The US government stated there was evidence that several workers at the WIV had become ill enough to require hospitalization in December [State21]. Shi said she was unaware of any sick workers at that time which would be untrue if the US government source is correct. She also said that serum samples were taken from workers around March and all proved negative for any SARS virus, but no verifiable details have been released.
That grant was declined due to Gain of Function concerns. The WHO report described searches of hospital records and other sources and determined the beginning of the outbreak to be early December [WHO20]. This contact tracing has been very effective in containing outbreaks in Australia and elsewhere, and should be able to push the source back to a small number of initial cases.
Director of WIV biosafety, Yuan Zhiming, said that zero staff tested positive for antibodies, which would actually be surprising given that the virus was so prevalent in Wuhan [Global21]. One explanation for these observations is that the Chinese government already knew the source, namely the WIV.
Not proof, but yet more evidence. The Chinese government has reacted angrily to any suggestion of a laboratory leak and has obstructed any investigation. They have prevented laboratory workers from being interviewed, or their laboratory notes being reviewed by external parties.
The Chinese government has conducted their own investigation which includes the sampling of some 80, animals. They would certainly refute the lab leak hypothesis if they could.
Strong words indeed. However, this article is based on an unreviewed preprint on a discussion board. The difference in the lineages is based on just two nucleotides C and T, which could have easily evolved naturally after a lab leak in October or November. Indeed, [WHO21] estimates that the most recent common ancestor was 11 December , well after the beginning of the outbreak in late November.
The intermediate virus may then have had many generations in cell cultures and humanized mice which would have introduced random changes throughout the virus. Such changes are known to happen at a faster rate than in natural evolution. But the actual source may actually be some other closely related virus known only to the WIV.
RaTG13 is just a series of letters in a text file that was published after the outbreak. It might not even be the exact genome of any virus and it has not been independently verified. There are two of them, so that is 0. It is only evidence, not proof. The Furin cleavage site was also inserted out of frame, meaning that it was inserted in the middle of an existing three nucleotide codon.
That excludes certain natural processes, but could have been manipulated. Regardless, it evidently works very well. What is certain is that having both the furin site and the effective spike protein is very unusual. It is now relatively easy to engineer a virus to produce any desired protein, but it is extremely difficult to engineer a protein that will have a particular function.
In particular, to design a spike protein from first principals that fits snugly into the human ACE2 receptor is beyond current technology. So it is argued that it could not have been engineered. New models to predict human ACE2 affinity have been developed. What is certain is that laboratories regularly create chimeras that would be unlikely to occur naturally. Shi Zhengli has complained that it is unreasonable to expect the lab to prove that something did not happen.
To prove the non-existence of an event. Evidence of that would be in their lab notes. An independent review of those same notes would help resolve the issue.
Peter Daszak had also stated that no bats were kept at the institute, even though there were published videos showing such bats.
It has been speculated that researchers may have become infected while collecting viruses, just as the six miners had been. The researchers could then have spread it to others in Wuhan. No evidence of such an infection has been presented, nor do we know of any recent trips to the caves.
She stated that they were friendly and that she saw nothing untoward. However, the WIV is a large institute with many labs, and she left at about the time of the leak. It is not surprising she would have been unaware of any issues. It has been suggested that China was developing bioweapons at the WIV. This could explain their secrecy, rather than their concealing a lab leak. However, there were many visitors to the WIV prior to December , including Ralph Baric and Danielle Andersen, who reported that they were friendly and open.
In October a major sporting event was held in Wuhan. There are confused reports that many athletes became ill with a SARS-like disease that might have been flu [Squitieri20]. However, if several athletes from around the world had been infected with SARS-COV-2 in October then there should have been many subsequent cases around the world in November, yet the first confirmed external case is 31 December in France.
Chinese government officials have accused the USA of creating the virus in Fort Detrick laboratories and deliberately seeding it in the games to discredit China [Panda20]. However, there is no evidence for such an outrageous claim. In this influential paper Kristian Andersen et.
Andersen then argues that the virus could not have been produced in cell cultures or humanized mice because the development of both the chimera and the furin cleavage site at the same time would require genetic engineering. A more technical rebuttal can be found at [Segreto20]. Surprisingly, this paper was accepted for publication in Nature and cited over times. They declare no competing interests [Calisher20]. The letter was drafted by one of the signatories, Peter Daszak, who oversaw the US funding of the WIV and thus had a huge conflict of interest.
This was published in the Lancet, March However, they did not interview workers at the WIV and the page report only devoted 2 pages to the lab leak hypothesis. The only American member of the committee was Peter Daszak, whose obvious conflict of interest was considered to be acceptable.
The report argues that there is no record of a closely related virus at the WIV, but they fail to mention that genetic records from the WIV had been removed. They note that other more distantly related SARS viruses have furin cleavage sites or bind to humans, but without any explanation as to how that could be relevant. That would be expected if that was the date of the lab leak. An intelligence community assessment prepared for President Biden in August stated that it was not possible to know the source of the virus because the Chinese government would not cooperate in any investigation.
We would argue that withholding evidence is not normally a reason to presume innocence. The assessment does not address any of the specific points made in this paper. The Biden administration wishes to heal rifts with China created by President Trump. More specifically, it wants China to continue to cooperate on health related matters. An overt accusation that Covid was probably the result of a laboratory leak could cause China to terminate such cooperation.
We suspect that such cooperation has already been terminated in practice. Cheat Engine 6. C-Free 5. Mozilla Firefox Horizon 2. NET Framework 4. Visual Basic Express Visual Studio Community. Outlook Express 6. Vector on PC 1. IObit Unlocker 1.
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