Well said! It's maddening, there's no consistency to any of it!
We have the house GOP report saying the virus leaked in September and spread around the world by October. The house senate report saying October to November. In 2021, the WSJ reported with high confidence that 3 lab workers got sick in November, which doesn't even matter if the virus had already circled the world by October. Now the WSJ is reporting that the DoE also thinks it leaked, but probably in December, from a different lab. And, for the icing on the cake, the reporter for both those 2 WSJ articles was the same guy who announced Iraq has weapons of mass destruction:
The lab creation theories themselves are just as varied. Some say covid is a bat virus with a furin cleavage site added, or it’s a chimera combining bat and pangolin viruses, or it was created synthetically by stitching together multiple segments of RNA, or it was created by serial passaging in ferrets, or by serial passaging in transgenic mice, or by serial passaging in cells, or it has HIV genes inserted, or it was developed as a self-spreading vaccine against other coronaviruses, or that Moderna patented the virus 3 years before the pandemic. There’s also a theory that it was a natural virus harvested in a mineshaft back in 2012, in which case it doesn’t need gain of function research, because it was already 50% fatal. There’s even a theory that it was made in a US lab and released in China.
We've got this game where lab leak supporters complain how badly censored and silenced they are, despite the story being in every newspaper, podcast, and TV show. One newcomer to the lab leak field, Andrew Huff, says that the government tried so hard to stop him from publishing his book that they shined laser pointers into his windows and flew “mosquito sized drones” inside his house to spy on him.
While I’m not sure whether or not mosquito sized drones exist, I do wonder why the government can’t just use those to fly around the Wuhan lab and gather information, so that all the reports could agree on details.
"if anyone could stick to any one story and make it testable." Yes, there's no consistent theory, but that isn't too surprising given China's bad behavior. There are many possibilities remaining open. I even saw the pangolin-intermediate story floated by someone favoring the natural origin theory again.
There's no dispute however that for 2 years many in the virology community, public health officials like Fauci, Dem politicians, the press worked hard to suppress any discussion that a lab-involved origin was a viable hypothesis. Stating with certainty that the virus had a natural origin.
My own take: I don't know. & I agree that Andrew Huff 's story seems a little out there.
Not quite 2 years, maybe about a year and a half? I think the theory went mainstream mid 2021, sometime around Jon Stewart's comments and Nicholas Wade's editorial.
I'm not sure that the suppression was coordinated. And I don't think you can conclude that every idea that's suppressed is true, or suppressed because it's true. There are lots of false things we simply don't talk about because they're false. And there are ideas that were suppressed during the pandemic because we thought they were harmful (like people self medicating with ivermectin).
Anyways, I was a lab leak believer back in 2020, before it was cool. And I've since realized that I just didn't know shit about virology and the idea never made all that much sense.
I think it's maybe just an IQ test? Guys like Kristian Anderson or Bob Garry look corrupt because they quickly figured out reasons why it's probably not a lab leak. People like me eventually get a clue after reading enough scientific papers, seeing enough inconsistencies between different lab leak theories, and noticing that the lab leak theorists always just move the goalposts whenever something new gets discovered. And maybe half of the general public will never figure it out, because they won't be able to understand the details, or they just like the idea of blaming China/Fauci/evil scientists.
That article repeats so many tired arguments. The first SARS case was in Foshan, also a thousand miles from the Yunnan province caves that it was later tracked to.
Also, there are caves in Hubei province. There have been bats found in Hubei province with SARS family viruses. There have been farm animals (civets) found in Hubei with SARS family viruses.
While the WIV might have been the best lab in China, there are labs in other cities and we can expect that lab leak theories would have still formed around those labs if Covid had started there. If it started in Beijing, there would be a different lab leak theory. There were lab leak theories around HIV, Monkeypox, Omicron, Ebola, even lyme disease. That's just the kind of thing people always make up.
In this case, the details fit better than the average lab leak theory, but I'm pretty sure that's still just humans looking for coincidences.
As far as China being dishonest and hiding details, that's totally true. But it's true about the market and the lab and just about everything else.
Here's a new article I wrote yesterday, a summary of some of the lies they told about the market, and some of the market data we know they have but never shared:
Thank you so much for this discussion. Something that doesn't get asked often enough about various (usually right-leaning) conspiracy theories is "What is your actual theory?" They're almost invariably a blend of mutually-contradictory claims without any single coherent, logical, testable narrative.
I think the annoyance among Nate Silver and others is not that they're convinced the origin of Covid-19 was released from a lab, but that many in the media acted like the idea was preposterous, and inherently racist. I personally have no idea if Covid-19 was released from a lab, was designed by humans, or 100% natural. I do think knowing where it came from is worth understanding and investigating. I also don't trust the Chinese Communist Party to be honest or truthful about the origin of the virus (no more than the US federal government would be honest had THEY made the mistake).
I don’t trust the Chinese government either, and as I noted I somewhat famously caught the UN and its US government allies in a similar set of lies. But a government coverup of the disease’s origins could also explain the immediate closure and cleaning of the seafood market — both local and national authorities had reason to be sensitive about an examination of their food and livestock handling practices too. I’d also add (as others have) that a big part of the reason people associated lab leakism with racist conspiracism and Sinophobia was that its first major proponents were Sinophobic conspiracists like Tom Cotton, whose original theories haven’t aged well at all. The fact that disease-blaming does have a very long and very well documented history of racism and xenophobia is yet another reason to be extremely careful and specific before making accusations. They haven’t been.
I hear you that some people pushing a lab leak are racist. But clearly it’s a plausible explanation, even if we don’t have all the evidence. To me the point isn’t “we know this theory is right” but “those who are saying we shouldn’t investigate it or consider it were wrong before, are wrong now and we’re not making fair arguments three years ago.” I don’t think Nate Silver and Matt Yglesias are racists trying to pin this on China.
Unless you think the Department of Energy or the FBI are “contrarians duped by racists” I don’t agree. We don’t know where the virus came from and angrily denouncing anyone who wants to investigate why is dumb. To me the issue isn’t “we know this came from a lab!” It’s “we don’t know where this came from but we’re going to call anyone who proposes maybe it came from a lab a racist!” Sure maybe it didn’t, but we don’t know and stopping reporting that you don’t like is a bad way to get to the truth.
The FBI is famously racist, and the whole administration — much of the country at this point — is being whipped up into anti-Chinese hysteria. But my problem isn’t the attitude of the people claiming the lab leak. It’s that they don’t even have a coherent theory of what they’re alleging.
No reporting has been stopped. Conspiracy theorists need to stop whining and playing the victim. Who stopped them? They never shut up lol
People who don't automatically believe covid was a bioweapon (which includes the department of energy and the FBI) are not the only ones who want this investigated. Most of us are also not going to leap to conclusions without evidence, as a pretext to war with China. So the rest can drop their "I'm being silenced waaaaaa" victim complex martyr crap.
FOX News says what they want, true or not. That's not the model. Those who wait for evidence are right to do so.
Many social media organizations labeled any suggestion that Covid was the result of a lab leak as misinformation (which I think given the conclusions of both the FBI & the DOE) seems absurd. Many also viciously attacked people for proposing it as a possibility. Heck: Johnathan has been pretty aggressive in his dismissal of innocuous people like Yglesias and Nate Silver (who aren't proposing anything like what some far right conspiracists are proposing).
Not inherently but there are definitely racist versions of it. Remember “bat soup?” Which was, not for nothing, the first memetic the social media giants tried to crack down on.
A lab leak scenario, as Jonathan himself notes in this piece, does not require the virus to be bioengineered or enhanced, nor does it require the leak to be intentional. More disinformation.
I agree, @Benjamin and @Adam. Assigning the origin of SARS-COVID19 is a fool's game without any practical upshot. And even if it were a military weapon, why unleash it on your own people? Even if true, what is the US supposed to do about it. This "controversy" is an inconsequential sideshow to attract eyeballs and I hope this is the last time you write about it. You have so many other insights to offer.
I disagree in part — knowing where and how an epidemic started can be key to preventing the next one. And I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this only once before! But I don’t plan to make it a habit.
Well, to play Devil's advocate, if a troublesome community pushing for democratic reforms took to the streets for the whole world to see that would be problematic for an authoritarian regime and a crack down a la Tiananmen Square would be also. A less lethal but highly contagious virus might do the trick. Hong Kong is a lot quieter these days...
What a mess of confusion and posturing over the last three years.
And also, who cares where it came from. You can't change the past at this point, right? Only look to the future and the next, even worse pandemic that we are all distracted from trying to avoid! 😂
Just noting here, as below, that I do think finding the origins of epidemics is a valuable endeavor. John Snow and all that. You just have to be careful doing so.
This article seems written to reinforce a narrative that people called Lab Leakers are nuts. Most of these folks just objected to the certainty imposed that this virus had a natural origin and wanted better explanations before declaring case closed..
What got everybody riled up about the DOE report is that it's another data point that a lab-involved virus origin is a real possibility. What the author fails to talk about was that for 2 years, any talk of a lab leak was branded a kooky Trumpster conspiracy theory that had no merit whatsoever. This was the approach of most virologists, Dem politicians, & the press. Well that was bullshit. No mention in his article of how Fauci & Collins worked in secret to deep-six the LL hypothesis; no mention of Peter Daszak behind the scene coordination of his Lancet "we stand together" letter branding the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy. A better article would have been a discussion of all of the misdeeds of these pro-natural origin people & their motivations for acting as they did.
This certainty and suppression of any talk of a lab leak is what most reasonable people like Alina Chan & Matt Ridley objected to. Most do not state that a lab leak absolutely had to be the virus origin because at this time, there is no way to know. All data, including the often cited Worobey/Pekar papers claimed as dispositive, are consistent with either a lab-involved or a wet-market involved origin. Most just say they don't know & we need to investigate further. This is hard to do as China isn't sharing much and lies a lot.
"A better article would have been a discussion of all of the misdeeds of these pro-natural origin people & their motivations for acting as they did."
Agreed. This article is reflexive hyperbole, frankly on the border of disinformation. I expect better from its author.
Jonathan wrote:
// The irony is that the very DOE story Carlson was piggybacking off of fits better with the market being the first major site of contagion. That’s because, while the Huanan market was far from WIV, it was very close to the CCDC. So, points for the lab leakers, right?
Maybe, maybe not. While switching out the lab does solve the distance issue, it creates bigger problems for the lab leakers. That is because it would probably invalidate their most cherished idea: that the virus not only escaped from a lab, but was engineered in one. //
Instead of grappling with the best good faith questions about a lab leak, he decides to lump every grifter contrarian along with them. This is really cheap and does a disservice to his readers.
That said, that article already exists. It was written by Katherine Eban in 2021:
The problem is that all the leading lab leakers are grifters. As noted in the piece, there were good faith reasons to suspect the link between the lab(s) and the outbreak at the beginning, and reasons to worry about the coverup. Which is why it is so notable that the most definitive proof to date of a zoonotic origin came from a team led by one of the authors of the May 2021 Science letter pointing out the flaws in the WHO report and calling for a more robust investigation.
I think you mentioned this in your piece, but since you seem to be forgetting it here, a zoonotic origin and a lab leak are not mutually exclusive scenarios.
I don’t know the rest of her work, but her stuff on Covid has been absolutely awful. That ProPublica piece with the ridiculous translations that she worked on almost single-handedly destroyed the whole outlet’s reputation.
// We commissioned three Chinese language experts with impeccable credentials who were not involved in the original story to review Reid’s translation. They all agreed that his version was a plausible way to represent the passage, though two also said they would have translated the words to refer to the dangers of day-to-day lab operations. The third produced a translation that was in line with Reid’s. All agreed the passage was ambiguous. We have updated the story to underscore the complexity of interpreting that dispatch.
We have added additional context to the story. We have also identified two factual errors inconsequential to the premise of the story. They have been corrected.
It remains clear that in 2019, the WIV was addressing serious safety issues while scientists there faced pressure to perform. Risky coronavirus research took place in laboratories that lacked the maximum biocontainment safeguards, according to the interim report. //
Yes, that was called ass covering. Putting an editor’s note at the top was an admission that it had significant problems. I’d love to know who this third translator was and exactly how “in line” their translation was with Reids. But with the admission that they hadn’t fact-checked his work, and that even then a majority of the translators they contacted showed that the story’s entire premise was built on an obvious mistake, they should have killed the story.
Thanks. Hadn't seen first link. The leaving out context of full thought seems more egregious than overcertain arbitrary translation. Are you aware of any factual or framing errors in Eban's original report from 2021?
Among other things, we're arguing that the immediate within-platform censorship of banning any discussion of this topic from several major social media platforms was wildly inappropriate given that there are many credentialed virologists and other subject-matter experts who have repeatedly said that it's plausible that the virus escaped a lab. We know it's plausible because, among other things, experts have been ringing the alarm bell literally for decades that a major lab leak epidemic was coming if nothing was done to systematically improve lab security and containment procedures. Now that the lab leak idea has been politicized, people who are angrily denying the possibility that it could be a lab leak are in effect acting as useful idiots for those corporations and institutions who run virology labs, who don't want to pay to upgrade their facilities. Lab safety practices have become polarized along culture war lines and the left, bizarrely, is obstructing efforts to improve those practices by accident through their rabid dismissal of the lab leak.
I think the lab leak theory is only plausible. But it certainly IS plausible. And if it weren't for culture war, most people would be perfectly willing to say "either of these two major theories are plausible, we don't know which is correct right now, and we may never know." Why would that be threatening?
“The samples taken from the surfaces on the area where the animals were housed tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.” – How did these samples get to scientists if the market was sanitized by Chinese authorities? Seems magical that all of a sudden a mysterious cage with a sample was produced by Chinese authorities to give to scientists. And it just happens to promote the interests of the Chinese government.
For previous outbreaks in China, how fast do they normally discover the originating creature? Seems there would be extra motivation to find this creature immediately considering the impact on the world. Three years down the line, still no smoking gun? Is that unusual?
Is the Chinese government always this secretive and sensitive in the way they handle these types of investigations into viruses? Are they acting differently this time?
What about the unusual characteristics of this virus?
(unusual trait) – Both contagious and deadly from the onset
(unusual trait) – Respiratory virus that attacks other parts of the body
(unusual trait) – For a naturally emerging virus, it is highly contagious inside but not outside
COVID-19 has all these unusual characteristics combined. Seems unlikely.
In terms of incentives, it seems that the Chinese government, American scientists, American media, Fauci/Collins, definitely want this to be a naturally emerging virus. We will all look like fools if it ends up being a lab leak. And if you think about it, if the media and Fauci had alerted the public that there was a decent chance this was a lab leak in January or February 2020, Americans would have taken more aggressive and urgent action to lockdown sooner. This would have saved New York city from being the COVID hub of the world and would have probably saved tens of thousands of American lives, probably more. Who would be held responsible?
I’m open to this being a naturally emerging virus, but the circumstantial evidence and behavior of the key players involved stinks. We already know that Fauci was warned really early on from his own staff that this could be a lab leak and he wanted media notions of a lab leak theory to be squashed. We know that Lancet published an influential article of support for the naturally emerging theory without the author of the article acknowledging his clear conflicts of interest. We know the “fact checkers” of the media clowned the lab leak theory without any real evidence to support the debunking. In the early days of the pandemic, interested parties worked hard to denounce the lab leak theory without evidence. That’s not ethical science nor ethical media coverage. That’s propaganda. Straight from the Chinese government playbook.
There are answers to all those questions If you’d look for them. According to the Worobey paper, the samples were taken by the CCDC between Jan. 1 and 12, 2020. Is your theory that the CCDC faked the samples to implicate its lab next door? If they were going to fake a market source, wouldn’t they pick one that was -- I dunno -- not 500 meters from their offices? SARS-CoV-1 took four years to confirm the intermediary species and I believe 13 years to find the bat. So no, not unusual. Is the Chinese government always this secretive? Yes, famously. And none of those traits are unusual for a virus.
And again, even if the answers to any of those questions was yes, it still is not a theory of a lab leak. Which was the point of the piece you are responding to.
Fair enough on the CCDC, though I would think at that point the CCDC couldn't fake a market source anywhere else since it was already established that this market was where the outbreak either started or was amplified.
Thanks for the info on the time it takes to solve these things. I assumed with advances in these types of virus foresnic investigations, the average time would be shorter.
"And none of those traits are unusual for a virus" - how about all of those traits packed into one virus? I mean, the original SARS was pretty nasty, high mortality rate, and it went after old people as well. Apparently not very contagious though, I think it just flamed out. Which is why this virus being so darn dangerous out of the gate is suspicious,....no?
If the Worobey papers and at least a few others that I've seen around are so credible, then what is the theory behind the FBI saying that COVID most likely originated in a lab? (Wray said this a few days ago) Why is Fauci in 2021 changing his tune on lab leak saying that he is "not convinced" it is a naturally emerging virus? ...a position he should have just stated from the beginning. UK govt believes lab leak is most likely the starting point. So why are all these powerful agencies taking the risk of saying something so controversial about the virus at the risk of harming Chinese diplomacy?
"Three years down the line, still no smoking gun? Is that unusual?"
We lack any knowledge of the intermediate organism for almost all human zoonotic diseases. 50 years later, for instance, we still don't know what the intermediate organism for Ebola was, or even what organism is its reservoir.
Thanks for the information. Hadn't realized that there was still open cases from the past and hoping that modern technology would have aided more recent investigations into these mysteries.
Actually, as I see it, there IS a theory, but because China isn't Haiti, it's a lot harder for people to get data points for that theory, whether confirmatory or disconfirmatory. Jonathan also doesn't discuss the Senate committee minority report by Richard Burr as ranking member, reported by ProPublica last year and NOT refuted, despite the attacks on it. https://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2022/10/coronavirus-week-125-lab-leak-theory.html
China raised the alarm about Covid because China was the only country looking for it, having spent billions on a 70,000-node detection network after SARS, in 2013.
Western countries, you may recall, seemed to NOT be looking for it, and the US went so far as to ban testing for it until the Spring of 2020.
But we now know that Covid was endemic in Northern Europe and the United States by mid-2019.
The CDC even certified that the world's first Covid death occurred in Kansas, a week before the first such Chinese death.
CDC: Serologic testing of US. blood donations to identify SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies: 1-4% seropositive in December 2019: "These findings suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may have been introduced into the United States prior to 19 January 2020." https://tinyurl.com/bde86nfu
Well done. Finally, a sane article on the subject. Conspiracy theories get part of their plausibility by being many inconsistent theories in one story, and this is a prime example.
For every epidemic, there is a conspiracy origin story that develops, and it is always bullshit.
No, not Wuhan, Hong Kong. Just as a thought experiment it is plausible the virus was being adapted to be a less deadly but highly contagious agent to be released amongst the demonstrators but perhaps it escaped the lab before perfected Again, not saying I think this to be the case but answering your question as to why a country might use pathogens against its own population.
Is there evidence to eliminate an anthropogenic hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 was the result of a mutation during human-to-human transmission of a SARS-CoV-1-related virus (either a "cousin" or a descendant) that had continued to circulate (slowly but just enough to not completely die out) in the human population without causing significant illness?
I remember seeing a report (I cannot attest to the validity) that "signal" of a SARS-Cov-2-like virus being detected during sewage monitoring in early 2019 in Europe (Spain or Portugal if I remember correctly).
The 2019 Military World Games had the characteristics of an ideal super-spreader event - hundreds of uber-fit young adults, housed in close-quarters, who could become infected without becoming ill but still transmit the virus to others. The competitors in the games would likely have enjoyed the culture of Wuhan, including the wet market. The virus could have been brought to the games from outside Wuhan and then spread to other competitors and to more vulnerable individuals at the wet market (the anthropogenic explanation) by a competitor or picked up by a competitor from the wet market and then spread to other competitors (a zoonotic explanation). The competitors would then have brought the virus back to their countries-of-origin, which would explain nearly simultaneous outbreaks of unexplained pneumonia in late-2019 in multiple locations around the world.
I would very much appreciate your thoughts on this.
Blaming the Wuhan military games for the spread around the world doesn't fit the timing of when most countries had covid cases, that's too early.
That didn't stop the US government, of course! The house GOP report on covid says that covid leaked from the lab in September and then spread around the world with the October military games. And then other government sources blame 3 WIV employees getting sick in November, which wouldn't even matter, if the virus was all over the world by then.
Are you asking if SARS-CoV-1 transmitted widely among humans for 2 decades after the first epidemic and turned into SARS-CoV-2? No.
There was a single positive sewage sample in Spain, in March 2019. Likely a false positive, as all other sewage sampling done around the world was negative until at least late November 2019.
There have been multiple attempts to find antibodies in blood banks and saved samples around the world. A study in Wuhan found nothing before December 2019. That's the same in most of the other studies, with the exception of contested study in Italy that used a less accurate test that reported some positives in September 2019.
Have you forgotten about the first SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2003–2004.
It’s easy to forget about that one because it was contained. Globally, only 8,096 people got infected. It was a blip on most people’s radar.
If you were an epidemiologist, it was a screaming red alert. Because the Infection Mortality Rate (IMR) was 9.5%. Of the 8,096 who got infected, 774 died.
By comparison, the IMR for SARS-CoV-2, or Covid-19, is just over 1%.
So, when SARS-Cov-1 happened it got a lot of attention. No one in their right mind wants to see a pandemic like Covid, but with a 10% mortality rate. So, there was money put into vaccine research.
Not a lot. Tiny amounts. The amounts that fund small research projects, in the small number of places capable of doing vaccine research on a virus as dangerous as SARS-CoV-1. The small steady amounts that drive government funded research yet have great power. Because, over time, they add up and produce results.
About 80% of the research needed to produce the Covid vaccine had already been done when the pandemic hit.
They did this basic “not for profit” research so that we would be ready if another round of SARS showed up. Because the next version might be even more lethal.
We dodged a bullet the first time. They wanted to be sure that the next time a SARS virus came around, we were ready.
They were right to be concerned,
The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 at the origin of COVID-19 shares more than 70% genetic similarity with SARS-CoV-1 that was at the origin of 2003 SARS. Basically all of the research done on the first SARS virus was applicable to the new SARS virus.
SARS-CoV-2 vs. SARS-CoV-1 management: antibiotics and inflammasome modulators potential
P Rat 1 , E Olivier, M Dutot
Affiliations
PMID: 32744716 DOI: 10.26355/eurrev_202007_22293
Abstract
The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 at the origin of COVID-19 shares more than 70% genetic similarity with SARS-CoV-1 that was at the origin of 2003 SARS.
Infection-associated symptoms are very similar between SARS and COVID-19 diseases and are the same as community-acquired pneumonia symptoms. Antibiotics were empirically given to SARS patients in the early stages of the pathology whereas a different strategy has been decided in the management of COVID-19 pandemic with a worldwide shutdown.
The cytokine storm, both identified in SARS and COVID-19 severe cases, is generated through inflammasome activation, which opens therapeutic perspectives to counteract the pathogenic inflammation. As corticoids have numerous side effects that limit their use, focusing on anti-inflammasome agents could represent a safer alternative for patients with severe COVID-19.
Excellent explanation of this whole thing, and wonderful takedown of all the nonsense. This is the clearest article about this issue I've seen.
I try!
Well said! It's maddening, there's no consistency to any of it!
We have the house GOP report saying the virus leaked in September and spread around the world by October. The house senate report saying October to November. In 2021, the WSJ reported with high confidence that 3 lab workers got sick in November, which doesn't even matter if the virus had already circled the world by October. Now the WSJ is reporting that the DoE also thinks it leaked, but probably in December, from a different lab. And, for the icing on the cake, the reporter for both those 2 WSJ articles was the same guy who announced Iraq has weapons of mass destruction:
https://medium.com/@tgof137/new-lab-leak-article-was-written-by-the-same-journalist-that-said-iraq-has-weapons-of-mass-fb8e403979a4
The lab creation theories themselves are just as varied. Some say covid is a bat virus with a furin cleavage site added, or it’s a chimera combining bat and pangolin viruses, or it was created synthetically by stitching together multiple segments of RNA, or it was created by serial passaging in ferrets, or by serial passaging in transgenic mice, or by serial passaging in cells, or it has HIV genes inserted, or it was developed as a self-spreading vaccine against other coronaviruses, or that Moderna patented the virus 3 years before the pandemic. There’s also a theory that it was a natural virus harvested in a mineshaft back in 2012, in which case it doesn’t need gain of function research, because it was already 50% fatal. There’s even a theory that it was made in a US lab and released in China.
We've got this game where lab leak supporters complain how badly censored and silenced they are, despite the story being in every newspaper, podcast, and TV show. One newcomer to the lab leak field, Andrew Huff, says that the government tried so hard to stop him from publishing his book that they shined laser pointers into his windows and flew “mosquito sized drones” inside his house to spy on him.
While I’m not sure whether or not mosquito sized drones exist, I do wonder why the government can’t just use those to fly around the Wuhan lab and gather information, so that all the reports could agree on details.
Did the lab leak happen? I think probably not:
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-lab-leak-theory-f640ae1c3704
But I'd be happy to re-evaluate if anyone could stick to any one story and make it testable.
"if anyone could stick to any one story and make it testable." Yes, there's no consistent theory, but that isn't too surprising given China's bad behavior. There are many possibilities remaining open. I even saw the pangolin-intermediate story floated by someone favoring the natural origin theory again.
There's no dispute however that for 2 years many in the virology community, public health officials like Fauci, Dem politicians, the press worked hard to suppress any discussion that a lab-involved origin was a viable hypothesis. Stating with certainty that the virus had a natural origin.
My own take: I don't know. & I agree that Andrew Huff 's story seems a little out there.
Not quite 2 years, maybe about a year and a half? I think the theory went mainstream mid 2021, sometime around Jon Stewart's comments and Nicholas Wade's editorial.
I'm not sure that the suppression was coordinated. And I don't think you can conclude that every idea that's suppressed is true, or suppressed because it's true. There are lots of false things we simply don't talk about because they're false. And there are ideas that were suppressed during the pandemic because we thought they were harmful (like people self medicating with ivermectin).
Anyways, I was a lab leak believer back in 2020, before it was cool. And I've since realized that I just didn't know shit about virology and the idea never made all that much sense.
I think it's maybe just an IQ test? Guys like Kristian Anderson or Bob Garry look corrupt because they quickly figured out reasons why it's probably not a lab leak. People like me eventually get a clue after reading enough scientific papers, seeing enough inconsistencies between different lab leak theories, and noticing that the lab leak theorists always just move the goalposts whenever something new gets discovered. And maybe half of the general public will never figure it out, because they won't be able to understand the details, or they just like the idea of blaming China/Fauci/evil scientists.
A related article popped up today coincidently: https://inews.co.uk/opinion/covid-lab-leak-scandal-easily-politicians-scientists-dismissed-it-2189084
That article repeats so many tired arguments. The first SARS case was in Foshan, also a thousand miles from the Yunnan province caves that it was later tracked to.
Also, there are caves in Hubei province. There have been bats found in Hubei province with SARS family viruses. There have been farm animals (civets) found in Hubei with SARS family viruses.
While the WIV might have been the best lab in China, there are labs in other cities and we can expect that lab leak theories would have still formed around those labs if Covid had started there. If it started in Beijing, there would be a different lab leak theory. There were lab leak theories around HIV, Monkeypox, Omicron, Ebola, even lyme disease. That's just the kind of thing people always make up.
In this case, the details fit better than the average lab leak theory, but I'm pretty sure that's still just humans looking for coincidences.
As far as China being dishonest and hiding details, that's totally true. But it's true about the market and the lab and just about everything else.
Here's a new article I wrote yesterday, a summary of some of the lies they told about the market, and some of the market data we know they have but never shared:
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/china-is-lying-about-the-origin-of-covid-399ce83d0346
"Well said! It's maddening, there's no consistency to any of it!"
Yes, what a smoking gun, truly, that there's no consistency to a wide range of perspectives from a wide range of actors!
Your profile says "communication thinking", but you don't seem skilled at communicating or thinking.
What part of my comment was hard for you to understand?
Let’s take it down a notch here boys.
Thank you so much for this discussion. Something that doesn't get asked often enough about various (usually right-leaning) conspiracy theories is "What is your actual theory?" They're almost invariably a blend of mutually-contradictory claims without any single coherent, logical, testable narrative.
I think the annoyance among Nate Silver and others is not that they're convinced the origin of Covid-19 was released from a lab, but that many in the media acted like the idea was preposterous, and inherently racist. I personally have no idea if Covid-19 was released from a lab, was designed by humans, or 100% natural. I do think knowing where it came from is worth understanding and investigating. I also don't trust the Chinese Communist Party to be honest or truthful about the origin of the virus (no more than the US federal government would be honest had THEY made the mistake).
I don’t trust the Chinese government either, and as I noted I somewhat famously caught the UN and its US government allies in a similar set of lies. But a government coverup of the disease’s origins could also explain the immediate closure and cleaning of the seafood market — both local and national authorities had reason to be sensitive about an examination of their food and livestock handling practices too. I’d also add (as others have) that a big part of the reason people associated lab leakism with racist conspiracism and Sinophobia was that its first major proponents were Sinophobic conspiracists like Tom Cotton, whose original theories haven’t aged well at all. The fact that disease-blaming does have a very long and very well documented history of racism and xenophobia is yet another reason to be extremely careful and specific before making accusations. They haven’t been.
I hear you that some people pushing a lab leak are racist. But clearly it’s a plausible explanation, even if we don’t have all the evidence. To me the point isn’t “we know this theory is right” but “those who are saying we shouldn’t investigate it or consider it were wrong before, are wrong now and we’re not making fair arguments three years ago.” I don’t think Nate Silver and Matt Yglesias are racists trying to pin this on China.
They're not racists pinning it on China, they're contrarians trying to seem like they're smarter than everyone else.
In that effort, they were duped by racists trying to pin it on China.
Unless you think the Department of Energy or the FBI are “contrarians duped by racists” I don’t agree. We don’t know where the virus came from and angrily denouncing anyone who wants to investigate why is dumb. To me the issue isn’t “we know this came from a lab!” It’s “we don’t know where this came from but we’re going to call anyone who proposes maybe it came from a lab a racist!” Sure maybe it didn’t, but we don’t know and stopping reporting that you don’t like is a bad way to get to the truth.
The FBI is famously racist, and the whole administration — much of the country at this point — is being whipped up into anti-Chinese hysteria. But my problem isn’t the attitude of the people claiming the lab leak. It’s that they don’t even have a coherent theory of what they’re alleging.
And I would suggest part of why we lack a theory is we lack the evidence.
No reporting has been stopped. Conspiracy theorists need to stop whining and playing the victim. Who stopped them? They never shut up lol
People who don't automatically believe covid was a bioweapon (which includes the department of energy and the FBI) are not the only ones who want this investigated. Most of us are also not going to leap to conclusions without evidence, as a pretext to war with China. So the rest can drop their "I'm being silenced waaaaaa" victim complex martyr crap.
FOX News says what they want, true or not. That's not the model. Those who wait for evidence are right to do so.
Many social media organizations labeled any suggestion that Covid was the result of a lab leak as misinformation (which I think given the conclusions of both the FBI & the DOE) seems absurd. Many also viciously attacked people for proposing it as a possibility. Heck: Johnathan has been pretty aggressive in his dismissal of innocuous people like Yglesias and Nate Silver (who aren't proposing anything like what some far right conspiracists are proposing).
So I don't think this is true at all.
Re your 2010 UN/Haiti story - care to name those US officials who lied?
Re the 2010 UN/Haiti story: care to name those US govt allies? I’d like to know.
eg https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/03/when-the-u-n-sowed-cholera-in-haiti-how-fast-did-americans-know.html
Wouldn't you say that blaming the origin of the disease on the wet market vs an accidental lab leak would be the more racist theory?
Not inherently but there are definitely racist versions of it. Remember “bat soup?” Which was, not for nothing, the first memetic the social media giants tried to crack down on.
Yes. But conspiracy theorists are paranoid. So they always hear imaginary voices calling them racist.
See my comment for details but SARS-Cov-2 almost certainly evolved out of SARS-Cov-1 from 2003. Remember that outbreak?
SARS-1 was contained, it only infected 8096 people. But it killed 774, giving it a 9.5% infection mortality rate. Covid (SARS-2) has an IMR around 1%.
SARS-1 and SARS-2 are over 70% genetically the same.
SARS-1 was zoonotic, it's almost 100% certain SARS-2 is as well. People who obsess over a "lab leak" WANT IT TO BE A LAB LEAK.
A lab leak scenario, as Jonathan himself notes in this piece, does not require the virus to be bioengineered or enhanced, nor does it require the leak to be intentional. More disinformation.
I agree, @Benjamin and @Adam. Assigning the origin of SARS-COVID19 is a fool's game without any practical upshot. And even if it were a military weapon, why unleash it on your own people? Even if true, what is the US supposed to do about it. This "controversy" is an inconsequential sideshow to attract eyeballs and I hope this is the last time you write about it. You have so many other insights to offer.
I disagree in part — knowing where and how an epidemic started can be key to preventing the next one. And I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this only once before! But I don’t plan to make it a habit.
Well, to play Devil's advocate, if a troublesome community pushing for democratic reforms took to the streets for the whole world to see that would be problematic for an authoritarian regime and a crack down a la Tiananmen Square would be also. A less lethal but highly contagious virus might do the trick. Hong Kong is a lot quieter these days...
Are you saying that Wuhan was a hotbed of insurrectionists that were met with germ warfare?
What a mess of confusion and posturing over the last three years.
And also, who cares where it came from. You can't change the past at this point, right? Only look to the future and the next, even worse pandemic that we are all distracted from trying to avoid! 😂
Just noting here, as below, that I do think finding the origins of epidemics is a valuable endeavor. John Snow and all that. You just have to be careful doing so.
Who cares where it came from? Really?
This article seems written to reinforce a narrative that people called Lab Leakers are nuts. Most of these folks just objected to the certainty imposed that this virus had a natural origin and wanted better explanations before declaring case closed..
What got everybody riled up about the DOE report is that it's another data point that a lab-involved virus origin is a real possibility. What the author fails to talk about was that for 2 years, any talk of a lab leak was branded a kooky Trumpster conspiracy theory that had no merit whatsoever. This was the approach of most virologists, Dem politicians, & the press. Well that was bullshit. No mention in his article of how Fauci & Collins worked in secret to deep-six the LL hypothesis; no mention of Peter Daszak behind the scene coordination of his Lancet "we stand together" letter branding the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy. A better article would have been a discussion of all of the misdeeds of these pro-natural origin people & their motivations for acting as they did.
This certainty and suppression of any talk of a lab leak is what most reasonable people like Alina Chan & Matt Ridley objected to. Most do not state that a lab leak absolutely had to be the virus origin because at this time, there is no way to know. All data, including the often cited Worobey/Pekar papers claimed as dispositive, are consistent with either a lab-involved or a wet-market involved origin. Most just say they don't know & we need to investigate further. This is hard to do as China isn't sharing much and lies a lot.
"A better article would have been a discussion of all of the misdeeds of these pro-natural origin people & their motivations for acting as they did."
Agreed. This article is reflexive hyperbole, frankly on the border of disinformation. I expect better from its author.
Jonathan wrote:
// The irony is that the very DOE story Carlson was piggybacking off of fits better with the market being the first major site of contagion. That’s because, while the Huanan market was far from WIV, it was very close to the CCDC. So, points for the lab leakers, right?
Maybe, maybe not. While switching out the lab does solve the distance issue, it creates bigger problems for the lab leakers. That is because it would probably invalidate their most cherished idea: that the virus not only escaped from a lab, but was engineered in one. //
Instead of grappling with the best good faith questions about a lab leak, he decides to lump every grifter contrarian along with them. This is really cheap and does a disservice to his readers.
That said, that article already exists. It was written by Katherine Eban in 2021:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
With a significant follow-up article this past October:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/10/covid-origins-investigation-wuhan-lab
Her update vis-a-vis the latest news here:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/covid-19-origins-lab-leak
See also Jimmy Tobias's recent reporting in The Intercept here:
https://theintercept.com/2023/01/19/covid-origin-nih-emails/
The problem is that all the leading lab leakers are grifters. As noted in the piece, there were good faith reasons to suspect the link between the lab(s) and the outbreak at the beginning, and reasons to worry about the coverup. Which is why it is so notable that the most definitive proof to date of a zoonotic origin came from a team led by one of the authors of the May 2021 Science letter pointing out the flaws in the WHO report and calling for a more robust investigation.
I think you mentioned this in your piece, but since you seem to be forgetting it here, a zoonotic origin and a lab leak are not mutually exclusive scenarios.
Agree it's a horrible article and I too am a fan of Katherine Eban's work.
I don’t know the rest of her work, but her stuff on Covid has been absolutely awful. That ProPublica piece with the ridiculous translations that she worked on almost single-handedly destroyed the whole outlet’s reputation.
These "ridiculous translations"?
// We commissioned three Chinese language experts with impeccable credentials who were not involved in the original story to review Reid’s translation. They all agreed that his version was a plausible way to represent the passage, though two also said they would have translated the words to refer to the dangers of day-to-day lab operations. The third produced a translation that was in line with Reid’s. All agreed the passage was ambiguous. We have updated the story to underscore the complexity of interpreting that dispatch.
We have added additional context to the story. We have also identified two factual errors inconsequential to the premise of the story. They have been corrected.
It remains clear that in 2019, the WIV was addressing serious safety issues while scientists there faced pressure to perform. Risky coronavirus research took place in laboratories that lacked the maximum biocontainment safeguards, according to the interim report. //
https://www.propublica.org/article/editors-note-a-review-of-criticisms-of-a-propublica-vanity-fair-story-on-a-covid-origins-report
Yes, that was called ass covering. Putting an editor’s note at the top was an admission that it had significant problems. I’d love to know who this third translator was and exactly how “in line” their translation was with Reids. But with the admission that they hadn’t fact-checked his work, and that even then a majority of the translators they contacted showed that the story’s entire premise was built on an obvious mistake, they should have killed the story.
More here: https://fallows.substack.com/p/on-that-propublica-chinese-lab-leak
https://www.semafor.com/article/10/31/2022/pro-publica-scrambles-to-check-translation-in-covid-origin-story
Thanks. Hadn't seen first link. The leaving out context of full thought seems more egregious than overcertain arbitrary translation. Are you aware of any factual or framing errors in Eban's original report from 2021?
What do you think is "horrible" about it?
Another good article popped up today: https://inews.co.uk/opinion/covid-lab-leak-scandal-easily-politicians-scientists-dismissed-it-2189084
"OK, so then, what are we even arguing here?"
Among other things, we're arguing that the immediate within-platform censorship of banning any discussion of this topic from several major social media platforms was wildly inappropriate given that there are many credentialed virologists and other subject-matter experts who have repeatedly said that it's plausible that the virus escaped a lab. We know it's plausible because, among other things, experts have been ringing the alarm bell literally for decades that a major lab leak epidemic was coming if nothing was done to systematically improve lab security and containment procedures. Now that the lab leak idea has been politicized, people who are angrily denying the possibility that it could be a lab leak are in effect acting as useful idiots for those corporations and institutions who run virology labs, who don't want to pay to upgrade their facilities. Lab safety practices have become polarized along culture war lines and the left, bizarrely, is obstructing efforts to improve those practices by accident through their rabid dismissal of the lab leak.
I think the lab leak theory is only plausible. But it certainly IS plausible. And if it weren't for culture war, most people would be perfectly willing to say "either of these two major theories are plausible, we don't know which is correct right now, and we may never know." Why would that be threatening?
I went ahead and responded to this as a post: https://theracket.news/p/arguing-virology-with-the-mods
My Friday posts are paid, so I’ll forward it to you.
“The samples taken from the surfaces on the area where the animals were housed tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.” – How did these samples get to scientists if the market was sanitized by Chinese authorities? Seems magical that all of a sudden a mysterious cage with a sample was produced by Chinese authorities to give to scientists. And it just happens to promote the interests of the Chinese government.
For previous outbreaks in China, how fast do they normally discover the originating creature? Seems there would be extra motivation to find this creature immediately considering the impact on the world. Three years down the line, still no smoking gun? Is that unusual?
Is the Chinese government always this secretive and sensitive in the way they handle these types of investigations into viruses? Are they acting differently this time?
What about the unusual characteristics of this virus?
(unusual trait) – Both contagious and deadly from the onset
(unusual trait) – Respiratory virus that attacks other parts of the body
(unusual trait) – For a naturally emerging virus, it is highly contagious inside but not outside
COVID-19 has all these unusual characteristics combined. Seems unlikely.
In terms of incentives, it seems that the Chinese government, American scientists, American media, Fauci/Collins, definitely want this to be a naturally emerging virus. We will all look like fools if it ends up being a lab leak. And if you think about it, if the media and Fauci had alerted the public that there was a decent chance this was a lab leak in January or February 2020, Americans would have taken more aggressive and urgent action to lockdown sooner. This would have saved New York city from being the COVID hub of the world and would have probably saved tens of thousands of American lives, probably more. Who would be held responsible?
I’m open to this being a naturally emerging virus, but the circumstantial evidence and behavior of the key players involved stinks. We already know that Fauci was warned really early on from his own staff that this could be a lab leak and he wanted media notions of a lab leak theory to be squashed. We know that Lancet published an influential article of support for the naturally emerging theory without the author of the article acknowledging his clear conflicts of interest. We know the “fact checkers” of the media clowned the lab leak theory without any real evidence to support the debunking. In the early days of the pandemic, interested parties worked hard to denounce the lab leak theory without evidence. That’s not ethical science nor ethical media coverage. That’s propaganda. Straight from the Chinese government playbook.
There are answers to all those questions If you’d look for them. According to the Worobey paper, the samples were taken by the CCDC between Jan. 1 and 12, 2020. Is your theory that the CCDC faked the samples to implicate its lab next door? If they were going to fake a market source, wouldn’t they pick one that was -- I dunno -- not 500 meters from their offices? SARS-CoV-1 took four years to confirm the intermediary species and I believe 13 years to find the bat. So no, not unusual. Is the Chinese government always this secretive? Yes, famously. And none of those traits are unusual for a virus.
And again, even if the answers to any of those questions was yes, it still is not a theory of a lab leak. Which was the point of the piece you are responding to.
Fair enough on the CCDC, though I would think at that point the CCDC couldn't fake a market source anywhere else since it was already established that this market was where the outbreak either started or was amplified.
Thanks for the info on the time it takes to solve these things. I assumed with advances in these types of virus foresnic investigations, the average time would be shorter.
"And none of those traits are unusual for a virus" - how about all of those traits packed into one virus? I mean, the original SARS was pretty nasty, high mortality rate, and it went after old people as well. Apparently not very contagious though, I think it just flamed out. Which is why this virus being so darn dangerous out of the gate is suspicious,....no?
If the Worobey papers and at least a few others that I've seen around are so credible, then what is the theory behind the FBI saying that COVID most likely originated in a lab? (Wray said this a few days ago) Why is Fauci in 2021 changing his tune on lab leak saying that he is "not convinced" it is a naturally emerging virus? ...a position he should have just stated from the beginning. UK govt believes lab leak is most likely the starting point. So why are all these powerful agencies taking the risk of saying something so controversial about the virus at the risk of harming Chinese diplomacy?
"Three years down the line, still no smoking gun? Is that unusual?"
We lack any knowledge of the intermediate organism for almost all human zoonotic diseases. 50 years later, for instance, we still don't know what the intermediate organism for Ebola was, or even what organism is its reservoir.
Thanks for the information. Hadn't realized that there was still open cases from the past and hoping that modern technology would have aided more recent investigations into these mysteries.
Actually, as I see it, there IS a theory, but because China isn't Haiti, it's a lot harder for people to get data points for that theory, whether confirmatory or disconfirmatory. Jonathan also doesn't discuss the Senate committee minority report by Richard Burr as ranking member, reported by ProPublica last year and NOT refuted, despite the attacks on it. https://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2022/10/coronavirus-week-125-lab-leak-theory.html
The PP/VF piece was based on a silly mistranslation, and would be completely obviated by the apparent DOE hypothesis.
It was a US-based lab leak.
Great work! Many thanks.
China raised the alarm about Covid because China was the only country looking for it, having spent billions on a 70,000-node detection network after SARS, in 2013.
Western countries, you may recall, seemed to NOT be looking for it, and the US went so far as to ban testing for it until the Spring of 2020.
But we now know that Covid was endemic in Northern Europe and the United States by mid-2019.
The CDC even certified that the world's first Covid death occurred in Kansas, a week before the first such Chinese death.
That seems … wrong. When did the CDC certify that?
World's first Covid death?
CDC: US Jan. 9, 2020. (First Chinese death Jan 11). https://tinyurl.com/bddh5vbz
Covid endemic in USA?
CDC: Serologic testing of US. blood donations to identify SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies: 1-4% seropositive in December 2019: "These findings suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may have been introduced into the United States prior to 19 January 2020." https://tinyurl.com/bde86nfu
CHART: https://i.imgur.com/CxxGRzE.jpg
Well done. Finally, a sane article on the subject. Conspiracy theories get part of their plausibility by being many inconsistent theories in one story, and this is a prime example.
For every epidemic, there is a conspiracy origin story that develops, and it is always bullshit.
No, not Wuhan, Hong Kong. Just as a thought experiment it is plausible the virus was being adapted to be a less deadly but highly contagious agent to be released amongst the demonstrators but perhaps it escaped the lab before perfected Again, not saying I think this to be the case but answering your question as to why a country might use pathogens against its own population.
Is there evidence to eliminate an anthropogenic hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 was the result of a mutation during human-to-human transmission of a SARS-CoV-1-related virus (either a "cousin" or a descendant) that had continued to circulate (slowly but just enough to not completely die out) in the human population without causing significant illness?
I remember seeing a report (I cannot attest to the validity) that "signal" of a SARS-Cov-2-like virus being detected during sewage monitoring in early 2019 in Europe (Spain or Portugal if I remember correctly).
The 2019 Military World Games had the characteristics of an ideal super-spreader event - hundreds of uber-fit young adults, housed in close-quarters, who could become infected without becoming ill but still transmit the virus to others. The competitors in the games would likely have enjoyed the culture of Wuhan, including the wet market. The virus could have been brought to the games from outside Wuhan and then spread to other competitors and to more vulnerable individuals at the wet market (the anthropogenic explanation) by a competitor or picked up by a competitor from the wet market and then spread to other competitors (a zoonotic explanation). The competitors would then have brought the virus back to their countries-of-origin, which would explain nearly simultaneous outbreaks of unexplained pneumonia in late-2019 in multiple locations around the world.
I would very much appreciate your thoughts on this.
Blaming the Wuhan military games for the spread around the world doesn't fit the timing of when most countries had covid cases, that's too early.
That didn't stop the US government, of course! The house GOP report on covid says that covid leaked from the lab in September and then spread around the world with the October military games. And then other government sources blame 3 WIV employees getting sick in November, which wouldn't even matter, if the virus was all over the world by then.
Are you asking if SARS-CoV-1 transmitted widely among humans for 2 decades after the first epidemic and turned into SARS-CoV-2? No.
There was a single positive sewage sample in Spain, in March 2019. Likely a false positive, as all other sewage sampling done around the world was negative until at least late November 2019.
There have been multiple attempts to find antibodies in blood banks and saved samples around the world. A study in Wuhan found nothing before December 2019. That's the same in most of the other studies, with the exception of contested study in Italy that used a less accurate test that reported some positives in September 2019.
I can link the studies if you want more info.
Have you forgotten about the first SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2003–2004.
It’s easy to forget about that one because it was contained. Globally, only 8,096 people got infected. It was a blip on most people’s radar.
If you were an epidemiologist, it was a screaming red alert. Because the Infection Mortality Rate (IMR) was 9.5%. Of the 8,096 who got infected, 774 died.
By comparison, the IMR for SARS-CoV-2, or Covid-19, is just over 1%.
So, when SARS-Cov-1 happened it got a lot of attention. No one in their right mind wants to see a pandemic like Covid, but with a 10% mortality rate. So, there was money put into vaccine research.
Not a lot. Tiny amounts. The amounts that fund small research projects, in the small number of places capable of doing vaccine research on a virus as dangerous as SARS-CoV-1. The small steady amounts that drive government funded research yet have great power. Because, over time, they add up and produce results.
About 80% of the research needed to produce the Covid vaccine had already been done when the pandemic hit.
They did this basic “not for profit” research so that we would be ready if another round of SARS showed up. Because the next version might be even more lethal.
We dodged a bullet the first time. They wanted to be sure that the next time a SARS virus came around, we were ready.
They were right to be concerned,
The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 at the origin of COVID-19 shares more than 70% genetic similarity with SARS-CoV-1 that was at the origin of 2003 SARS. Basically all of the research done on the first SARS virus was applicable to the new SARS virus.
SARS-CoV-2 vs. SARS-CoV-1 management: antibiotics and inflammasome modulators potential
P Rat 1 , E Olivier, M Dutot
Affiliations
PMID: 32744716 DOI: 10.26355/eurrev_202007_22293
Abstract
The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 at the origin of COVID-19 shares more than 70% genetic similarity with SARS-CoV-1 that was at the origin of 2003 SARS.
Infection-associated symptoms are very similar between SARS and COVID-19 diseases and are the same as community-acquired pneumonia symptoms. Antibiotics were empirically given to SARS patients in the early stages of the pathology whereas a different strategy has been decided in the management of COVID-19 pandemic with a worldwide shutdown.
The cytokine storm, both identified in SARS and COVID-19 severe cases, is generated through inflammasome activation, which opens therapeutic perspectives to counteract the pathogenic inflammation. As corticoids have numerous side effects that limit their use, focusing on anti-inflammasome agents could represent a safer alternative for patients with severe COVID-19.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32744716/
If you were wondering how “Project Warp Speed” literally produced a miracle vaccine for Covid in less than one year. That’s how.