Great video and only 176 views . Thats okay. This video is caught in the middle. Technical videos like this will be hard for the rest to follow and for the others this is not technical enough. They would much rather get there info from scientific papers.
Flip it around. (Suppose) the virology lab is North Carolina is suspected to be the epicenter for release of a contagion. Seriously believe the US government will allow foreign governments and foreign investigators into one of our own labs? To root around to their heart's content? After a wacko Chinese leader Trumpisan promulgates a wild conspiracy theory that the US Lab is culpable? And we're gonna be "transparent" about it? I kinda doubt it. Also, Dr. Linfa Wang personally knows and worked with the lead virologist at the Wuhan Lab (altho I think Wang is actually Singoporean). He's got an inside scoop and he's not "troubled by the transparency" because he's knows the people involved and the lab involved and he sees no reason to doubt her integrity and truthfullness. I find that pretty plausible testimony myself. So I'm not inclined to take your "seriously?" seriously.
You’ve ignored so much other information available in the public domain. The probability of sarscov2 emerging from the natural domain without any laboratory intervention is remote.
Four experts who are not agreeing with each other "ignored so much other information available in the public domain" ... wow. Did you take the time to listen or the conspiracy theories run deep into your brain and can't be moved aside for one hour?
@@desmondpun1773 lol you're just another chinese bot! You've posted the same comment on multiple videos and this really shows that you're a part of the propaganda campaign run by China.
18:00 collecting bats some go to the lab some goes to the market to make some money. However the rare animal research paper that was going on prior to the outbreak said they did not see bats But this was not a 7/24 surveillance
Baric and Daszac were in direct competition with XI at the WIV until the Obama administration shut them down. It is possible that after that Fauci used Daszac to try to keep an eye on the WIV who were going full steam ahead on god knows what. Their involvement in the WIV was minuscule in comparison to the CCP budget for the lab, and at a minimum very embarrassing in retrospect. All kinds of political, national security and perception issues have contributed to the lack of transparency around their roles.
could it really have evolved that quickly jumping to multiple species at the market from a single exposure within a single week (typical animal's stay at market)?
So good to finally have a proper and fair discussion from a wide variety of sources. This video shows the case for lab leak is at least as likely as natural spillover if not more. It also highlights the alarming lack of transparency from the American EcoHealth Alliance, DAPRA, the University of North Carolina, the Chinese government and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It's not a good look when governments, universities, NGOs and labs refuse to release relevant and crucial data in the midst of the biggest pandemic in living memory that directly relates to that pandemic.
There are Patents for Corona virus including 19. The patent process requires the virus not be naturally occurring. After 19 evolutions the virus certainly is not natural any more. In January of 2020 Lysol spray listed Corona viruses as something the spray kills. Another patent that states it kills patented corona viruses. Currently Three major countries have called a halt to corona virus protocols because they are seeing results that call for that.
@@tomahawkx188 This recent publication is not accepted by many epidemiologists including the Taiwanese CDC. Therefore the cause of the epidemic is still an open question and far from settled science
This was a very important and interesting discussion. I think Doc.Chan ultimately has a point, with the current info we could debate 24/7 and no definitive proof either side will emerge. What we need is a proper investigation with real access, data, emails, records...as well as more analysis of the species at the market. That's the only way we could have new data and move forward in the discussion. But if we continuously have to rely on leaks to discover stuff, it does nothing but undermine trust in the scientific institutions. Another thing - why has nobody raised the point of EcoHealth Alliance sampling bat viruses in Laos as well? It also was in one of the leaked docs. Sorry, too little transparency from that organization.
"These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead they exposed its weaknesses" LA Times 11/15/2021 Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has become one of the leading exponents of the hypothesis that the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Matt Ridley, a much-published science writer and member of the British House of Lords, emerged as a leading climate change denier with a provocative Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2014. The book they joined forces to write, “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,” presents the case for the lab-leak hypothesis, presumably with the secondary goal of establishing the authors as the preeminent truth-tellers on the topic. (The book’s epilogue is titled “Truth Will Out,” a line from “The Merchant of Venice.”) “Viral” comes to bookstores amid a wave of hype. Its publisher describes it as a “uniquely insightful book” in which the authors come “tantalizingly close to a shaft that leads to the light” about the pandemic’s origins. In reality, however, “Viral” is a laboratory-perfect example of how not to write about a scientific issue. The authors rely less on the scientists doing the painstaking work to unearth the virus’ origin than on self-described sleuths who broadcast their dubious claims, sometimes anonymously, on social media. In the end, Chan and Ridley spotlight all the shortcomings of the hypothesis they set out to defend. As Chan and Ridley acknowledge, determining the origin of the virus technically known as SARS-CoV-2 (or SARS2, for short) is of paramount importance to humanity. “If we do not find out how this pandemic began,” they write, “we are ill-equipped to know when, where and how the next pandemic may start.” Yet if the authors were truly concerned with the origin of COVID-19, they would give proper due to the prevailing scientific judgment about it: that COVID was “zoonotic,” spilling over from infected animals to humans via natural contact the way most viruses known to science have reached humankind. As virologists reported this summer, the emergence of SARS2 bears unmistakable signatures of those prior zoonotic events. Chan and Ridley, however, pay insufficient attention to the scientific consensus, or to the significant research findings around which it has coalesced. The hypothesis that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the same city where the pandemic first emerged, was initially championed in 2020 by ideologues in the State Department under then-President Trump. For them, blaming a pandemic on the Chinese government and its laboratories served the dual purposes of scoring points against a geopolitical adversary and distracting attention from the Trump administration’s incompetent response. In its original form, the theory held that the Chinese deliberately created the virus as a biological weapon. Over time, it devolved into a claim that the virus originated in experiments to enhance the infectivity of microbes being studied in the lab (so-called gain-of-function experiments) - and ultimately to the proposition that researchers at the institute unwittingly became infected while doing fieldwork and carried the virus into the institute, from which it escaped through inattention. Blaming the Chinese government for the pandemic has remained the one unchanging element of the hypothesis. No evidence whatsoever has ever been produced for any of these versions. All that remains is an argument based on unsupported conjecture and the absence of evidence: Why don’t we know more about the work at the Wuhan Institute, unless the Chinese government is hiding its guilt? It’s true that the Chinese government has obstructed investigations focused on the virology lab, but basing a conspiracy theory on government secrecy is a dead end. The Chinese are secretive about all things, and in any case, there isn’t a government on Earth, including the U.S., that welcomes snooping into its operations with the probable goal of laying blame. The authors make much of the location of the virology institute in the city where the outbreak was identified. Lab-leak theorists call this “circumstantial evidence,” but it’s not much of a circumstance. Wuhan is a metropolis of more than 9 million, comparable to New York City or Los Angeles, and a major transit and trade crossroads for southeastern China. In Wuhan and its environs, interactions between consumers and animals being sold at so-called wet markets are common. It’s true that dangerous microbes have escaped from research labs in the past, though none have triggered a pandemic. But that doesn’t warrant the conclusion that the same thing happened in Wuhan, especially with scientific findings weighing heavily in favor of a zoonotic spillover. “Viral” is built on vague innuendo, dressed up with assertions that may strike laypeople as plausible but have long since been debunked by experienced virologists. An entire chapter, for example, is devoted to the “furin cleavage site,” a feature of the virus’ structure through which the enzyme furin makes the spikes on its surface - which it uses to penetrate and infect healthy cells - more effective. The furin site was originally described by lab-leak advocates as so unusual that it could have been placed there only by humans. Virologists have since determined that the feature is not all that rare in viruses similar to SARS2, and in any case, it could have emerged through natural evolutionary processes well known to experts. Chan and Ridley place a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose gloss on these findings, writing that if the site “proves to have been inserted artificially, it confirms that the virus was in a laboratory and was altered. ... If, on the other hand, the furin cleavage site proves to be natural, it still says nothing about where the virus came from.” Why write about it at all, then? Contrary to the curiosity-piquing subtitle, the authors don’t tell us much that is illuminating about how virologists actually search for the origins of new viruses. They don’t appear to have spent much time, if any, watching experts at work in the lab. At least that might have been interesting as an explication of scientific methods. Instead, what Chan and Ridley have done is place a conspiracy theory between hardcovers to masquerade as sober scientific inquiry. Spoiler alert: Near the end of their book, Chan and Ridley acknowledge that they have conducted a wild goose chase. “The reader may want to know what the authors of this book think happened,” they write. “Of course, we do not know for sure. ... We have tried to lay out the evidence and follow it wherever it leads, but it has not led us to a definite conclusion.” After 400-odd pages of argument, learning that the authors don’t even emerge with the courage of their own convictions may leave readers feeling cheated. That points to the chief unanswered question raised by “Viral”: Who thought this book was necessary at this point in time? In virological and epidemiological terms, the search for the origin of COVID-19 is in its infancy. Experts in those fields know that the critical links, the original animal source and the intermediate species that may have been the direct transmitter to humans, may never be identified; similar inquiries have taken years, and some have never reached a conclusion. The lab-leak theory, if proved, would point to the need to tighten biosecurity at laboratories all over the world. The zoonotic theory would remind us that human interactions with wildlife, a common occurrence in rural China, need to be closely regulated. The shame of “Viral” is that it promotes a groundless theory that threatens to lead policymakers, as well as members of the public, down the wrong road, to humankind’s enduring detriment.
The early cases being clustered around the Wuhan Market is, if not definitive, at least highly suggestive of natural origin while the lab leak hypothesis has no such positive evidence. Dr. Chan’s main line of argument talked about to lack of evidence she did not point to any of the evidence we do have but to hypothetical evidence we don’t have *which could point either way*. If there’s known evidence that points one way, and the unknown evidence that could point either way then it’s silly to postulate the un evidenced side is more likely.
Appreciate this content. The view count is baffling considering the relevance of the panel and topic. Alina is sharp, on-topic, and objective. Michael Worobey should be commended for furthering this conversation. Wang has a lot of experience but seemed incapable of having an opinion on China's lack of transparency. Would have liked to hear more from Jesse. Thanks.
Here’s my summary: while the lab leak hypothesis is entirely possible it’s not likely, and that based on the evidence we have now, the zoonotic origin hypothesis is stronger and more likely. While this could change with new evidence, so far it has not. This is the most reasonable, nonpartisan summation anyone can make after listening to these brilliant researchers.
What if the evidence for a lab leak is being intentionally covered up? That people like Fauci and Dazsak are fighting so hard to obfuscate and cover up a potential lab leak tells me they suspect they might be held accountable for funding the research that led to the outbreak. Many in power desperately need it to be zoological origin, while those with access aren't being forthcoming with evidence for lab leak. That should tell us a lot about probable origin.
18:00 collecting bats some go to the lab some goes to the market to make some money. However the rare animal research paper that was going on prior to the outbreak said they did not see bats But this was not a 7/24 surveillance
Wikipedia: Alina Chan - Chan became known during the COVID-19 pandemic for co-authoring a preprint claiming the virus was "pre-adapted" to humans and suggesting COVID-19 could have escaped from a laboratory.[2][4] The preprint was not accepted or published by any scientific journals, but received a significant reception in the popular press.[2] The reaction of virologists and other specialists to Chan's hypothesis has been largely, but not exclusively, negative. The New York Times noted in October 2021 that Chan's view has been "widely disputed by other scientists", but some have commended her willingness to advance alternative hypotheses in the face of controversy.[5] Jonathan Eisen of UC Davis praised Chan for raising the lab-origin discussion, but said her views remain conjecture, as not enough disease outbreaks have been traced in enough molecular detail to know what is normal, noting also that the virus continues to change and adapt.[2] Sixteen months after Chan's preprint was shared online, a scientific review article published in Cell described the pre-adaptation theory as "lacking validity."
"These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead they exposed its weaknesses" LA Times 11/15/2021 Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has become one of the leading exponents of the hypothesis that the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Matt Ridley, a much-published science writer and member of the British House of Lords, emerged as a leading climate change denier with a provocative Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2014. The book they joined forces to write, “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,” presents the case for the lab-leak hypothesis, presumably with the secondary goal of establishing the authors as the preeminent truth-tellers on the topic. (The book’s epilogue is titled “Truth Will Out,” a line from “The Merchant of Venice.”) “Viral” comes to bookstores amid a wave of hype. Its publisher describes it as a “uniquely insightful book” in which the authors come “tantalizingly close to a shaft that leads to the light” about the pandemic’s origins. In reality, however, “Viral” is a laboratory-perfect example of how not to write about a scientific issue. The authors rely less on the scientists doing the painstaking work to unearth the virus’ origin than on self-described sleuths who broadcast their dubious claims, sometimes anonymously, on social media. In the end, Chan and Ridley spotlight all the shortcomings of the hypothesis they set out to defend. As Chan and Ridley acknowledge, determining the origin of the virus technically known as SARS-CoV-2 (or SARS2, for short) is of paramount importance to humanity. “If we do not find out how this pandemic began,” they write, “we are ill-equipped to know when, where and how the next pandemic may start.” Yet if the authors were truly concerned with the origin of COVID-19, they would give proper due to the prevailing scientific judgment about it: that COVID was “zoonotic,” spilling over from infected animals to humans via natural contact the way most viruses known to science have reached humankind. As virologists reported this summer, the emergence of SARS2 bears unmistakable signatures of those prior zoonotic events. Chan and Ridley, however, pay insufficient attention to the scientific consensus, or to the significant research findings around which it has coalesced. The hypothesis that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the same city where the pandemic first emerged, was initially championed in 2020 by ideologues in the State Department under then-President Trump. For them, blaming a pandemic on the Chinese government and its laboratories served the dual purposes of scoring points against a geopolitical adversary and distracting attention from the Trump administration’s incompetent response. In its original form, the theory held that the Chinese deliberately created the virus as a biological weapon. Over time, it devolved into a claim that the virus originated in experiments to enhance the infectivity of microbes being studied in the lab (so-called gain-of-function experiments) - and ultimately to the proposition that researchers at the institute unwittingly became infected while doing fieldwork and carried the virus into the institute, from which it escaped through inattention. Blaming the Chinese government for the pandemic has remained the one unchanging element of the hypothesis. No evidence whatsoever has ever been produced for any of these versions. All that remains is an argument based on unsupported conjecture and the absence of evidence: Why don’t we know more about the work at the Wuhan Institute, unless the Chinese government is hiding its guilt? It’s true that the Chinese government has obstructed investigations focused on the virology lab, but basing a conspiracy theory on government secrecy is a dead end. The Chinese are secretive about all things, and in any case, there isn’t a government on Earth, including the U.S., that welcomes snooping into its operations with the probable goal of laying blame. The authors make much of the location of the virology institute in the city where the outbreak was identified. Lab-leak theorists call this “circumstantial evidence,” but it’s not much of a circumstance. Wuhan is a metropolis of more than 9 million, comparable to New York City or Los Angeles, and a major transit and trade crossroads for southeastern China. In Wuhan and its environs, interactions between consumers and animals being sold at so-called wet markets are common. It’s true that dangerous microbes have escaped from research labs in the past, though none have triggered a pandemic. But that doesn’t warrant the conclusion that the same thing happened in Wuhan, especially with scientific findings weighing heavily in favor of a zoonotic spillover. “Viral” is built on vague innuendo, dressed up with assertions that may strike laypeople as plausible but have long since been debunked by experienced virologists. An entire chapter, for example, is devoted to the “furin cleavage site,” a feature of the virus’ structure through which the enzyme furin makes the spikes on its surface - which it uses to penetrate and infect healthy cells - more effective. The furin site was originally described by lab-leak advocates as so unusual that it could have been placed there only by humans. Virologists have since determined that the feature is not all that rare in viruses similar to SARS2, and in any case, it could have emerged through natural evolutionary processes well known to experts. Chan and Ridley place a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose gloss on these findings, writing that if the site “proves to have been inserted artificially, it confirms that the virus was in a laboratory and was altered. ... If, on the other hand, the furin cleavage site proves to be natural, it still says nothing about where the virus came from.” Why write about it at all, then? Contrary to the curiosity-piquing subtitle, the authors don’t tell us much that is illuminating about how virologists actually search for the origins of new viruses. They don’t appear to have spent much time, if any, watching experts at work in the lab. At least that might have been interesting as an explication of scientific methods. Instead, what Chan and Ridley have done is place a conspiracy theory between hardcovers to masquerade as sober scientific inquiry. Spoiler alert: Near the end of their book, Chan and Ridley acknowledge that they have conducted a wild goose chase. “The reader may want to know what the authors of this book think happened,” they write. “Of course, we do not know for sure. ... We have tried to lay out the evidence and follow it wherever it leads, but it has not led us to a definite conclusion.” After 400-odd pages of argument, learning that the authors don’t even emerge with the courage of their own convictions may leave readers feeling cheated. That points to the chief unanswered question raised by “Viral”: Who thought this book was necessary at this point in time? In virological and epidemiological terms, the search for the origin of COVID-19 is in its infancy. Experts in those fields know that the critical links, the original animal source and the intermediate species that may have been the direct transmitter to humans, may never be identified; similar inquiries have taken years, and some have never reached a conclusion. The lab-leak theory, if proved, would point to the need to tighten biosecurity at laboratories all over the world. The zoonotic theory would remind us that human interactions with wildlife, a common occurrence in rural China, need to be closely regulated. The shame of “Viral” is that it promotes a groundless theory that threatens to lead policymakers, as well as members of the public, down the wrong road, to humankind’s enduring detriment.
It's good to see this sort of debate, and disappointing to see there are only 2000 views a month and a half later. When I say it's great to see this debate, I'm not implying that these people have equal credibility in my eyes. Alina Chan and Jesse Bloom are facing the obvious, and being about as forthright as they can be (especially Chan), but also know that discretion is the better part of valour in modern institutional science. As for the other two, well.... I find it particularly galling that Michael Worobey insinuates that he was in large part responsible for bringing the lab leak theory back into mainstream discussion (via the Science letter in mid-May), only to regret it now. Nice try at getting some "honest broker" credit, then play the converted believer role. Problem is, the lab leak theory was already well and truly back before that letter. While I don't doubt that most of the individual signatories had good intentions (both Bloom and Chan were among them, for starters), its public impact was insignificant compared to the Nicholas Wade article which preceded it. And Wade's article was in large part just getting a wider audience for things which had been public knowledge (even if buried by most media) for a year or so in many cases. Update: I just got the Audiobook of Viral. I didn't realise just how long Alina Chan has been fighting the good fight. A real beacon of integrity in a field which has done itself huge reputational damage by excluding the lab leak theory on the most transparently ridiculous grounds.
Alina Chan is just the kind of spokesperson the world needs on this. Her integrity and personal motivation is exemplary. I think her book is the best so far, although Elaine Dewar’s is good as well, Shari Clarksons is more journalistic and political but doggedly researched. The relationship between Matt Ridley and Alina is heartwarming as well.
Nicholas Wade's article was debunked in the video "Fact-checking Nicholas Wade's claims about a 'man-made' virus". Meanwhile, Chan is authoring books with Matt Ridley, the same non-expert contrarian who got the origin of the HIV/AIDS pandemic wrong and had to be corrected on that by Worobey. Also, Worobey continues to publish peer-reviewed research improving our understanding of the origins of the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic, just as he did on the HIV/AIDS pandemic, while Chan doesn't. She's busying profiting off book sales outside of peer review. "The origin of AIDS", by Matt Ridley "Viral: The search for the origin of COVID-19", by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan "Contaminated polio vaccine theory refuted" "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2" "The origins of SARS-CoV-2: A critical review" "The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic" "The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2"
@@bacchusevolution7875 Maybe the clown that made the "Fact-checking Nicholas Wade's claims…” video is just stupid, but my money is on him being deliberately disingenuous (the fact that he sounds just like John Pilger definitely doesn’t help). Admittedly, I only made it to the 12 minute mark, so maybe he saved an honest criticism for last, but my BS quota for the day was exceeded by then. I’ll pick just two idiocies to dump on: 1 - Contrary to Potholer’s dissembling, the Nature paper was effectively asserting the lack of optimal binding of the spike protein to receptors was a sign of natural evolution rather than lab creation (fair enough), and extending that (by implication) to rule out the virus being assembled in a lab from bits of natural viruses (a sleight of hand). Potholer himself then boosts this transparent non-sequitur by his touching account of how the CCP’s virologist would have been working i.e. trying to work out the minimum number of changes necessary to most reach a more infectious / virulent virus. That would be how they work when trying to understand how an existing virus might evolve in nature into a dangerous human pathogen. It will almost certainly NOT be how they work if their main concern is quickly and efficiently assembling very nasty pathogens for, say, experimental bioweapons. 2 - Potholer’s dwelling on, and deliberate misinterpretation of Wade’s phrase “DNA backbones are quite easy to make”. He appeals to Robert Gary, who allegedly said that it would be "impossible" to make a backbone. Say what? But aren’t there already a number of said backbones in use? How can this be if they are impossible to make? OK so scratch one highly invested expert. Could it be that Wade was not referring to anything more difficult than doing what has clearly already been done many times in the past? Perhaps doing something that the guy from Benhur Lee University said might be achieved in “months to years”, although what exactly is being discussed there seems to be much more conditional than Potholer lets on. A pity Potholer doesn’t let us see more of the actual context in that email. But even if we assume Potholer is presenting things in good faith, a process requiring months in a lab can quite reasonably be described as “quite easy”, if it is straight forward. Perhaps somewhat tedious, and expensive, but eminently doable. Building a house is “quite easy”, but requires similar timeframes. Wade didn’t say “trivial”. The fact that Potholer makes such a big deal of it is a tell that he’s got nothing. Wade debunked? - not by that sniffy Pilger wanna be. As for the ad homs on Chan by you, well, you know what you are.
30:00 Lab is not off the table because we know the furin site can be dropped into the virus Furin sites don't like being bats and thus it came from the lab or the last combination event occurred in humans with the adding of the furin site
53:00 Alina Chan makes a great point if the cleavage site was an insert they would have dropped a cleavage site in that they observered and knew worked ie.. had fitnesss.
Wikipedia: Alina Chan "Chan became known during the COVID-19 pandemic for co-authoring a preprint claiming the virus was "pre-adapted" to humans and suggesting COVID-19 could have escaped from a laboratory.[2][4] The preprint was not accepted or published by any scientific journals, but received a significant reception in the popular press.[2] The reaction of virologists and other specialists to Chan's hypothesis has been largely, but not exclusively, negative. The New York Times noted in October 2021 that Chan's view has been "widely disputed by other scientists", but some have commended her willingness to advance alternative hypotheses in the face of controversy.[5] Jonathan Eisen of UC Davis praised Chan for raising the lab-origin discussion, but said her views remain conjecture, as not enough disease outbreaks have been traced in enough molecular detail to know what is normal, noting also that the virus continues to change and adapt.[2] Sixteen months after Chan's preprint was shared online, a scientific review article published in Cell described the pre-adaptation theory as "lacking validity."
@@KevinWayne True, but the Covid furin site was already patented by Moderna, coincidence? Maybe But China still has not allowed this conspiracy to go away. They just won't release any info
"These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead they exposed its weaknesses" LA Times 11/15/2021 Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has become one of the leading exponents of the hypothesis that the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Matt Ridley, a much-published science writer and member of the British House of Lords, emerged as a leading climate change denier with a provocative Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2014. The book they joined forces to write, “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,” presents the case for the lab-leak hypothesis, presumably with the secondary goal of establishing the authors as the preeminent truth-tellers on the topic. (The book’s epilogue is titled “Truth Will Out,” a line from “The Merchant of Venice.”) “Viral” comes to bookstores amid a wave of hype. Its publisher describes it as a “uniquely insightful book” in which the authors come “tantalizingly close to a shaft that leads to the light” about the pandemic’s origins. In reality, however, “Viral” is a laboratory-perfect example of how not to write about a scientific issue. The authors rely less on the scientists doing the painstaking work to unearth the virus’ origin than on self-described sleuths who broadcast their dubious claims, sometimes anonymously, on social media. In the end, Chan and Ridley spotlight all the shortcomings of the hypothesis they set out to defend. As Chan and Ridley acknowledge, determining the origin of the virus technically known as SARS-CoV-2 (or SARS2, for short) is of paramount importance to humanity. “If we do not find out how this pandemic began,” they write, “we are ill-equipped to know when, where and how the next pandemic may start.” Yet if the authors were truly concerned with the origin of COVID-19, they would give proper due to the prevailing scientific judgment about it: that COVID was “zoonotic,” spilling over from infected animals to humans via natural contact the way most viruses known to science have reached humankind. As virologists reported this summer, the emergence of SARS2 bears unmistakable signatures of those prior zoonotic events. Chan and Ridley, however, pay insufficient attention to the scientific consensus, or to the significant research findings around which it has coalesced. The hypothesis that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the same city where the pandemic first emerged, was initially championed in 2020 by ideologues in the State Department under then-President Trump. For them, blaming a pandemic on the Chinese government and its laboratories served the dual purposes of scoring points against a geopolitical adversary and distracting attention from the Trump administration’s incompetent response. In its original form, the theory held that the Chinese deliberately created the virus as a biological weapon. Over time, it devolved into a claim that the virus originated in experiments to enhance the infectivity of microbes being studied in the lab (so-called gain-of-function experiments) - and ultimately to the proposition that researchers at the institute unwittingly became infected while doing fieldwork and carried the virus into the institute, from which it escaped through inattention. Blaming the Chinese government for the pandemic has remained the one unchanging element of the hypothesis. No evidence whatsoever has ever been produced for any of these versions. All that remains is an argument based on unsupported conjecture and the absence of evidence: Why don’t we know more about the work at the Wuhan Institute, unless the Chinese government is hiding its guilt? It’s true that the Chinese government has obstructed investigations focused on the virology lab, but basing a conspiracy theory on government secrecy is a dead end. The Chinese are secretive about all things, and in any case, there isn’t a government on Earth, including the U.S., that welcomes snooping into its operations with the probable goal of laying blame. The authors make much of the location of the virology institute in the city where the outbreak was identified. Lab-leak theorists call this “circumstantial evidence,” but it’s not much of a circumstance. Wuhan is a metropolis of more than 9 million, comparable to New York City or Los Angeles, and a major transit and trade crossroads for southeastern China. In Wuhan and its environs, interactions between consumers and animals being sold at so-called wet markets are common. It’s true that dangerous microbes have escaped from research labs in the past, though none have triggered a pandemic. But that doesn’t warrant the conclusion that the same thing happened in Wuhan, especially with scientific findings weighing heavily in favor of a zoonotic spillover. “Viral” is built on vague innuendo, dressed up with assertions that may strike laypeople as plausible but have long since been debunked by experienced virologists. An entire chapter, for example, is devoted to the “furin cleavage site,” a feature of the virus’ structure through which the enzyme furin makes the spikes on its surface - which it uses to penetrate and infect healthy cells - more effective. The furin site was originally described by lab-leak advocates as so unusual that it could have been placed there only by humans. Virologists have since determined that the feature is not all that rare in viruses similar to SARS2, and in any case, it could have emerged through natural evolutionary processes well known to experts. Chan and Ridley place a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose gloss on these findings, writing that if the site “proves to have been inserted artificially, it confirms that the virus was in a laboratory and was altered. ... If, on the other hand, the furin cleavage site proves to be natural, it still says nothing about where the virus came from.” Why write about it at all, then? Contrary to the curiosity-piquing subtitle, the authors don’t tell us much that is illuminating about how virologists actually search for the origins of new viruses. They don’t appear to have spent much time, if any, watching experts at work in the lab. At least that might have been interesting as an explication of scientific methods. Instead, what Chan and Ridley have done is place a conspiracy theory between hardcovers to masquerade as sober scientific inquiry. Spoiler alert: Near the end of their book, Chan and Ridley acknowledge that they have conducted a wild goose chase. “The reader may want to know what the authors of this book think happened,” they write. “Of course, we do not know for sure. ... We have tried to lay out the evidence and follow it wherever it leads, but it has not led us to a definite conclusion.” After 400-odd pages of argument, learning that the authors don’t even emerge with the courage of their own convictions may leave readers feeling cheated. That points to the chief unanswered question raised by “Viral”: Who thought this book was necessary at this point in time? In virological and epidemiological terms, the search for the origin of COVID-19 is in its infancy. Experts in those fields know that the critical links, the original animal source and the intermediate species that may have been the direct transmitter to humans, may never be identified; similar inquiries have taken years, and some have never reached a conclusion. The lab-leak theory, if proved, would point to the need to tighten biosecurity at laboratories all over the world. The zoonotic theory would remind us that human interactions with wildlife, a common occurrence in rural China, need to be closely regulated. The shame of “Viral” is that it promotes a groundless theory that threatens to lead policymakers, as well as members of the public, down the wrong road, to humankind’s enduring detriment.
Linfa Wang isn't being honest .he does not want to be transparent, this is the problem. Came here to get educated then won't be honest to the Americans.
Exactly. And to all the people of the world who has suffered from C19. Wang is lying and covering up for China, same with the DARPA proposal. It is good to see him in this video, so we can see how false and evil the Chinese actually can be. "But in the west you are guilty until your proven innocent, China is being treated so unfair". Well, mr Wang, China hasn't been transparent and remotely tried to show any signs of innocence. Yuck.
Losing affordable labor & bio-risk-tolerant research vendor like China is really bad for globalism. Making profits on government grants gathering potential deadly viruses from wild animals becomes so much more difficult. Such a blow to scientific progress!
First of all, very good debate! Thank you for sharing! This gave very good information. All agree that the Huanan market is a central place for the spread and is either a progenitor place (start of the spread in humans) or an amplification place (a “super spreader” event). This result in two different paths for the virus to have spread. 1. A person at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was infected and either directly or indirectly infected one or more people at the Hunan Market. The people then infected a number of animals at the market. 2. An animal at the market infected other animals and one or more animals infected one or more humans, which then infected other humans. Both are possible, we don’t have enough data to definitively rule,out one or the other. But there is a difference in the likeliness. There have been numerous zoonotic events historically, including SARS 1, Ebola, HIV etc. There have been lab leaks before, but very rarely of dangerous viruses and never of a completely new dangerous virus. (With the possible exception of Marburg, depending on if you consider that a lab leak or a zoonotic infection). This is important since, as Alina stated, it informs us where we should focus our resources to prevent future events. If we take this one step further, it’s comparatively easy to “plug” a lab leak. It very hard, almost impossible, to prevent a zoonotic event. It seems like Alina in particular is proposing harder regulation of virus research. Although I consider it important to have adequate safety protocols in place, a harder regulation will likely have the exact opposite effect of what we want. It will make it harder and more costly to research viruses and prepare adequately for the next zoonotic event and the next pandemic, which will happen regardless of tight controls of lab work. History proves that beyond any doubt.
Someone pointed out that we should pray it was lab/research origin because the alternative is we have no way to mitigate the risk of the next pandemic.
Wikipedia Alina Chan: "Chan became known during the COVID-19 pandemic for co-authoring a preprint claiming the virus was "pre-adapted" to humans and suggesting COVID-19 could have escaped from a laboratory.[2][4] The preprint was not accepted or published by any scientific journals, but received a significant reception in the popular press.[2] The reaction of virologists and other specialists to Chan's hypothesis has been largely, but not exclusively, negative. The New York Times noted in October 2021 that Chan's view has been "widely disputed by other scientists", but some have commended her willingness to advance alternative hypotheses in the face of controversy.[5] Jonathan Eisen of UC Davis praised Chan for raising the lab-origin discussion, but said her views remain conjecture, as not enough disease outbreaks have been traced in enough molecular detail to know what is normal, noting also that the virus continues to change and adapt.[2] Sixteen months after Chan's preprint was shared online, a scientific review article published in Cell described the pre-adaptation theory as "lacking validity.""
@Kevin Wayne 🤣🤣🤣 I thought you were quoting Wikipedia to make a statement as to the transparent and and sorry state of its political capture! ...but no, you seem to be cutting & pasting Wikipedia to somehow let me know - just in case I hadn't realised - that the establishment don't like what Chan has to say, and have an interest in covering up the origin of the pandemic. I don't know if it's the case for you, but I can only see your reply in my notifications - not in the reply thread - this is TH-cam's algorithm censoring speech around this issue. It happens all the time. The lengths you would have to go NOT to see this cover-up are so extreme, I can only assume you are aware, and have chosen to support the establishment censors.
"These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead they exposed its weaknesses" LA Times 11/15/2021 Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has become one of the leading exponents of the hypothesis that the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Matt Ridley, a much-published science writer and member of the British House of Lords, emerged as a leading climate change denier with a provocative Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2014. The book they joined forces to write, “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,” presents the case for the lab-leak hypothesis, presumably with the secondary goal of establishing the authors as the preeminent truth-tellers on the topic. (The book’s epilogue is titled “Truth Will Out,” a line from “The Merchant of Venice.”) “Viral” comes to bookstores amid a wave of hype. Its publisher describes it as a “uniquely insightful book” in which the authors come “tantalizingly close to a shaft that leads to the light” about the pandemic’s origins. In reality, however, “Viral” is a laboratory-perfect example of how not to write about a scientific issue. The authors rely less on the scientists doing the painstaking work to unearth the virus’ origin than on self-described sleuths who broadcast their dubious claims, sometimes anonymously, on social media. In the end, Chan and Ridley spotlight all the shortcomings of the hypothesis they set out to defend. As Chan and Ridley acknowledge, determining the origin of the virus technically known as SARS-CoV-2 (or SARS2, for short) is of paramount importance to humanity. “If we do not find out how this pandemic began,” they write, “we are ill-equipped to know when, where and how the next pandemic may start.” Yet if the authors were truly concerned with the origin of COVID-19, they would give proper due to the prevailing scientific judgment about it: that COVID was “zoonotic,” spilling over from infected animals to humans via natural contact the way most viruses known to science have reached humankind. As virologists reported this summer, the emergence of SARS2 bears unmistakable signatures of those prior zoonotic events. Chan and Ridley, however, pay insufficient attention to the scientific consensus, or to the significant research findings around which it has coalesced. The hypothesis that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the same city where the pandemic first emerged, was initially championed in 2020 by ideologues in the State Department under then-President Trump. For them, blaming a pandemic on the Chinese government and its laboratories served the dual purposes of scoring points against a geopolitical adversary and distracting attention from the Trump administration’s incompetent response. In its original form, the theory held that the Chinese deliberately created the virus as a biological weapon. Over time, it devolved into a claim that the virus originated in experiments to enhance the infectivity of microbes being studied in the lab (so-called gain-of-function experiments) - and ultimately to the proposition that researchers at the institute unwittingly became infected while doing fieldwork and carried the virus into the institute, from which it escaped through inattention. Blaming the Chinese government for the pandemic has remained the one unchanging element of the hypothesis. No evidence whatsoever has ever been produced for any of these versions. All that remains is an argument based on unsupported conjecture and the absence of evidence: Why don’t we know more about the work at the Wuhan Institute, unless the Chinese government is hiding its guilt? It’s true that the Chinese government has obstructed investigations focused on the virology lab, but basing a conspiracy theory on government secrecy is a dead end. The Chinese are secretive about all things, and in any case, there isn’t a government on Earth, including the U.S., that welcomes snooping into its operations with the probable goal of laying blame. The authors make much of the location of the virology institute in the city where the outbreak was identified. Lab-leak theorists call this “circumstantial evidence,” but it’s not much of a circumstance. Wuhan is a metropolis of more than 9 million, comparable to New York City or Los Angeles, and a major transit and trade crossroads for southeastern China. In Wuhan and its environs, interactions between consumers and animals being sold at so-called wet markets are common. It’s true that dangerous microbes have escaped from research labs in the past, though none have triggered a pandemic. But that doesn’t warrant the conclusion that the same thing happened in Wuhan, especially with scientific findings weighing heavily in favor of a zoonotic spillover. “Viral” is built on vague innuendo, dressed up with assertions that may strike laypeople as plausible but have long since been debunked by experienced virologists. An entire chapter, for example, is devoted to the “furin cleavage site,” a feature of the virus’ structure through which the enzyme furin makes the spikes on its surface - which it uses to penetrate and infect healthy cells - more effective. The furin site was originally described by lab-leak advocates as so unusual that it could have been placed there only by humans. Virologists have since determined that the feature is not all that rare in viruses similar to SARS2, and in any case, it could have emerged through natural evolutionary processes well known to experts. Chan and Ridley place a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose gloss on these findings, writing that if the site “proves to have been inserted artificially, it confirms that the virus was in a laboratory and was altered. ... If, on the other hand, the furin cleavage site proves to be natural, it still says nothing about where the virus came from.” Why write about it at all, then? Contrary to the curiosity-piquing subtitle, the authors don’t tell us much that is illuminating about how virologists actually search for the origins of new viruses. They don’t appear to have spent much time, if any, watching experts at work in the lab. At least that might have been interesting as an explication of scientific methods. Instead, what Chan and Ridley have done is place a conspiracy theory between hardcovers to masquerade as sober scientific inquiry. Spoiler alert: Near the end of their book, Chan and Ridley acknowledge that they have conducted a wild goose chase. “The reader may want to know what the authors of this book think happened,” they write. “Of course, we do not know for sure. ... We have tried to lay out the evidence and follow it wherever it leads, but it has not led us to a definite conclusion.” After 400-odd pages of argument, learning that the authors don’t even emerge with the courage of their own convictions may leave readers feeling cheated. That points to the chief unanswered question raised by “Viral”: Who thought this book was necessary at this point in time? In virological and epidemiological terms, the search for the origin of COVID-19 is in its infancy. Experts in those fields know that the critical links, the original animal source and the intermediate species that may have been the direct transmitter to humans, may never be identified; similar inquiries have taken years, and some have never reached a conclusion. The lab-leak theory, if proved, would point to the need to tighten biosecurity at laboratories all over the world. The zoonotic theory would remind us that human interactions with wildlife, a common occurrence in rural China, need to be closely regulated. The shame of “Viral” is that it promotes a groundless theory that threatens to lead policymakers, as well as members of the public, down the wrong road, to humankind’s enduring detriment.
Did we know at what tissue temperature did SARS COV2 better replicate? At TWiV 659 at min29 virologist Christian Drosten suggest that SARS COV2 better replicate at very low tissue temperature.
Is it not possible that the pandemic started near the Hunan seafood market because it was a market, rather than anything to do with intermediate hosts?. Assuming a scenario where the first zoonotic spillover may have been Seattle, say, is it that surprising that a visitor from Seattle may have brought it to Wuhan, and the exponential outbreak occurred in a market? Any market could suffice, a clothes market for instance. The Hunan market may have been the vector, because any market could have been a candidate vector.
Agreed. I will have to listen to the beginning but I believe the first panelist said that it was widespread in animals and that is well known. I was under the understanding that that was not the case.
I think you are factually incorrect. It is now accepted the virus can spread through many animals. If you don't accept this please cite reliable source. Here is mine pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33091230/
@@vvanderer Thankyou for the reference. Did you read and understand the abstract? It clearly states it is uncommon, no evidence it occurs naturally, except for rumours of two minks, and these infections were clearly forced and post pandemic, not pre pandemic. The search for the host intermediary species goes on and years of trying to find it in the Wuhan market species is still coming up empty. Thx
Yeah, from what I heard, early samples showed to be NOT related to the market. When the latest investigation team (without Daszak) asked for information about these earliest samples of Covid-19 in Wuhan, the Chinese refused to give them the samples.
Bravo, we need many more of these types of discussions. Challenging to match the technical acumen of the participants though. Alina was clearly the broadest and most informed. Linfa a good example of why affiliated researchers are against transparency. Not sure where Michael is coming from but his rudimentary chart proved Alina’s point, not his ;-). Jesse was at least open minded enough to not want to be grouped with Linfa.
I'm writing this reply with the unfair advantage of hindsight. Worobey just published "Dissecting the early COVID-19 cases in Wuhan", where he tries to reanimate the discredited "wet market" theory. I think I now know where he was coming from. In signing the May Science letter, he was trying to position himself as an "honest broker" in the natural origin Vs lab leak debate. Unfortunately, I think he has about the same level of credibility in that role as Peter Daszak had leading the WHO mission, i.e. he's batting for the CCP.
@@jimwest63 In a somewhat strange and twisted way, I often feel like Daszak’s conscience might be the only way the truth will ever fully come out and be accepted by the majority of the world against the onslaught of CCP propaganda. There was just a mainstream media report about white tailed deer in Canada having Covid. This was a CCP bright shiny object a few months back before they realized Canadian deer aren’t domesticated and don’t really come in contact with people so they moved on to something else as the source. Most people thought it was a comedy sketch, fake news broadcast but for sure some people will believe it is a threat given all the bs we have been through. Noise drowns out the signal these days.
The science is so complicated that I have no idea who to believe. On a level of personal intuition, Alina Chan comes across as extremely trustworthy, whereas Linfa Wang comes across as a snake.
100% agree. And thank you for commenting. Wang doesn't seem to be bothered the slightest that the DARPA proposal was being covered up. And not being bothered that the Chinese government has been covering up and committing crimes to keep secret the information about the origins of the virus. It is not about being "Western" or Asian, as he refers it to, its about being a decent human being and not a lying snake.
@@paulwally9007 LMAO. Think so, eh? Her co-author of the much-touted "Viral" is a known AIDS and CC Denialist. The LA Times did a thorough trashing: "These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead they exposed its weaknesses" 11/15/2021
52:07 That is some great info. I had no idea that the Laos study had that info. Why could you not do a better graph I cant tell which viruses you are refering to so I can check the Laos study. But what I can see the top three viruses are very close to the PRRA furin cleavage site of T-CCT-CGG-CGG-GC. Also why is that not "technically a furin site"
It could also be that the LAOS viruses are evolved from SARS-CoV-2, since it also infects animals. The virus has run wild around the world. How does he no (tye guy who showed the sequence) this virus predates SARS-CoV-2?
@@alexcoventry1579 Not a biochemist either, but curious what your thoughts are on the underlying codons being statistically ‘human prevalent’ and generally not that common in bats. Alina touches on this briefly in her book, it seems kind of like giving the human cell a recipe it knows it has the ingredients for?
@@alexcoventry1579 It's a sentence or two in her book pg 212 in a section looking at the rare CGGCGG referring to the underlying codons for Arg, that were inserted are quite rare in Coronavirus genome but quite common in Human genomes. It is certainly statistical evidence against a natural recombination event involving the furin site from another coronavirus. Intuitively it would make for more efficient transcription in the molecular soup of a human cell than in a bat or 'codon optimisation'. Not every virologists smoking gun, but where there's smoke.....
@@NiceTriGuy "These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead they exposed its weaknesses" LA Times 11/15/2021 Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has become one of the leading exponents of the hypothesis that the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Matt Ridley, a much-published science writer and member of the British House of Lords, emerged as a leading climate change denier with a provocative Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2014. The book they joined forces to write, “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,” presents the case for the lab-leak hypothesis, presumably with the secondary goal of establishing the authors as the preeminent truth-tellers on the topic. (The book’s epilogue is titled “Truth Will Out,” a line from “The Merchant of Venice.”) “Viral” comes to bookstores amid a wave of hype. Its publisher describes it as a “uniquely insightful book” in which the authors come “tantalizingly close to a shaft that leads to the light” about the pandemic’s origins. In reality, however, “Viral” is a laboratory-perfect example of how not to write about a scientific issue. The authors rely less on the scientists doing the painstaking work to unearth the virus’ origin than on self-described sleuths who broadcast their dubious claims, sometimes anonymously, on social media. In the end, Chan and Ridley spotlight all the shortcomings of the hypothesis they set out to defend. As Chan and Ridley acknowledge, determining the origin of the virus technically known as SARS-CoV-2 (or SARS2, for short) is of paramount importance to humanity. “If we do not find out how this pandemic began,” they write, “we are ill-equipped to know when, where and how the next pandemic may start.” Yet if the authors were truly concerned with the origin of COVID-19, they would give proper due to the prevailing scientific judgment about it: that COVID was “zoonotic,” spilling over from infected animals to humans via natural contact the way most viruses known to science have reached humankind. As virologists reported this summer, the emergence of SARS2 bears unmistakable signatures of those prior zoonotic events. Chan and Ridley, however, pay insufficient attention to the scientific consensus, or to the significant research findings around which it has coalesced. The hypothesis that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the same city where the pandemic first emerged, was initially championed in 2020 by ideologues in the State Department under then-President Trump. For them, blaming a pandemic on the Chinese government and its laboratories served the dual purposes of scoring points against a geopolitical adversary and distracting attention from the Trump administration’s incompetent response. In its original form, the theory held that the Chinese deliberately created the virus as a biological weapon. Over time, it devolved into a claim that the virus originated in experiments to enhance the infectivity of microbes being studied in the lab (so-called gain-of-function experiments) - and ultimately to the proposition that researchers at the institute unwittingly became infected while doing fieldwork and carried the virus into the institute, from which it escaped through inattention. Blaming the Chinese government for the pandemic has remained the one unchanging element of the hypothesis. No evidence whatsoever has ever been produced for any of these versions. All that remains is an argument based on unsupported conjecture and the absence of evidence: Why don’t we know more about the work at the Wuhan Institute, unless the Chinese government is hiding its guilt? It’s true that the Chinese government has obstructed investigations focused on the virology lab, but basing a conspiracy theory on government secrecy is a dead end. The Chinese are secretive about all things, and in any case, there isn’t a government on Earth, including the U.S., that welcomes snooping into its operations with the probable goal of laying blame. The authors make much of the location of the virology institute in the city where the outbreak was identified. Lab-leak theorists call this “circumstantial evidence,” but it’s not much of a circumstance. Wuhan is a metropolis of more than 9 million, comparable to New York City or Los Angeles, and a major transit and trade crossroads for southeastern China. In Wuhan and its environs, interactions between consumers and animals being sold at so-called wet markets are common. It’s true that dangerous microbes have escaped from research labs in the past, though none have triggered a pandemic. But that doesn’t warrant the conclusion that the same thing happened in Wuhan, especially with scientific findings weighing heavily in favor of a zoonotic spillover. “Viral” is built on vague innuendo, dressed up with assertions that may strike laypeople as plausible but have long since been debunked by experienced virologists. An entire chapter, for example, is devoted to the “furin cleavage site,” a feature of the virus’ structure through which the enzyme furin makes the spikes on its surface - which it uses to penetrate and infect healthy cells - more effective. The furin site was originally described by lab-leak advocates as so unusual that it could have been placed there only by humans. Virologists have since determined that the feature is not all that rare in viruses similar to SARS2, and in any case, it could have emerged through natural evolutionary processes well known to experts. Chan and Ridley place a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose gloss on these findings, writing that if the site “proves to have been inserted artificially, it confirms that the virus was in a laboratory and was altered. ... If, on the other hand, the furin cleavage site proves to be natural, it still says nothing about where the virus came from.” Why write about it at all, then? Contrary to the curiosity-piquing subtitle, the authors don’t tell us much that is illuminating about how virologists actually search for the origins of new viruses. They don’t appear to have spent much time, if any, watching experts at work in the lab. At least that might have been interesting as an explication of scientific methods. Instead, what Chan and Ridley have done is place a conspiracy theory between hardcovers to masquerade as sober scientific inquiry. Spoiler alert: Near the end of their book, Chan and Ridley acknowledge that they have conducted a wild goose chase. “The reader may want to know what the authors of this book think happened,” they write. “Of course, we do not know for sure. ... We have tried to lay out the evidence and follow it wherever it leads, but it has not led us to a definite conclusion.” After 400-odd pages of argument, learning that the authors don’t even emerge with the courage of their own convictions may leave readers feeling cheated. That points to the chief unanswered question raised by “Viral”: Who thought this book was necessary at this point in time? In virological and epidemiological terms, the search for the origin of COVID-19 is in its infancy. Experts in those fields know that the critical links, the original animal source and the intermediate species that may have been the direct transmitter to humans, may never be identified; similar inquiries have taken years, and some have never reached a conclusion. The lab-leak theory, if proved, would point to the need to tighten biosecurity at laboratories all over the world. The zoonotic theory would remind us that human interactions with wildlife, a common occurrence in rural China, need to be closely regulated. The shame of “Viral” is that it promotes a groundless theory that threatens to lead policymakers, as well as members of the public, down the wrong road, to humankind’s enduring detriment.
If SARS COV2 better replicate at very low tissue temperature, increasing mucoseal respiratory temperature can avoid SARS COV2 infection,or can mitigate. How can increase upper respiratory temperature? May be ,, mask wearing,,can do that rapidly?
Nature dot come: Published: 11 June 2020 "Bat-borne virus diversity, spillover and emergence" Michael Letko, Stephanie N. Seifert, Kevin J. Olival, Raina K. Plowright & Vincent J. Munster
Live discussions like this aren't where the real substantive discussion happens in science since, for instance, there's insufficient time for citing sources of evidence and fact-checking, they favor rhetorical skill over citing evidence, they're directed at an audience who likely lack the domain knowledge to parse the claims + thus are more likely to instead choose whatever presented position suits their biases, etc. That why young Earth creationists and other science denialists can claim to win some of these live 'debates' with experts, even though their claims don't pass muster in the peer-reviewed literature. In science the real debate happens in the peer-reviewed literature where there's sufficient time for fact-checking + presenting evidence, and where one needs to get through peer review by domain experts who are more likely to spot obvious issues that non-experts may not pick up on. In the peer-reviewed literature, evidence continues to show how SARS-CoV-2 arose via natural non-directed evolution and then initially spread to humans via zoonotic transmission, just as experts previously showed for HIV that caused the HIV/AIDS pandemic, despite conspiracy theories about HIV arising from a lab or initially spreading via polio vaccination. Tellingly, *some of the same informed experts who previously debunked paranoid ideas about the origin of the HIV/AIDS pandemic are some of the same experts now debunking paranoid ideas about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic.* For example: Michael Worobey and Andrew Rambaut. And *some of the same non-experts who previously promoted (and profited from) HIV conspiracism now promote (and profit from) SARS-CoV-2 conspiracism.* For example: Matt Ridley, who Alina Chan chose to co-author a book with on SARS-CoV-2's origin. Telling how Worobey + Rambaut now debunk the SARS-CoV-2 claims of Ridley + Chan, just as they did over 15 years ago for the HIV claims of Ridley. Sources on this below for the curious. "The origin of AIDS", by Matt Ridley "Viral: The search for the origin of COVID-19", by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan "How East Germany fabricated the myth of HIV being man-made" "HIV-1 did not contribute to the 2019-nCoV genome" "Protein structure and sequence reanalysis of 2019-nCoV genome refutes snakes as its intermediate host and the unique similarity between its spike protein insertions and HIV-1" co-authored by Worobey and/or Rambaut: "Contaminated polio vaccine theory refuted" "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2" "Evolutionary origins of the SARS‐CoV‐2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic" "The origins of SARS-CoV-2: A critical review" "The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic" "The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2" not co-authored by Worobey and/or Rambaut: "Polio vaccine samples not linked to AIDS" "Untruths and consequences: the false hypothesis linking CHAT type 1 polio vaccination to the origin of human immunodeficiency virus" "Epidemiology and the emergence of human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immune deficiency syndrome" "Postscript relating to new allegations made by Edward Hooper at The Royal Society Discussion Meeting on 11 September 2000" "Mutation patterns of human SARS-CoV-2 and bat RaTG13 coronavirus genomes are strongly biased towards C>U transitions, indicating rapid evolution in their hosts" "A palindromic RNA sequence as a common breakpoint contributor to copy-choice recombination in SARS-COV-2" "There is no evidence of SARS-CoV-2 laboratory origin: Response to Segreto and Deigin" "There is still no evidence of SARS-CoV-2 laboratory origin: Response to Segreto and Deigin"
I have a technical question. Could SARS-CoV-2 have been lab-made, but made to appear natural? I am not asking about a lab-made bioweapon, but a lab-made novel coronavirus? I am also not assuming that the virus came from WIV, whether lab-made or not. From what I've learned so far, a bioweapon would be hard to conceal as something natural looking, but what about a new virus developed from pre-existing viruses. Like a hybrid, I guess... If SARS 2.0 was lab-made, then it could have come from a laboratory anywhere in the world, and then delivered anywhere in the world... The Chinese have been making the point that the virus was identified in China, but that it did not necessarily come from China.
From what I heard any virus that is made in a lab is cannot be distinguished from a naturally evolved virus. There is simply no genetic finger print that can identify it was human made. Sars-Cov2 could have naturally evolved but what makes it suspicious is that no other sars viruses of it's type have furin cleavage sites and they haven't been able to find the virus in the wild despite 2 years of looking, whereas SARS1 and MERS were both found in the wild within 2 months at most of looking.
The CCP have spent the better part of 2 years inventing bright shiny objects for us to look at. Not exactly innocent behaviour, nor is it proof. Not sure where you ‘learned’ that a bio weapon would not look natural. There are a lot of molecular tools in the toolbox, most derived from natural tools. After 2 years no one can prove or disprove that the Wuhan virus is or is not a bio weapon…… that is likely your answer and the only one we will ever have short of a confession. Who cares if it was a bio weapon if we can just stay focussed on the fact that it was accidentally released we might make some progress.
@@NiceTriGuy The Wuhan virus? Why do you call it the Wuhan virus? Isn't blaming China the politically expedient thing to do? It let's everybody else off the hook, and China wasn't popular before the pandemic, making it a good scapegoat. If lab made, then the virus could have made by a Chinese rival, then imported into the country to frame China for a pandemic. This was no accident, and most likely happened during the October 2019 Military World Games. Which would explain the rapid worldwide spread of the virus. You could call that a conspiracy theory coming from the CCP, but does that make it a lie?.. Are we interested in the truth, or just vilifying the CCP? There is a longstanding war agenda against China, and the rest of the Asian world, that required the demonization of China to make people feel comfortable genociding the whole Asian world. That is what the end result will be if we continue to wage war against China, and it goes kinetic. And that is the whole idea. To wipe out all major Asian economic competitors. If we get false flagged into a hot war against China, it will get nuclear hot very quickly, as we cannot win in a conventional war against China. In a nuclear war, facing their extinction, the Chinese will launch counter attacks not only against the U.S., but also against U.S. Asian military allies South Korea, Japan and India. The motivation on our side is not the South China Sea, Taiwan, Uyghur or any of the other excuses. The real motive behind our genocidal intentions is that Caucasians do not feel they can compete with Asian intellect, industry and technology. Which threatens our perceived hegemony over the world. Framing China for this extremely costly pandemic has incited more hatred of Asians all over the world. Making it easier for us politically to destroy and subjugate the Asian race. This agenda if realized will not be cost-free for our side, even if we have no conscience. After a nuclear war with China, China will be permanently destroyed, but America will be permanently dystopian. The End Times Suicide Club won't mind that too much. I will, if I'm still alive, so I'm trying to do what I can to expose and deter this madness, and all of the hate and war mongering with it.
@@NiceTriGuy All options are on the table, every time I hear it came from the meat market can not help think a Wuhan lab employee left the lab and picked up dinner there.
The recent posting of sequences from the marketplace considered the epicentre, shows raccoon dog and human DNA commingled. This is strong confirmation of the marketplace hypothesis
@David Austin That raccoon dog story was a ridiculous contrived attempt to distract by the same unethical and corrupted and compromised scientists, right at the same time as the lab created hypothesis is released by two U.S. government agencies. Just listening to their fictional account makes one wonder, how far will they will stoop to push the fake natural origin hypothesis? Let's just address the absurdity of the serendipity of finding the alleged smoking gun on a Chinese CDC web site. Was this data just waiting for someone to interpret for over two years? If this was in fact from the Wuhan seafood market, why did no one at the Chinese CDC analyze the data for over 2 years? And why would the Chinese CDC immediately delete the data as soon as this group of of cover-up artists, asked if they could analyze the data? Do you think that the Chinese CDC was scared that the natural origin conspiracy could possibly be supported and they quickly hid the data? But most obvious of all, was the choice to publish their "findings" in the Atlantic magazine. A magazine well known for publishing spurious stories that can't be verified and usually are proven false and based on zero reliable facts. What is even more disappointing is seeing so many scientist act so gullible and not question another obvious unverifiable conspiracy theory using very dubious data.
No. Not at all. Essentially irrelevant. raccoon dog DNA fragments and SARS-2 RNA fragments were purported to be found on some of the environmental sample swabs collected in early January 2020 ACCORDING TO a post made by THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT which was quickly taken down (within a day I believe). Pretty much the only (ostensible) data/information they have ever released (other than the viral genome) and it can be used to spin the narrative toward Zoonosis again; yet if it were later discovered SARS-2 was in fact a lab leak then they have plausible deniability because the “evidence” here could well just be fragments of raccoon dog DNA and fragments of SARS-2 RNA that never existed in the animals, just deposited on the same (or nearby) surfaces (ie it doesn’t tell us that any non-human animals were infected. And they release it 2 years after the fact and quickly take it down. If it were genuine, they would have released it immediately because it tends to exculpate them (at least in some people’s minds) from what would be one of history’s greatest disasters. It’s all very convenient. Not plausibly genuine. But even if it were genuine, it wouldn’t prove anything, just place a hair on the scale in favor of Zoonosis.
😁😁😁 Wikipedia Alina Chan: "Chan became known during the COVID-19 pandemic for co-authoring a preprint claiming the virus was "pre-adapted" to humans and suggesting COVID-19 could have escaped from a laboratory.[2][4] The preprint was not accepted or published by any scientific journals, but received a significant reception in the popular press.[2] The reaction of virologists and other specialists to Chan's hypothesis has been largely, but not exclusively, negative. The New York Times noted in October 2021 that Chan's view has been "widely disputed by other scientists", but some have commended her willingness to advance alternative hypotheses in the face of controversy.[5] Jonathan Eisen of UC Davis praised Chan for raising the lab-origin discussion, but said her views remain conjecture, as not enough disease outbreaks have been traced in enough molecular detail to know what is normal, noting also that the virus continues to change and adapt.[2] Sixteen months after Chan's preprint was shared online, a scientific review article published in Cell described the pre-adaptation theory as "lacking validity.""
"These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead they exposed its weaknesses" LA Times 11/15/2021 Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has become one of the leading exponents of the hypothesis that the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Matt Ridley, a much-published science writer and member of the British House of Lords, emerged as a leading climate change denier with a provocative Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2014. The book they joined forces to write, “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,” presents the case for the lab-leak hypothesis, presumably with the secondary goal of establishing the authors as the preeminent truth-tellers on the topic. (The book’s epilogue is titled “Truth Will Out,” a line from “The Merchant of Venice.”) “Viral” comes to bookstores amid a wave of hype. Its publisher describes it as a “uniquely insightful book” in which the authors come “tantalizingly close to a shaft that leads to the light” about the pandemic’s origins. In reality, however, “Viral” is a laboratory-perfect example of how not to write about a scientific issue. The authors rely less on the scientists doing the painstaking work to unearth the virus’ origin than on self-described sleuths who broadcast their dubious claims, sometimes anonymously, on social media. In the end, Chan and Ridley spotlight all the shortcomings of the hypothesis they set out to defend. As Chan and Ridley acknowledge, determining the origin of the virus technically known as SARS-CoV-2 (or SARS2, for short) is of paramount importance to humanity. “If we do not find out how this pandemic began,” they write, “we are ill-equipped to know when, where and how the next pandemic may start.” Yet if the authors were truly concerned with the origin of COVID-19, they would give proper due to the prevailing scientific judgment about it: that COVID was “zoonotic,” spilling over from infected animals to humans via natural contact the way most viruses known to science have reached humankind. As virologists reported this summer, the emergence of SARS2 bears unmistakable signatures of those prior zoonotic events. Chan and Ridley, however, pay insufficient attention to the scientific consensus, or to the significant research findings around which it has coalesced.
This virus may of started back in March 2019. Because some people in Wales was having a Continuous Cough and a very high temperature. Me and my daughter had a Continuous Cough an SD my daughter had it first a Continuous Cough and a temperature was 39.6. with 3 days I had a Continuous Cough and my temperature was 39.8. my daughter at to go to a A&E and she had chest infection. I had it and I had steroids tablets and inhalers and antibiotics I was ill with my asthma in the coming months until I had pneumonia with a bacterial infection called Streptococcus in December 2019 and in 2020 march I had influenza with another bacterial infection so I had antibiotics again. Since this had started. I have very bad tiredness and poor concentration and my Crohn's disease as been bad since I had this Continuous Cough. I recently had Avery bad could and a green muck from my nose. My ear tubes are block in both ears of course you can.
Great video and only 176 views . Thats okay. This video is caught in the middle. Technical videos like this will be hard for the rest to follow and for the others this is not technical enough. They would much rather get there info from scientific papers.
“Are you troubled by the transparency?” “No I am not” Seriously?
Flip it around. (Suppose) the virology lab is North Carolina is suspected to be the epicenter for release of a contagion. Seriously believe the US government will allow foreign governments and foreign investigators into one of our own labs? To root around to their heart's content? After a wacko Chinese leader Trumpisan promulgates a wild conspiracy theory that the US Lab is culpable? And we're gonna be "transparent" about it? I kinda doubt it.
Also, Dr. Linfa Wang personally knows and worked with the lead virologist at the Wuhan Lab (altho I think Wang is actually Singoporean). He's got an inside scoop and he's not "troubled by the transparency" because he's knows the people involved and the lab involved and he sees no reason to doubt her integrity and truthfullness. I find that pretty plausible testimony myself.
So I'm not inclined to take your "seriously?" seriously.
You’ve ignored so much other information available in the public domain. The probability of sarscov2 emerging from the natural domain without any laboratory intervention is remote.
Yeah they ignored the conspiracy theories and wild misinformation and stuck to the science.
Four experts who are not agreeing with each other "ignored so much other information available in the public domain" ... wow. Did you take the time to listen or the conspiracy theories run deep into your brain and can't be moved aside for one hour?
Serial passage thru humanized mice is what created covid 19
No, you weren’t listening to the video then or may be exhibiting confirmation bias.
No, what you are talking about is called disinformation. 😂
Thanks for taking the initiative. This is the exactly the type of discussion we should be seeing on a wide variety of Covid-19 topics.
@@desmondpun1773 lol you're just another chinese bot! You've posted the same comment on multiple videos and this really shows that you're a part of the propaganda campaign run by China.
@@desmondpun1773 yeah yeah ofcourse
Lock up Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak
And?
There are seven biiolabs in Wuhan that had BLS2 labs
18:00 collecting bats some go to the lab some goes to the market to make some money. However the rare animal research paper that was going on prior to the outbreak said they did not see bats But this was not a 7/24 surveillance
And any current administration involved in the eco health alliance.
Baric and Daszac were in direct competition with XI at the WIV until the Obama administration shut them down. It is possible that after that Fauci used Daszac to try to keep an eye on the WIV who were going full steam ahead on god knows what. Their involvement in the WIV was minuscule in comparison to the CCP budget for the lab, and at a minimum very embarrassing in retrospect. All kinds of political, national security and perception issues have contributed to the lack of transparency around their roles.
could it really have evolved that quickly jumping to multiple species at the market from a single exposure within a single week (typical animal's stay at market)?
So good to finally have a proper and fair discussion from a wide variety of sources. This video shows the case for lab leak is at least as likely as natural spillover if not more. It also highlights the alarming lack of transparency from the American EcoHealth Alliance, DAPRA, the University of North Carolina, the Chinese government and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It's not a good look when governments, universities, NGOs and labs refuse to release relevant and crucial data in the midst of the biggest pandemic in living memory that directly relates to that pandemic.
There are Patents for Corona virus including 19. The patent process requires the virus not be naturally occurring. After 19 evolutions the virus certainly is not natural any more. In January of 2020 Lysol spray listed Corona viruses as something the spray kills. Another patent that states it kills patented corona viruses. Currently Three major countries have called a halt to corona virus protocols because they are seeing results that call for that.
This comment didn't age well with the recent publication
@@tomahawkx188 This recent publication is not accepted by many epidemiologists including the Taiwanese CDC. Therefore the cause of the epidemic is still an open question and far from settled science
@@gabeshepperd these recent publications. There are at least three
@@tomahawkx188 Yes and there are more than three that dispute them
I thought cases predated the wet market by a few weeks.
They did, and after testing 15,000 animals, no link has been found. These people are idiots
Staff from the WIV likely got infected way back in November, according to intel
No, the earliest were found to be centered around the market.
This was a very important and interesting discussion. I think Doc.Chan ultimately has a point, with the current info we could debate 24/7 and no definitive proof either side will emerge. What we need is a proper investigation with real access, data, emails, records...as well as more analysis of the species at the market. That's the only way we could have new data and move forward in the discussion. But if we continuously have to rely on leaks to discover stuff, it does nothing but undermine trust in the scientific institutions. Another thing - why has nobody raised the point of EcoHealth Alliance sampling bat viruses in Laos as well? It also was in one of the leaked docs. Sorry, too little transparency from that organization.
"These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead they exposed its weaknesses" LA Times 11/15/2021
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has become one of the leading exponents of the hypothesis that the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Matt Ridley, a much-published science writer and member of the British House of Lords, emerged as a leading climate change denier with a provocative Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2014.
The book they joined forces to write, “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,” presents the case for the lab-leak hypothesis, presumably with the secondary goal of establishing the authors as the preeminent truth-tellers on the topic. (The book’s epilogue is titled “Truth Will Out,” a line from “The Merchant of Venice.”)
“Viral” comes to bookstores amid a wave of hype. Its publisher describes it as a “uniquely insightful book” in which the authors come “tantalizingly close to a shaft that leads to the light” about the pandemic’s origins.
In reality, however, “Viral” is a laboratory-perfect example of how not to write about a scientific issue. The authors rely less on the scientists doing the painstaking work to unearth the virus’ origin than on self-described sleuths who broadcast their dubious claims, sometimes anonymously, on social media. In the end, Chan and Ridley spotlight all the shortcomings of the hypothesis they set out to defend.
As Chan and Ridley acknowledge, determining the origin of the virus technically known as SARS-CoV-2 (or SARS2, for short) is of paramount importance to humanity. “If we do not find out how this pandemic began,” they write, “we are ill-equipped to know when, where and how the next pandemic may start.”
Yet if the authors were truly concerned with the origin of COVID-19, they would give proper due to the prevailing scientific judgment about it: that COVID was “zoonotic,” spilling over from infected animals to humans via natural contact the way most viruses known to science have reached humankind. As virologists reported this summer, the emergence of SARS2 bears unmistakable signatures of those prior zoonotic events. Chan and Ridley, however, pay insufficient attention to the scientific consensus, or to the significant research findings around which it has coalesced.
The hypothesis that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the same city where the pandemic first emerged, was initially championed in 2020 by ideologues in the State Department under then-President Trump. For them, blaming a pandemic on the Chinese government and its laboratories served the dual purposes of scoring points against a geopolitical adversary and distracting attention from the Trump administration’s incompetent response.
In its original form, the theory held that the Chinese deliberately created the virus as a biological weapon. Over time, it devolved into a claim that the virus originated in experiments to enhance the infectivity of microbes being studied in the lab (so-called gain-of-function experiments) - and ultimately to the proposition that researchers at the institute unwittingly became infected while doing fieldwork and carried the virus into the institute, from which it escaped through inattention. Blaming the Chinese government for the pandemic has remained the one unchanging element of the hypothesis.
No evidence whatsoever has ever been produced for any of these versions. All that remains is an argument based on unsupported conjecture and the absence of evidence: Why don’t we know more about the work at the Wuhan Institute, unless the Chinese government is hiding its guilt?
It’s true that the Chinese government has obstructed investigations focused on the virology lab, but basing a conspiracy theory on government secrecy is a dead end. The Chinese are secretive about all things, and in any case, there isn’t a government on Earth, including the U.S., that welcomes snooping into its operations with the probable goal of laying blame.
The authors make much of the location of the virology institute in the city where the outbreak was identified. Lab-leak theorists call this “circumstantial evidence,” but it’s not much of a circumstance. Wuhan is a metropolis of more than 9 million, comparable to New York City or Los Angeles, and a major transit and trade crossroads for southeastern China. In Wuhan and its environs, interactions between consumers and animals being sold at so-called wet markets are common.
It’s true that dangerous microbes have escaped from research labs in the past, though none have triggered a pandemic. But that doesn’t warrant the conclusion that the same thing happened in Wuhan, especially with scientific findings weighing heavily in favor of a zoonotic spillover.
“Viral” is built on vague innuendo, dressed up with assertions that may strike laypeople as plausible but have long since been debunked by experienced virologists. An entire chapter, for example, is devoted to the “furin cleavage site,” a feature of the virus’ structure through which the enzyme furin makes the spikes on its surface - which it uses to penetrate and infect healthy cells - more effective.
The furin site was originally described by lab-leak advocates as so unusual that it could have been placed there only by humans. Virologists have since determined that the feature is not all that rare in viruses similar to SARS2, and in any case, it could have emerged through natural evolutionary processes well known to experts. Chan and Ridley place a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose gloss on these findings, writing that if the site “proves to have been inserted artificially, it confirms that the virus was in a laboratory and was altered. ... If, on the other hand, the furin cleavage site proves to be natural, it still says nothing about where the virus came from.” Why write about it at all, then?
Contrary to the curiosity-piquing subtitle, the authors don’t tell us much that is illuminating about how virologists actually search for the origins of new viruses. They don’t appear to have spent much time, if any, watching experts at work in the lab. At least that might have been interesting as an explication of scientific methods. Instead, what Chan and Ridley have done is place a conspiracy theory between hardcovers to masquerade as sober scientific inquiry.
Spoiler alert: Near the end of their book, Chan and Ridley acknowledge that they have conducted a wild goose chase. “The reader may want to know what the authors of this book think happened,” they write. “Of course, we do not know for sure. ... We have tried to lay out the evidence and follow it wherever it leads, but it has not led us to a definite conclusion.” After 400-odd pages of argument, learning that the authors don’t even emerge with the courage of their own convictions may leave readers feeling cheated.
That points to the chief unanswered question raised by “Viral”: Who thought this book was necessary at this point in time? In virological and epidemiological terms, the search for the origin of COVID-19 is in its infancy. Experts in those fields know that the critical links, the original animal source and the intermediate species that may have been the direct transmitter to humans, may never be identified; similar inquiries have taken years, and some have never reached a conclusion.
The lab-leak theory, if proved, would point to the need to tighten biosecurity at laboratories all over the world. The zoonotic theory would remind us that human interactions with wildlife, a common occurrence in rural China, need to be closely regulated. The shame of “Viral” is that it promotes a groundless theory that threatens to lead policymakers, as well as members of the public, down the wrong road, to humankind’s enduring detriment.
Excellent points!!
The early cases being clustered around the Wuhan Market is, if not definitive, at least highly suggestive of natural origin while the lab leak hypothesis has no such positive evidence.
Dr. Chan’s main line of argument talked about to lack of evidence she did not point to any of the evidence we do have but to hypothetical evidence we don’t have *which could point either way*.
If there’s known evidence that points one way, and the unknown evidence that could point either way then it’s silly to postulate the un evidenced side is more likely.
e😢
Appreciate this content. The view count is baffling considering the relevance of the panel and topic. Alina is sharp, on-topic, and objective. Michael Worobey should be commended for furthering this conversation. Wang has a lot of experience but seemed incapable of having an opinion on China's lack of transparency. Would have liked to hear more from Jesse. Thanks.
"On topic"?!!! Jesus H. CHRIST!!!
😮😮😮😮😀
I had to sign in to Facebook to see this live. Thanks for the upload!
Here’s my summary: while the lab leak hypothesis is entirely possible it’s not likely, and that based on the evidence we have now, the zoonotic origin hypothesis is stronger and more likely. While this could change with new evidence, so far it has not. This is the most reasonable, nonpartisan summation anyone can make after listening to these brilliant researchers.
What if the evidence for a lab leak is being intentionally covered up? That people like Fauci and Dazsak are fighting so hard to obfuscate and cover up a potential lab leak tells me they suspect they might be held accountable for funding the research that led to the outbreak. Many in power desperately need it to be zoological origin, while those with access aren't being forthcoming with evidence for lab leak. That should tell us a lot about probable origin.
Absolute nonsense.
25:00 Laos study shows that 5recombination events got us to SARS-CoV-2 except it's missing the furin site
Patents don't lie, it points right back to the people who filed them and when it was filed.
18:00 collecting bats some go to the lab some goes to the market to make some money. However the rare animal research paper that was going on prior to the outbreak said they did not see bats But this was not a 7/24 surveillance
Pivotal moment? when Alina Chan asks Linfa Wang who authorized the inclusion of the Furin Cleavage Site.
Wikipedia: Alina Chan - Chan became known during the COVID-19 pandemic for co-authoring a preprint claiming the virus was "pre-adapted" to humans and suggesting COVID-19 could have escaped from a laboratory.[2][4] The preprint was not accepted or published by any scientific journals, but received a significant reception in the popular press.[2]
The reaction of virologists and other specialists to Chan's hypothesis has been largely, but not exclusively, negative. The New York Times noted in October 2021 that Chan's view has been "widely disputed by other scientists", but some have commended her willingness to advance alternative hypotheses in the face of controversy.[5] Jonathan Eisen of UC Davis praised Chan for raising the lab-origin discussion, but said her views remain conjecture, as not enough disease outbreaks have been traced in enough molecular detail to know what is normal, noting also that the virus continues to change and adapt.[2] Sixteen months after Chan's preprint was shared online, a scientific review article published in Cell described the pre-adaptation theory as "lacking validity."
"These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead they exposed its weaknesses" LA Times 11/15/2021
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has become one of the leading exponents of the hypothesis that the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Matt Ridley, a much-published science writer and member of the British House of Lords, emerged as a leading climate change denier with a provocative Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2014.
The book they joined forces to write, “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,” presents the case for the lab-leak hypothesis, presumably with the secondary goal of establishing the authors as the preeminent truth-tellers on the topic. (The book’s epilogue is titled “Truth Will Out,” a line from “The Merchant of Venice.”)
“Viral” comes to bookstores amid a wave of hype. Its publisher describes it as a “uniquely insightful book” in which the authors come “tantalizingly close to a shaft that leads to the light” about the pandemic’s origins.
In reality, however, “Viral” is a laboratory-perfect example of how not to write about a scientific issue. The authors rely less on the scientists doing the painstaking work to unearth the virus’ origin than on self-described sleuths who broadcast their dubious claims, sometimes anonymously, on social media. In the end, Chan and Ridley spotlight all the shortcomings of the hypothesis they set out to defend.
As Chan and Ridley acknowledge, determining the origin of the virus technically known as SARS-CoV-2 (or SARS2, for short) is of paramount importance to humanity. “If we do not find out how this pandemic began,” they write, “we are ill-equipped to know when, where and how the next pandemic may start.”
Yet if the authors were truly concerned with the origin of COVID-19, they would give proper due to the prevailing scientific judgment about it: that COVID was “zoonotic,” spilling over from infected animals to humans via natural contact the way most viruses known to science have reached humankind. As virologists reported this summer, the emergence of SARS2 bears unmistakable signatures of those prior zoonotic events. Chan and Ridley, however, pay insufficient attention to the scientific consensus, or to the significant research findings around which it has coalesced.
The hypothesis that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the same city where the pandemic first emerged, was initially championed in 2020 by ideologues in the State Department under then-President Trump. For them, blaming a pandemic on the Chinese government and its laboratories served the dual purposes of scoring points against a geopolitical adversary and distracting attention from the Trump administration’s incompetent response.
In its original form, the theory held that the Chinese deliberately created the virus as a biological weapon. Over time, it devolved into a claim that the virus originated in experiments to enhance the infectivity of microbes being studied in the lab (so-called gain-of-function experiments) - and ultimately to the proposition that researchers at the institute unwittingly became infected while doing fieldwork and carried the virus into the institute, from which it escaped through inattention. Blaming the Chinese government for the pandemic has remained the one unchanging element of the hypothesis.
No evidence whatsoever has ever been produced for any of these versions. All that remains is an argument based on unsupported conjecture and the absence of evidence: Why don’t we know more about the work at the Wuhan Institute, unless the Chinese government is hiding its guilt?
It’s true that the Chinese government has obstructed investigations focused on the virology lab, but basing a conspiracy theory on government secrecy is a dead end. The Chinese are secretive about all things, and in any case, there isn’t a government on Earth, including the U.S., that welcomes snooping into its operations with the probable goal of laying blame.
The authors make much of the location of the virology institute in the city where the outbreak was identified. Lab-leak theorists call this “circumstantial evidence,” but it’s not much of a circumstance. Wuhan is a metropolis of more than 9 million, comparable to New York City or Los Angeles, and a major transit and trade crossroads for southeastern China. In Wuhan and its environs, interactions between consumers and animals being sold at so-called wet markets are common.
It’s true that dangerous microbes have escaped from research labs in the past, though none have triggered a pandemic. But that doesn’t warrant the conclusion that the same thing happened in Wuhan, especially with scientific findings weighing heavily in favor of a zoonotic spillover.
“Viral” is built on vague innuendo, dressed up with assertions that may strike laypeople as plausible but have long since been debunked by experienced virologists. An entire chapter, for example, is devoted to the “furin cleavage site,” a feature of the virus’ structure through which the enzyme furin makes the spikes on its surface - which it uses to penetrate and infect healthy cells - more effective.
The furin site was originally described by lab-leak advocates as so unusual that it could have been placed there only by humans. Virologists have since determined that the feature is not all that rare in viruses similar to SARS2, and in any case, it could have emerged through natural evolutionary processes well known to experts. Chan and Ridley place a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose gloss on these findings, writing that if the site “proves to have been inserted artificially, it confirms that the virus was in a laboratory and was altered. ... If, on the other hand, the furin cleavage site proves to be natural, it still says nothing about where the virus came from.” Why write about it at all, then?
Contrary to the curiosity-piquing subtitle, the authors don’t tell us much that is illuminating about how virologists actually search for the origins of new viruses. They don’t appear to have spent much time, if any, watching experts at work in the lab. At least that might have been interesting as an explication of scientific methods. Instead, what Chan and Ridley have done is place a conspiracy theory between hardcovers to masquerade as sober scientific inquiry.
Spoiler alert: Near the end of their book, Chan and Ridley acknowledge that they have conducted a wild goose chase. “The reader may want to know what the authors of this book think happened,” they write. “Of course, we do not know for sure. ... We have tried to lay out the evidence and follow it wherever it leads, but it has not led us to a definite conclusion.” After 400-odd pages of argument, learning that the authors don’t even emerge with the courage of their own convictions may leave readers feeling cheated.
That points to the chief unanswered question raised by “Viral”: Who thought this book was necessary at this point in time? In virological and epidemiological terms, the search for the origin of COVID-19 is in its infancy. Experts in those fields know that the critical links, the original animal source and the intermediate species that may have been the direct transmitter to humans, may never be identified; similar inquiries have taken years, and some have never reached a conclusion.
The lab-leak theory, if proved, would point to the need to tighten biosecurity at laboratories all over the world. The zoonotic theory would remind us that human interactions with wildlife, a common occurrence in rural China, need to be closely regulated. The shame of “Viral” is that it promotes a groundless theory that threatens to lead policymakers, as well as members of the public, down the wrong road, to humankind’s enduring detriment.
Linfa showed some serious dodging skills a few times but that one in particular was telling.
Furin cleavage site: a complete red herring. It is present in nature INCLUDING some other Corona viruses.
It's good to see this sort of debate, and disappointing to see there are only 2000 views a month and a half later. When I say it's great to see this debate, I'm not implying that these people have equal credibility in my eyes. Alina Chan and Jesse Bloom are facing the obvious, and being about as forthright as they can be (especially Chan), but also know that discretion is the better part of valour in modern institutional science.
As for the other two, well....
I find it particularly galling that Michael Worobey insinuates that he was in large part responsible for bringing the lab leak theory back into mainstream discussion (via the Science letter in mid-May), only to regret it now. Nice try at getting some "honest broker" credit, then play the converted believer role. Problem is, the lab leak theory was already well and truly back before that letter.
While I don't doubt that most of the individual signatories had good intentions (both Bloom and Chan were among them, for starters), its public impact was insignificant compared to the Nicholas Wade article which preceded it. And Wade's article was in large part just getting a wider audience for things which had been public knowledge (even if buried by most media) for a year or so in many cases.
Update: I just got the Audiobook of Viral. I didn't realise just how long Alina Chan has been fighting the good fight. A real beacon of integrity in a field which has done itself huge reputational damage by excluding the lab leak theory on the most transparently ridiculous grounds.
Alina Chan is just the kind of spokesperson the world needs on this. Her integrity and personal motivation is exemplary. I think her book is the best so far, although Elaine Dewar’s is good as well, Shari Clarksons is more journalistic and political but doggedly researched. The relationship between Matt Ridley and Alina is heartwarming as well.
Than you Jim for your comment.
I will try to listen to her book now as well.
Nicholas Wade's article was debunked in the video "Fact-checking Nicholas Wade's claims about a 'man-made' virus". Meanwhile, Chan is authoring books with Matt Ridley, the same non-expert contrarian who got the origin of the HIV/AIDS pandemic wrong and had to be corrected on that by Worobey. Also, Worobey continues to publish peer-reviewed research improving our understanding of the origins of the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic, just as he did on the HIV/AIDS pandemic, while Chan doesn't. She's busying profiting off book sales outside of peer review.
"The origin of AIDS", by Matt Ridley
"Viral: The search for the origin of COVID-19", by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan
"Contaminated polio vaccine theory refuted"
"The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2"
"The origins of SARS-CoV-2: A critical review"
"The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic"
"The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2"
@@bacchusevolution7875 Maybe the clown that made the "Fact-checking Nicholas Wade's claims…” video is just stupid, but my money is on him being deliberately disingenuous (the fact that he sounds just like John Pilger definitely doesn’t help). Admittedly, I only made it to the 12 minute mark, so maybe he saved an honest criticism for last, but my BS quota for the day was exceeded by then. I’ll pick just two idiocies to dump on:
1 - Contrary to Potholer’s dissembling, the Nature paper was effectively asserting the lack of optimal binding of the spike protein to receptors was a sign of natural evolution rather than lab creation (fair enough), and extending that (by implication) to rule out the virus being assembled in a lab from bits of natural viruses (a sleight of hand).
Potholer himself then boosts this transparent non-sequitur by his touching account of how the CCP’s virologist would have been working i.e. trying to work out the minimum number of changes necessary to most reach a more infectious / virulent virus. That would be how they work when trying to understand how an existing virus might evolve in nature into a dangerous human pathogen. It will almost certainly NOT be how they work if their main concern is quickly and efficiently assembling very nasty pathogens for, say, experimental bioweapons.
2 - Potholer’s dwelling on, and deliberate misinterpretation of Wade’s phrase “DNA backbones are quite easy to make”. He appeals to Robert Gary, who allegedly said that it would be "impossible" to make a backbone. Say what? But aren’t there already a number of said backbones in use? How can this be if they are impossible to make? OK so scratch one highly invested expert.
Could it be that Wade was not referring to anything more difficult than doing what has clearly already been done many times in the past? Perhaps doing something that the guy from Benhur Lee University said might be achieved in “months to years”, although what exactly is being discussed there seems to be much more conditional than Potholer lets on. A pity Potholer doesn’t let us see more of the actual context in that email.
But even if we assume Potholer is presenting things in good faith, a process requiring months in a lab can quite reasonably be described as “quite easy”, if it is straight forward. Perhaps somewhat tedious, and expensive, but eminently doable. Building a house is “quite easy”, but requires similar timeframes. Wade didn’t say “trivial”. The fact that Potholer makes such a big deal of it is a tell that he’s got nothing.
Wade debunked? - not by that sniffy Pilger wanna be. As for the ad homs on Chan by you, well, you know what you are.
Nicolas Wade is not a qualified Scientist. He's a journalist with only a BA. He's a known "Race Realist" and a crackpot.
Good to hear a balanced and 'transparent' discussion on this controversial topic... have many more.
30:00 Lab is not off the table because we know the furin site can be dropped into the virus Furin sites don't like being bats and thus it came from the lab or the last combination event occurred in humans with the adding of the furin site
What are the chances of this furin cleavage site forming naturally, please give examples of past viruses.
@@Zara-tt7rh th-cam.com/video/S4k3aLjO4zw/w-d-xo.html. 1000 years ago
@@desmondpun1773 genomic science puts origin in Wuhan
@@johnfarmer3506 he is a Chinese bot
53:00 Alina Chan makes a great point if the cleavage site was an insert they would have dropped a cleavage site in that they observered and knew worked ie.. had fitnesss.
Wikipedia: Alina Chan "Chan became known during the COVID-19 pandemic for co-authoring a preprint claiming the virus was "pre-adapted" to humans and suggesting COVID-19 could have escaped from a laboratory.[2][4] The preprint was not accepted or published by any scientific journals, but received a significant reception in the popular press.[2]
The reaction of virologists and other specialists to Chan's hypothesis has been largely, but not exclusively, negative. The New York Times noted in October 2021 that Chan's view has been "widely disputed by other scientists", but some have commended her willingness to advance alternative hypotheses in the face of controversy.[5] Jonathan Eisen of UC Davis praised Chan for raising the lab-origin discussion, but said her views remain conjecture, as not enough disease outbreaks have been traced in enough molecular detail to know what is normal, noting also that the virus continues to change and adapt.[2] Sixteen months after Chan's preprint was shared online, a scientific review article published in Cell described the pre-adaptation theory as "lacking validity."
@@KevinWayne True, but the Covid furin site was already patented by Moderna, coincidence? Maybe But China still has not allowed this conspiracy to go away. They just won't release any info
"These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead they exposed its weaknesses" LA Times 11/15/2021
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has become one of the leading exponents of the hypothesis that the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Matt Ridley, a much-published science writer and member of the British House of Lords, emerged as a leading climate change denier with a provocative Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2014.
The book they joined forces to write, “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,” presents the case for the lab-leak hypothesis, presumably with the secondary goal of establishing the authors as the preeminent truth-tellers on the topic. (The book’s epilogue is titled “Truth Will Out,” a line from “The Merchant of Venice.”)
“Viral” comes to bookstores amid a wave of hype. Its publisher describes it as a “uniquely insightful book” in which the authors come “tantalizingly close to a shaft that leads to the light” about the pandemic’s origins.
In reality, however, “Viral” is a laboratory-perfect example of how not to write about a scientific issue. The authors rely less on the scientists doing the painstaking work to unearth the virus’ origin than on self-described sleuths who broadcast their dubious claims, sometimes anonymously, on social media. In the end, Chan and Ridley spotlight all the shortcomings of the hypothesis they set out to defend.
As Chan and Ridley acknowledge, determining the origin of the virus technically known as SARS-CoV-2 (or SARS2, for short) is of paramount importance to humanity. “If we do not find out how this pandemic began,” they write, “we are ill-equipped to know when, where and how the next pandemic may start.”
Yet if the authors were truly concerned with the origin of COVID-19, they would give proper due to the prevailing scientific judgment about it: that COVID was “zoonotic,” spilling over from infected animals to humans via natural contact the way most viruses known to science have reached humankind. As virologists reported this summer, the emergence of SARS2 bears unmistakable signatures of those prior zoonotic events. Chan and Ridley, however, pay insufficient attention to the scientific consensus, or to the significant research findings around which it has coalesced.
The hypothesis that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the same city where the pandemic first emerged, was initially championed in 2020 by ideologues in the State Department under then-President Trump. For them, blaming a pandemic on the Chinese government and its laboratories served the dual purposes of scoring points against a geopolitical adversary and distracting attention from the Trump administration’s incompetent response.
In its original form, the theory held that the Chinese deliberately created the virus as a biological weapon. Over time, it devolved into a claim that the virus originated in experiments to enhance the infectivity of microbes being studied in the lab (so-called gain-of-function experiments) - and ultimately to the proposition that researchers at the institute unwittingly became infected while doing fieldwork and carried the virus into the institute, from which it escaped through inattention. Blaming the Chinese government for the pandemic has remained the one unchanging element of the hypothesis.
No evidence whatsoever has ever been produced for any of these versions. All that remains is an argument based on unsupported conjecture and the absence of evidence: Why don’t we know more about the work at the Wuhan Institute, unless the Chinese government is hiding its guilt?
It’s true that the Chinese government has obstructed investigations focused on the virology lab, but basing a conspiracy theory on government secrecy is a dead end. The Chinese are secretive about all things, and in any case, there isn’t a government on Earth, including the U.S., that welcomes snooping into its operations with the probable goal of laying blame.
The authors make much of the location of the virology institute in the city where the outbreak was identified. Lab-leak theorists call this “circumstantial evidence,” but it’s not much of a circumstance. Wuhan is a metropolis of more than 9 million, comparable to New York City or Los Angeles, and a major transit and trade crossroads for southeastern China. In Wuhan and its environs, interactions between consumers and animals being sold at so-called wet markets are common.
It’s true that dangerous microbes have escaped from research labs in the past, though none have triggered a pandemic. But that doesn’t warrant the conclusion that the same thing happened in Wuhan, especially with scientific findings weighing heavily in favor of a zoonotic spillover.
“Viral” is built on vague innuendo, dressed up with assertions that may strike laypeople as plausible but have long since been debunked by experienced virologists. An entire chapter, for example, is devoted to the “furin cleavage site,” a feature of the virus’ structure through which the enzyme furin makes the spikes on its surface - which it uses to penetrate and infect healthy cells - more effective.
The furin site was originally described by lab-leak advocates as so unusual that it could have been placed there only by humans. Virologists have since determined that the feature is not all that rare in viruses similar to SARS2, and in any case, it could have emerged through natural evolutionary processes well known to experts. Chan and Ridley place a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose gloss on these findings, writing that if the site “proves to have been inserted artificially, it confirms that the virus was in a laboratory and was altered. ... If, on the other hand, the furin cleavage site proves to be natural, it still says nothing about where the virus came from.” Why write about it at all, then?
Contrary to the curiosity-piquing subtitle, the authors don’t tell us much that is illuminating about how virologists actually search for the origins of new viruses. They don’t appear to have spent much time, if any, watching experts at work in the lab. At least that might have been interesting as an explication of scientific methods. Instead, what Chan and Ridley have done is place a conspiracy theory between hardcovers to masquerade as sober scientific inquiry.
Spoiler alert: Near the end of their book, Chan and Ridley acknowledge that they have conducted a wild goose chase. “The reader may want to know what the authors of this book think happened,” they write. “Of course, we do not know for sure. ... We have tried to lay out the evidence and follow it wherever it leads, but it has not led us to a definite conclusion.” After 400-odd pages of argument, learning that the authors don’t even emerge with the courage of their own convictions may leave readers feeling cheated.
That points to the chief unanswered question raised by “Viral”: Who thought this book was necessary at this point in time? In virological and epidemiological terms, the search for the origin of COVID-19 is in its infancy. Experts in those fields know that the critical links, the original animal source and the intermediate species that may have been the direct transmitter to humans, may never be identified; similar inquiries have taken years, and some have never reached a conclusion.
The lab-leak theory, if proved, would point to the need to tighten biosecurity at laboratories all over the world. The zoonotic theory would remind us that human interactions with wildlife, a common occurrence in rural China, need to be closely regulated. The shame of “Viral” is that it promotes a groundless theory that threatens to lead policymakers, as well as members of the public, down the wrong road, to humankind’s enduring detriment.
Linfa Wang isn't being honest .he does not want to be transparent, this is the problem. Came here to get educated then won't be honest to the Americans.
Michael is lying too
@@erichhere he's playing safe
@@hemiacetal1331 LOL.
Exactly. And to all the people of the world who has suffered from C19.
Wang is lying and covering up for China, same with the DARPA proposal. It is good to see him in this video, so we can see how false and evil the Chinese actually can be. "But in the west you are guilty until your proven innocent, China is being treated so unfair". Well, mr Wang, China hasn't been transparent and remotely tried to show any signs of innocence. Yuck.
it was made by the usa, by ralph baric's team and used as a bioweapon against China but it blew back.
Losing affordable labor & bio-risk-tolerant research vendor like China is really bad for globalism. Making profits on government grants gathering potential deadly viruses from wild animals becomes so much more difficult. Such a blow to scientific progress!
First of all, very good debate! Thank you for sharing!
This gave very good information.
All agree that the Huanan market is a central place for the spread and is either a progenitor place (start of the spread in humans) or an amplification place (a “super spreader” event).
This result in two different paths for the virus to have spread.
1. A person at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was infected and either directly or indirectly infected one or more people at the Hunan Market. The people then infected a number of animals at the market.
2. An animal at the market infected other animals and one or more animals infected one or more humans, which then infected other humans.
Both are possible, we don’t have enough data to definitively rule,out one or the other.
But there is a difference in the likeliness.
There have been numerous zoonotic events historically, including SARS 1, Ebola, HIV etc. There have been lab leaks before, but very rarely of dangerous viruses and never of a completely new dangerous virus. (With the possible exception of Marburg, depending on if you consider that a lab leak or a zoonotic infection).
This is important since, as Alina stated, it informs us where we should focus our resources to prevent future events.
If we take this one step further, it’s comparatively easy to “plug” a lab leak. It very hard, almost impossible, to prevent a zoonotic event.
It seems like Alina in particular is proposing harder regulation of virus research. Although I consider it important to have adequate safety protocols in place, a harder regulation will likely have the exact opposite effect of what we want. It will make it harder and more costly to research viruses and prepare adequately for the next zoonotic event and the next pandemic, which will happen regardless of tight controls of lab work. History proves that beyond any doubt.
Alina Chan is a whistleblower. A very competent scientist ... nevertheless a personality with conspiratorial leanings.
Great conversation.
Someone pointed out that we should pray it was lab/research origin because the alternative is we have no way to mitigate the risk of the next pandemic.
How bout if we A. GET RID of the damn wet markets B. Stop going out and collecting random bat viruses from caves
@@presence5426 good point! Getting rid of wet markets in Asia would take as ome serious Draconian tendencies.
Alina Chan was fantastic.
The FOIA requested emails to/from Fauci, show a clear cover-up by Kristian Anderssen, Fauci and others.
Oh please.
Wikipedia Alina Chan: "Chan became known during the COVID-19 pandemic for co-authoring a preprint claiming the virus was "pre-adapted" to humans and suggesting COVID-19 could have escaped from a laboratory.[2][4] The preprint was not accepted or published by any scientific journals, but received a significant reception in the popular press.[2]
The reaction of virologists and other specialists to Chan's hypothesis has been largely, but not exclusively, negative. The New York Times noted in October 2021 that Chan's view has been "widely disputed by other scientists", but some have commended her willingness to advance alternative hypotheses in the face of controversy.[5] Jonathan Eisen of UC Davis praised Chan for raising the lab-origin discussion, but said her views remain conjecture, as not enough disease outbreaks have been traced in enough molecular detail to know what is normal, noting also that the virus continues to change and adapt.[2] Sixteen months after Chan's preprint was shared online, a scientific review article published in Cell described the pre-adaptation theory as "lacking validity.""
@Kevin Wayne 🤣🤣🤣
I thought you were quoting Wikipedia to make a statement as to the transparent and and sorry state of its political capture!
...but no, you seem to be cutting & pasting Wikipedia to somehow let me know - just in case I hadn't realised - that the establishment don't like what Chan has to say, and have an interest in covering up the origin of the pandemic.
I don't know if it's the case for you, but I can only see your reply in my notifications - not in the reply thread - this is TH-cam's algorithm censoring speech around this issue. It happens all the time.
The lengths you would have to go NOT to see this cover-up are so extreme, I can only assume you are aware, and have chosen to support the establishment censors.
"These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead they exposed its weaknesses" LA Times 11/15/2021
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has become one of the leading exponents of the hypothesis that the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Matt Ridley, a much-published science writer and member of the British House of Lords, emerged as a leading climate change denier with a provocative Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2014.
The book they joined forces to write, “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,” presents the case for the lab-leak hypothesis, presumably with the secondary goal of establishing the authors as the preeminent truth-tellers on the topic. (The book’s epilogue is titled “Truth Will Out,” a line from “The Merchant of Venice.”)
“Viral” comes to bookstores amid a wave of hype. Its publisher describes it as a “uniquely insightful book” in which the authors come “tantalizingly close to a shaft that leads to the light” about the pandemic’s origins.
In reality, however, “Viral” is a laboratory-perfect example of how not to write about a scientific issue. The authors rely less on the scientists doing the painstaking work to unearth the virus’ origin than on self-described sleuths who broadcast their dubious claims, sometimes anonymously, on social media. In the end, Chan and Ridley spotlight all the shortcomings of the hypothesis they set out to defend.
As Chan and Ridley acknowledge, determining the origin of the virus technically known as SARS-CoV-2 (or SARS2, for short) is of paramount importance to humanity. “If we do not find out how this pandemic began,” they write, “we are ill-equipped to know when, where and how the next pandemic may start.”
Yet if the authors were truly concerned with the origin of COVID-19, they would give proper due to the prevailing scientific judgment about it: that COVID was “zoonotic,” spilling over from infected animals to humans via natural contact the way most viruses known to science have reached humankind. As virologists reported this summer, the emergence of SARS2 bears unmistakable signatures of those prior zoonotic events. Chan and Ridley, however, pay insufficient attention to the scientific consensus, or to the significant research findings around which it has coalesced.
The hypothesis that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the same city where the pandemic first emerged, was initially championed in 2020 by ideologues in the State Department under then-President Trump. For them, blaming a pandemic on the Chinese government and its laboratories served the dual purposes of scoring points against a geopolitical adversary and distracting attention from the Trump administration’s incompetent response.
In its original form, the theory held that the Chinese deliberately created the virus as a biological weapon. Over time, it devolved into a claim that the virus originated in experiments to enhance the infectivity of microbes being studied in the lab (so-called gain-of-function experiments) - and ultimately to the proposition that researchers at the institute unwittingly became infected while doing fieldwork and carried the virus into the institute, from which it escaped through inattention. Blaming the Chinese government for the pandemic has remained the one unchanging element of the hypothesis.
No evidence whatsoever has ever been produced for any of these versions. All that remains is an argument based on unsupported conjecture and the absence of evidence: Why don’t we know more about the work at the Wuhan Institute, unless the Chinese government is hiding its guilt?
It’s true that the Chinese government has obstructed investigations focused on the virology lab, but basing a conspiracy theory on government secrecy is a dead end. The Chinese are secretive about all things, and in any case, there isn’t a government on Earth, including the U.S., that welcomes snooping into its operations with the probable goal of laying blame.
The authors make much of the location of the virology institute in the city where the outbreak was identified. Lab-leak theorists call this “circumstantial evidence,” but it’s not much of a circumstance. Wuhan is a metropolis of more than 9 million, comparable to New York City or Los Angeles, and a major transit and trade crossroads for southeastern China. In Wuhan and its environs, interactions between consumers and animals being sold at so-called wet markets are common.
It’s true that dangerous microbes have escaped from research labs in the past, though none have triggered a pandemic. But that doesn’t warrant the conclusion that the same thing happened in Wuhan, especially with scientific findings weighing heavily in favor of a zoonotic spillover.
“Viral” is built on vague innuendo, dressed up with assertions that may strike laypeople as plausible but have long since been debunked by experienced virologists. An entire chapter, for example, is devoted to the “furin cleavage site,” a feature of the virus’ structure through which the enzyme furin makes the spikes on its surface - which it uses to penetrate and infect healthy cells - more effective.
The furin site was originally described by lab-leak advocates as so unusual that it could have been placed there only by humans. Virologists have since determined that the feature is not all that rare in viruses similar to SARS2, and in any case, it could have emerged through natural evolutionary processes well known to experts. Chan and Ridley place a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose gloss on these findings, writing that if the site “proves to have been inserted artificially, it confirms that the virus was in a laboratory and was altered. ... If, on the other hand, the furin cleavage site proves to be natural, it still says nothing about where the virus came from.” Why write about it at all, then?
Contrary to the curiosity-piquing subtitle, the authors don’t tell us much that is illuminating about how virologists actually search for the origins of new viruses. They don’t appear to have spent much time, if any, watching experts at work in the lab. At least that might have been interesting as an explication of scientific methods. Instead, what Chan and Ridley have done is place a conspiracy theory between hardcovers to masquerade as sober scientific inquiry.
Spoiler alert: Near the end of their book, Chan and Ridley acknowledge that they have conducted a wild goose chase. “The reader may want to know what the authors of this book think happened,” they write. “Of course, we do not know for sure. ... We have tried to lay out the evidence and follow it wherever it leads, but it has not led us to a definite conclusion.” After 400-odd pages of argument, learning that the authors don’t even emerge with the courage of their own convictions may leave readers feeling cheated.
That points to the chief unanswered question raised by “Viral”: Who thought this book was necessary at this point in time? In virological and epidemiological terms, the search for the origin of COVID-19 is in its infancy. Experts in those fields know that the critical links, the original animal source and the intermediate species that may have been the direct transmitter to humans, may never be identified; similar inquiries have taken years, and some have never reached a conclusion.
The lab-leak theory, if proved, would point to the need to tighten biosecurity at laboratories all over the world. The zoonotic theory would remind us that human interactions with wildlife, a common occurrence in rural China, need to be closely regulated. The shame of “Viral” is that it promotes a groundless theory that threatens to lead policymakers, as well as members of the public, down the wrong road, to humankind’s enduring detriment.
Did we know at what tissue temperature did SARS COV2 better replicate?
At TWiV 659 at min29 virologist Christian Drosten suggest that SARS COV2 better replicate at very low tissue temperature.
Is it not possible that the pandemic started near the Hunan seafood market because it was a market, rather than anything to do with intermediate hosts?. Assuming a scenario where the first zoonotic spillover may have been Seattle, say, is it that surprising that a visitor from Seattle may have brought it to Wuhan, and the exponential outbreak occurred in a market? Any market could suffice, a clothes market for instance. The Hunan market may have been the vector, because any market could have been a candidate vector.
Why is no one challenging Michael on the fact that SARS COV2 cannot replicate in any of the animal species that were in the market?
Agreed. I will have to listen to the beginning but I believe the first panelist said that it was widespread in animals and that is well known. I was under the understanding that that was not the case.
@@edpiv2233 you're right, not s single animal has been found. Don't listen to these propagandists
I think you are factually incorrect. It is now accepted the virus can spread through many animals. If you don't accept this please cite reliable source. Here is mine pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33091230/
@@vvanderer Thankyou for the reference. Did you read and understand the abstract? It clearly states it is uncommon, no evidence it occurs naturally, except for rumours of two minks, and these infections were clearly forced and post pandemic, not pre pandemic. The search for the host intermediary species goes on and years of trying to find it in the Wuhan market species is still coming up empty. Thx
and only replicates in animals in the lab
Chinese government already ruled out Huanan market as the origin of Covid-19.
Yeah, from what I heard, early samples showed to be NOT related to the market. When the latest investigation team (without Daszak) asked for information about these earliest samples of Covid-19 in Wuhan, the Chinese refused to give them the samples.
Bravo, we need many more of these types of discussions. Challenging to match the technical acumen of the participants though. Alina was clearly the broadest and most informed. Linfa a good example of why affiliated researchers are against transparency. Not sure where Michael is coming from but his rudimentary chart proved Alina’s point, not his ;-). Jesse was at least open minded enough to not want to be grouped with Linfa.
I'm writing this reply with the unfair advantage of hindsight. Worobey just published "Dissecting the early COVID-19 cases in Wuhan", where he tries to reanimate the discredited "wet market" theory. I think I now know where he was coming from.
In signing the May Science letter, he was trying to position himself as an "honest broker" in the natural origin Vs lab leak debate. Unfortunately, I think he has about the same level of credibility in that role as Peter Daszak had leading the WHO mission, i.e. he's batting for the CCP.
@@jimwest63 In a somewhat strange and twisted way, I often feel like Daszak’s conscience might be the only way the truth will ever fully come out and be accepted by the majority of the world against the onslaught of CCP propaganda. There was just a mainstream media report about white tailed deer in Canada having Covid. This was a CCP bright shiny object a few months back before they realized Canadian deer aren’t domesticated and don’t really come in contact with people so they moved on to something else as the source. Most people thought it was a comedy sketch, fake news broadcast but for sure some people will believe it is a threat given all the bs we have been through. Noise drowns out the signal these days.
@@jimwest63 Take off the tinfoil hat.
@@KevinWayne Do they pay you to say moronic things, or does it just come naturally?
@@jimwest63 I think you'd better look in the mirror when you spew that one :D
The science is so complicated that I have no idea who to believe. On a level of personal intuition, Alina Chan comes across as extremely trustworthy, whereas Linfa Wang comes across as a snake.
100% agree. And thank you for commenting.
Wang doesn't seem to be bothered the slightest that the DARPA proposal was being covered up. And not being bothered that the Chinese government has been covering up and committing crimes to keep secret the information about the origins of the virus. It is not about being "Western" or Asian, as he refers it to, its about being a decent human being and not a lying snake.
That's do to your natural perceptions based on her because she's a woman. And possibly also your bias against LW because of his connections to WIV.
@@KevinWayne Or possibly because she's honest.
@@paulwally9007 LMAO. Think so, eh? Her co-author of the much-touted "Viral" is a known AIDS and CC Denialist. The LA Times did a thorough trashing: "These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead they exposed its weaknesses" 11/15/2021
@@KevinWayneWang seems shady as hell.
52:07 That is some great info. I had no idea that the Laos study had that info. Why could you not do a better graph I cant tell which viruses you are refering to so I can check the Laos study. But what I can see the top three viruses are very close to the PRRA furin cleavage site of T-CCT-CGG-CGG-GC. Also why is that not "technically a furin site"
It could also be that the LAOS viruses are evolved from SARS-CoV-2, since it also infects animals. The virus has run wild around the world. How does he no (tye guy who showed the sequence) this virus predates SARS-CoV-2?
@@pcuimac I dont think the Micro or phylogenetics would with stand that evolution you describe but it is a good thought.
@@alexcoventry1579 Not a biochemist either, but curious what your thoughts are on the underlying codons being statistically ‘human prevalent’ and generally not that common in bats. Alina touches on this briefly in her book, it seems kind of like giving the human cell a recipe it knows it has the ingredients for?
@@alexcoventry1579 It's a sentence or two in her book pg 212 in a section looking at the rare CGGCGG referring to the underlying codons for Arg, that were inserted are quite rare in Coronavirus genome but quite common in Human genomes. It is certainly statistical evidence against a natural recombination event involving the furin site from another coronavirus. Intuitively it would make for more efficient transcription in the molecular soup of a human cell than in a bat or 'codon optimisation'. Not every virologists smoking gun, but where there's smoke.....
@@NiceTriGuy "These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead they exposed its weaknesses" LA Times 11/15/2021
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has become one of the leading exponents of the hypothesis that the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Matt Ridley, a much-published science writer and member of the British House of Lords, emerged as a leading climate change denier with a provocative Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2014.
The book they joined forces to write, “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,” presents the case for the lab-leak hypothesis, presumably with the secondary goal of establishing the authors as the preeminent truth-tellers on the topic. (The book’s epilogue is titled “Truth Will Out,” a line from “The Merchant of Venice.”)
“Viral” comes to bookstores amid a wave of hype. Its publisher describes it as a “uniquely insightful book” in which the authors come “tantalizingly close to a shaft that leads to the light” about the pandemic’s origins.
In reality, however, “Viral” is a laboratory-perfect example of how not to write about a scientific issue. The authors rely less on the scientists doing the painstaking work to unearth the virus’ origin than on self-described sleuths who broadcast their dubious claims, sometimes anonymously, on social media. In the end, Chan and Ridley spotlight all the shortcomings of the hypothesis they set out to defend.
As Chan and Ridley acknowledge, determining the origin of the virus technically known as SARS-CoV-2 (or SARS2, for short) is of paramount importance to humanity. “If we do not find out how this pandemic began,” they write, “we are ill-equipped to know when, where and how the next pandemic may start.”
Yet if the authors were truly concerned with the origin of COVID-19, they would give proper due to the prevailing scientific judgment about it: that COVID was “zoonotic,” spilling over from infected animals to humans via natural contact the way most viruses known to science have reached humankind. As virologists reported this summer, the emergence of SARS2 bears unmistakable signatures of those prior zoonotic events. Chan and Ridley, however, pay insufficient attention to the scientific consensus, or to the significant research findings around which it has coalesced.
The hypothesis that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the same city where the pandemic first emerged, was initially championed in 2020 by ideologues in the State Department under then-President Trump. For them, blaming a pandemic on the Chinese government and its laboratories served the dual purposes of scoring points against a geopolitical adversary and distracting attention from the Trump administration’s incompetent response.
In its original form, the theory held that the Chinese deliberately created the virus as a biological weapon. Over time, it devolved into a claim that the virus originated in experiments to enhance the infectivity of microbes being studied in the lab (so-called gain-of-function experiments) - and ultimately to the proposition that researchers at the institute unwittingly became infected while doing fieldwork and carried the virus into the institute, from which it escaped through inattention. Blaming the Chinese government for the pandemic has remained the one unchanging element of the hypothesis.
No evidence whatsoever has ever been produced for any of these versions. All that remains is an argument based on unsupported conjecture and the absence of evidence: Why don’t we know more about the work at the Wuhan Institute, unless the Chinese government is hiding its guilt?
It’s true that the Chinese government has obstructed investigations focused on the virology lab, but basing a conspiracy theory on government secrecy is a dead end. The Chinese are secretive about all things, and in any case, there isn’t a government on Earth, including the U.S., that welcomes snooping into its operations with the probable goal of laying blame.
The authors make much of the location of the virology institute in the city where the outbreak was identified. Lab-leak theorists call this “circumstantial evidence,” but it’s not much of a circumstance. Wuhan is a metropolis of more than 9 million, comparable to New York City or Los Angeles, and a major transit and trade crossroads for southeastern China. In Wuhan and its environs, interactions between consumers and animals being sold at so-called wet markets are common.
It’s true that dangerous microbes have escaped from research labs in the past, though none have triggered a pandemic. But that doesn’t warrant the conclusion that the same thing happened in Wuhan, especially with scientific findings weighing heavily in favor of a zoonotic spillover.
“Viral” is built on vague innuendo, dressed up with assertions that may strike laypeople as plausible but have long since been debunked by experienced virologists. An entire chapter, for example, is devoted to the “furin cleavage site,” a feature of the virus’ structure through which the enzyme furin makes the spikes on its surface - which it uses to penetrate and infect healthy cells - more effective.
The furin site was originally described by lab-leak advocates as so unusual that it could have been placed there only by humans. Virologists have since determined that the feature is not all that rare in viruses similar to SARS2, and in any case, it could have emerged through natural evolutionary processes well known to experts. Chan and Ridley place a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose gloss on these findings, writing that if the site “proves to have been inserted artificially, it confirms that the virus was in a laboratory and was altered. ... If, on the other hand, the furin cleavage site proves to be natural, it still says nothing about where the virus came from.” Why write about it at all, then?
Contrary to the curiosity-piquing subtitle, the authors don’t tell us much that is illuminating about how virologists actually search for the origins of new viruses. They don’t appear to have spent much time, if any, watching experts at work in the lab. At least that might have been interesting as an explication of scientific methods. Instead, what Chan and Ridley have done is place a conspiracy theory between hardcovers to masquerade as sober scientific inquiry.
Spoiler alert: Near the end of their book, Chan and Ridley acknowledge that they have conducted a wild goose chase. “The reader may want to know what the authors of this book think happened,” they write. “Of course, we do not know for sure. ... We have tried to lay out the evidence and follow it wherever it leads, but it has not led us to a definite conclusion.” After 400-odd pages of argument, learning that the authors don’t even emerge with the courage of their own convictions may leave readers feeling cheated.
That points to the chief unanswered question raised by “Viral”: Who thought this book was necessary at this point in time? In virological and epidemiological terms, the search for the origin of COVID-19 is in its infancy. Experts in those fields know that the critical links, the original animal source and the intermediate species that may have been the direct transmitter to humans, may never be identified; similar inquiries have taken years, and some have never reached a conclusion.
The lab-leak theory, if proved, would point to the need to tighten biosecurity at laboratories all over the world. The zoonotic theory would remind us that human interactions with wildlife, a common occurrence in rural China, need to be closely regulated. The shame of “Viral” is that it promotes a groundless theory that threatens to lead policymakers, as well as members of the public, down the wrong road, to humankind’s enduring detriment.
43:28 DARPA Proposal
If SARS COV2 better replicate at very low tissue temperature, increasing mucoseal respiratory temperature can avoid SARS COV2 infection,or can mitigate.
How can increase upper respiratory temperature?
May be ,, mask wearing,,can do that rapidly?
Nature dot come: Published: 11 June 2020 "Bat-borne virus diversity, spillover and emergence" Michael Letko, Stephanie N. Seifert, Kevin J. Olival, Raina K. Plowright & Vincent J. Munster
Guilty until proven innocent? If that’s really the case she will be locked up already. WTH is this Chinese professor talking about?
You forgot to mention the USA. Military...
Linfa Wang is China born Chinese correct?
Live discussions like this aren't where the real substantive discussion happens in science since, for instance, there's insufficient time for citing sources of evidence and fact-checking, they favor rhetorical skill over citing evidence, they're directed at an audience who likely lack the domain knowledge to parse the claims + thus are more likely to instead choose whatever presented position suits their biases, etc. That why young Earth creationists and other science denialists can claim to win some of these live 'debates' with experts, even though their claims don't pass muster in the peer-reviewed literature.
In science the real debate happens in the peer-reviewed literature where there's sufficient time for fact-checking + presenting evidence, and where one needs to get through peer review by domain experts who are more likely to spot obvious issues that non-experts may not pick up on. In the peer-reviewed literature, evidence continues to show how SARS-CoV-2 arose via natural non-directed evolution and then initially spread to humans via zoonotic transmission, just as experts previously showed for HIV that caused the HIV/AIDS pandemic, despite conspiracy theories about HIV arising from a lab or initially spreading via polio vaccination.
Tellingly, *some of the same informed experts who previously debunked paranoid ideas about the origin of the HIV/AIDS pandemic are some of the same experts now debunking paranoid ideas about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic.* For example: Michael Worobey and Andrew Rambaut. And *some of the same non-experts who previously promoted (and profited from) HIV conspiracism now promote (and profit from) SARS-CoV-2 conspiracism.* For example: Matt Ridley, who Alina Chan chose to co-author a book with on SARS-CoV-2's origin. Telling how Worobey + Rambaut now debunk the SARS-CoV-2 claims of Ridley + Chan, just as they did over 15 years ago for the HIV claims of Ridley.
Sources on this below for the curious.
"The origin of AIDS", by Matt Ridley
"Viral: The search for the origin of COVID-19", by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan
"How East Germany fabricated the myth of HIV being man-made"
"HIV-1 did not contribute to the 2019-nCoV genome"
"Protein structure and sequence reanalysis of 2019-nCoV genome refutes snakes as its intermediate host and the unique similarity between its spike protein insertions and HIV-1"
co-authored by Worobey and/or Rambaut:
"Contaminated polio vaccine theory refuted"
"The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2"
"Evolutionary origins of the SARS‐CoV‐2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic"
"The origins of SARS-CoV-2: A critical review"
"The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic"
"The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2"
not co-authored by Worobey and/or Rambaut:
"Polio vaccine samples not linked to AIDS"
"Untruths and consequences: the false hypothesis linking CHAT type 1 polio vaccination to the origin of human immunodeficiency virus"
"Epidemiology and the emergence of human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immune deficiency syndrome"
"Postscript relating to new allegations made by Edward Hooper at The Royal Society Discussion Meeting on 11 September 2000"
"Mutation patterns of human SARS-CoV-2 and bat RaTG13 coronavirus genomes are strongly biased towards C>U transitions, indicating rapid evolution in their hosts"
"A palindromic RNA sequence as a common breakpoint contributor to copy-choice recombination in SARS-COV-2"
"There is no evidence of SARS-CoV-2 laboratory origin: Response to Segreto and Deigin"
"There is still no evidence of SARS-CoV-2 laboratory origin: Response to Segreto and Deigin"
Thanks~! I'm finding out Alina Chan is widely viewed as a crackpot. Your comment should be pinned to the top~!
Good post! A lot of information.
I have a technical question. Could SARS-CoV-2 have been lab-made, but made to appear natural? I am not asking about a lab-made bioweapon, but a lab-made novel coronavirus? I am also not assuming that the virus came from WIV, whether lab-made or not. From what I've learned so far, a bioweapon would be hard to conceal as something natural looking, but what about a new virus developed from pre-existing viruses. Like a hybrid, I guess... If SARS 2.0 was lab-made, then it could have come from a laboratory anywhere in the world, and then delivered anywhere in the world... The Chinese have been making the point that the virus was identified in China, but that it did not necessarily come from China.
From what I heard any virus that is made in a lab is cannot be distinguished from a naturally evolved virus. There is simply no genetic finger print that can identify it was human made.
Sars-Cov2 could have naturally evolved but what makes it suspicious is that no other sars viruses of it's type have furin cleavage sites and they haven't been able to find the virus in the wild despite 2 years of looking, whereas SARS1 and MERS were both found in the wild within 2 months at most of looking.
The CCP have spent the better part of 2 years inventing bright shiny objects for us to look at. Not exactly innocent behaviour, nor is it proof. Not sure where you ‘learned’ that a bio weapon would not look natural. There are a lot of molecular tools in the toolbox, most derived from natural tools. After 2 years no one can prove or disprove that the Wuhan virus is or is not a bio weapon…… that is likely your answer and the only one we will ever have short of a confession. Who cares if it was a bio weapon if we can just stay focussed on the fact that it was accidentally released we might make some progress.
@@NiceTriGuy The Wuhan virus? Why do you call it the Wuhan virus? Isn't blaming China the politically expedient thing to do? It let's everybody else off the hook, and China wasn't popular before the pandemic, making it a good scapegoat.
If lab made, then the virus could have made by a Chinese rival, then imported into the country to frame China for a pandemic.
This was no accident, and most likely happened during the October 2019 Military World Games. Which would explain the rapid worldwide spread of the virus.
You could call that a conspiracy theory coming from the CCP, but does that make it a lie?.. Are we interested in the truth, or just vilifying the CCP?
There is a longstanding war agenda against China, and the rest of the Asian world, that required the demonization of China to make people feel comfortable genociding the whole Asian world.
That is what the end result will be if we continue to wage war against China, and it goes kinetic. And that is the whole idea.
To wipe out all major Asian economic competitors.
If we get false flagged into a hot war against China, it will get nuclear hot very quickly, as we cannot win in a conventional war against China.
In a nuclear war, facing their extinction, the Chinese will launch counter attacks not only against the U.S., but also against U.S. Asian military allies South Korea, Japan and India.
The motivation on our side is not the South China Sea, Taiwan, Uyghur or any of the other excuses. The real motive behind our genocidal intentions is that Caucasians do not feel they can compete with Asian intellect, industry and technology. Which threatens our perceived hegemony over the world.
Framing China for this extremely costly pandemic has incited more hatred of Asians all over the world. Making it easier for us politically to destroy and subjugate the Asian race.
This agenda if realized will not be cost-free for our side, even if we have no conscience. After a nuclear war with China, China will be permanently destroyed, but America will be permanently dystopian.
The End Times Suicide Club won't mind that too much. I will, if I'm still alive, so I'm trying to do what I can to expose and deter this madness, and all of the hate and war mongering with it.
@@NiceTriGuy All options are on the table, every time I hear it came from the meat market can not help think a Wuhan lab employee left the lab and picked up dinner there.
@@jerrygriffin7629 That might be too simple and logical for Harley Earl ;-)
The recent posting of sequences from the marketplace considered the epicentre, shows raccoon dog and human DNA commingled. This is strong confirmation of the marketplace hypothesis
@David Austin That raccoon dog story was a ridiculous contrived attempt to distract by the same unethical and corrupted and compromised scientists, right at the same time as the lab created hypothesis is released by two U.S. government agencies.
Just listening to their fictional account makes one wonder, how far will they will stoop to push the fake natural origin hypothesis?
Let's just address the absurdity of the serendipity of finding the alleged smoking gun on a Chinese CDC web site.
Was this data just waiting for someone to interpret for over two years?
If this was in fact from the Wuhan seafood market, why did no one at the Chinese CDC analyze the data for over 2 years?
And why would the Chinese CDC immediately delete the data as soon as this group of of cover-up artists, asked if they could analyze the data?
Do you think that the Chinese CDC was scared that the natural origin conspiracy could possibly be supported and they quickly hid the data?
But most obvious of all, was the choice to publish their "findings" in the Atlantic magazine. A magazine well known for publishing spurious stories that can't be verified and usually are proven false and based on zero reliable facts.
What is even more disappointing is seeing so many scientist act so gullible and not question another obvious unverifiable conspiracy theory using very dubious data.
No. Not at all.
Essentially irrelevant. raccoon dog DNA fragments and SARS-2 RNA fragments were purported to be found on some of the environmental sample swabs collected in early January 2020 ACCORDING TO a post made by THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT which was quickly taken down (within a day I believe). Pretty much the only (ostensible) data/information they have ever released (other than the viral genome) and it can be used to spin the narrative toward Zoonosis again; yet if it were later discovered SARS-2 was in fact a lab leak then they have plausible deniability because the “evidence” here could well just be fragments of raccoon dog DNA and fragments of SARS-2 RNA that never existed in the animals, just deposited on the same (or nearby) surfaces (ie it doesn’t tell us that any non-human animals were infected. And they release it 2 years after the fact and quickly take it down. If it were genuine, they would have released it immediately because it tends to exculpate them (at least in some people’s minds) from what would be one of history’s greatest disasters. It’s all very convenient. Not plausibly genuine. But even if it were genuine, it wouldn’t prove anything, just place a hair on the scale in favor of Zoonosis.
Someone stop this misinformation please
Brought to you by the CCP
That is very clear it is found in different animals, etc.
That is what God said in the book of Leviticus chapter 11,verse 1-47
They said the origin bat came from louse not wuhan that
s how we know it was made in lab.
Louse? 😆
They WERE cherry picked..Even the chinese say the market was a spreader
On a slightly different note, Alina Chan is a fox.
why you say she a fox?
@@meilingyan2642 She's sly and underhanded 😁
Still not enough discussion of FCS and MSH3 patent by Moderna... these aspects are real evidence...
Alina is the only genuine researcher
😁😁😁 Wikipedia Alina Chan: "Chan became known during the COVID-19 pandemic for co-authoring a preprint claiming the virus was "pre-adapted" to humans and suggesting COVID-19 could have escaped from a laboratory.[2][4] The preprint was not accepted or published by any scientific journals, but received a significant reception in the popular press.[2]
The reaction of virologists and other specialists to Chan's hypothesis has been largely, but not exclusively, negative. The New York Times noted in October 2021 that Chan's view has been "widely disputed by other scientists", but some have commended her willingness to advance alternative hypotheses in the face of controversy.[5] Jonathan Eisen of UC Davis praised Chan for raising the lab-origin discussion, but said her views remain conjecture, as not enough disease outbreaks have been traced in enough molecular detail to know what is normal, noting also that the virus continues to change and adapt.[2] Sixteen months after Chan's preprint was shared online, a scientific review article published in Cell described the pre-adaptation theory as "lacking validity.""
"These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead they exposed its weaknesses" LA Times 11/15/2021
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has become one of the leading exponents of the hypothesis that the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Matt Ridley, a much-published science writer and member of the British House of Lords, emerged as a leading climate change denier with a provocative Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2014.
The book they joined forces to write, “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,” presents the case for the lab-leak hypothesis, presumably with the secondary goal of establishing the authors as the preeminent truth-tellers on the topic. (The book’s epilogue is titled “Truth Will Out,” a line from “The Merchant of Venice.”)
“Viral” comes to bookstores amid a wave of hype. Its publisher describes it as a “uniquely insightful book” in which the authors come “tantalizingly close to a shaft that leads to the light” about the pandemic’s origins.
In reality, however, “Viral” is a laboratory-perfect example of how not to write about a scientific issue. The authors rely less on the scientists doing the painstaking work to unearth the virus’ origin than on self-described sleuths who broadcast their dubious claims, sometimes anonymously, on social media. In the end, Chan and Ridley spotlight all the shortcomings of the hypothesis they set out to defend.
As Chan and Ridley acknowledge, determining the origin of the virus technically known as SARS-CoV-2 (or SARS2, for short) is of paramount importance to humanity. “If we do not find out how this pandemic began,” they write, “we are ill-equipped to know when, where and how the next pandemic may start.”
Yet if the authors were truly concerned with the origin of COVID-19, they would give proper due to the prevailing scientific judgment about it: that COVID was “zoonotic,” spilling over from infected animals to humans via natural contact the way most viruses known to science have reached humankind. As virologists reported this summer, the emergence of SARS2 bears unmistakable signatures of those prior zoonotic events. Chan and Ridley, however, pay insufficient attention to the scientific consensus, or to the significant research findings around which it has coalesced.
This virus may of started back in March 2019. Because some people in Wales was having a Continuous Cough and a very high temperature. Me and my daughter had a Continuous Cough an SD my daughter had it first a Continuous Cough and a temperature was 39.6. with 3 days I had a Continuous Cough and my temperature was 39.8. my daughter at to go to a A&E and she had chest infection. I had it and I had steroids tablets and inhalers and antibiotics I was ill with my asthma in the coming months until I had pneumonia with a bacterial infection called Streptococcus in December 2019 and in 2020 march I had influenza with another bacterial infection so I had antibiotics again. Since this had started. I have very bad tiredness and poor concentration and my Crohn's disease as been bad since I had this Continuous Cough. I recently had Avery bad could and a green muck from my nose. My ear tubes are block in both ears of course you can.
Oh lab origin equates to modified. I completely don't care what they did in the lab they could created it or discovered it all the same.
Especially if your thinking evil you want something useful discovered in nature so there will never be a fingerprint.
Michael & Linfa should've been the whole show. Jesse and especially Alina can't seem to take off the tinfoil hat.
What part was unreasonable?
TWiV Special: How the pandemic began in Nature, in 5 key points
th-cam.com/video/rZ1FGCPenns/w-d-xo.html
They are playing politics due to the undesirable hypothesis. The virus started months before the documented market cases as evidence by numerous data.
The lengthy comment below by @bacchusevolution7875 is brimming with good sources and should be pinned to the top of this comments section.