It was often found to be sensitive
> to temperature, something expected for viruses used in
> vaccine research.
>
> It was only in 2004 that a prominent virologist, Peter
> Palese, wrote that Chi-Ming Chu, a respected virologist &
> a former member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told him
> that “the intro of this 1977 H1N1 virus” was indeed thought
> to be due to vaccine trials involving “the challenge of
> several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus.”
> For the first time, science itself seemed to have caused
> a pandemic while trying to prepare for it.
>
> Now, for the 2nd time in 50 years, there are questions about
> whether we are dealing with a pandemic caused by scientific
> research. While the Chinese govt’s obstruction may keep us
> from knowing for sure whether the virus, SARS-CoV-2, came
> from the wild directly or thru a lab in Wuhan or if genetic
> experimentation was involved, what we know already is
> troubling.
>
> Years of research on the dangers of coronas, & the broader
> history of lab accidents & errors around the world, provided
> scientists with plenty of reasons to proceed with caution
> as they investigated this class of pathogens. But troubling
> safety practices persisted. Worse, researchers’ success at
> uncovering new threats didn't always translate into
> preparedness.
>
> Even if the corona jumped from animal to human without the
> involvement of research activities, the groundwork for a
> potential disaster had been laid for years, and learning
> its lessons is essential to preventing others.
>
> Until the SARS outbreak, coronas were considered fairly
> benign, causing only minor to moderate colds. Even 5 months
> after SARS emerged in south China in Nov 2002, the Chinese
> govt was covering up details about its threat, while the
> disease was spreading to other countries. By summer 2003,
> it had been contained, but not before infecting over 8,000
> people & killing 774. Officials were able to suppress SARS
> because infected people spread it when visibly sick, making
> it easier to identify & isolate people. But it was a close
> call, & that roughly 10% case fatality rate raised alarms.
> Preventing the next corona pandemic became a scientific
> priority.
>
> By 2005, researchers — including Dr. Shi Zhengli, a
> virologist at the Wuhan Inst. of Virology — had ID'ed
> horseshoe bats as the likely primary host animal from which
> SARS had emerged. In the years that followed, scientists
> pursued bat coronas in the field & studied them in the lab.
>
> It is often assumed that SARS was spread to humans by palm
> civets, an adorable small mammal sometimes sold at wildlife
> markets, though by 2008, it was suspected that bat coronas
> could directly infect human lung cells without needing an
> intermediary animal. By 2013, Shi’s lab experiments showed
> this could happen. Still, scientists sometimes worked
> with bats, bat samples & bat viruses under conditions
> that have since raised eyebrows.
>
> It is in the nature of viruses to continually mutate, with
> random accidents altering, adding or removing parts of its
> genome or bits of genetic code being exchanged with other
> viruses — recombination. This constant trial & error
> enables the emergence of features that can allow viruses
> to infect a new species.
>
> In order to anticipate these jumps, humans have tried to
> steer this process. In what is sometimes called gain-of-
> function research, they genetically manipulate viruses
> to see how they can become more dangerous.
>
> In an article in Nature Medicine in 2015, researchers
> from two of the major corona labs in the world — Dr. Shi;
> Ralph Baric, a prof at UNC Chapel Hill; and others — wrote
> that they had bioengineered a coronavirus. The work was
> carried out in Baric’s lab at UNC. They took a spike
> protein, the “key” that coronas use to unlock & infect
> cells, from a horseshoe bat virus & combined it with a human
> SARS virus adapted for mice. They reported that this
> “chimeric” virus could infect human cells, suggesting some
> bat viruses may be “capable of infecting humans without
> mutation or adaptation.” This was the 2nd time since
> Shi’s 2013 experiments that a SARS-like bat corona showed
> the ability in the lab to directly infect human airway cells.
>
> This kind of genetic manipulation had already raised
> concerns, esp. after labs in the Netherlands & the US
> announced in 2011 that they had created strains of flu
> viruses using genetic material from the H5N1 flu A virus,
> which is very deadly but generally can’t yet spread among
> people. These new strains could spread by air among ferrets,
> which have humanlike lungs. The uproar had been immediate.
>
> In defense of the 2015 corona experiment by Shi & her
> colleagues, Peter Daszak, whose org, EcoHealth Alliance,
> has worked closely with her & has been granted tens of
> millions of dollars in the last decade from the U.S. govt,
> said the findings would allow scientists to focus on the
> greatest risk because it would “move this virus from a
> candidate emerging pathogen to a clear & present danger.”
>
> Others were more worried. “If the virus escaped, nobody
> could predict the trajectory,” said Simon Wain-Hobson, a
> virologist at the Pasteur Inst. in Paris.
>
> Recent history provided plenty of reason for such concern.
> Nearly every SARS case since the original epidemic has
> been due to lab leaks — 6 incidents in 3 countries, incl.
> twice in a single month from a lab in Beijing. In one
> instance, the mother of a lab worker died.
>
> In 2007, foot-&-mouth disease, which can devastate live-
> stock & caused a massive crisis in Britain in 2001, escaped
> from a drainage pipe leak at an English lab with the
> highest biosafety rating, BSL-4. Even the last known
> person who died of smallpox was someone infected because
> of a lab incident in Britain in 1978.
>
> In its first published survey of the reporting systems in
> American labs working with dangerous pathogens, the CDC
> in 2012 reported 11 laboratory-acquired infections across
> six years, often in BSL-3 labs — the category of safety
> reserved for pathogens like TB. In each instance, the
> exposure was not realized or reported until lab workers
> became infected.
>
> In Jan 2014, the C.D.C. contaminated a benign flu virus
> sample with deadly A(H5N1) but didn’t discover the danger
> until months later. And in June 2014, it mistakenly sent
> improperly deactivated anthrax bacteria to labs, poten-
> tially exposing at least 62 C.D.C. employees who worked
> with the samples without protective gear. One month later,
> vials of live smallpox virus were found in a storage room
> at the NIH.
>
> In Oct 2014, after that string of high-profile incidents,
> the US paused its funding of new gain-of-function research,
> with few exceptions. The moratorium was lifted in 2017.
>
> Far more serious questions about scientific safety would
> soon arise. On Dec. 30, 2019, a public email list run by
> the Int'l Society for Infectious Diseases warned that an
> “unexplained pneumonia” had appeared in Wuhan, China, &
> reports connected the first cases to the city’s Huanan
> seafood market. On Jan 10 2020, a Chinese scientist posted
> the genome of the virus — soon to be named SARS-CoV-2 — on
> an open internet depository, confirming that it was a
> corona. The Chinese govt denied that the virus was spreading
> among humans until Jan. 19, 2020; 3 days later, it announced
> a complete lockdown of Wuhan, a city of 11 million people.
>
> About a week after the lockdown, Chinese scientists
> published a paper in The Lancet that ID'ed bats as the
> likely source of the virus. The authors noted that the
> outbreak happened during local bat hibernation season &
> “no bats were sold or found at the Huanan seafood market,”
> so they reasoned that it may have been transmitted by an
> intermediary animal.
>
> Outbreaks can occur far from their source. The 2002 SARS
> outbreak started in Guangdong, about 1000 km from the caves
> in Yunnan with the horseshoe bats from which SARS is
> believed to have emerged. Masked palm civets, farmed &
> traded across China, often in cramped, unsanitary conditions
> making them prone to outbreaks, were cited as the vehicle
> that SARS probably used to travel from Yunnan to Guangdong.
> Since SARS-CoV-2 was first detected at a market where live
> wild animals may have been sold, the wildlife trade was
> immediately suspected.
>
> Social media users in China were among the first to be
> more skeptical. Did the spread of a disease from bats just
> happen to start in Wuhan, home to Wuhan Inst. of Virology,
> one of the few top bat corona research facilities in the
> world? And what about the Wuhan CDC, which also carries out
> bat research, a few hundred yards from the seafood market?
>
> On Feb 19, 2020, 27 prominent scientists published an open
> letter in The Lancet. They decried “conspiracy theories
> suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.”
>
> As we consider its origin, the question is not so much
> whether SARS-CoV-2 could have gotten out of a lab —
> accidents happen — but whether it could have gotten in
> & how it would have been handled there.
>
> Shortly after Wuhan was locked down in Jan 2020, it became
> apparent that SARS-CoV-2 was related to a virus that
> scientists had been aware of for years.
>
> On Feb. 3, 2020, Shi & co-authors announced in Nature that
> they had found a virus in their database, RaTG13, whose
> genome sequence was 96.2 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2
> & was previously detected in horseshoe bats of Yunnan.
>
> Suspicious internet sleuths combed thru genomic databases
> & found that RaTG13 was an exact match for a bat corona
> called 4991 retrieved from a cave implicated in an
> unexplained outbreak of pneumonia in 2012 among miners
> who collected bat guano from a mine in Yunnan. 3 of the
> 6 miners died.
>
> In May 2020, a former science teacher from India, with the
> Twitter pseudonym TheSeeker268, found a 2013 master’s
> thesis, as well as a 2016 Ph.D. thesis, supervised by
> George Fu Gao, the current director of the Chinese CDC.
> The master’s thesis hypothesized that the miners’ illness
> was caused by direct transmission of a SARS-like corona from
> a horseshoe bat. The Ph.D. thesis was more cautious but
> still called the outbreak “notable.” It also revealed that
> a team from the Wuhan Inst. of Virology had collected bat
> samples from the cave. The dissertation noted that all 4 of
> the miners who were tested for SARS antibodies had them in
> their blood a few weeks after they became ill.
>
> None of those crucial facts — the name change or the link
> to the previous fatal outbreak possibly from a SARS-like
> corona — were mentioned in the original paper about RaTG13.
> In an interview published in Mar 2020, DShi said fungus was
> the pathogen that had sickened the miners, not a corona.
>
> The questions persisted. Last July, Shi confirmed that
> RaTG13 was indeed 4991 renamed. In Nov 2020, her paper in
> Nature was finally updated, additionally acknowledging what
> sleuths had also uncovered: Her team genetically sequenced
> RaTG13 in 2018. (The possible bat corona link to the miner
> deaths was still not acknowledged.)
>
> The less than forthcoming disclosure — a virus with two
> names, the connection to a deadly outbreak, shifting
> diseases & inconsistent stories — fueled suspicions.
>
> Some speculated whether RaTG13 had been subjected to gain-
> of-function-type manipulation to create SARS-CoV-2. But
> RaTG13 is more like a distant cousin of SARS-CoV-2, meaning
> it is unlikely to have produced SARS-CoV-2 as an offspring,
> either throu recent evolution in the wild or manipulation
> in the lab.
>
> Even if RaTG13 had no role in the Covid-19 outbreak,
> questions were raised about why Shi &7 others seemed so
> unforthcoming about it. Then more questions were raised.
>
> For example, the same group of internet sleuths that
> linked RaTG13 to the mine also uncovered that a genomic
> database maintained by the Wuhan Inst. of Virology, with
> info about thousands of bat samples & at least 500 recently
> discovered bat coronas, went offline in Sept 2019. The
> official explanation — that it was taken offline because
> it had been subjected to hacking — doesn’t explain why it
> was never securely shared some other way with responsible
> independent researchers.
>
> Such gaps made it harder to rule out worrying scenarios.
> If there had been a lab accident involving SARS-CoV-2 or a
> virus like it that had been collected in the wild or experi-
> mented on in the lab, the database might have been taken
> down so there would be less evidence that might help others
> connect the dots. Officials might've investigated possible
> lab cases & prematurely believed it was in the clear.
> However, cases can be asymptomatic, & they might have
> missed the one that started a transmission chain & allowed
> the virus to circulate quietly until a superspreader event
> in Dec.
>
> The secrecy & the cover-ups have led to some frantic
> theories — for example, that the virus leaked from a
> bioweapons lab, which makes little sense, since, for one
> thing, bioweapons usually involve more lethal pathogens
> with a known cure or vaccine, to protect those who employ them.
>
> But much more mundane threats lurked. Shi’s scientific work
> was dependent on collecting & analyzing hundreds of bat
> samples. And it was her work that showed the dangers
> associated with this endeavor. The 2013 paper by Shi, Daszak
> & others demonstrated that a live bat coronavirus from a
> Yunnan sample could bind to human lung cell receptors,
> showing that “intermediate hosts may not be necessary for
> direct human infection.” That controversial 2015 experiment
> co-authored by a group of researchers that included Baric
> & Shi was carried out after they had found another bat
> coronavirus they suspected could infect humans, but it was
> difficult to cultivate. They then created that chimeric one
> using its spike. They showed that it, too, could infect
> human airway cells directly.
>
> In Oct 2015, Shi’s lab sampled over 200 people living
> within a few miles of two Yunnan bat caves & found that six
> tested positive for bat coronavirus antibodies, indicating
> past infection. All six reported having seen bats & only
> 20 people in total had reported seeing bats flying close
> to their homes, suggesting exposure created a great risk
> of infection.
>
> The research practices, however, may not have always
> incorporated these lessons. While a 2017 Chinese article
> noted the caution of the Wuhan Inst. of Virology’s workers
> & showed them hooded & some wearing N95 masks, later that
> year a Chinese state-TV story about Shi’s studies showed
> researchers handling bats or bat feces with their bare
> hands or with exposed arms. A person on her team likened
> a bat bite to “being jabbed with a needle.”
>
> In a 2018 blog post that was later removed, Shi said that
> the job was “not as dangerous” as everyone thought. “The
> chance of directly infecting humans is very small,” she
> wrote. “In most cases only ordinary protection will be
> taken,” unless a bat was known to carry a virus that might
> infect humans. She repeated something similar in a 2018
> TED Talk-style video, acc. to The Washington Post, noting
> that “simpler protection” — illustrated with slides of
> unmasked or surgically masked colleagues with bare hands
> — was appropriate because it was believed that bat pathogens
> usually required an intermediate host.
>
> Shi said that all the research at the institute is done
> in strict accordance with biosafety standards and the lab
> is tested annually by a third-party institution. The Wuhan
> C.D.C. also reportedly conducts research on bat-borne viruses.
> One of its staff members, Tian Junhua, has developed a rep
> for adventurous scientific discovery. A 2013 paper notes his
> team caught 155 bats in Hubei Province. The Washington Post
> reported that in a video released on Dec 10 2019, he boasted
> about “having visited dozens of bat caves & studied 300 types
> of virus vectors.” Previously, he also talked about having
> made mistakes in the field, like forgetting personal protec-
> tive equipment & being splashed with bat urine or accident-
> ally getting bat blood on his skin, acc. to The Post. And
> yet the WHO reported that the agency denied ever storing or
> working with bat viruses in the lab before the pandemic.
>
> This March the W.H.O. reported that the Wuhan C.D.C. lab
> “moved on 2nd Dec 2019 to a new location near the Huanan
> market.” The W.H.O. report said there were “no disruptions
> or incidents” during the move. Given the Chinese govt’s
> lack of candor, that raises suspicions that lab samples,
> if not bats themselves, were being hauled around near the
> market at the time of the outbreak.
>
> Many of these research practices weren’t deviations from
> int'l norms. A bat field researcher in the US told me she
> now always wears a respirator in bat caves but that wasn’t
> standard practice before.
>
> It isn’t a wild idea to suggest that field research risks
> setting off an outbreak. Dr. Linfa Wang, a Chinese-Aussie
> virologist based in Singapore who frequently works with
> Shi & pioneered the hypothesis that bats were behind the
> 2003 SARS epidemic, told Nature there is a small chance that
> this pandemic was seeded by a researcher inadvertently
> getting infected by an unknown virus while collecting
> bat samples in a cave.
>
> Bats could create further risks if housed in labs, like the
> risk posed by the sale of wildlife in urban markets.
> On Dec. 10, Peter Daszak, who organized The Lancet letter
> denouncing the questioning of Covid-19’s natural origins &
> was announced as a member of the WHO origins investigation
> committee last fall, insisted it was a conspiracy theory
> to suggest that there were live bats in labs he had collab-
> orated with for 15 yrs. “That’s not how the science works,”
> he wrote in a tweet he later deleted. “We collect bat
> samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we
> catch them!”
>
> But evidence to the contrary has accumulated. An assistant
> researcher told a reporter that Shi took on the role of
> feeding the bats when students were away. Another news rpt
> in 2018 said a team led by one of her doctoral trainees
> “collected a full rack of swabs & bagged a dozen live bats
> for further testing back at the lab.” The Chinese Academy
> of Sciences website has listed the Wuhan Inst. as having
> at least a dozen cages for bats, & in 2018 the institute
> applied for a patent for a bat cage. Shi has talked about
> monitoring antibodies in bats over time — which would not
> be done in a cave. Recently, another video surfaced that
> reportedly showed live bats in the institute.
>
> Just a few weeks ago, Daszak changed his claims. “
> I wouldn’t be surprised if,” he said, “like many other
> virology labs, they were trying to set up a bat colony.”
>
> Meanwhile, no intermediary animal has yet been found,
> despite testing thousands of animals around Wuhan. Last
> month a former commissioner of the FDA, Scott Gottlieb,
> said this failure added to the evidence of a lab leak,
> although Dr. Daszak suggested that investigators look
> further, at wildlife farms in southern China.
>
> But if bat-to-human transmission is how the spillover
> happened, no intermediary animal is necessary, since it
> could have been any interaction with a bat — by a villager
> or a field researcher.
>
> Despite widespread assertions that bat viruses need an
> intermediary animal to spread to humans, research is not
> even settled on whether the palm civet spread SARS to
> humans from bats. We do know that palm civets amplified
> the outbreak once SARS arrived in the Guangdong market &
> that back-and-forth transmission between humans & civets
> was possible. However, the only widespread infected civet
> populations that researchers found were those at urban
> markets & sometimes at farms — where people are — & not in
> the wild. We know we can infect animals. Last year Denmark
> had to kill 17 million minks after they caught SARS-CoV-2
> from people. It’s possible that humans were the initial
> intermediary animal for civets & that the cute little
> creatures were framed.
>
> Other sources of risk were the lab activities themselves.
> There has been a lot of speculation that SARS-CoV-2 was
> the result of genetic engineering. This hypothesis can't be
> ruled out based on genomic analysis alone, & suspicion has
> grown because of the opaque response by Chinese authorities.
>
> They have refused to share direct records from the lab. Shi
> echoed this stance in May when a group of scientists, incl.
> her co-author Dr. Baric, pushed for broader transparency.
> “It’s definitely not acceptable,” she emailed a reporter in
> response to the group’s request to see her lab’s records.
>
> Meanwhile, thruout Dec 2019, Wuhan doctors suspected that
> a SARS-like virus was on the loose, & the local govt
> arrested whistle-blowers, incl. at least one health care
> worker. The cover-up by Communist Party officials continued
> until the prominent SARS scientist Zhong Nanshan traveled
> to Wuhan on Jan. 18 & raised the alarm. Circumstantial
> evidence casts some doubt on the claim that SARS-CoV-2
> was bioengineered. For instance, aspects of the virus that
> have made some suspect it was bioengineered could also be
> evidence that it evolved naturally. A lot of attention has
> been drawn to an unusual feature on its spike protein
> called a furin cleavage site, with which the virus can
> better infect a human cell. It’s one of several odd features
> of SARS-CoV-2 that are weird enough that even virologists
> who greatly doubt lab involvement told me they were shocked
> to see it. In fact, even beyond the furin cleavage site,
> SARS-CoV-2 was a virus scientists had never seen before.
>
> Evolution can be a random accumulation of weird, novel
> features. For the research on viruses that scientists like
> Shi do for high-level scientific publications, such a combo
> would be incongruous. Their work usually involves examining
> or changing one element of a virus at a time to find out
> what each element does & can be made to do. If your computer
> conked out, for instance, you wouldn’t see what’s wrong by
> simultaneously changing the power source, the cable & the
> electrical outlet. You’d test each one individually. Having
> a variety of unusual elements leads to hard-to-assess
> results, not a paper in Nature.
>
> But even if we put aside directed engineering, regular lab
> work at the Wuhan labs has raised concerns. In 2016 the
> Wuhan Inst. reported experimenting on a live bat corona
> that could infect human cells in a BSL-2 lab — a biosafety
> level that has been compared with that of a dentist’s
> office. Protective gear other than gloves &d lab coats is
> usually optional at this level, & there’s often no airflow
> control sealing ventilation between the work area & the
> rest of the building. Michael Lin, an associate prof of
> neurobiology & bioengineering at Stanford, told me it was
> “an actual scandal, recorded in print,” that a SARS-like
> virus capable of replicating in human cells was worked on
> under such low safety conditions.
>
> Just trying to culture bat viruses in the lab can create
> risks that the scientists may not even be aware of. While
> trying & failing to cultivate one strain, they might inadver-
> tently culture another one they don’t even know about. It’s
> even possible, Dr. Lin told me, that viruses can coexist in
> a single sample & quietly recombine, giving rise to some-
> thing novel but undetected. Under BSL-2 conditions or even
> sloppy BSL-3 conditions, researchers could get exposed to a
> pathogen they didn’t know existed.
>
> Several scientists who signed The Lancet letter denouncing
> the consideration of anything but natural origins have since
> said they are more open to lab involvement. One, Bernard
> Roizman, an emeritus virologist at the U of Chicago with
> 4 honorary professorships from Chinese universities, said
> he was leaning toward believing there was a lab accident.
>
> “I’m convinced that what happened is that the virus was
> brought to a lab, they started to work with it,” he told
> Wall St. Journal, “& some sloppy individual brought it out.”
> He added, “They can’t admit they did something so stupid.”
>
> Charles Calisher of Colorado State U, another signatory,
> recently told ABC News that “there is too much coincidence”
> to ignore the lab-leak theory & he now believes “it is more
> likely that it came out of that lab.”
>
> Peter Palese, the virologist who wrote about the 1977 flu
> pandemic, said that “a lot of disturbing info has surfaced
> since The Lancet letter I signed” & that he wants an
> investigation to come up with answers.
>
> Other scientists have also said they have changed their
> minds. Ian Lipkin, the director of the Ctr for Infection &
> Immunity at Columbia U & a co-author of an influential
> article in Nature Medicine that argued in favor of a natural
> origin in Mar 2020, is also now more skeptical. “People
> should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs,” he
> told the science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. last month.
> “My view has changed.”
>
> Medical records of lab workers could help clarify such
> questions. Last July, Shi said “a possibility did not
> exist” that anyone associated with the institute may have
> gotten infected “while collecting, sampling or handling
> bats.” She added that it had recently tested all institute
> staff members & students for antibodies showing past
> infection by SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses & had
> found “zero infection” & insisted that she could rule out
> this possibility for all labs in Wuhan.
>
> It’s hard to see how a careful scientist could dismiss
> even the slightest possibility for all labs, incl. those
> not her own. “Zero infection” would mean not a single case
> among the hundreds of people at the institute, even though
> a study found that 4.4% of the Wuhan population had been
> infected. Later, the W.H.O. team asked for more info about
> the earliest Covid-19 cases in Wuhan, incl. anonymized but
> detailed patient data — something that should be standard
> in any outbreak origin investigation — & were denied access.
>
> All this leaves a lot of possibilities open & a lot of
> confusion. Since most pandemics have been due to zoonotic
> events, emerging from animals, is there reason to doubt
> lab involvement? Maybe if you look at all of human history.
> A better period of comparison is the time since the advent
> of molecular biology, when it became more likely for
> scientists to cause outbreaks. The 1977 pandemic was tied
> to research activities, while the other two pandemics that
> have occurred since then, AIDS & the H1N1 swine flu of 2009,
> were not.
>
> Plus, once a rare event, like a pandemic, has happened,
> one has to consider all the potential paths to it. It’s
> like investigating a plane crash. Flying is usually very
> safe, but when a crash does happen, we don’t just say
> mechanical errors & pilot mistakes don’t usually lead to
> catastrophes & that terrorism is rare. Rather, we investigate
> all possible paths, including unusual ones, so we can figure
> out how to prevent similar events.
>
> Perhaps the biggest question has been what to read into the
> location of the outbreak, 1000 miles from the closest known
> viral relatives yet close to a leading research institution.
>
> Sometimes the curiosity around the location has been waved
> away with the explanation that labs are set up where viruses
> are. However, the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been where
> it is since 1956, doing research on agro & enviro micro-
> biology under a different name. It was upgraded & began to
> focus on coronavirus research only after SARS. Wuhan is a
> metropolis with a larger population than NYC’s, not some
> rural outpost near bat caves. Dr. Shi said the Dec 2019
> outbreak surprised her because she “never expected this kind
> of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” When her lab
> needed a population with a lower likelihood of bat corona
> exposure, they used Wuhan residents, noting that “inhabitants
> have a much lower likelihood of contact with bats due to its
> urban setting.”
>
> Still, location itself is not proof, either. Plausible
> scenarios implicating research activities don’t rule out
> other options. This week, Jesse Bloom, an associate prof
> at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Ctr, told me that
> when he recovered & analyzed a set of partial early Wuhan
> genetic sequences that had been removed from a genomic
> archive, it supported “substantial existing evidence that
> SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in Wuhan prior to the seafood
> market outbreak.” Both the early reports from Chinese
> scientists & the more recent W.H.O. investigation this winter
> found many of the early cases had no connection to the
> seafood market, incl. the earliest acknowledged case so far,
> on Dec. 8, 2019. So the seafood market may not have been
> the original location of the outbreak.
>
> It’s also plausible that an outbreak could have started
> someplace else & was detected in Wuhan simply because it
> was a big city. Testing blood banks from across China, esp.
> in areas near wildlife farms & bat caves, would help, but
> with limited exceptions, the Chinese govt has not carried
> out such research — or allowed the sharing of the results
> if it has.
>
> With so much evidence withheld, it’s hard to say anything
> about Covid-19’s origins with certainty, & even a genuine
> investigation would face challenges. Some outbreaks have
> never been traced to their origin.
>
> But even if we are denied answers, we can still learn
> lessons. Perhaps the biggest one is that we were due for
> a bat coronavirus outbreak, one way or another, and the
> research showing bat coronaviruses’ ability to jump to
> humans was a warning not heeded.
>
> Scientists & govt officials need to weigh the benefits &
> dangers of how we work with bats & viruses, in the field &
> the lab, esp. since other public health investments may do
> much more to prevent a pandemic. It might be more effective
> to institute rigorous surveillance where threatening
> pathogens are known to thrive, & better prepare our
> institutions to react quickly & transparently to the first
> sign of an outbreak. Research can be weighted toward response
> rather than prediction; these overlap but aren’t identical.
> Finding a dangerous virus in a cave or a petri dish
> might be useful, but it’s a bit like poking a bear
> we are trying to avoid.
>
> Field research on bats should've been done more carefully.
> Bat viruses should not be studied in BSL-2 labs, & research
> in BSL-3 labs should be done only under the strictest
> caution. Bats should be treated as a serious threat in labs.
> Human interactions with bats should occur under strict
> regulation & surveillance.
>
> Alison Young, an investigative reporter who has long
> covered lab incidents, wrote that from 2015-19, there were
> over 450 reported accidents with pathogens that the federal
> govt regulates because of their danger. Comparable rates
> of incidents were found in British labs — & research
> suggests lab accidents are not even always reported.
>
> Some scientists have proposed imposing stricter controls
> & a stronger risk-benefit analysis for research on pathogens
> that could inadvertently spark pandemics. Some research may
> still be worth it, & there have been proposals to move such
> labs outside densely populated cities.
>
> Cooperation with China on these issues is vital, including
> on lab safety & outbreak surveillance. Some argue that
> criticizing China’s response to the pandemic & the scientific
> practices that might have led to it will imperil that
> cooperation. It’s hard to see how angry op-eds could make
> Chinese officials more intransigent than they already are.
>
> People are understandably wary that these claims might
> demonize scientists from other countries, esp. given the
> anti-Asian racism that has abounded. But why would
> perpetuating this state of events be to their benefit?
>
> After a lab accident with anthrax bacteria in the Soviet
> Union in 1979 that killed dozens, leading Western scientists
> accepted the Soviet govt’s excuses, which all turned out to
> be lies. That doesn’t help lead to better safety standards,
> incl. those that would benefit scientists in authoritarian
> countries.
>
> But a better path forward is one of true global cooperation
> based on mutual benefit & reciprocity. Despite the current
> dissembling, we should assume that the Chinese govt also
> doesn’t want to go thru this again — especially given that
> SARS, too, started there.
>
> This means putting the public interest before personal
> ambitions & acknowledging that despite the wonders of its
> power, biomedical research also holds dangers.
>
> To do this, govt officials & scientists need to look at
> the big picture: Seek comity & truth instead of just
> avoiding embarrassment. Develop a framework that goes
> beyond blaming China, since the issues raised are truly
> global. And realize that the next big thing can simply
> mean taking great care with a lot of small details.
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.html

On Saturday, August 21, 2021 at 2:13:12 AM UTC-4, dosai prata wrote:
> On Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 8:04:37 PM UTC, David P. wrote:
> > Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.
> > By Zeynep Tufekci, 6/25/21, New York Times
> >
> > There were curious characteristics about the H1N1 flu
> > pandemic of 1977-78, which emerged from northeastern Asia
> > & killed an estimated 700,000 people around the world.
> > For one, it almost exclusively affected people in their
> > mid-20s or younger. Scientists discovered another oddity
> > that could explain the first: It was virtually identical to
> > a strain that circulated in the 50s. People born before that
> > had immunity that protected them, & younger people didn’t.
> >
> > But how on earth had it remained so steady genetically,
> > since viruses continually mutate? Scientists guessed that it
> > had been frozen in a lab. It was often found to be sensitive
> > to temperature, something expected for viruses used in
> > vaccine research.
> >
> > It was only in 2004 that a prominent virologist, Peter
> > Palese, wrote that Chi-Ming Chu, a respected virologist &
> > a former member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told him
> > that “the intro of this 1977 H1N1 virus” was indeed thought
> > to be due to vaccine trials involving “the challenge of
> > several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus.”
> > For the first time, science itself seemed to have caused
> > a pandemic while trying to prepare for it.
> >
> > Now, for the 2nd time in 50 years, there are questions about
> > whether we are dealing with a pandemic caused by scientific
> > research. While the Chinese govt’s obstruction may keep us
> > from knowing for sure whether the virus, SARS-CoV-2, came
> > from the wild directly or thru a lab in Wuhan or if genetic
> > experimentation was involved, what we know already is
> > troubling.
> >
> > Years of research on the dangers of coronas, & the broader
> > history of lab accidents & errors around the world, provided
> > scientists with plenty of reasons to proceed with caution
> > as they investigated this class of pathogens. But troubling
> > safety practices persisted. Worse, researchers’ success at
> > uncovering new threats didn't always translate into
> > preparedness.
> >
> > Even if the corona jumped from animal to human without the
> > involvement of research activities, the groundwork for a
> > potential disaster had been laid for years, and learning
> > its lessons is essential to preventing others.
> >
> > Until the SARS outbreak, coronas were considered fairly
> > benign, causing only minor to moderate colds. Even 5 months
> > after SARS emerged in south China in Nov 2002, the Chinese
> > govt was covering up details about its threat, while the
> > disease was spreading to other countries. By summer 2003,
> > it had been contained, but not before infecting over 8,000
> > people & killing 774. Officials were able to suppress SARS
> > because infected people spread it when visibly sick, making
> > it easier to identify & isolate people. But it was a close
> > call, & that roughly 10% case fatality rate raised alarms.
> > Preventing the next corona pandemic became a scientific
> > priority.
> >
> > By 2005, researchers — including Dr. Shi Zhengli, a
> > virologist at the Wuhan Inst. of Virology — had ID'ed
> > horseshoe bats as the likely primary host animal from which
> > SARS had emerged. In the years that followed, scientists
> > pursued bat coronas in the field & studied them in the lab.
> >
> > It is often assumed that SARS was spread to humans by palm
> > civets, an adorable small mammal sometimes sold at wildlife
> > markets, though by 2008, it was suspected that bat coronas
> > could directly infect human lung cells without needing an
> > intermediary animal. By 2013, Shi’s lab experiments showed
> > this could happen. Still, scientists sometimes worked
> > with bats, bat samples & bat viruses under conditions
> > that have since raised eyebrows.
> >
> > It is in the nature of viruses to continually mutate, with
> > random accidents altering, adding or removing parts of its
> > genome or bits of genetic code being exchanged with other
> > viruses — recombination. This constant trial & error
> > enables the emergence of features that can allow viruses
> > to infect a new species.
> >
> > In order to anticipate these jumps, humans have tried to
> > steer this process. In what is sometimes called gain-of-
> > function research, they genetically manipulate viruses
> > to see how they can become more dangerous.
> >
> > In an article in Nature Medicine in 2015, researchers
> > from two of the major corona labs in the world — Dr. Shi;
> > Ralph Baric, a prof at UNC Chapel Hill; and others — wrote
> > that they had bioengineered a coronavirus. The work was
> > carried out in Baric’s lab at UNC. They took a spike
> > protein, the “key” that coronas use to unlock & infect
> > cells, from a horseshoe bat virus & combined it with a human
> > SARS virus adapted for mice. They reported that this
> > “chimeric” virus could infect human cells, suggesting some
> > bat viruses may be “capable of infecting humans without
> > mutation or adaptation.” This was the 2nd time since
> > Shi’s 2013 experiments that a SARS-like bat corona showed
> > the ability in the lab to directly infect human airway cells.
> >
> > This kind of genetic manipulation had already raised
> > concerns, esp. after labs in the Netherlands & the US
> > announced in 2011 that they had created strains of flu
> > viruses using genetic material from the H5N1 flu A virus,
> > which is very deadly but generally can’t yet spread among
> > people. These new strains could spread by air among ferrets,
> > which have humanlike lungs. The uproar had been immediate.
> >
> > In defense of the 2015 corona experiment by Shi & her
> > colleagues, Peter Daszak, whose org, EcoHealth Alliance,
> > has worked closely with her & has been granted tens of
> > millions of dollars in the last decade from the U.S. govt,
> > said the findings would allow scientists to focus on the
> > greatest risk because it would “move this virus from a
> > candidate emerging pathogen to a clear & present danger.”
> >
> > Others were more worried. “If the virus escaped, nobody
> > could predict the trajectory,” said Simon Wain-Hobson, a
> > virologist at the Pasteur Inst. in Paris.
> >
> > Recent history provided plenty of reason for such concern.
> > Nearly every SARS case since the original epidemic has
> > been due to lab leaks — 6 incidents in 3 countries, incl.
> > twice in a single month from a lab in Beijing. In one
> > instance, the mother of a lab worker died.
> >
> > In 2007, foot-&-mouth disease, which can devastate live-
> > stock & caused a massive crisis in Britain in 2001, escaped
> > from a drainage pipe leak at an English lab with the
> > highest biosafety rating, BSL-4. Even the last known
> > person who died of smallpox was someone infected because
> > of a lab incident in Britain in 1978.
> >
> > In its first published survey of the reporting systems in
> > American labs working with dangerous pathogens, the CDC
> > in 2012 reported 11 laboratory-acquired infections across
> > six years, often in BSL-3 labs — the category of safety
> > reserved for pathogens like TB. In each instance, the
> > exposure was not realized or reported until lab workers
> > became infected.
> >
> > In Jan 2014, the C.D.C. contaminated a benign flu virus
> > sample with deadly A(H5N1) but didn’t discover the danger
> > until months later. And in June 2014, it mistakenly sent
> > improperly deactivated anthrax bacteria to labs, poten-
> > tially exposing at least 62 C.D.C. employees who worked
> > with the samples without protective gear. One month later,
> > vials of live smallpox virus were found in a storage room
> > at the NIH.
> >
> > In Oct 2014, after that string of high-profile incidents,
> > the US paused its funding of new gain-of-function research,
> > with few exceptions. The moratorium was lifted in 2017.
> >
> > Far more serious questions about scientific safety would
> > soon arise. On Dec. 30, 2019, a public email list run by
> > the Int'l Society for Infectious Diseases warned that an
> > “unexplained pneumonia” had appeared in Wuhan, China, &
> > reports connected the first cases to the city’s Huanan
> > seafood market. On Jan 10 2020, a Chinese scientist posted
> > the genome of the virus — soon to be named SARS-CoV-2 — on
> > an open internet depository, confirming that it was a
> > corona. The Chinese govt denied that the virus was spreading
> > among humans until Jan. 19, 2020; 3 days later, it announced
> > a complete lockdown of Wuhan, a city of 11 million people.
> >
> > About a week after the lockdown, Chinese scientists
> > published a paper in The Lancet that ID'ed bats as the
> > likely source of the virus. The authors noted that the
> > outbreak happened during local bat hibernation season &
> > “no bats were sold or found at the Huanan seafood market,”
> > so they reasoned that it may have been transmitted by an
> > intermediary animal.
> >
> > Outbreaks can occur far from their source. The 2002 SARS
> > outbreak started in Guangdong, about 1000 km from the caves
> > in Yunnan with the horseshoe bats from which SARS is
> > believed to have emerged. Masked palm civets, farmed &
> > traded across China, often in cramped, unsanitary conditions
> > making them prone to outbreaks, were cited as the vehicle
> > that SARS probably used to travel from Yunnan to Guangdong.
> > Since SARS-CoV-2 was first detected at a market where live
> > wild animals may have been sold, the wildlife trade was
> > immediately suspected.
> >
> > Social media users in China were among the first to be
> > more skeptical. Did the spread of a disease from bats just
> > happen to start in Wuhan, home to Wuhan Inst. of Virology,
> > one of the few top bat corona research facilities in the
> > world? And what about the Wuhan CDC, which also carries out
> > bat research, a few hundred yards from the seafood market?
> >
> > On Feb 19, 2020, 27 prominent scientists published an open
> > letter in The Lancet. They decried “conspiracy theories
> > suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.”
> >
> > As we consider its origin, the question is not so much
> > whether SARS-CoV-2 could have gotten out of a lab —
> > accidents happen — but whether it could have gotten in
> > & how it would have been handled there.
> >
> > Shortly after Wuhan was locked down in Jan 2020, it became
> > apparent that SARS-CoV-2 was related to a virus that
> > scientists had been aware of for years.
> >
> > On Feb. 3, 2020, Shi & co-authors announced in Nature that
> > they had found a virus in their database, RaTG13, whose
> > genome sequence was 96.2 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2
> > & was previously detected in horseshoe bats of Yunnan.
> >
> > Suspicious internet sleuths combed thru genomic databases
> > & found that RaTG13 was an exact match for a bat corona
> > called 4991 retrieved from a cave implicated in an
> > unexplained outbreak of pneumonia in 2012 among miners
> > who collected bat guano from a mine in Yunnan. 3 of the
> > 6 miners died.
> >
> > In May 2020, a former science teacher from India, with the
> > Twitter pseudonym TheSeeker268, found a 2013 master’s
> > thesis, as well as a 2016 Ph.D. thesis, supervised by
> > George Fu Gao, the current director of the Chinese CDC.
> > The master’s thesis hypothesized that the miners’ illness
> > was caused by direct transmission of a SARS-like corona from
> > a horseshoe bat. The Ph.D. thesis was more cautious but
> > still called the outbreak “notable.” It also revealed that
> > a team from the Wuhan Inst. of Virology had collected bat
> > samples from the cave. The dissertation noted that all 4 of
> > the miners who were tested for SARS antibodies had them in
> > their blood a few weeks after they became ill.
> >
> > None of those crucial facts — the name change or the link
> > to the previous fatal outbreak possibly from a SARS-like
> > corona — were mentioned in the original paper about RaTG13.
> > In an interview published in Mar 2020, DShi said fungus was
> > the pathogen that had sickened the miners, not a corona.
> >
> > The questions persisted. Last July, Shi confirmed that
> > RaTG13 was indeed 4991 renamed. In Nov 2020, her paper in
> > Nature was finally updated, additionally acknowledging what
> > sleuths had also uncovered: Her team genetically sequenced
> > RaTG13 in 2018. (The possible bat corona link to the miner
> > deaths was still not acknowledged.)
> >
> > The less than forthcoming disclosure — a virus with two
> > names, the connection to a deadly outbreak, shifting
> > diseases & inconsistent stories — fueled suspicions.
> >
> > Some speculated whether RaTG13 had been subjected to gain-
> > of-function-type manipulation to create SARS-CoV-2. But
> > RaTG13 is more like a distant cousin of SARS-CoV-2, meaning
> > it is unlikely to have produced SARS-CoV-2 as an offspring,
> > either throu recent evolution in the wild or manipulation
> > in the lab.
> >
> > Even if RaTG13 had no role in the Covid-19 outbreak,
> > questions were raised about why Shi &7 others seemed so
> > unforthcoming about it. Then more questions were raised.
> >
> > For example, the same group of internet sleuths that
> > linked RaTG13 to the mine also uncovered that a genomic
> > database maintained by the Wuhan Inst. of Virology, with
> > info about thousands of bat samples & at least 500 recently
> > discovered bat coronas, went offline in Sept 2019. The
> > official explanation — that it was taken offline because
> > it had been subjected to hacking — doesn’t explain why it
> > was never securely shared some other way with responsible
> > independent researchers.
> >
> > Such gaps made it harder to rule out worrying scenarios.
> > If there had been a lab accident involving SARS-CoV-2 or a
> > virus like it that had been collected in the wild or experi-
> > mented on in the lab, the database might have been taken
> > down so there would be less evidence that might help others
> > connect the dots. Officials might've investigated possible
> > lab cases & prematurely believed it was in the clear.
> > However, cases can be asymptomatic, & they might have
> > missed the one that started a transmission chain & allowed
> > the virus to circulate quietly until a superspreader event
> > in Dec.
> >
> > The secrecy & the cover-ups have led to some frantic
> > theories — for example, that the virus leaked from a
> > bioweapons lab, which makes little sense, since, for one
> > thing, bioweapons usually involve more lethal pathogens
> > with a known cure or vaccine, to protect those who employ them.
> >
> > But much more mundane threats lurked. Shi’s scientific work
> > was dependent on collecting & analyzing hundreds of bat
> > samples. And it was her work that showed the dangers
> > associated with this endeavor. The 2013 paper by Shi, Daszak
> > & others demonstrated that a live bat coronavirus from a
> > Yunnan sample could bind to human lung cell receptors,
> > showing that “intermediate hosts may not be necessary for
> > direct human infection.” That controversial 2015 experiment
> > co-authored by a group of researchers that included Baric
> > & Shi was carried out after they had found another bat
> > coronavirus they suspected could infect humans, but it was
> > difficult to cultivate. They then created that chimeric one
> > using its spike. They showed that it, too, could infect
> > human airway cells directly.
> >
> > In Oct 2015, Shi’s lab sampled over 200 people living
> > within a few miles of two Yunnan bat caves & found that six
> > tested positive for bat coronavirus antibodies, indicating
> > past infection. All six reported having seen bats & only
> > 20 people in total had reported seeing bats flying close
> > to their homes, suggesting exposure created a great risk
> > of infection.
> >
> > The research practices, however, may not have always
> > incorporated these lessons. While a 2017 Chinese article
> > noted the caution of the Wuhan Inst. of Virology’s workers
> > & showed them hooded & some wearing N95 masks, later that
> > year a Chinese state-TV story about Shi’s studies showed
> > researchers handling bats or bat feces with their bare
> > hands or with exposed arms. A person on her team likened
> > a bat bite to “being jabbed with a needle.”
> >
> > In a 2018 blog post that was later removed, Shi said that
> > the job was “not as dangerous” as everyone thought. “The
> > chance of directly infecting humans is very small,” she
> > wrote. “In most cases only ordinary protection will be
> > taken,” unless a bat was known to carry a virus that might
> > infect humans. She repeated something similar in a 2018
> > TED Talk-style video, acc. to The Washington Post, noting
> > that “simpler protection” — illustrated with slides of
> > unmasked or surgically masked colleagues with bare hands
> > — was appropriate because it was believed that bat pathogens
> > usually required an intermediate host.
> >
> > Shi said that all the research at the institute is done
> > in strict accordance with biosafety standards and the lab
> > is tested annually by a third-party institution. The Wuhan
> > C.D.C. also reportedly conducts research on bat-borne viruses.
> > One of its staff members, Tian Junhua, has developed a rep
> > for adventurous scientific discovery. A 2013 paper notes his
> > team caught 155 bats in Hubei Province. The Washington Post
> > reported that in a video released on Dec 10 2019, he boasted
> > about “having visited dozens of bat caves & studied 300 types
> > of virus vectors.” Previously, he also talked about having
> > made mistakes in the field, like forgetting personal protec-
> > tive equipment & being splashed with bat urine or accident-
> > ally getting bat blood on his skin, acc. to The Post. And
> > yet the WHO reported that the agency denied ever storing or
> > working with bat viruses in the lab before the pandemic.
> >
> > This March the W.H.O. reported that the Wuhan C.D.C. lab
> > “moved on 2nd Dec 2019 to a new location near the Huanan
> > market.” The W.H.O. report said there were “no disruptions
> > or incidents” during the move. Given the Chinese govt’s
> > lack of candor, that raises suspicions that lab samples,
> > if not bats themselves, were being hauled around near the
> > market at the time of the outbreak.
> >
> > Many of these research practices weren’t deviations from
> > int'l norms. A bat field researcher in the US told me she
> > now always wears a respirator in bat caves but that wasn’t
> > standard practice before.
> >
> > It isn’t a wild idea to suggest that field research risks
> > setting off an outbreak. Dr. Linfa Wang, a Chinese-Aussie
> > virologist based in Singapore who frequently works with
> > Shi & pioneered the hypothesis that bats were behind the
> > 2003 SARS epidemic, told Nature there is a small chance that
> > this pandemic was seeded by a researcher inadvertently
> > getting infected by an unknown virus while collecting
> > bat samples in a cave.
> >
> > Bats could create further risks if housed in labs, like the
> > risk posed by the sale of wildlife in urban markets.
> > On Dec. 10, Peter Daszak, who organized The Lancet letter
> > denouncing the questioning of Covid-19’s natural origins &
> > was announced as a member of the WHO origins investigation
> > committee last fall, insisted it was a conspiracy theory
> > to suggest that there were live bats in labs he had collab-
> > orated with for 15 yrs. “That’s not how the science works,”
> > he wrote in a tweet he later deleted. “We collect bat
> > samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we
> > catch them!”
> >
> > But evidence to the contrary has accumulated. An assistant
> > researcher told a reporter that Shi took on the role of
> > feeding the bats when students were away. Another news rpt
> > in 2018 said a team led by one of her doctoral trainees
> > “collected a full rack of swabs & bagged a dozen live bats
> > for further testing back at the lab.” The Chinese Academy
> > of Sciences website has listed the Wuhan Inst. as having
> > at least a dozen cages for bats, & in 2018 the institute
> > applied for a patent for a bat cage. Shi has talked about
> > monitoring antibodies in bats over time — which would not
> > be done in a cave. Recently, another video surfaced that
> > reportedly showed live bats in the institute.
> >
> > Just a few weeks ago, Daszak changed his claims. “
> > I wouldn’t be surprised if,” he said, “like many other
> > virology labs, they were trying to set up a bat colony.”
> >
> > Meanwhile, no intermediary animal has yet been found,
> > despite testing thousands of animals around Wuhan. Last
> > month a former commissioner of the FDA, Scott Gottlieb,
> > said this failure added to the evidence of a lab leak,
> > although Dr. Daszak suggested that investigators look
> > further, at wildlife farms in southern China.
> >
> > But if bat-to-human transmission is how the spillover
> > happened, no intermediary animal is necessary, since it
> > could have been any interaction with a bat — by a villager
> > or a field researcher.
> >
> > Despite widespread assertions that bat viruses need an
> > intermediary animal to spread to humans, research is not
> > even settled on whether the palm civet spread SARS to
> > humans from bats. We do know that palm civets amplified
> > the outbreak once SARS arrived in the Guangdong market &
> > that back-and-forth transmission between humans & civets
> > was possible. However, the only widespread infected civet
> > populations that researchers found were those at urban
> > markets & sometimes at farms — where people are — & not in
> > the wild. We know we can infect animals. Last year Denmark
> > had to kill 17 million minks after they caught SARS-CoV-2
> > from people. It’s possible that humans were the initial
> > intermediary animal for civets & that the cute little
> > creatures were framed.
> >
> > Other sources of risk were the lab activities themselves.
> > There has been a lot of speculation that SARS-CoV-2 was
> > the result of genetic engineering. This hypothesis can't be
> > ruled out based on genomic analysis alone, & suspicion has
> > grown because of the opaque response by Chinese authorities.
> >
> > They have refused to share direct records from the lab. Shi
> > echoed this stance in May when a group of scientists, incl.
> > her co-author Dr. Baric, pushed for broader transparency.
> > “It’s definitely not acceptable,” she emailed a reporter in
> > response to the group’s request to see her lab’s records.
> >
> > Meanwhile, thruout Dec 2019, Wuhan doctors suspected that
> > a SARS-like virus was on the loose, & the local govt
> > arrested whistle-blowers, incl. at least one health care
> > worker. The cover-up by Communist Party officials continued
> > until the prominent SARS scientist Zhong Nanshan traveled
> > to Wuhan on Jan. 18 & raised the alarm. Circumstantial
> > evidence casts some doubt on the claim that SARS-CoV-2
> > was bioengineered. For instance, aspects of the virus that
> > have made some suspect it was bioengineered could also be
> > evidence that it evolved naturally. A lot of attention has
> > been drawn to an unusual feature on its spike protein
> > called a furin cleavage site, with which the virus can
> > better infect a human cell. It’s one of several odd features
> > of SARS-CoV-2 that are weird enough that even virologists
> > who greatly doubt lab involvement told me they were shocked
> > to see it. In fact, even beyond the furin cleavage site,
> > SARS-CoV-2 was a virus scientists had never seen before.
> >
> > Evolution can be a random accumulation of weird, novel
> > features. For the research on viruses that scientists like
> > Shi do for high-level scientific publications, such a combo
> > would be incongruous. Their work usually involves examining
> > or changing one element of a virus at a time to find out
> > what each element does & can be made to do. If your computer
> > conked out, for instance, you wouldn’t see what’s wrong by
> > simultaneously changing the power source, the cable & the
> > electrical outlet. You’d test each one individually. Having
> > a variety of unusual elements leads to hard-to-assess
> > results, not a paper in Nature.
> >
> > But even if we put aside directed engineering, regular lab
> > work at the Wuhan labs has raised concerns. In 2016 the
> > Wuhan Inst. reported experimenting on a live bat corona
> > that could infect human cells in a BSL-2 lab — a biosafety
> > level that has been compared with that of a dentist’s
> > office. Protective gear other than gloves &d lab coats is
> > usually optional at this level, & there’s often no airflow
> > control sealing ventilation between the work area & the
> > rest of the building. Michael Lin, an associate prof of
> > neurobiology & bioengineering at Stanford, told me it was
> > “an actual scandal, recorded in print,” that a SARS-like
> > virus capable of replicating in human cells was worked on
> > under such low safety conditions.
> >
> > Just trying to culture bat viruses in the lab can create
> > risks that the scientists may not even be aware of. While
> > trying & failing to cultivate one strain, they might inadver-
> > tently culture another one they don’t even know about. It’s
> > even possible, Dr. Lin told me, that viruses can coexist in
> > a single sample & quietly recombine, giving rise to some-
> > thing novel but undetected. Under BSL-2 conditions or even
> > sloppy BSL-3 conditions, researchers could get exposed to a
> > pathogen they didn’t know existed.
> >
> > Several scientists who signed The Lancet letter denouncing
> > the consideration of anything but natural origins have since
> > said they are more open to lab involvement. One, Bernard
> > Roizman, an emeritus virologist at the U of Chicago with
> > 4 honorary professorships from Chinese universities, said
> > he was leaning toward believing there was a lab accident.
> >
> > “I’m convinced that what happened is that the virus was
> > brought to a lab, they started to work with it,” he told
> > Wall St. Journal, “& some sloppy individual brought it out.”
> > He added, “They can’t admit they did something so stupid.”
> >
> > Charles Calisher of Colorado State U, another signatory,
> > recently told ABC News that “there is too much coincidence”
> > to ignore the lab-leak theory & he now believes “it is more
> > likely that it came out of that lab.”
> >
> > Peter Palese, the virologist who wrote about the 1977 flu
> > pandemic, said that “a lot of disturbing info has surfaced
> > since The Lancet letter I signed” & that he wants an
> > investigation to come up with answers.
> >
> > Other scientists have also said they have changed their
> > minds. Ian Lipkin, the director of the Ctr for Infection &
> > Immunity at Columbia U & a co-author of an influential
> > article in Nature Medicine that argued in favor of a natural
> > origin in Mar 2020, is also now more skeptical. “People
> > should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs,” he
> > told the science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. last month.
> > “My view has changed.”
> >
> > Medical records of lab workers could help clarify such
> > questions. Last July, Shi said “a possibility did not
> > exist” that anyone associated with the institute may have
> > gotten infected “while collecting, sampling or handling
> > bats.” She added that it had recently tested all institute
> > staff members & students for antibodies showing past
> > infection by SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses & had
> > found “zero infection” & insisted that she could rule out
> > this possibility for all labs in Wuhan.
> >
> > It’s hard to see how a careful scientist could dismiss
> > even the slightest possibility for all labs, incl. those
> > not her own. “Zero infection” would mean not a single case
> > among the hundreds of people at the institute, even though
> > a study found that 4.4% of the Wuhan population had been
> > infected. Later, the W.H.O. team asked for more info about
> > the earliest Covid-19 cases in Wuhan, incl. anonymized but
> > detailed patient data — something that should be standard
> > in any outbreak origin investigation — & were denied access.
> >
> > All this leaves a lot of possibilities open & a lot of
> > confusion. Since most pandemics have been due to zoonotic
> > events, emerging from animals, is there reason to doubt
> > lab involvement? Maybe if you look at all of human history.
> > A better period of comparison is the time since the advent
> > of molecular biology, when it became more likely for
> > scientists to cause outbreaks. The 1977 pandemic was tied
> > to research activities, while the other two pandemics that
> > have occurred since then, AIDS & the H1N1 swine flu of 2009,
> > were not.
> >
> > Plus, once a rare event, like a pandemic, has happened,
> > one has to consider all the potential paths to it. It’s
> > like investigating a plane crash. Flying is usually very
> > safe, but when a crash does happen, we don’t just say
> > mechanical errors & pilot mistakes don’t usually lead to
> > catastrophes & that terrorism is rare. Rather, we investigate
> > all possible paths, including unusual ones, so we can figure
> > out how to prevent similar events.
> >
> > Perhaps the biggest question has been what to read into the
> > location of the outbreak, 1000 miles from the closest known
> > viral relatives yet close to a leading research institution.
> >
> > Sometimes the curiosity around the location has been waved
> > away with the explanation that labs are set up where viruses
> > are. However, the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been where
> > it is since 1956, doing research on agro & enviro micro-
> > biology under a different name. It was upgraded & began to
> > focus on coronavirus research only after SARS. Wuhan is a
> > metropolis with a larger population than NYC’s, not some
> > rural outpost near bat caves. Dr. Shi said the Dec 2019
> > outbreak surprised her because she “never expected this kind
> > of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” When her lab
> > needed a population with a lower likelihood of bat corona
> > exposure, they used Wuhan residents, noting that “inhabitants
> > have a much lower likelihood of contact with bats due to its
> > urban setting.”
> >
> > Still, location itself is not proof, either. Plausible
> > scenarios implicating research activities don’t rule out
> > other options. This week, Jesse Bloom, an associate prof
> > at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Ctr, told me that
> > when he recovered & analyzed a set of partial early Wuhan
> > genetic sequences that had been removed from a genomic
> > archive, it supported “substantial existing evidence that
> > SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in Wuhan prior to the seafood
> > market outbreak.” Both the early reports from Chinese
> > scientists & the more recent W.H.O. investigation this winter
> > found many of the early cases had no connection to the
> > seafood market, incl. the earliest acknowledged case so far,
> > on Dec. 8, 2019. So the seafood market may not have been
> > the original location of the outbreak.
> >
> > It’s also plausible that an outbreak could have started
> > someplace else & was detected in Wuhan simply because it
> > was a big city. Testing blood banks from across China, esp.
> > in areas near wildlife farms & bat caves, would help, but
> > with limited exceptions, the Chinese govt has not carried
> > out such research — or allowed the sharing of the results
> > if it has.
> >
> > With so much evidence withheld, it’s hard to say anything
> > about Covid-19’s origins with certainty, & even a genuine
> > investigation would face challenges. Some outbreaks have
> > never been traced to their origin.
> >
> > But even if we are denied answers, we can still learn
> > lessons. Perhaps the biggest one is that we were due for
> > a bat coronavirus outbreak, one way or another, and the
> > research showing bat coronaviruses’ ability to jump to
> > humans was a warning not heeded.
> >
> > Scientists & govt officials need to weigh the benefits &
> > dangers of how we work with bats & viruses, in the field &
> > the lab, esp. since other public health investments may do
> > much more to prevent a pandemic. It might be more effective
> > to institute rigorous surveillance where threatening
> > pathogens are known to thrive, & better prepare our
> > institutions to react quickly & transparently to the first
> > sign of an outbreak. Research can be weighted toward response
> > rather than prediction; these overlap but aren’t identical.
> > Finding a dangerous virus in a cave or a petri dish
> > might be useful, but it’s a bit like poking a bear
> > we are trying to avoid.
> >
> > Field research on bats should've been done more carefully.
> > Bat viruses should not be studied in BSL-2 labs, & research
> > in BSL-3 labs should be done only under the strictest
> > caution. Bats should be treated as a serious threat in labs.
> > Human interactions with bats should occur under strict
> > regulation & surveillance.
> >
> > Alison Young, an investigative reporter who has long
> > covered lab incidents, wrote that from 2015-19, there were
> > over 450 reported accidents with pathogens that the federal
> > govt regulates because of their danger. Comparable rates
> > of incidents were found in British labs — & research
> > suggests lab accidents are not even always reported.
> >
> > Some scientists have proposed imposing stricter controls
> > & a stronger risk-benefit analysis for research on pathogens
> > that could inadvertently spark pandemics. Some research may
> > still be worth it, & there have been proposals to move such
> > labs outside densely populated cities.
> >
> > Cooperation with China on these issues is vital, including
> > on lab safety & outbreak surveillance. Some argue that
> > criticizing China’s response to the pandemic & the scientific
> > practices that might have led to it will imperil that
> > cooperation. It’s hard to see how angry op-eds could make
> > Chinese officials more intransigent than they already are.
> >
> > People are understandably wary that these claims might
> > demonize scientists from other countries, esp. given the
> > anti-Asian racism that has abounded. But why would
> > perpetuating this state of events be to their benefit?
> >
> > After a lab accident with anthrax bacteria in the Soviet
> > Union in 1979 that killed dozens, leading Western scientists
> > accepted the Soviet govt’s excuses, which all turned out to
> > be lies. That doesn’t help lead to better safety standards,
> > incl. those that would benefit scientists in authoritarian
> > countries.
> >
> > But a better path forward is one of true global cooperation
> > based on mutual benefit & reciprocity. Despite the current
> > dissembling, we should assume that the Chinese govt also
> > doesn’t want to go thru this again — especially given that
> > SARS, too, started there.
> >
> > This means putting the public interest before personal
> > ambitions & acknowledging that despite the wonders of its
> > power, biomedical research also holds dangers.
> >
> > To do this, govt officials & scientists need to look at
> > the big picture: Seek comity & truth instead of just
> > avoiding embarrassment. Develop a framework that goes
> > beyond blaming China, since the issues raised are truly
> > global. And realize that the next big thing can simply
> > mean taking great care with a lot of small details.
> >
> > https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.html
> The priority now is how to deal effectively with the Indian Desi variant of the virus. The number of infections and deaths due to this variant is increasing across the world.
>
> In the US, daily new infections for the past week average over 100k+ and it is growing toward daily figure of 200k+. More new infections now means more death on the way. The number of daily death in the US is now over a 1000. Hospitals are beginning to feel the strain again.

The world is infected with Indian variant suffered with heavy casualties.
Indian variant is now impacting all over the world, killed millions more
people around the world.

India is very happy to see how effective their Indian virus from their shit
has defeated the world. India is happy to see how they spread their export
of Indian variant to the world.

They are very happy to see he world is slowing down for them to catch up.
They are happy to produce more Indian shit virus to the world to show India
is the supreme power to the world .

They are happy to see Indian people travel around the world to shit their
virus to infect and kill people around the world, too.

They will be happy to see how cheaply their Indian virus variant is produced
by themselves. The Indian variant will be their super power to the world.

Their biological variant stored in the Indian body is ready to premix their
shit and smelly body odour to produce Indian variant for defecation around
the world.

"dosai prata" wrote in message
news:0d5091ea-895c-43a6-99e0-d361492cbfaen@googlegroups.com...

On Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 8:04:37 PM UTC, David P. wrote:
> Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.
> By Zeynep Tufekci, 6/25/21, New York Times
>
> There were curious characteristics about the H1N1 flu
> pandemic of 1977-78, which emerged from northeastern Asia
> & killed an estimated 700,000 people around the world.
> For one, it almost exclusively affected people in their
> mid-20s or younger. Scientists discovered another oddity
> that could explain the first: It was virtually identical to
> a strain that circulated in the 50s. People born before that
> had immunity that protected them, & younger people didn’t.
>
> But how on earth had it remained so steady genetically,
> since viruses continually mutate? Scientists guessed that it
> had been frozen in a lab. It was often found to be sensitive
> to temperature, something expected for viruses used in
> vaccine research.
>
> It was only in 2004 that a prominent virologist, Peter
> Palese, wrote that Chi-Ming Chu, a respected virologist &
> a former member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told him
> that “the intro of this 1977 H1N1 virus” was indeed thought
> to be due to vaccine trials involving “the challenge of
> several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus.”
> For the first time, science itself seemed to have caused
> a pandemic while trying to prepare for it.
>
> Now, for the 2nd time in 50 years, there are questions about
> whether we are dealing with a pandemic caused by scientific
> research. While the Chinese govt’s obstruction may keep us
> from knowing for sure whether the virus, SARS-CoV-2, came
> from the wild directly or thru a lab in Wuhan or if genetic
> experimentation was involved, what we know already is
> troubling.
>
> Years of research on the dangers of coronas, & the broader
> history of lab accidents & errors around the world, provided
> scientists with plenty of reasons to proceed with caution
> as they investigated this class of pathogens. But troubling
> safety practices persisted. Worse, researchers’ success at
> uncovering new threats didn't always translate into
> preparedness.
>
> Even if the corona jumped from animal to human without the
> involvement of research activities, the groundwork for a
> potential disaster had been laid for years, and learning
> its lessons is essential to preventing others.
>
> Until the SARS outbreak, coronas were considered fairly
> benign, causing only minor to moderate colds. Even 5 months
> after SARS emerged in south China in Nov 2002, the Chinese
> govt was covering up details about its threat, while the
> disease was spreading to other countries. By summer 2003,
> it had been contained, but not before infecting over 8,000
> people & killing 774. Officials were able to suppress SARS
> because infected people spread it when visibly sick, making
> it easier to identify & isolate people. But it was a close
> call, & that roughly 10% case fatality rate raised alarms.
> Preventing the next corona pandemic became a scientific
> priority.
>
> By 2005, researchers — including Dr. Shi Zhengli, a
> virologist at the Wuhan Inst. of Virology — had ID'ed
> horseshoe bats as the likely primary host animal from which
> SARS had emerged. In the years that followed, scientists
> pursued bat coronas in the field & studied them in the lab.
>
> It is often assumed that SARS was spread to humans by palm
> civets, an adorable small mammal sometimes sold at wildlife
> markets, though by 2008, it was suspected that bat coronas
> could directly infect human lung cells without needing an
> intermediary animal. By 2013, Shi’s lab experiments showed
> this could happen. Still, scientists sometimes worked
> with bats, bat samples & bat viruses under conditions
> that have since raised eyebrows.
>
> It is in the nature of viruses to continually mutate, with
> random accidents altering, adding or removing parts of its
> genome or bits of genetic code being exchanged with other
> viruses — recombination. This constant trial & error
> enables the emergence of features that can allow viruses
> to infect a new species.
>
> In order to anticipate these jumps, humans have tried to
> steer this process. In what is sometimes called gain-of-
> function research, they genetically manipulate viruses
> to see how they can become more dangerous.
>
> In an article in Nature Medicine in 2015, researchers
> from two of the major corona labs in the world — Dr. Shi;
> Ralph Baric, a prof at UNC Chapel Hill; and others — wrote
> that they had bioengineered a coronavirus. The work was
> carried out in Baric’s lab at UNC. They took a spike
> protein, the “key” that coronas use to unlock & infect
> cells, from a horseshoe bat virus & combined it with a human
> SARS virus adapted for mice. They reported that this
> “chimeric” virus could infect human cells, suggesting some
> bat viruses may be “capable of infecting humans without
> mutation or adaptation.” This was the 2nd time since
> Shi’s 2013 experiments that a SARS-like bat corona showed
> the ability in the lab to directly infect human airway cells.
>
> This kind of genetic manipulation had already raised
> concerns, esp. after labs in the Netherlands & the US
> announced in 2011 that they had created strains of flu
> viruses using genetic material from the H5N1 flu A virus,
> which is very deadly but generally can’t yet spread among
> people. These new strains could spread by air among ferrets,
> which have humanlike lungs. The uproar had been immediate.
>
> In defense of the 2015 corona experiment by Shi & her
> colleagues, Peter Daszak, whose org, EcoHealth Alliance,
> has worked closely with her & has been granted tens of
> millions of dollars in the last decade from the U.S. govt,
> said the findings would allow scientists to focus on the
> greatest risk because it would “move this virus from a
> candidate emerging pathogen to a clear & present danger.”
>
> Others were more worried. “If the virus escaped, nobody
> could predict the trajectory,” said Simon Wain-Hobson, a
> virologist at the Pasteur Inst. in Paris.
>
> Recent history provided plenty of reason for such concern.
> Nearly every SARS case since the original epidemic has
> been due to lab leaks — 6 incidents in 3 countries, incl.
> twice in a single month from a lab in Beijing. In one
> instance, the mother of a lab worker died.
>
> In 2007, foot-&-mouth disease, which can devastate live-
> stock & caused a massive crisis in Britain in 2001, escaped
> from a drainage pipe leak at an English lab with the
> highest biosafety rating, BSL-4. Even the last known
> person who died of smallpox was someone infected because
> of a lab incident in Britain in 1978.
>
> In its first published survey of the reporting systems in
> American labs working with dangerous pathogens, the CDC
> in 2012 reported 11 laboratory-acquired infections across
> six years, often in BSL-3 labs — the category of safety
> reserved for pathogens like TB. In each instance, the
> exposure was not realized or reported until lab workers
> became infected.
>
> In Jan 2014, the C.D.C. contaminated a benign flu virus
> sample with deadly A(H5N1) but didn’t discover the danger
> until months later. And in June 2014, it mistakenly sent
> improperly deactivated anthrax bacteria to labs, poten-
> tially exposing at least 62 C.D.C. employees who worked
> with the samples without protective gear. One month later,
> vials of live smallpox virus were found in a storage room
> at the NIH.
>
> In Oct 2014, after that string of high-profile incidents,
> the US paused its funding of new gain-of-function research,
> with few exceptions. The moratorium was lifted in 2017.
>
> Far more serious questions about scientific safety would
> soon arise. On Dec. 30, 2019, a public email list run by
> the Int'l Society for Infectious Diseases warned that an
> “unexplained pneumonia” had appeared in Wuhan, China, &
> reports connected the first cases to the city’s Huanan
> seafood market. On Jan 10 2020, a Chinese scientist posted
> the genome of the virus — soon to be named SARS-CoV-2 — on
> an open internet depository, confirming that it was a
> corona. The Chinese govt denied that the virus was spreading
> among humans until Jan. 19, 2020; 3 days later, it announced
> a complete lockdown of Wuhan, a city of 11 million people.
>
> About a week after the lockdown, Chinese scientists
> published a paper in The Lancet that ID'ed bats as the
> likely source of the virus. The authors noted that the
> outbreak happened during local bat hibernation season &
> “no bats were sold or found at the Huanan seafood market,”
> so they reasoned that it may have been transmitted by an
> intermediary animal.
>
> Outbreaks can occur far from their source. The 2002 SARS
> outbreak started in Guangdong, about 1000 km from the caves
> in Yunnan with the horseshoe bats from which SARS is
> believed to have emerged. Masked palm civets, farmed &
> traded across China, often in cramped, unsanitary conditions
> making them prone to outbreaks, were cited as the vehicle
> that SARS probably used to travel from Yunnan to Guangdong.
> Since SARS-CoV-2 was first detected at a market where live
> wild animals may have been sold, the wildlife trade was
> immediately suspected.
>
> Social media users in China were among the first to be
> more skeptical. Did the spread of a disease from bats just
> happen to start in Wuhan, home to Wuhan Inst. of Virology,
> one of the few top bat corona research facilities in the
> world? And what about the Wuhan CDC, which also carries out
> bat research, a few hundred yards from the seafood market?
>
> On Feb 19, 2020, 27 prominent scientists published an open
> letter in The Lancet. They decried “conspiracy theories
> suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.”
>
> As we consider its origin, the question is not so much
> whether SARS-CoV-2 could have gotten out of a lab —
> accidents happen — but whether it could have gotten in
> & how it would have been handled there.
>
> Shortly after Wuhan was locked down in Jan 2020, it became
> apparent that SARS-CoV-2 was related to a virus that
> scientists had been aware of for years.
>
> On Feb. 3, 2020, Shi & co-authors announced in Nature that
> they had found a virus in their database, RaTG13, whose
> genome sequence was 96.2 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2
> & was previously detected in horseshoe bats of Yunnan.
>
> Suspicious internet sleuths combed thru genomic databases
> & found that RaTG13 was an exact match for a bat corona
> called 4991 retrieved from a cave implicated in an
> unexplained outbreak of pneumonia in 2012 among miners
> who collected bat guano from a mine in Yunnan. 3 of the
> 6 miners died.
>
> In May 2020, a former science teacher from India, with the
> Twitter pseudonym TheSeeker268, found a 2013 master’s
> thesis, as well as a 2016 Ph.D. thesis, supervised by
> George Fu Gao, the current director of the Chinese CDC.
> The master’s thesis hypothesized that the miners’ illness
> was caused by direct transmission of a SARS-like corona from
> a horseshoe bat. The Ph.D. thesis was more cautious but
> still called the outbreak “notable.” It also revealed that
> a team from the Wuhan Inst. of Virology had collected bat
> samples from the cave. The dissertation noted that all 4 of
> the miners who were tested for SARS antibodies had them in
> their blood a few weeks after they became ill.
>
> None of those crucial facts — the name change or the link
> to the previous fatal outbreak possibly from a SARS-like
> corona — were mentioned in the original paper about RaTG13.
> In an interview published in Mar 2020, DShi said fungus was
> the pathogen that had sickened the miners, not a corona.
>
> The questions persisted. Last July, Shi confirmed that
> RaTG13 was indeed 4991 renamed. In Nov 2020, her paper in
> Nature was finally updated, additionally acknowledging what
> sleuths had also uncovered: Her team genetically sequenced
> RaTG13 in 2018. (The possible bat corona link to the miner
> deaths was still not acknowledged.)
>
> The less than forthcoming disclosure — a virus with two
> names, the connection to a deadly outbreak, shifting
> diseases & inconsistent stories — fueled suspicions.
>
> Some speculated whether RaTG13 had been subjected to gain-
> of-function-type manipulation to create SARS-CoV-2. But
> RaTG13 is more like a distant cousin of SARS-CoV-2, meaning
> it is unlikely to have produced SARS-CoV-2 as an offspring,
> either throu recent evolution in the wild or manipulation
> in the lab.
>
> Even if RaTG13 had no role in the Covid-19 outbreak,
> questions were raised about why Shi &7 others seemed so
> unforthcoming about it. Then more questions were raised.
>
> For example, the same group of internet sleuths that
> linked RaTG13 to the mine also uncovered that a genomic
> database maintained by the Wuhan Inst. of Virology, with
> info about thousands of bat samples & at least 500 recently
> discovered bat coronas, went offline in Sept 2019. The
> official explanation — that it was taken offline because
> it had been subjected to hacking — doesn’t explain why it
> was never securely shared some other way with responsible
> independent researchers.
>
> Such gaps made it harder to rule out worrying scenarios.
> If there had been a lab accident involving SARS-CoV-2 or a
> virus like it that had been collected in the wild or experi-
> mented on in the lab, the database might have been taken
> down so there would be less evidence that might help others
> connect the dots. Officials might've investigated possible
> lab cases & prematurely believed it was in the clear.
> However, cases can be asymptomatic, & they might have
> missed the one that started a transmission chain & allowed
> the virus to circulate quietly until a superspreader event
> in Dec.
>
> The secrecy & the cover-ups have led to some frantic
> theories — for example, that the virus leaked from a
> bioweapons lab, which makes little sense, since, for one
> thing, bioweapons usually involve more lethal pathogens
> with a known cure or vaccine, to protect those who employ them.
>
> But much more mundane threats lurked. Shi’s scientific work
> was dependent on collecting & analyzing hundreds of bat
> samples. And it was her work that showed the dangers
> associated with this endeavor. The 2013 paper by Shi, Daszak
> & others demonstrated that a live bat coronavirus from a
> Yunnan sample could bind to human lung cell receptors,
> showing that “intermediate hosts may not be necessary for
> direct human infection.” That controversial 2015 experiment
> co-authored by a group of researchers that included Baric
> & Shi was carried out after they had found another bat
> coronavirus they suspected could infect humans, but it was
> difficult to cultivate. They then created that chimeric one
> using its spike. They showed that it, too, could infect
> human airway cells directly.
>
> In Oct 2015, Shi’s lab sampled over 200 people living
> within a few miles of two Yunnan bat caves & found that six
> tested positive for bat coronavirus antibodies, indicating
> past infection. All six reported having seen bats & only
> 20 people in total had reported seeing bats flying close
> to their homes, suggesting exposure created a great risk
> of infection.
>
> The research practices, however, may not have always
> incorporated these lessons. While a 2017 Chinese article
> noted the caution of the Wuhan Inst. of Virology’s workers
> & showed them hooded & some wearing N95 masks, later that
> year a Chinese state-TV story about Shi’s studies showed
> researchers handling bats or bat feces with their bare
> hands or with exposed arms. A person on her team likened
> a bat bite to “being jabbed with a needle.”
>
> In a 2018 blog post that was later removed, Shi said that
> the job was “not as dangerous” as everyone thought. “The
> chance of directly infecting humans is very small,” she
> wrote. “In most cases only ordinary protection will be
> taken,” unless a bat was known to carry a virus that might
> infect humans. She repeated something similar in a 2018
> TED Talk-style video, acc. to The Washington Post, noting
> that “simpler protection” — illustrated with slides of
> unmasked or surgically masked colleagues with bare hands
> — was appropriate because it was believed that bat pathogens
> usually required an intermediate host.
>
> Shi said that all the research at the institute is done
> in strict accordance with biosafety standards and the lab
> is tested annually by a third-party institution. The Wuhan
> C.D.C. also reportedly conducts research on bat-borne viruses.
> One of its staff members, Tian Junhua, has developed a rep
> for adventurous scientific discovery. A 2013 paper notes his
> team caught 155 bats in Hubei Province. The Washington Post
> reported that in a video released on Dec 10 2019, he boasted
> about “having visited dozens of bat caves & studied 300 types
> of virus vectors.” Previously, he also talked about having
> made mistakes in the field, like forgetting personal protec-
> tive equipment & being splashed with bat urine or accident-
> ally getting bat blood on his skin, acc. to The Post. And
> yet the WHO reported that the agency denied ever storing or
> working with bat viruses in the lab before the pandemic.
>
> This March the W.H.O. reported that the Wuhan C.D.C. lab
> “moved on 2nd Dec 2019 to a new location near the Huanan
> market.” The W.H.O. report said there were “no disruptions
> or incidents” during the move. Given the Chinese govt’s
> lack of candor, that raises suspicions that lab samples,
> if not bats themselves, were being hauled around near the
> market at the time of the outbreak.
>
> Many of these research practices weren’t deviations from
> int'l norms. A bat field researcher in the US told me she
> now always wears a respirator in bat caves but that wasn’t
> standard practice before.
>
> It isn’t a wild idea to suggest that field research risks
> setting off an outbreak. Dr. Linfa Wang, a Chinese-Aussie
> virologist based in Singapore who frequently works with
> Shi & pioneered the hypothesis that bats were behind the
> 2003 SARS epidemic, told Nature there is a small chance that
> this pandemic was seeded by a researcher inadvertently
> getting infected by an unknown virus while collecting
> bat samples in a cave.
>
> Bats could create further risks if housed in labs, like the
> risk posed by the sale of wildlife in urban markets.
> On Dec. 10, Peter Daszak, who organized The Lancet letter
> denouncing the questioning of Covid-19’s natural origins &
> was announced as a member of the WHO origins investigation
> committee last fall, insisted it was a conspiracy theory
> to suggest that there were live bats in labs he had collab-
> orated with for 15 yrs. “That’s not how the science works,”
> he wrote in a tweet he later deleted. “We collect bat
> samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we
> catch them!”
>
> But evidence to the contrary has accumulated. An assistant
> researcher told a reporter that Shi took on the role of
> feeding the bats when students were away. Another news rpt
> in 2018 said a team led by one of her doctoral trainees
> “collected a full rack of swabs & bagged a dozen live bats
> for further testing back at the lab.” The Chinese Academy
> of Sciences website has listed the Wuhan Inst. as having
> at least a dozen cages for bats, & in 2018 the institute
> applied for a patent for a bat cage. Shi has talked about
> monitoring antibodies in bats over time — which would not
> be done in a cave. Recently, another video surfaced that
> reportedly showed live bats in the institute.
>
> Just a few weeks ago, Daszak changed his claims. “
> I wouldn’t be surprised if,” he said, “like many other
> virology labs, they were trying to set up a bat colony.”
>
> Meanwhile, no intermediary animal has yet been found,
> despite testing thousands of animals around Wuhan. Last
> month a former commissioner of the FDA, Scott Gottlieb,
> said this failure added to the evidence of a lab leak,
> although Dr. Daszak suggested that investigators look
> further, at wildlife farms in southern China.
>
> But if bat-to-human transmission is how the spillover
> happened, no intermediary animal is necessary, since it
> could have been any interaction with a bat — by a villager
> or a field researcher.
>
> Despite widespread assertions that bat viruses need an
> intermediary animal to spread to humans, research is not
> even settled on whether the palm civet spread SARS to
> humans from bats. We do know that palm civets amplified
> the outbreak once SARS arrived in the Guangdong market &
> that back-and-forth transmission between humans & civets
> was possible. However, the only widespread infected civet
> populations that researchers found were those at urban
> markets & sometimes at farms — where people are — & not in
> the wild. We know we can infect animals. Last year Denmark
> had to kill 17 million minks after they caught SARS-CoV-2
> from people. It’s possible that humans were the initial
> intermediary animal for civets & that the cute little
> creatures were framed.
>
> Other sources of risk were the lab activities themselves.
> There has been a lot of speculation that SARS-CoV-2 was
> the result of genetic engineering. This hypothesis can't be
> ruled out based on genomic analysis alone, & suspicion has
> grown because of the opaque response by Chinese authorities.
>
> They have refused to share direct records from the lab. Shi
> echoed this stance in May when a group of scientists, incl.
> her co-author Dr. Baric, pushed for broader transparency.
> “It’s definitely not acceptable,” she emailed a reporter in
> response to the group’s request to see her lab’s records.
>
> Meanwhile, thruout Dec 2019, Wuhan doctors suspected that
> a SARS-like virus was on the loose, & the local govt
> arrested whistle-blowers, incl. at least one health care
> worker. The cover-up by Communist Party officials continued
> until the prominent SARS scientist Zhong Nanshan traveled
> to Wuhan on Jan. 18 & raised the alarm. Circumstantial
> evidence casts some doubt on the claim that SARS-CoV-2
> was bioengineered. For instance, aspects of the virus that
> have made some suspect it was bioengineered could also be
> evidence that it evolved naturally. A lot of attention has
> been drawn to an unusual feature on its spike protein
> called a furin cleavage site, with which the virus can
> better infect a human cell. It’s one of several odd features
> of SARS-CoV-2 that are weird enough that even virologists
> who greatly doubt lab involvement told me they were shocked
> to see it. In fact, even beyond the furin cleavage site,
> SARS-CoV-2 was a virus scientists had never seen before.
>
> Evolution can be a random accumulation of weird, novel
> features. For the research on viruses that scientists like
> Shi do for high-level scientific publications, such a combo
> would be incongruous. Their work usually involves examining
> or changing one element of a virus at a time to find out
> what each element does & can be made to do. If your computer
> conked out, for instance, you wouldn’t see what’s wrong by
> simultaneously changing the power source, the cable & the
> electrical outlet. You’d test each one individually. Having
> a variety of unusual elements leads to hard-to-assess
> results, not a paper in Nature.
>
> But even if we put aside directed engineering, regular lab
> work at the Wuhan labs has raised concerns. In 2016 the
> Wuhan Inst. reported experimenting on a live bat corona
> that could infect human cells in a BSL-2 lab — a biosafety
> level that has been compared with that of a dentist’s
> office. Protective gear other than gloves &d lab coats is
> usually optional at this level, & there’s often no airflow
> control sealing ventilation between the work area & the
> rest of the building. Michael Lin, an associate prof of
> neurobiology & bioengineering at Stanford, told me it was
> “an actual scandal, recorded in print,” that a SARS-like
> virus capable of replicating in human cells was worked on
> under such low safety conditions.
>
> Just trying to culture bat viruses in the lab can create
> risks that the scientists may not even be aware of. While
> trying & failing to cultivate one strain, they might inadver-
> tently culture another one they don’t even know about. It’s
> even possible, Dr. Lin told me, that viruses can coexist in
> a single sample & quietly recombine, giving rise to some-
> thing novel but undetected. Under BSL-2 conditions or even
> sloppy BSL-3 conditions, researchers could get exposed to a
> pathogen they didn’t know existed.
>
> Several scientists who signed The Lancet letter denouncing
> the consideration of anything but natural origins have since
> said they are more open to lab involvement. One, Bernard
> Roizman, an emeritus virologist at the U of Chicago with
> 4 honorary professorships from Chinese universities, said
> he was leaning toward believing there was a lab accident.
>
> “I’m convinced that what happened is that the virus was
> brought to a lab, they started to work with it,” he told
> Wall St. Journal, “& some sloppy individual brought it out.”
> He added, “They can’t admit they did something so stupid.”
>
> Charles Calisher of Colorado State U, another signatory,
> recently told ABC News that “there is too much coincidence”
> to ignore the lab-leak theory & he now believes “it is more
> likely that it came out of that lab.”
>
> Peter Palese, the virologist who wrote about the 1977 flu
> pandemic, said that “a lot of disturbing info has surfaced
> since The Lancet letter I signed” & that he wants an
> investigation to come up with answers.
>
> Other scientists have also said they have changed their
> minds. Ian Lipkin, the director of the Ctr for Infection &
> Immunity at Columbia U & a co-author of an influential
> article in Nature Medicine that argued in favor of a natural
> origin in Mar 2020, is also now more skeptical. “People
> should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs,” he
> told the science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. last month.
> “My view has changed.”
>
> Medical records of lab workers could help clarify such
> questions. Last July, Shi said “a possibility did not
> exist” that anyone associated with the institute may have
> gotten infected “while collecting, sampling or handling
> bats.” She added that it had recently tested all institute
> staff members & students for antibodies showing past
> infection by SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses & had
> found “zero infection” & insisted that she could rule out
> this possibility for all labs in Wuhan.
>
> It’s hard to see how a careful scientist could dismiss
> even the slightest possibility for all labs, incl. those
> not her own. “Zero infection” would mean not a single case
> among the hundreds of people at the institute, even though
> a study found that 4.4% of the Wuhan population had been
> infected. Later, the W.H.O. team asked for more info about
> the earliest Covid-19 cases in Wuhan, incl. anonymized but
> detailed patient data — something that should be standard
> in any outbreak origin investigation — & were denied access.
>
> All this leaves a lot of possibilities open & a lot of
> confusion. Since most pandemics have been due to zoonotic
> events, emerging from animals, is there reason to doubt
> lab involvement? Maybe if you look at all of human history.
> A better period of comparison is the time since the advent
> of molecular biology, when it became more likely for
> scientists to cause outbreaks. The 1977 pandemic was tied
> to research activities, while the other two pandemics that
> have occurred since then, AIDS & the H1N1 swine flu of 2009,
> were not.
>
> Plus, once a rare event, like a pandemic, has happened,
> one has to consider all the potential paths to it. It’s
> like investigating a plane crash. Flying is usually very
> safe, but when a crash does happen, we don’t just say
> mechanical errors & pilot mistakes don’t usually lead to
> catastrophes & that terrorism is rare. Rather, we investigate
> all possible paths, including unusual ones, so we can figure
> out how to prevent similar events.
>
> Perhaps the biggest question has been what to read into the
> location of the outbreak, 1000 miles from the closest known
> viral relatives yet close to a leading research institution.
>
> Sometimes the curiosity around the location has been waved
> away with the explanation that labs are set up where viruses
> are. However, the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been where
> it is since 1956, doing research on agro & enviro micro-
> biology under a different name. It was upgraded & began to
> focus on coronavirus research only after SARS. Wuhan is a
> metropolis with a larger population than NYC’s, not some
> rural outpost near bat caves. Dr. Shi said the Dec 2019
> outbreak surprised her because she “never expected this kind
> of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” When her lab
> needed a population with a lower likelihood of bat corona
> exposure, they used Wuhan residents, noting that “inhabitants
> have a much lower likelihood of contact with bats due to its
> urban setting.”
>
> Still, location itself is not proof, either. Plausible
> scenarios implicating research activities don’t rule out
> other options. This week, Jesse Bloom, an associate prof
> at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Ctr, told me that
> when he recovered & analyzed a set of partial early Wuhan
> genetic sequences that had been removed from a genomic
> archive, it supported “substantial existing evidence that
> SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in Wuhan prior to the seafood
> market outbreak.” Both the early reports from Chinese
> scientists & the more recent W.H.O. investigation this winter
> found many of the early cases had no connection to the
> seafood market, incl. the earliest acknowledged case so far,
> on Dec. 8, 2019. So the seafood market may not have been
> the original location of the outbreak.
>
> It’s also plausible that an outbreak could have started
> someplace else & was detected in Wuhan simply because it
> was a big city. Testing blood banks from across China, esp.
> in areas near wildlife farms & bat caves, would help, but
> with limited exceptions, the Chinese govt has not carried
> out such research — or allowed the sharing of the results
> if it has.
>
> With so much evidence withheld, it’s hard to say anything
> about Covid-19’s origins with certainty, & even a genuine
> investigation would face challenges. Some outbreaks have
> never been traced to their origin.
>
> But even if we are denied answers, we can still learn
> lessons. Perhaps the biggest one is that we were due for
> a bat coronavirus outbreak, one way or another, and the
> research showing bat coronaviruses’ ability to jump to
> humans was a warning not heeded.
>
> Scientists & govt officials need to weigh the benefits &
> dangers of how we work with bats & viruses, in the field &
> the lab, esp. since other public health investments may do
> much more to prevent a pandemic. It might be more effective
> to institute rigorous surveillance where threatening
> pathogens are known to thrive, & better prepare our
> institutions to react quickly & transparently to the first
> sign of an outbreak. Research can be weighted toward response
> rather than prediction; these overlap but aren’t identical.
> Finding a dangerous virus in a cave or a petri dish
> might be useful, but it’s a bit like poking a bear
> we are trying to avoid.
>
> Field research on bats should've been done more carefully.
> Bat viruses should not be studied in BSL-2 labs, & research
> in BSL-3 labs should be done only under the strictest
> caution. Bats should be treated as a serious threat in labs.
> Human interactions with bats should occur under strict
> regulation & surveillance.
>
> Alison Young, an investigative reporter who has long
> covered lab incidents, wrote that from 2015-19, there were
> over 450 reported accidents with pathogens that the federal
> govt regulates because of their danger. Comparable rates
> of incidents were found in British labs — & research
> suggests lab accidents are not even always reported.
>
> Some scientists have proposed imposing stricter controls
> & a stronger risk-benefit analysis for research on pathogens
> that could inadvertently spark pandemics. Some research may
> still be worth it, & there have been proposals to move such
> labs outside densely populated cities.
>
> Cooperation with China on these issues is vital, including
> on lab safety & outbreak surveillance. Some argue that
> criticizing China’s response to the pandemic & the scientific
> practices that might have led to it will imperil that
> cooperation. It’s hard to see how angry op-eds could make
> Chinese officials more intransigent than they already are.
>
> People are understandably wary that these claims might
> demonize scientists from other countries, esp. given the
> anti-Asian racism that has abounded. But why would
> perpetuating this state of events be to their benefit?
>
> After a lab accident with anthrax bacteria in the Soviet
> Union in 1979 that killed dozens, leading Western scientists
> accepted the Soviet govt’s excuses, which all turned out to
> be lies. That doesn’t help lead to better safety standards,
> incl. those that would benefit scientists in authoritarian
> countries.
>
> But a better path forward is one of true global cooperation
> based on mutual benefit & reciprocity. Despite the current
> dissembling, we should assume that the Chinese govt also
> doesn’t want to go thru this again — especially given that
> SARS, too, started there.
>
> This means putting the public interest before personal
> ambitions & acknowledging that despite the wonders of its
> power, biomedical research also holds dangers.
>
> To do this, govt officials & scientists need to look at
> the big picture: Seek comity & truth instead of just
> avoiding embarrassment. Develop a framework that goes
> beyond blaming China, since the issues raised are truly
> global. And realize that the next big thing can simply
> mean taking great care with a lot of small details.
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.html

dean wrote:
> The world is infected with Indian variant suffered with heavy casualties.
> Indian variant is now impacting all over the world, killed millions more
> people around the world.
> [ . . . ]

Every species has natural enemies that keep its numbers in check!
Nowhere else in Nature does a population increase indefinitely
without a crash! The Laws of Nature supersede and overrule
all human laws! You don't have to like it; you just have to accept it!

> "dosai prata" wrote...
> David P. wrote:
> > Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.
> > By Zeynep Tufekci, 6/25/21, New York Times
> > [ . . . ]
> > https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.html
>
> The priority now is how to deal effectively with the Indian Desi variant of
> the virus. The number of infections and deaths due to this variant is
> increasing across the world.
>
> In the US, daily new infections for the past week average over 100k+ and it
> is growing toward daily figure of 200k+. More new infections now means more
> death on the way. The number of daily death in the US is now over a 1000.
> Hospitals are beginning to feel the strain again.