Viral

#Consume

• Learned a lot. Clear that China covered up, whether or not there was actually a lab leak
• At the onset of the outbreak Covid was evolving much more slowly than one that had newly arrived from a different species. Implies it was already well-adapted to humans before Wuhan outbreak
• How Covid-19 started may be the biggest mystery of our lifetime (BOLD!) If we dont know how this pandemic began, we are not equipped to prevent the next one.
• Phages are viruses that kill bacteria.
• Bats carry a huge number of viruses; they live in larger groups than any other mammals except humans. Bats are mammals and their viruses are thus easier to jump humans or other mammal intermediates. Humans actually rarely exposed to bats (Mainly through guano trade) One in four mammal species is a bat. They are the only flying mammals; they travel over long distances.

• Furin cleavage site: helps the virus infect human cells. One of the reasons the virus can cause a pandemic. Where it got if from is controversial.
• Diseases that spread by direct contact will evolve to be low in virulence Diseases that spread by other means (insect bites/dirty water) will remain or can become highly virulent. Diseases that spread by sex will become good at hiding in the body. Attendant-bore illness – which are spread by care givers – will become highly virulent. (The sicker the patient the more visits from the nurse)
• On Jan 3, China ordered all labs to destroy all Covid-19 samples or transfer them to designated institutions.
• In 2003, the WHO was severely critical of the Chinese government for its lack of openness.
• The summary of the Hunnan market is that all the evidence is consistent with a sick person bringing COVID to the market where it became amplified in a crowded space. No pangolins or bats had been found to be traded in the markets between May 2017 and November 2019
• Pangolins (scaly ant eaters) are the most illegally trafficked mammal in the world.
• The first SARS virus escaped several times from labs and infected people.
• Experience shows that it is possible for there to be a lab leak without any reported incident and with no one noticing until there are cases in the hospitals.
• In January 2021 the US state department announced that it had evidence that Wuhan lab workers had been among the first cases of COVID in Nov 2019.
• The Chinese took a pathogen database offline. Sharing this information (publicly or privately with international scientists) would be a quick and effective way to refute theories about the virus escaping from a lab. The failure to share the database raises suspicion that there was something to hide.
• SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to be a bio-weapon. It would make no sense to release in the very city in which a world-renowned lab was performing similar research.
• Furin cleavage site: four reasons that this matters so much.
  • makes the virus more infectious
  • it is unique among all the sarbecoviruses
  • it is the sort of sequence in the exact location that scientists have been deliberately inserting into other coronaviruses.
  • the site is coded with the least common codon for coronaviruses (but one that is the most common for humans)
• The virus that is most similar to COVID was found inside a Mojiang mine shaft (which lead to a fatal respiratory outbreak among miners in 2012), RaTG13; It was brought to Wuhan in 2013. Every discovery if a slightly less similar virus strengthens the case of a lab leak. Ditto for the Furin cleavage site; every new discovery of a coronaviruse without the site and the human codons supports the lab-leak hypothesis.
• The Addendum: Published a year after the pandemic started. Confirmed that RaTG13 was discovered in a mine and was associated with the 2012 deaths. It also announced 8 other (which have turned out to be the next most closely related viruses) were also collected from the same mine shaft. No one mentioned these viruses them until then, despite international searches for viruses that were similar to COVID. Even in the short addendum to the RaTG13 paper that mentioned them, the authors didn't give their sequences or describe what they did with them; they failed to draw attention to them.
• When the genetic sequence of COVID was first published, by scientist associated with the Wuhan lab, the critical, never-before-seen Furin cleavage site was not mentioned. Despite the fact that the same authors discovered this site in other virus and made a big deal about how important it is to starting a pandemic. It is a suspicious omission.
• "Imagine how differently the world would have reacted if in Jan 2020, the WIV had announced that the closest relatives of the novel coronavirus came from a place where half of the infected people had died from a mysterious respiratory disease – and that the nine closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 had been under study a the WIV long before the Covid-19 outbreak."
• The fact the pandemic did not cause the release of the Moijan mine accident and the viruses collected from them is inexplicable. This was the whole point of this work.
• "That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence" - Hitch
• The WHO decided (after intense lobbying by the Chinese government) not to declare an international emergency; This was reversed a week later, with only the Chinese delegate voting against.
• The case for the lab leak:
  • Makes the assumption that the scientists at WIV were doing exactly what they said they were doing; collecting and studying bat viruses with a view to predict pandemics.
  • Lab leaks are rare, but common enough to be expected.
  • There is no direct evidence of a natural origin (unlike other pandemics were it has been rapidly established)
  • Evidence suggests that Covid was brought to the market by where a super spreading event occurred.
  • No explanation of why it was so adept at spreading among humans from day 0.
  • Why were/are the Chinese hiding data about early cases in Wuhan ?
  • Why Wuhan? 1000 km from were the relevant bats live. However scientists regularly made the long difficult trek to explicitly bring back viruses.
  • Wuhan had been in possession of the most closely related viruses prior to the pandemic. (And have hid this information)
  • The widespread search for a closer virus has been a failure
  • The ridiculous secrecy that surrounds the mine.
  • The WIV database of viruses was taken offline in early 2020 (b/c of hackers) (And has not shared privately with scientists)
  • They were performing experiments on the viruses, which ran the risk of creating viruses more adaptive to humans and capable of starting a pandemic
  • There were also secret projects at WIV
  • coincidence that the first sarbecovirus with a Furin cleavage site showed up in one of the few gin joints in all the world with the knowledge and experience of inserting them.
  • The failure to mention the Furin cleave site in the first COVID paper.

• US government intelligence agreed that the virus was not a bio-weapon, and thought that with "low confidence" it was not genetically engineered, but said that they could not rule out lab leak.
• the work on SARS-like coronaviruses had been conducted at Chinese BSL-2 and BSL-3 labs, not BSL-4.