
Seven year coronavirus trail from mine deaths to a Wuhan lab - adventured
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/seven-year-covid-trail-revealed-l5vxt7jqp
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roenxi
1) It doesn't matter whether or not this virus is a lab escape. Much more
important is to note that it could have been a lab escape and our modern
transport networks and logistic networks leave us very vulnerable to viruses
in multiple concerning ways.

If borders stay open to tourists and business as they were pre-COVID, this
will happen again in our lifetimes whatever the source was.

2)

> Researchers in China have been unable to find any news reports of this new
> Sars-like coronavirus and the three deaths. There appears to have been a
> media blackout.

Why on earth would China do this? Surely it is easier to get people to help
control a new virus if they know about it.

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mnky9800n
Yes. In a normal world, American scientists and healthcare researchers would
be available to help in any sort of catastrophe.

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sradman
> But the bats in Yunnan are 1,000 miles from her laboratory, and one of the
> most extraordinary coincidences of the Covid-19 pandemic is that ground zero
> happened to be in Wuhan...

Yunnan is also about 1,000 miles from southern Guangdong where SARS-1 broke
out. The source in both cases is horseshoe bats that live in the
Lancang/Mekong River basin. The intermediate hosts are humans that enter the
bat roosting caves and the nocturnal arboreal mammals that live where bats
perch feed (pangolins, civets, and raccoon dogs).

> Shi and her team had already collected hundreds of samples of the
> coronavirus — including RaBtCov/4991 — from their work on bats across Yunnan
> province, and they were running controversial experiments...

This is sloppy. It conflates collecting RNA samples with virus isolates. There
is no evidence that gain-of-function experiments were being performed on a
variation of a SARS-CoV-2 isolate. It is plausible but very unlikely.

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rjvs
Has anyone done any studies on the level of similarity of the viewpoints
between various arms of the Murdoch media outlets (Sky/Fox/Star & various
newspapers such as The Times) around the world when compared to say, their
nearest competitors in each market?

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timbit42
Murdoch doesn't own Sky anymore.

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DiogenesKynikos
This article is written in a highly conspiratorial tone, but the author does
not appear to understand several basic things about coronavirus research.

> Evidence seen by The Sunday Times suggests that a virus found in its depths
> — part of a faecal sample that was frozen and sent to a Chinese laboratory
> for analysis and storage — is the closest known match to the virus that
> causes Covid-19.

This has been publicly known for months. It was published in biorRxiv in
January and appeared in _Nature_ in early February.[1]

> The virus was a huge discovery. It was a “new strain” of a Sars-type
> coronavirus that, surprisingly, received only a passing mention in an
> academic paper.

RaTG13 was one of hundreds of SARS-like coronaviruses discovered in these bat
caves. In 2013, it was not considered a major discovery. One reason is that it
is only 80% similar to the original SARS. At the time, researchers were much
more interested in viruses that were more like 99% similar to SARS. Those
viruses were studied much more intensively, and were the subject of numerous
papers.

> What happened to the virus in the years between its discovery and the
> eruption of Covid-19? Why was its existence tucked away in obscure records,
> and its link to three deaths not mentioned?

The article never provides any evidence that these people became sick from
RaTG13. There are hundreds of known SARS-like coronaviruses, and there are
estimated to be thousands of as-of-yet undiscovered ones. The author of this
article seems to be under the impression that RaTG13 is the only known SARS-
like coronavirus.

> These produced a remarkable finding: while none had tested positive for
> Sars, all four had antibodies against another, unknown Sars-like
> coronavirus.

There was a study published in 2016 that found that 3% of people tested in a
region of the countryside in Yunnan province had antibodies against SARS-like
coronaviruses.[2] The sorts of spillover events described in this article are
probably not uncommon at all. It has always just been a question of when a
spillover event would lead to sustained transmission, instead of petering out.

The rest of the article goes on to try to suggest that RaTG13 leaked from a
lab. RaTG13 is separated from SARS-CoV-2 by decades of evolution. It's the
closest _known_ relative of SARS-CoV-2, but not its ancestor. It's sad that
tabloids are going after the people who have spent decades trying to
understand these types of viruses, so that we would be prepared for new
outbreaks.

1\.
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7)

2\.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/)

~~~
awb
What's your opinion on these claims from the article?

> they were running controversial experiments to find out how they might
> mutate to become more infectious to humans. This “gain-of-function” work is
> described in papers released by the WIV between 2015 and 2017, scientists
> say. Shi’s team combined snippets of different coronaviruses to see if they
> could be made more transmissible in what they called “virus infectivity
> experiments”.

> Ebright alleges, however, that the type of work required to create Covid-19
> from RaTG13 was “identical” to work the laboratory had done in the past.
> “The very same techniques, the very same experimental strategies using
> RaTG13 as the starting point, would yield a virus essentially identical to
> Sars-Cov-2.”

I also heard this claim from Eric Weinstein on Joe Rogan's podcast but don't
know enough about the science or the claim to know if it's plausible.

~~~
alaxsxaq
You might be thinking of the Joe Rogan podcast episode from late June with
Bret Weinstein, formerly professor of biology at Evergreen State College,
where the topic of gain-of-function research relative to Covid-19 is discussed
in some depth.

Eric Weinstein, Bret's brother, as mentioned in a later comment, is the
managing director of Thiel Capital. Eric was last on the podcast in April 2020
where there was some discussion of Covid - perhaps he also discussed gain-of-
function coronavirus research which is not a new subject and has been the
subject of controversy - even leading the NIH to suspend funding for this
category of research in 2014 (that policy was reversed in 2017).

~~~
awb
You're right, it was Bret:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQLF4DUSXGs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQLF4DUSXGs)

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gvpmahesh
can someone post the story, it's behind a paywall

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totetsu
[http://archive.fo/LPCD1](http://archive.fo/LPCD1)

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blackrock
LOL. Now the western media is just making sh*t up, as an excuse for their
failures at handling the virus.

Hey don’t look at my problem here, look over there!

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chvid
It is election time in the US ...

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jacquesm
It's a UK publication. That said this is a very low quality article that seems
to have only one goal: to drive sign ups for the paywalled articles.

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chvid
It is part of the Murdoch empire.

