By catching bats, these "virus hunters" hope to stop the next pandemic. Photo: REUTERS
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By catching bats, these 'virus hunters' hope to stop the next pandemic

27 Comments
By Eloisa Lopez and Adrian Portugal

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This is good news.

However, lets not forget that the bubonic plague was caused and transmitted by fleas on rats, so maybe they should look into that as well?

6 ( +6 / -0 )

"Wonderful!"

That is how the current pandemic started; researchers collecting and "studying" bat coronaviruses.

-1 ( +7 / -8 )

No, in contrary. They bring the viruses again intentionally out of there into our civilization, earlier and faster than it would eventually come by random processes. In other words, the same stupid mistake as with other corona or especially COVID. You have to stop all those morons, can’t you understand that?

-2 ( +4 / -6 )

That is how the current pandemic started; researchers collecting and "studying" bat coronaviruses.

The consensus of science is that there is no realistic possibility of this being true, with every "evidence" of the supposed artificial origin of the virus already exposed as false and misleading.

They bring the viruses again intentionally out of there into our civilization, earlier and faster than it would eventually come by random processes. 

You would need data to prove this, introduction of zoonosis is a constant process being endlessly repeated by human interaction with nature without using any of the precautions that scientist do, an in huge bigger scale than a scientific research project.

No other corona has been introduced by scientific studies but by other human activity, and at the same time the research being done in coronaviruses is precisely why a safe and effective vaccine was developed in less than a year. If scientist had to ignore the scientific evidence to listen to your mistaken recommendation we would still be years away from a vaccine, maybe not even yet understanding the SARS-CoV-2.

It is fortunate that the people in charge of those decisions are better informed and do not confuse movie plots with reality.

3 ( +9 / -6 )

virusrex

good to see you on the board mate. Had a question for you:

what do you think about the Hudson institute and David Asher saying that there appears that the very first cluster of covid seems to have been in November at the Wuhan institute of Virology?

Also could you please give us your opinion on Asher in particular?

3 ( +6 / -3 )

Most people will always tend to believe what is more interesting, and some people will always try to sell them a very interesting story to believe. A big part of scientific training is learn to examine all the evidence available until you can find what is the explanation that is most likely to be true, even if its completely boring.

Asher is selling an interesting story, but as usual it completely depends on uncertified sources and ignoring all the evidence that indicates it is wrong, people will be very attracted to this explanation (it would be great for a fictional movie for example) but compared with the natural origin of the pandemic is not realistically possible.

For example it is quite obvious that the cases on the Wuhan market were not the first human cases, just the first that were found because the outbreak was very evident. Even a student on the first year of epidemiology would know that. Asher wants people to believe that the real first cases came from an outbreak inside the laboratory a few weeks before the market.

The problem is that scientifically this explanation is not believable,

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210318185328.htm

The evidence points out that the first infections were much sooner (around October) and the disease spread slowly around the Hubei province without raisin alarms until December, when the marked outbreak was identified and China tried to control it the disease was already spreading around outside the province. Even the supposed outbreak in the lab on November (that the conspiracy theory proposes as the original infections) are already too late to actually explain how the disease spread, and it fails to explain how early human cases were found outside the city.

4 ( +9 / -5 )

That is how the current pandemic started; researchers collecting and "studying" bat coronaviruses.

The consensus of science is that there is no realistic possibility of this being true, with every "evidence" of the supposed artificial origin of the virus already exposed as false and misleading.

No, at most they can say that it is "possible" that it emerged naturally. But it is so much more likely that it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The same WIV that had been collecting and studying novel bat coronaviruses for many years, with several published papers related to their gain of function research, and reports of infecting humanized mice with novel bat SARS-like coronaviruses.

The same WIV that immediately after the outbreak altered and then removed online records of its work with bat corona viruses and other viruses.

The same WIV that had been previously cited for their poor safety standards.

The long delayed "fact-finding" team included at least one member who was directly connected with the funding of that research, and they never ever considered to look at the WIV's possible role.

-1 ( +6 / -7 )

No, at most they can say that it is "possible" that it emerged naturally. But it is so much more likely that it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

That is mistaken, the scientific consensus is the exact opposite, the only realistic possibility for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is a natural zoonosis in the same way that has happenend countless times before, including the previous highly pathogenic coronaviruses.

This is as easy to prove as searching for the official opinion of scientific or medical professional associations so you can corroborate none of them supports any other explanation instead of the natural.

The rest of the conspiracy theory is still easily demonstrated as false for the reasons Asher is proved wrong, wild accusations without proof that completely fail to explain why the first cases were outside of the city and completely unrelated to the laboratory. People that religiously want to believe in conspiracy depend on a magical virus that escaped out of a lab, pass completely undetected and without causing any outbreak on a populous city, then produce a few slow cases in more rural places and only then go back to the big city and make a big obvious outbreak.

Any theory that depends of a series of impossible things happening one after another is impossible to believe, especially when it also depends on a very common thing not happening this time, just because.

1 ( +6 / -5 )

virusrex-thanks for your insight.

1 ( +5 / -4 )

Any theory that depends of a series of impossible things happening one after another is impossible to believe, especially when it also depends on a very common thing not happening this time, just because.

Exactly!

-5 ( +2 / -7 )

Exactly!

Are coronaviruses impossible to get from nature?

Obviously not, even the closely related SARS and MERS prove it.

Is a highly communicable disease able to escape without causing outbreaks from a highly populated city to begin causing cases in more rural areas?

For al realistic purposes, yes.

1 ( +5 / -4 )

Are coronaviruses impossible to get from nature?

Not at all. Coronaviruses are very common in nature. What's your point?

The WIV were experts at turning bat coronaviruses into viruses that are highly infectious for humans, and they had poor safety standards, and the funding for this gain of function research was provided by someone who one year later went to investigate and told us "nothing to see here"!

-3 ( +3 / -6 )

Not at all. Coronaviruses are very common in nature. What's your point?

That the other theory is the impossible one. An origin in nature is the remaining explanation.

The WIV were experts at turning bat coronaviruses into viruses that are highly infectious for humans, and they had poor safety standards, and the funding for this gain of function research was provided by someone who one year later went to investigate and told us "nothing to see here"!

None of those reasons explain the magical virus necessary for this explanation to be true, no amount of funding, no amount of lack of standards, no amount of research makes it even slightly possible for a leaked virus to completely escape a highly populous city without making outbreaks, then go to more rural areas and mimic exactly the behavior or a zoonosis recently introduced to humans from a wild reservoir.

Thus this explanation is inadequate and depend on impossible things to happen repeatedly, this is the reason why not a single professional organization of scientists or health workers thinks is how the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak began. On the opposite the scientific consensus is the natural origin.

1 ( +5 / -4 )

@VirusEx

After a HongKong and Taiwan tour in November and December or 2019, we got very sick and it was not fun. Me two days down and a few weeks to get over itmy love of my life was down for four days and diabetic 1!!!!

Blessed or luck in my opinion, we made it. Are we immune? Are we part of the herd?

-2 ( +2 / -4 )

My office mate and I working in the high desert of California had a virus in November 2019 nobody could diagnose with pneumonia like symptoms that was just awful. I had been suffering for maybe two weeks before seeing a doctor so no fever by then but most of the other classic symptoms were there. Same for my co-worker. In hindsight out doctor treated multiple cases of something SARS in November and December of 2019 but none of the available tests were positive, chest x-rays were inconclusive (lousy lab) and nobody was thinking of a novel corona virus at that time. The cough, fatigue and shortness of breath lingered in me until mid summer 2020.

2 ( +3 / -1 )

After a HongKong and Taiwan tour in November and December or 2019, we got very sick and it was not fun. Me two days down and a few weeks to get over itmy love of my life was down for four days and diabetic 1!!!!

My neighbor's wife, barely 40 years old, mother of three, died in Hong Kong in December 2019 from a very aggressive pneumonia. She went there for a visit and died.

5 ( +5 / -0 )

@Virusrex

It is a pity that you don’t comment on the feasibility of studying bats.

When I suggested this several months ago you expressed doubt that it was impossible to do so.

Yet here with have people in the field doing just that.

"By having baseline data on the nature and occurrence of the potentially zoonotic virus in bats, we can somehow predict possible outbreaks."

Well, there you go-it is possible to learn something new everyday.

0 ( +4 / -4 )

None of those reasons explain the magical virus necessary for this explanation to be true, no amount of funding, no amount of lack of standards, no amount of research makes it even slightly possible for a leaked virus to completely escape a highly populous city without making outbreaks, then go to more rural areas and mimic exactly the behavior or a zoonosis recently introduced to humans from a wild reservoir.

There were professionals in the US State Department worried about exactly what you dismiss years before the current pandemic. There are official messages as far back as 2014 documenting these concerns. The primary concerns were the lack of visibility into the research being conducted in that lab and the documented lack of training for that level of lab among the staff (2017 messages) and documented sloppy practices. WaPo Columnist Josh Rogin makes a convincing case, more convincing than yours I'm afraid. Claims that the current SARS-CoV2 virus emerged from the wet market in Wuhan has to deal with the fact that the first confirmed case of Covid-19 occurred in a person with no connection to that market.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin-chaos-under-heaven-wuhan-lab-book-excerpt-474322

3 ( +5 / -2 )

From Josh Rogin's account, based on events in late 2017:

"These researchers, the American officials learned, had found a population of bats from caves in Yunnan province that gave them insight into how SARS coronaviruses originated and spread. The researchers boasted that they may have found the cave where the original SARS coronavirus originated. But all the U.S. diplomats cared about was that these scientists had discovered three new viruses that had a unique characteristic: they contained a "spike protein” that was particularly good at grabbing on to a specific receptor in human lung cells known as an ACE2 receptor. That means the viruses were potentially very dangerous for humans—and that these viruses were now in a lab with which they, the U.S. diplomats, were largely unfamiliar.

Knowing the significance of the Wuhan virologists’ discovery, and knowing that the WIV’s top-level biosafety laboratory (BSL-4) was relatively new, the U.S. Embassy health and science officials in Beijing decided to go to Wuhan and check it out. In total, the embassy sent three teams of experts in late 2017 and early 2018 to meet with the WIV scientists, among them Shi Zhengli, often referred to as the “bat woman” because of her extensive experience studying coronaviruses found in bats.

When they sat down with the scientists at the WIV, the American diplomats were shocked by what they heard. The Chinese researchers told them they didn’t have enough properly trained technicians to safely operate their BSL-4 lab. The Wuhan scientists were asking for more support to get the lab up to top standards.

The diplomats wrote two cables to Washington reporting on their visits to the Wuhan lab. More should be done to help the lab meet top safety standards, they said, and they urged Washington to get on it. They also warned that the WIV researchers had found new bat coronaviruses could easily infect human cells, and which used the same cellular route that had been used by the original SARS coronavirus."

2 ( +4 / -2 )

More from Josh Rogin's account:

"The Wuhan Institute of Virology had openly participated in gain-of-function research in partnership with U.S. universities and institutions. But the official told me the U.S. government had evidence that Chinese labs were performing gain-of-function research on a much larger scale than was publicly disclosed, meaning they were taking more risks in more labs than anyone outside China was aware of. This insight, in turn, fed into the lab-accident hypothesis in a new and troubling way.

A little-noticed study was released in early July 2020 by a group of Chinese researchers in Beijing, including several affiliated with the Academy of Military Medical Science. These scientists said they had created a new model for studying SARS-CoV-2 by creating mice with human-like lung characteristics by using the CRISPR gene-editing technology to give the mice lung cells with the human ACE2 receptor — the cell receptor that allowed coronaviruses to so easily infect human lungs.

After consultations with experts, some U.S. officials came to believe this Beijing lab was likely conducting coronavirus experiments on mice fitted with ACE2 receptors well before the coronavirus outbreak—research they hadn’t disclosed and continued not to admit to. In its January 15 statement, the State Department alleged that although the Wuhan Institute of Virology disclosed some of its participation in gain-of-function research, it has not disclosed its work on RaTG13 and “has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.” That, by itself, did not help to explain how SARS-CoV-2 originated. But it was clear that officials believed there was a lot of risky coronavirus research going on in Chinese labs that the rest of the world was simply not aware of.

“This was just a peek under a curtain of an entire galaxy of activity, including labs and military labs in Beijing and Wuhan playing around with coronaviruses in ACE2 mice in unsafe labs,” the senior administration official said. “It suggests we are getting a peek at a body of activity that isn’t understood in the West or even has precedent here.”

2 ( +4 / -2 )

It is a pity that you don’t comment on the feasibility of studying bats.

When I suggested this several months ago you expressed doubt that it was impossible to do so.

Yet here with have people in the field doing just that.

Quote exactly where did I said it was impossible to do it, that is false, everybody with an interest in emerging diseases is studying bats, even here on Japan. That is not a reason for this magical virus to actually exist and be able to escape a huge city only to mimic a natural introduction. Again, trying to dismiss imaginary arguments that only you have said do nothing against the real ones.

There were professionals in the US State Department worried about exactly what you dismiss years before the current pandemic.

They were worried about a virus that can escape a huge city without making any outbreak? and go to much more rural areas to cause limited cases, exactly as if this was a disease introduced from the wild? and then went back to the same populous city from which the virus escaped but this time began to behave normally and cause very visible outbreaks? because that is what I dismiss as impossible.

Your information was already tried to used before in the comments, he is not a source that can be trusted.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/02/24/pers-f24.html

Tellingly, when the full diplomatic cable referenced by Rogin was released in July, the Post itself concluded, “The full cable does not strengthen the claim that an accident at the lab caused the virus to escape.” Any reading of the cable makes clear it says nothing like Rogin’s interpretation. Instead, it makes clear that a shortage of qualified staff had precluded the lab from operating at full capacity and importing highly contagious diseases.

He is convincing only to people that don't have any experience working with viruses, because for the experts his account is full of holes, the ACE2 receptor binding of SARS-CoV-2 depends on a quite different sequence of amino acids from the spike protein, it is not similar to the viruses that are the basis for the report of Rogin

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698

This ACE2 binding spike protein sequence is the basis of their published work in mice (that don't require BSL4 lab, ABSL3 is enough), the sequence is nice and easy to get with a few mutations from the previously known bat coronavirus sequences, predicted to happen by computer analysis and also completely different from what was found in the SARS-CoV-2, that was supposedly much more difficult to appear in nature (except that it was not, and was later found similar to other isolates completely unrelated to the academy of Military Medical Science).

His whole conspiracy theory depends on a direct link with viruses that are much more different than the viruses that are actually related, a gross misrepresentation of the information he had that became obvious when other people gained access to it and hiding very pertinent information that clearly indicates other explanations to be more likely. Again this is a good story that people feel attracted to easily, but realistically impossible to be the correct, specially because it fails to account how the disease actually began spreading.

0 ( +4 / -4 )

 Again this is a good story that people feel attracted to easily, but realistically impossible to be the correct, specially because it fails to account how the disease actually began spreading.

If the disease spread naturally then why wasn't the epicenter of the pandemic far to the south in Yunnan where the caves full of bats carrying coronaviruses were? Is it not possible that one of the three new coronaviruses discovered in Yunnan in 2017 and studied by researchers at the WIV, a virus that evolved in the wild, escaped the lab due to inexperienced personnel with sloppy procedures and created this pandemic? Does anyone have the genetic sequences of those three viruses the researchers mentioned in 2017? Even the Chinese are now saying the seafood market where the pandemic supposedly started is not the source. Wuhan is a long way from Yunnan. Not a case of deliberate Chinese malice but more a case of bad processes and inexperienced staff combined with some terrible decisions by political leaders early in the pandemic.

3 ( +5 / -2 )

If the disease spread naturally then why wasn't the epicenter of the pandemic far to the south in Yunnan where the caves full of bats carrying coronaviruses were? 

Because that is not the only place where the bats live? dozens and dozens of potential zoonosis are isolated every year from Yunnan, Hunan, Guanxi, etc (not to mention Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, etc.)

The main thing is that for science everything is to be considered possible, but not all is realistically so, specially when other explanations are hugely more likely.

Again, the viruses at 2017 are not the closest match to the SARS-CoV-2, they are only misrepresented as such by people trying to mislead others to believing the conspiracy, there are other viruses isolated years before (the RaTG13 strain) that are much closer. They exist in the wild without any kind of control or inventory kept by humans, being identified in one location do not mean they are only found there, or even that they are more prevalent in that location, bats migrate and move over long distances and colonies pass their pathogens continuously between them, it is not realistic to think you can trace back outbreaks to a single isolation site away, maybe after a few thousand more isolates are fully characterized we will be able to understand the whole situation, but right now it is not justified to discard one location just because there was not an isolation done there. Especially when the virus do not move directly from bats to humans but usually require another reservoir animal (as happened with MERS and SARS).

Is it not possible that one of the three new coronaviruses discovered in Yunnan in 2017 and studied by researchers at the WIV, a virus that evolved in the wild, escaped the lab due to inexperienced personnel with sloppy procedures and created this pandemic?

What sloppy procedures can make the virus escape not only from a facility but from a huge well populated city without causing any outbreaks? This theory depends completely on the city of Wuhan as the place of the first human cases, this has been known to be false for a year now. There is nothing new on that, read the comments, I already put a scientific reference putting the first human cases in October. Your confusion comes from thinking that "the first human cases identified" is the same as "the first human cases", these are two very different things.

If there are two explanations, and one depends on something astronomically unlikely to happen, while the other depends on something that has happened repeatedly before, why do you want to focus on the one that is realistically impossible? that is just bias. The same as wanting to believe that isolates from Yunnan must be the origin of the strain, Guandong is also a very long distance of Yunnan, but the first SARS virus was first isolated from patients there (and ths virus is also related to the bats isolates), does that mean that this virus was also a laboratory escape? obviously not, it just mean that just because you can find something where you are searching for it that doesn't mean you would not be able to find it in another place if you were searching as much.

-1 ( +3 / -4 )

Again this is a good story that people feel attracted to easily, but realistically impossible to be the correct, specially because it fails to account how the disease actually began spreading.

The initial spreaders were likely asymptomatic. Those who developed symptoms did so days after infection.

And who is so naive as to trust what the CCP tells us about how and where this pandemic started?

-1 ( +4 / -5 )

The initial spreaders were likely asymptomatic. Those who developed symptoms did so days after infection.

Obviously, that is why the natural origin would have been the only possible explanation.

A laboratory leak would still mean the fist patients would be in the city, causing secondary cases around the city in October, with at least one big outbreak happening there at the latest in November, and then weeks later the disease spread to rural areas, exactly the opposite of what happened in reality. Asymptomatic patients and days of incubation are parts of the considerations that make impossible that the first human cases would have happened before (much less weeks before) the Wuhan market outbreak.

And who is so naive as to trust what the CCP tells us about how and where this pandemic started?

Nobody has to believe anything that the CCP says, that is a completely irrelevant strawman. The scientific method is the one that says it is not realistically possible for the outbreak to have originated in a lab. That is why no scientific or medical organization have said the most likely explanation is a laboratory escape, because depending on a magical teleporting time-travelling virus makes it easy to discard.

-1 ( +4 / -5 )

This is good news.

1 ( +3 / -2 )

Pseudoscience: Yan's report

mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/cloaked-science-yan-reports

0 ( +2 / -2 )

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