(22 Jun 2021, 12:00 )wolford57 Wrote: I don’t think there’s any question that Covid *could* have occurred naturally, but with China’s lack of transparency it is harder to exclude the possibility of lab escape (possibly from research partially funded by the US, just for fun). There is compelling circumstantial evidence that suggests artificial origins are more likely than normal here. Of course, natural spillover remains the most likely answer but maybe it’s 2/3 or 4/5 instead of 99/100 chance.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.100...21-01211-0
Another big issue I have is that press coverage of this topic has been enormously tainted by politics. I think Trump handled the pandemic foolishly in many ways and was not a fan at all, but the US press was also determined to get him—truth be damned in the process. There is a long list of things from the lab leak hypothesis to HCQ and Ivermectin that should have been entirely scientific questions where coverage was heavily slanted by politics.
It's almost certainly a zoonosis.
If you're unfamiliar with the word "zoonosis", you ought to fix that. We've been seeing a boatload of them over the last 50 years, including Ebola, Marburg, the carousel of avian influenzas that have tried to set up housekeeping in human hosts, West Nile, and last but not least, HIV-1.
That last was circulating in humans for nearly a century before anybody knew it. Yeah, that's right, human HIV-1 probably predates World War I.
Some good reading material from a first-rate science reporter on this issue is David Quammen's "Spillover". If you're willing to deal with a book by a professional virologist for the professional community, there's a lot a layman can glean from Edward Holmes' "The Evolution and Emergence of RNA Viruses". Softcopies of both these works can be found at libgen.
Personally, I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since the 2003 SARS epidemic guttered out. That, recall, was also a zoonosis.
Holmes and a very large group of contributors have recently published about as close to an authoritative account of its origins as anything we're likely to see:
The origins of SARS-CoV-2: A critical review, which is due to be published in
Cell on September 16. Holmes et. al. are not kind to the "laboratory origin" theories.
The "Conclusions" section has a couple of major takeaways.
The first one concerns zoonotic versus laboratory origin:
Quote:As for the vast majority of human viruses, the most parsimonious explanation for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is a zoonotic event. The documented epidemiological history of the virus is comparable to previous animal market-associated outbreaks of coronaviruses with a simple route for human exposure. The contact tracing of SARS-CoV-2 to markets in Wuhan exhibits striking similarities to the early spread of SARS-CoV to markets in Guangdong, where humans infected early in the epidemic lived near or worked in animal markets. Zoonotic spillover by definition selects for viruses able to infect humans. Although strong safeguards should be consistently employed to minimize the likelihood of laboratory accidents in virological research, those laboratory escapes documented to date have almost exclusively involved viruses brought into laboratories specifically because of their known human infectivity.
There is currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a laboratory origin.
Then they do an extended tapdance on the conjecture that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had anything to do with it.
Quote:There is no evidence that any early cases had any connection to the WIV, in contrast to the clear epidemiological links to animal markets in Wuhan, nor evidence that the WIV possessed or worked on a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 prior to the pandemic. The suspicion that SARS-CoV-2 might have a laboratory origin stems from the coincidence that it was first detected in a city that houses a major virological laboratory that studies coronaviruses. Wuhan is the largest city in central China with multiple animal markets and is a major hub for travel and commerce, well connected to other areas both within China and internationally. The link to Wuhan therefore more likely reflects the fact that pathogens often require heavily populated areas to become established (Pekar et al., 2021).
We contend that although the animal reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 has not been identified and the key species may not have been tested, in contrast to other scenarios there is substantial body of scientific evidence supporting a zoonotic origin. While the possibility of a laboratory accident cannot be entirely dismissed, and may be near impossible to falsify, this conduit for emergence is highly unlikely relative to the numerous and repeated human-animal contacts that occur routinely in the wildlife trade. Failure to comprehensively investigate the zoonotic origin through collaborative and carefully coordinated studies would leave the world vulnerable to future pandemics arising from the same human activities that have repeatedly put us on a collision course with novel viruses.
Lots more where that came from.
