Did scientists "re-wire" the Covid-19 virus to make it more transmissable? Did a lab accident create the pandemic? Author Nicholson Baker asked such questions as well as many others in the current issue of New York Magazine.* If you need a looooooooong read on a lazy Sunday, this article is it. Fix a drink, light up a Fuente Maduro, and read away. Mr. Baker opens:
A lab accident — a dropped flask, a needle prick, a mouse bite, an illegibly labeled bottle — is apolitical. Proposing that something unfortunate happened during a scientific experiment in Wuhan — where COVID-19 was first diagnosed and where there are three high-security virology labs, one of which held in its freezers the most comprehensive inventory of sampled bat viruses in the world — isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just a theory. It merits attention, I believe, alongside other reasoned attempts to explain the source of our current catastrophe....
Lab accidents have indeed resulted in casualties:
By 1960, hundreds of American scientists and technicians had been hospitalized, victims of the diseases they were trying to weaponize. Charles Armstrong, of the National Institutes of Health, one of the consulting founders of the American germ-warfare program, investigated Q fever three times, and all three times, scientists and staffers got sick. In the anthrax pilot plant at Camp Detrick, Maryland, in 1951, a microbiologist, attempting to perfect the “foaming process” of high-volume production, developed a fever and died. In 1964, veterinary worker Albert Nickel fell ill after being bitten by a lab animal...
In 1977, a worldwide epidemic of influenza A began in Russia and China; it was eventually traced to a sample of an American strain of flu preserved in a laboratory freezer since 1950. ...
Some experts think the cause was a lab accident:
consider the cautious words of Alina Chan, a scientist who works at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “There is a reasonable chance that what we are dealing with is the result of a lab accident,” Chan told me in July of last year. There was also, she added, a reasonable chance that the disease had evolved naturally — both were scientific possibilities. “I don’t know if we will ever find a smoking gun, especially if it was a lab accident. The stakes are so high now. It would be terrifying to be blamed for millions of cases of COVID-19 and possibly up to a million deaths by year end, if the pandemic continues to grow out of control. The Chinese government has also restricted their own scholars and scientists from looking into the origins of SARS-CoV-2. At this rate, the origin of SARS-CoV-2 may just be buried by the passage of time.”
I asked Jonathan A. King, a molecular biologist and biosafety advocate from MIT, whether he’d thought lab accident when he first heard about the epidemic. “Absolutely, absolutely,” King answered. Other scientists he knew were concerned as well. But scientists, he said, in general were cautious about speaking out. There were “very intense, very subtle pressures” on them not to push on issues of laboratory biohazards. Collecting lots of bat viruses, and passaging those viruses repeatedly through cell cultures, and making bat-human viral hybrids, King believes, “generates new threats and desperately needs to be reined in.”...
“All possibilities should be on the table, including a lab leak,” a scientist from the NIH, Philip Murphy — chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology — wrote me recently. Nikolai Petrovsky, a professor of endocrinology at Flinders University College of Medicine in Adelaide, Australia, said in an email, “There are indeed many unexplained features of this virus that are hard if not impossible to explain based on a completely natural origin.” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, wrote that he’d been concerned for some years about the Wuhan laboratory and about the work being done there to create “chimeric” (i.e., hybrid) SARS-related bat coronaviruses “with enhanced human infectivity.” Ebright said, “In this context, the news of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan ***screamed*** lab release.”...
However, more than a few scientists disputed the lab accident theory:
In The Lancet, in February, a powerful counterstatement appeared, signed by 27 scientists. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the statement said. “Scientists from multiple countries have published and analyzed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.”..
Vincent Racaniello, a professor at Columbia and a co-host of a podcast called This Week in Virology, said on February 9 that the idea of an accident in Wuhan was “complete bunk.” The coronavirus was 96 percent similar to a bat virus found in 2013, Racaniello said. “It’s not a man-made virus. It wasn’t released from a lab.”
Well, not so fast, my friend. A team of French researchers found some interesting features about Covid-19:
a group of French scientists from Aix-Marseille University posted a paper describing their investigation of a small insertion in the genome of the new SARS-2 virus. The virus’s spike protein contained a sequence of amino acids that formed what Etienne Decroly and colleagues called a “peculiar furin-like cleavage site” — a chemically sensitive region on the lobster claw of the spike protein that would react in the presence of an enzyme called furin, which is a type of protein found everywhere within the human body, but especially in the lungs. When the spike senses human furin, it shudders, chemically speaking, and the enzyme opens the protein, commencing the tiny morbid ballet whereby the virus burns a hole in a host cell’s outer membrane and finds its way inside.
The code for this particular molecular feature — not found in SARS or any SARS-like bat viruses, but present in a slightly different form in the more lethal MERS virus — is easy to remember because it’s a roar: “R-R-A-R.” The letter code stands for amino acids: arginine, arginine, alanine, and arginine. Its presence, so Decroly and his colleagues observed, may heighten the “pathogenicity” — that is, the god-awfulness — of a disease.
Such an insertion is not neccessarily due to artificial origin. Covid-19 contains three insertions are found in older, coronavirus strains. However, the insertion that produces the furin cleavage is not found in such strains. The author peeks at the Wuhan lab:
In January 2015, the brand-new BSL-4 lab in Wuhan, built by a French contractor, celebrated its opening, but full safety certification came slowly. According to State Department cables from 2018 leaked to the Washington Post, the new BSL-4 lab had some start-up problems, including “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.” The staff had gotten some training at a BSL-4 lab in Galveston, Texas, but they were doing potentially dangerous work with SARS-like viruses, the memo said, and they needed more help from the U.S.
In November or December of 2019, the novel coronavirus began to spread. Chinese scientists initially named it “Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus,” but soon that idea went away. The market, closed and decontaminated by Chinese officials on January 1, 2020, was an amplifying hub, not the source of the outbreak, according to several studies by Chinese scientists. Forty-five percent of the earliest SARS-2 patients had no link with the market.
Enter Dr. Fauci and the emerging disease theory. Simply put, scientists are scared to death of new diseases that devastate the human race. How do you plan for a theoretical virus that does not exist? Create it:
An emerging disease could be real and terrifying, as AIDS was — something that had just arrived on the medical scene and was confounding our efforts to combat it — or it could be a disease that hadn’t arrived, and might never arrive, but could be shown in a laboratory to be waiting in the wings, just a few mutations away from a human epidemic. It was real and unreal at the same time — a quality that was helpful when applying for research grants.
The leader of this movement is Dr. Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. Dr. Baric
described in this early paper how his lab was able to train a coronavirus, MHV, which causes hepatitis in mice, to jump species, so that it could reliably infect BHK (baby-hamster kidney) cell cultures. They did it using serial passaging: repeatedly dosing a mixed solution of mouse cells and hamster cells with mouse-hepatitis virus, while each time decreasing the number of mouse cells and upping the concentration of hamster cells. At first, predictably, the mouse-hepatitis virus couldn’t do much with the hamster cells, which were left almost free of infection, floating in their world of fetal-calf serum. But by the end of the experiment, after dozens of passages through cell cultures, the virus had mutated: It had mastered the trick of parasitizing an unfamiliar rodent. A scourge of mice was transformed into a scourge of hamsters. And there was more: “It is clear that MHV can rapidly alter its species specificity and infect rats and primates,”....
Then, in 2002, they announced something even more impressive: They’d found a way to create a full-length infectious clone of the entire mouse-hepatitis genome. Their “infectious construct” replicated itself just like the real thing, they wrote. Not only that, but they’d figured out how to perform their assembly seamlessly, without any signs of human handiwork. Nobody would know if the virus had been fabricated in a laboratory or grown in nature. Baric called this the “no-see’m method,” and he asserted that it had “broad and largely unappreciated molecular biology applications.”...
Such methods have been controversial:
In 2011, a tall, confident Dutch scientist, Ron Fouchier, using grant money from Fauci’s group at NIH, created a mutant form of highly pathogenic avian influenza, H5N1, and passaged it ten times through ferrets in order to prove that he could “force” (his word) this potentially fatal disease to infect mammals, including humans, “via aerosols or respiratory droplets.” Fouchier said his findings indicated that these avian influenza viruses, thus forced, “pose a risk of becoming pandemic in humans.”
This experiment was too much for some scientists: Why, out of a desire to prove that something extremely infectious could happen, would you make it happen? And why would the U.S. government feel compelled to pay for it to happen? Late in 2011, Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health got together with several other dismayed onlookers to ring the gong for caution. On January 8, 2012, the New York Times published a scorcher of an editorial, “An Engineered Doomsday.” “We cannot say there would be no benefits at all from studying the virus,” the Times said. “But the consequences, should the virus escape, are too devastating to risk.”
These gain-of-function experiments were an important part of the NIH’s approach to vaccine development, and Anthony Fauci was reluctant to stop funding them.
Dr. Fauci defended such efforts in an essay published in the Washington Post but there was resistance.
“Important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory,” they (Dr. Fauci and Dr. Gary Nabel) wrote; the work can “help delineate the principles of virus transmission between species.” The work was safe because the viruses were stored in a high-security lab, they believed, and the work was necessary because nature was always coming up with new threats. “Nature is the worst bioterrorist,” Fauci told a reporter. “We know that through history.”
Soon afterward, there followed some distressing screwups in secure federal laboratories involving live anthrax, live smallpox, and live avian influenza. These got attention in the science press. Then Lipsitch’s activists (calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group) sent around a strong statement on the perils of research with “Potential Pandemic Pathogens,” signed by more than a hundred scientists. The work might “trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control,” the signers said. Fauci reconsidered, and the White House in 2014 announced that there would be a “pause” in the funding of new influenza, SARS, and MERS gain-of-function research.
Ouch. Now back to Covid-19. Remember Covid-19?
In 2006, Baric, Yount, and two other scientists were granted a patent for their invisible method of fabricating a full-length infectious clone using the seamless, no-see’m method. But this time, it wasn’t a clone of the mouse-hepatitis virus — it was a clone of the entire deadly human SARS virus, the one that had emerged from Chinese bats, via civets, in 2002. The Baric Lab came to be known by some scientists as “the Wild Wild West.” In 2007, Baric said that we had entered “the golden age of coronavirus genetics.”
“I would be afraid to look in their freezers,” one virologist told me.
Baric and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the two top experts on the genetic interplay between bat and human coronaviruses, began collaborating in 2015.
What does it all mean? Covid-19 could have come from a lab or nature? We don't know and everything else is pure speculation.
There are, in fact, some helpful points of agreement between zoonoticists — those who believe in a natural origin of the SARS-2 virus — and those who believe that it probably came from a laboratory. They agree that bat virus RaTG13 (named for the Rinolophus affinus bat, from Tongguan, in 2013) is the closest match to the human virus that has yet been found, and that although the two viruses are very similar, the spike protein of the bat virus lacks the features the human spike protein possesses that enable it to work efficiently with human tissue....
Now back to Dr. Baric. This is about to get real interesting.
But in the end, Baric was allowed to proceed with his experiments, and the research papers that resulted, showered with money, became a sort of Anarchist’s Cookbook for the rest of the scientific world. In November 2015, Baric and colleagues published a collaboration paper with Shi Zhengli titled “A SARS-like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence.” Into a human SARS virus that they had adapted so that it would work in mice, Baric and Shi et al. inserted the spike protein of a bat virus, SHC014, discovered by Shi in southern China. They dabbed the mice nasally with virus and waited, looking for signs of sickness: “hunching, ruffled fur.” They also infected human airway cells with the mouse-adapted bat-spike-in-a-human-virus backbone. In both mice and human airway cells, the chimeric virus caused a “robust infection.”
This proved, Baric and Shi believed, that you did not need civets or other intermediate hosts in order for bats to cause an epidemic in humans and that therefore all the SARS-like viruses circulating in bat populations “may pose a future threat.” Peter Daszak, who had used Predict funds to pay Shi for her work on the paper, was impressed by this conclusion; the findings, he said, “move this virus from a candidate emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger.”...
Early in 2016, Baric and Shi again collaborated. Shi sent Baric a fresh bat virus spike protein, and Baric inserted it into the backbone of a human SARS virus and then used that infectious clone to attack human airway cells. “The virus readily and efficiently replicated in cultured human airway tissues, suggesting an ability to potentially jump directly to humans,” reported the UNC’s website. This time, they also used the bat-human hybrid virus to infect transgenic humanized mice that grew human ACE2 protein. The mice, young and old, lost weight and died, proving, again, that this particular bat virus was potentially “poised to emerge in human populations.” It was “an ongoing threat,” Baric wrote. But was it? Civets and camels that are exposed to a lot of bat-guano dust may be an ongoing threat and a manageable one. But the bats themselves just want to hang in their caves and not be bothered by frowning sightseers in spacesuits who want to poke Q-tips in their bottoms. This 2016 “poised for human emergence” paper was supported by eight different NIH grants. In 2015, Baric’s lab received $8.3 million from the NIH; in 2016, it received $10.5 million.
The Trump administration unleashed Dr. Fauci and gain-of-function research came roaring back into the research community.
Some media outlets are starting to ask whether a lab accident cause the pandemic. The WHO is initiating an investigation. However, the Chinese are not exactly cooperating. China won't allow WHO to talk to the Wuhan lab scientists nor visit the nearby wet market. The same China who locked up scientists and reporters who tried to warn the world about Covid-19.
What does Mr. Baker think happened?
Of the fragmentary bits of virus Shi retrieved from the mine shaft, one was SARS-like, and Shi sequenced it and called it BtCoV/4991 and published a paper about it. Several times — in 2016 and 2018 and 2019 — this most interesting sample, a portion of what we now know as RaTG13, was taken out of the freezers in Shi’s lab and worked on in undisclosed ways....
This is the period in the story that demands a very close investigation, when chimeric assemblages may have been created and serially passaged, using BtCoV/4991, a.k.a. RaTG13, and other bat viruses, perhaps along with forms of the human virus. It’s when Shi and Baric both published papers that were about what happened when you hot-swapped mutant spike proteins between bat viruses and human viruses.
The link, via the renamed sample BtCoV/4991, to the copper mine is of exceptional importance because of the one huge difference between the unnamed guano shovelers’ virus and the SARS-2 virus that is now ravaging, for example, California: transmissibility. Airborne human-to-human transmissibility — the kind of thing that gain-of-functioneers like Ron Fouchier and Ralph Baric were aiming at, in order to demonstrate what Baric called “lurking threats” — is COVID-19’s crucial distinguishing feature. If six men had gotten extremely sick with COVID-19 back in 2012 in southern China, doctors and nurses in the hospital where they lay dying would likely have gotten sick as well. There might have been hundreds or thousands of cases. Instead, only the shovelers themselves, who had breathed a heavy concentration of guano dust for days, got it.
The existence of bat virus RaTG13 is therefore not necessarily evidence of a natural bat origin. In fact, it seems to me to imply the opposite: New functional components may have been overlaid onto or inserted into the RaTG13 genome, new Tinkertoy intermolecular manipulations, especially to its spike protein, which have the effect of making it unprecedentedly infectious in human airways.
For more than 15 years, coronavirologists strove to prove that the threat of SARS was ever present and must be defended against, and they proved it by showing how they could doctor the viruses they stored in order to force them to jump species and go directly from bats to humans. More and more bat viruses came in from the field teams, and they were sequenced and synthesized and “rewired,” to use a term that Baric likes. In this international potluck supper of genetic cookery, hundreds of new variant diseases were invented and stored. And then one day, perhaps, somebody messed up. It’s at least a reasonable, “parsimonious” explanation of what might have happened....
Kingfish note: Interesting hypothesis and Mr. Baker asks more than a few valid questions. If a lab accident did indeed create the pandemic, it is a certainty China will never allow the truth to be discovered.
* Mr. Baker spent three months writing the essay. He interviewed 25 subjects. The magazine submitted his draft to several scientists for fact-checking and spend a month vetting the essay. Two molecular biologists proofed it as well.
31 comments:
tl;dr
you should post some flat earth bullshit next. ya know, for equal time.
Honestly i wonder where some of these tin hats get their news and then I check out what's on JJ and find this crazy shit. I don't live in MS anymore and just come here for the local news/politics.
Why do we entertain this bs? New York Magazine? Hoping people would confuse it for the New Yorker?
That long screed in an hypothesis, not a theory. In other words, speculation. I'll bet the guy is a QAnon believer.
This type of trash must fall under the “jackassery” portion of the blog.
UPDATE:
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It's very easy to shape into hats . . . and can receive messages from the Mothership better than the Dollar General tin foil.
Act fast!
Supplies are limited.
Y'all must know that it is a vast left-wing conspiracy initiated on a Warner Brothers back lot in Burbank.
And you think China loves you and is your friend? I’m rolling around laughing at you stupid asses. Given the chance they would kill every last one of us, but then who would sell them their food? They can’t even survive without us...so, thin the herd. More food for them and send more junk to Walmart and Autozone for you to buy. Turn your back on a Chinaman and see what he does.
You just know when you are on to something when the low information shills attack the messenger with such venom instead of making any attempt to refute the message.
Ostrich meet quicksand.
The first seven comments on this article were written by the same mainstream pablum fed zombie. They are totally incapable of independent thought. Absolutely have to be told what to believe, when to believe it, and how long they should believe it. What a maroon.
Thanks to all the trolls for their continued patronage.
Why is it unreasonable to ask if the virus came out of a lab when the first major outbreak took place in the same city as a major lab?
Covid-19...brought to you by Biden's masters in Communist China. No worries, Biden will soon be bowing and apologizing to the Commies, just like Nobama did.
Personally, I would like to see a very large number of footnotes, attributing every fact to a verifiable source, before swallowing this story whole. That said, it's a compelling story, and the Chinese government has certainly not gone out of its way to provide assurances to the rest of the world that something like this didn't actually happen.
FWIW, the author of this piece is an accomplished novelist (and also a writer of non-fiction). If he wanted to make something like this up, he apparently has the writing chops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholson_Baker
If this were written by a journalist, it would be incompetent and irresponsible to not give the scientists involved, particularly Dr. Fauci, an opportunity to comment as a part of the reporting.
Not to mention there have been several Chinese journalists and scientists that have been silenced for trying to get the word out that the Chinese government tried to coverup the outbreak and downplay the seriousness to WHO.
@ KF be every microbiologist and pathologist with an ounce of respect says that it didn't. You can say maybe they are liars, but then you're the one with an issue trusting science. Deny climate change and whatever else is inconvenient for you.
It’s not unreasonable to ask. The article demonstrates enough to show it’s possible and maybe probable. But the Chinese will never admit it or allow anyone to prove it. NEVER TRUST THE CHINESE (or the Russians for that matter). History matters, and always remember the Chinese take the long view. 245 years of American superiority is nothing to them.
A leading virologist from Hong Kong said it came from the lab. Any Chinese scientists who attempted to speak strangely disappeared. The ChinComs hid it for months and still have not let international inspectors come and study it.
Lots of common sense and circumstantial evidence says it came from the lab there. Some scientist say it has characteristics different from any other Corona viruses.
The real question is if there is any US citizens who was aware of this virus and cooperated with the Chinese to release it. A biological weapon that would cause enough death, panic, fear and economic damage to alter the results of an election. Perhaps the ChinComs were telling the truth when they said Americans brought it to Wuhan from America.
I went and looked up some of the scientists he mentioned. He wasn't misrepresenting what they've said.
I said up front it was an essay.
10:54: And that's where I disagree. I don't think it was an intentional delivery. I think it is more likely to be a case of a lab accident than biowar.
Now, are the Chinese astute enough to take advantage of a pandemic? Absolutely. However, if it was indeed biowar, then why didn't they do a better job of protecting their own people? Why the panicked response at the end of last year? Why where they scrambling to snap up every mask in other countries? Why is their vaccine only 50% effective? Why hit Italy first?
China will win. China has more millionaires the USA. China is unified. America is divided. Every new generation in the USA is less capable than their predecessors. Every battlefield that the USA has met China has seen no victory. From the armistice with North Korea to the humiliation in Vietnam.
China has even comprised the Legislative and Executive branches of incoming US government. We have just begun the second decade of the Chinese Century.
Where is Ralph Nader when we really need him?
You see KF, the trolls don't want you offering up any content, ANY, that runs counter to their narrative. Their true first preference would be to silence you. Short of that they want to intimidate and cast aspersions.
11:27 has hit the nail on the head. What I can’t understand is how you have communism and a strong economy like such as China. It’s kind of an oxymoron to be communist and have millionaires. But, they have been involved in our downfall no doubt...without firing the first shot. As far as them starting the bio war and allowing their people to die, the Chinese communists have no value of human life. There are so many of them they feel like they have an endless supply of lives to squander. We have come to a moment in time where I never thought we would be. It took 70 years to get here and our grandparents warned us of this. The Democratic Party and MANY in Washington have sold out to the Chinese. We lost our manufacturing. We lost our self worth. We lost our Lead in the world and younger generations feel like they no longer need to work and succeed.
The China folks were tinkering with an existing strain of virus, perhaps with good intentions, but got sloppy. It walked out of their lab and into the wild. China then covered it up and ramped up the panic, which the world bought into. So here we are. The good news is that the virus isn't very deadly, unless you are already at death's door.
We have been at war with China for 30 years, aided by their first bought president, Clinton. We, the man on the street, still don't realize or accept it yet either. The virus was just another shot fired, whether intentional or just by allowing the continued flights out of the country.
It's almost too late as it is. The 2nd is the only thing preventing a quick death. They'll continue to squeeze and slowly break us with this new, bought and paid for administration and the emboldened fucking morons on the left. Neighbors are already reporting neighbors for "extremism." Voices are already being silenced and access to speak is being stopped. Houses are being raided over internet posts as a "preventative measure."
We could still stop it, but we won't. We are still way too comfortable. Unfortunately, by the time enough of us realize it, it will be too late and the fight will be so much harder with way less chance of success.
And you true traitors on the left need to remember this....the guys that actually can and will do something, aren't the nuts you laugh at from pictures at Trump rallies. They aren't posting on message boards. They don't seek or draw attention. They are ex-military that see what is happening and don't like it. And there are millions upon millions of them.
I'm generally a guy that follows the science. What this person is proposing is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis of how the COVID-19 virus mutated into one that affected humans. It is certainly something that is worth exploring, particularly given China's secrecy and deflection around the virus origins.
However, that could be expressed in just a couple of paragraphs. His insistence on giving every citation showing there is viral research (common knowledge) seems to be pushing to convince people it actually happened that way instead of simply calling for finding the evidence. That's the problem with a lot of conspiracy theories, there's just enough truth in them to get people to believe in them instead of questioning them.
I have but one observation/question for most of the above commentary: does the phrase "narrative fallacy" mean anything to you?
That's when folks who have not a clue about the ever-changing world invent explanations they can understand. E.g., the bad Democrats, or, alternatively them bad Trumpsters, the liberal media, them bad Russians and them Chinamen and them Russians.
Wake up and smell the coffee. The real problem lies with morons who think they are in charge of their destiny. Generally overfed morons, with too much time on their hands.
Just one man's opinion. As for me, I don't know nothing about nothing.
5:32, Kinda like Plato's Allegory of the Cave, huh?
2,500 years later, people who study brains have actually identified the part that is responsible for filling in gaps in information to try to make sense of things we don't understand.
This post has aged veeeeeeeeeeeeeery well.
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