Trump says U.S. investigating whether virus came from Wuhan lab

[ChouDoufu]

43 minutes ago, candide said:

You seem to be more knowledgeable than me about such issues. Any link to a scientific paper supporting an alternative hypothesis or criticizing the article I linked?

it's much too early in the investigation to be certain of anything.  the origin is tentatively assumed to be the wuhan market, but there were some early cases with no link to the market.  we now know there is human-human transmission, so cannot rule out the current patient zero, a shrimp vendor, may have contracted the virus elsewhere and then proceeded to infect dozens at the market.

 

other researchers are looking into alternative means of intermediate transmission.  this week, stray dogs that had eaten dead bats was proposed as the link to humans.  probably not going to be widely accepted, but at this point it does merit consideration.

 

Coronavirus may have spread to humans by dogs not bats, bombshell new research claims

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/coronavirus-spread-humans-dogs-not-21867728

 

the #3 trending hot topic in the right column on their site is the "michael jackson alive conspiracy", so the "bombshell" is looking more like a dud.  but don't discount the research simply because it gets picked up and misused by disreputable clickbait purveyors.

[thesetat2013]

5 hours ago, PremiumLane said:

The made in a lab theory was debunked ages ago and they have a good idea of where it came from

 

Some folks including politicians in both the U.S. and China have suggested that the COVID-19 coronavirus (SARS-CoV2) that’s causing the pandemic may actually be a bioweapon that was manufactured in a lab. The only difference between their conspiracy theories is who’s being accused of doing the manufacturing.

 

Prof Stephen Turner, head of the department of microbiology at Melbourne’s Monash University, says what’s most likely is that virus originated in bats.

 

Created in lab was debunked months ago. But combining different viruses to have this one emerge was never debunked. 

The more info that gets learned about this virus. The more it looks like it came from that lab. Especially disconcerting was learning that China's top scientist was working on manipulating the SARS virus in that wuhan lab. And that no bat's were sold at that wuhan market.. Kind of hard to say that was the point of origin... 

[metisdead]

A post using content from an unapproved YouTube source has been removed. 

 

A troll post was also removed. 

[ChouDoufu]

12 minutes ago, thesetat2013 said:

Created in lab was debunked months ago. But combining different viruses to have this one emerge was never debunked. 

The more info that gets learned about this virus. The more it looks like it came from that lab. Especially disconcerting was learning that China's top scientist was working on manipulating the SARS virus in that wuhan lab. And that no bat's were sold at that wuhan market.. Kind of hard to say that was the point of origin... 

don't need to show bats at the market itself. 

 

if the theory is that the virus originated in bats, and was passed through an intermediary animal (dog, pangolin, etc) to humans, then look for the other animals being sold at or associated with the market.  for example, bats infected a pangolin in yunnan province, was captured for the chinese medicine trade and transported to wuhan for sale at the market, where the virus was passed to a customer.  the bats in this case never left their local area outside kunming city.

 

come to think of it, the could explain why there were other unlinked cases.  consider a pangolin, or parts thereof, are used at a traditional chinese medicine clinic somewhere in wuhan.  a shrimp vendor visits the clinic and is prescribed pangolin bits.  he (she?) returns to the market, is either asymptomatic and infects others, or dies from the disease before it's known, so investigators never had the opportunity to ask about possible sources.

 

 

Edited April 16, 2020 by ChouDoufu

[BKKBike09]

4 hours ago, ChouDoufu said:

correlation is not causation, and sometimes a coincidence truly is just a coincidence.

 

would you believe the conspiracy theories from the tinfoil nutters remarking on their "proof" because of the location of a chemical weapons lab with a history of accidents merely 10 miles outside of salisbury?  of course you wouldn't. 

 

we're should follow the evidence where it leads, not the other way around.  there can be unpleasant, unintended consequences when we "fix the intelligence" around our policy goals.

 

if trump goes too far with his accusations, he may get to a point where he can't back down, and will be even more at the mercy of his advisors who have their own agendas.  he could get backed into a corner politically he needs to "do something" to "look strong." 

 

sanctions and tariffs won't be enough, so he'll need to do something to give the "bad guys" a bloody nose.  with his military background essentially being reruns of the A-team, he could easily be convinced to do something...stupid. 

Indeed a coincidence sometimes can be just that. Sometimes too the simplest explanation is the right one.

 

I agree fully that we should follow the evidence although I suspect that, given this is China, that may be hard to do.

 

I don't understand the Salisbury reference. I'm guessing you're referring to the Skripal poisoning and presumably there's some conspiracy theory that it wasn't Russian agents, caught on CCTV, then interviewed by RTV and telling us how they visited Salisbury because of its 123 metre high cathedral steeple?

[ChouDoufu]

3 minutes ago, BKKBike09 said:

Indeed a coincidence sometimes can be just that. Sometimes too the simplest explanation is the right one.

 

I agree fully that we should follow the evidence although I suspect that, given this is China, that may be hard to do.

 

I don't understand the Salisbury reference. I'm guessing you're referring to the Skripal poisoning and presumably there's some conspiracy theory that it wasn't Russian agents, caught on CCTV, then interviewed by RTV and telling us how they visited Salisbury because of its 123 metre high cathedral steeple?

yes, some people were pointing to the location and history of porton down as being the simplest explanation being the right one. 

 

but let's just consider that as an example we can't simply take the easiest explanation that conveniently fits our biases.  going into more detail on that matter will derail the thread and get deleted.

[rabas]

4 hours ago, Why Me said:

A virus lab on end of the street and a PPE manufacturing plant at the other. Sounds like a business plan to me. I wish to invest.

A wet market in the middle could greatly boost PPE sales globally.

[placnx]

7 hours ago, webfact said:

This report and others have suggested the Wuhan lab where virology experiments take place and lax safety standards there led to someone getting infected and appearing at a nearby "wet" market, where the virus began to spread.

 

6 hours ago, Mavideol said:

I don't agree with Trump constant deflections of facts and egomaniac attitude but the above hypothesis has been put forward a couple times and sounds plausible.... wet markets in China are all around, why this one

It would seem logical to search for the natural source of this virus. Pangolin was suggested as an intermediate species, but shouldn't we attempt to confirm this by infecting pangolins with various bat virus precursors, to observe the mutations that occur? If studies like this are not undertaken, the suspicion will remain that this was a bioweapon under development - perhaps to take over Taiwan. Note that two Chinese vaccines are in advanced preparation. 

[Kerryd]

10 minutes ago, candide said:

You seem to be more knowledgeable than me about such issues. Any link to a scientific paper supporting an alternative hypothesis or criticizing the article I linked?

The article you linked is just that, an "article", not a "paper". As such there's little chance that any organization is going to peer review it. Most of the ones who would peer review such matters are probably reviewing actual research papers (which are submitted on special servers for that specific purpose).

I do find it interesting that apparently the CIA (and other Intelligence agencies) are starting to look into the possibility that this was created in a lab (whether it was released by accident or not is another matter).
"An intelligence official familiar with the government analysis said a theory US intelligence officials are investigating is that the virus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, and was accidentally released to the public. Other sources told CNN that US intelligence hasn't been able to corroborate the theory but is trying to discern whether someone was infected in the lab through an accident or poor handling of materials and may have then infected others."

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/politics/us-intelligence-virus-started-chinese-lab/index.html

Pretty sure they wouldn't be doing that if it was just me postulating some crazy idea on the internet.

From another CNN article:

"Though the scientists discount conspiracy theories about bioweapons, on other questions they are divided.

 

The experts are at odds over the once widely accepted theory that the virus originated at a wet market.

Proponents believe the gory nature of these crowded markets packed with people and wild animals slated for slaughter make them the most likely culprit; the doubters cite a peer-reviewed study indicating that many of the first known patients had no direct exposure to the so-called wet market."

How did coronavirus break out? Theories abound as researchers race to solve genetic detective story

So far, most seem to agree that the virus itself must have originated in bats (as it seems to share 96% of the characteristics of similar bat coronaviruses). After that, there is a wide range of ideas of how it got into humans.

One theory is that this virus jumped from a bat directly to a human (either at a market or in a lab) and then (rapidly) mutated to allow human to human transmission. (However the rapid mutation would seem to cancel that theory as these things don't normally mutate that quickly, except in Hollywood movies. Or possibly under controlled conditions in a lab.)

One theory is that an infected bat infected another animal (possibly a pangolin) and the virus mutated in that animal and then transmitted it to a human. (Hard to imagine that many bats infecting that many pangolins and the virus mutating the same way in all of them and then suddenly jumping into humans and mutating once more (but just once) to enable human to human transmission. The sheer odds of that happening must be astronomical.)

Another theory is that this was a strain of the SARS virus that may have been in some people for years, slowly evolving. (Which would make more sense and explain how it seems to be ideally suiting for invading human cells, as well as it's ability to jump from human to human. A slow mutation over years is a lot more plausible than a mutation happening in less than 2 weeks.)

Another theory is of course that this virus was created in a lab, probably by modifying an existing bat coronavirus and then it was released (by accident). In fact, supposedly at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (the lab located less than 300 meters from the market) they were researching ways that bat coronaviruses could jump to humans (in order to identify the methods and develop ways to stop it supposedly).

Found it interesting as well that a month ago, everyone in the world was dead positive that this virus came from people eating animals (specifically bats) bought at a wet market.

Now, as more research is being done, suddenly that theory isn't holding sway like it used to. 

In fact, an article on Nature.com (the same site candide linked an article from) suggests that the virus didn't come from pangolins (as one theory suggested) because in the samples tested from pangolins at the market, they shared less than a 91% commonality with the virus found in humans there.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00548-w
(During the SARS epidemic, the virus samples from infected civets shared a 99% commonality with the virus found in humans.)
Lol - that Nature article was from the end of February !

It was also noted that if the pangolins had the virus, then there should have been outbreaks of it from wherever they'd been captured until getting to the market in Wuhan (as they are all smuggled in).
That to helps trash the idea that this virus was transmitted from animals to humans (with the pangolins being an "intermediary" between bats and humans) as the pangolins would have had to been infected before arriving at the market, in which case there should be a trail of infections from China to Malaysia, or, they were infected (by bats) at the market where large numbers of them would have had to become infected in a short period of time, then have the virus mutate in the exact same way in each of them, before then passing it on to dozens/hundreds of people in the market.
(Again, pretty astronomical odds of that happening.)

Occam's razor

Well, I wasn't expecting to spend that much time reading that many news and science articles. 3+ hours just to make this one post. Some good reading in there though.

Right now, the most correct answer as to how this started is "nobody knows". 

This time next month there will probably be all sorts of people who are absolutely positive that this started (somewhere) because of (something) and that (someone) is to blame.
As noted in a previous post, right now there are more questions than answers. And sometimes those answers lead to more questions.
 

[Isaan sailor]

If I had to make a bet, I’d put my money on that Chinese lab, 280 meters from the wet market.  Millions of humans have contracted Wuhan virus.  How many bats?

The virus had to be engineered onto an existing Coronavirus—to become a pandemic.

[Tug]

Awww come on trumps gotta blame someone lol you can’t expect people to look closely can you?just more deflection and blame storming just pathetic 

[rabas]

41 minutes ago, thesetat2013 said:

Created in lab was debunked months ago. But combining different viruses to have this one emerge was never debunked. 

The more info that gets learned about this virus. The more it looks like it came from that lab. Especially disconcerting was learning that China's top scientist was working on manipulating the SARS virus in that wuhan lab. And that no bat's were sold at that wuhan market.. Kind of hard to say that was the point of origin... 

Few are saying  it's a completely man made virus. Rather, a dangerous virus they were working on escaped, which is easy when a researcher becomes infected. Remember, this virus is stealth.  The same lab was warned about safety issues in 2018. More glaring, the CCP released an emergency bulletin in Februrary instructing all such labs to clean up there safety procedures just after the accident!

 

If you wonder what they do with bat viruses in the Wuhan lab:

"In 2015, a team including scientists from the Institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[10][11]"

 

In other words, altering natural viruses to infect humans.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology

 

 

 

[WalkingOrders]

Good. Continue to investigate. And don't believe a damn word from the totalitarian, murderous, lying Communist Party of China, nor any of their cowardly sympathizers operating globally!

[digger70]

7 hours ago, webfact said:

Trump says U.S. investigating whether virus came from Wuhan lab

I would like to know if this is True. Good for DT to investigate this .  

Biological Warfare ?????????

 

HIV & Ebola-Like Mutations Suggest Coronavirus Leaked From a Lab. 

Researchers have found shocking similarities between the Wuhan coronavirus and HIV and Ebola. These mutations suggest the virus is manmade.

[TommyBlue]

2 minutes ago, digger70 said:

I would like to know if this is True. Good for DT to investigate this .  

Biological Warfare ?????????

 

HIV & Ebola-Like Mutations Suggest Coronavirus Leaked From a Lab. 

Researchers have found shocking similarities between the Wuhan coronavirus and HIV and Ebola. These mutations suggest the virus is manmade.

It was man-made I reckon - but not warfare - it 'escaped' by accident. That is why they tried so hard to cover it up.

 

[digger70]

2 minutes ago, TommyBlue said:

It was man-made I reckon - but not warfare - it 'escaped' by accident. That is why they tried so hard to cover it up.

 

Escaped or not It's out in the big wide world and we have to fight it .  

[Crazy Alex]

31 minutes ago, TommyBlue said:

It was man-made I reckon - but not warfare - it 'escaped' by accident. That is why they tried so hard to cover it up.

 

Funny how it escaped the year the first US president to call them on ripping us off is running for reelection. I'm sure it's all a big coincidence.

[Tropposurfer]

This guy is fast beginning to look like the antiChrist. Glad I'm on a waitlist for the big elevator to the afterlife as I don't want to watch what happens to the world.

The malevolent nature of the things this guy says and does are truly world destroying.

[Kerryd]

21 minutes ago, digger70 said:

I would like to know if this is True. Good for DT to investigate this .  

Biological Warfare ?????????

 

HIV & Ebola-Like Mutations Suggest Coronavirus Leaked From a Lab. 

Researchers have found shocking similarities between the Wuhan coronavirus and HIV and Ebola. These mutations suggest the virus is manmade.

Personally, I wouldn't believe **** that comes from bitcoin sites like CCN.com or articles from the NY Post which looks like the National Enquirer or (what is the one in the UK, the Daily Mail or the Mirror ?). (It supposedly was Trump's favourite newspaper in 2017.)
"The Post has been criticized since the beginning of Murdoch's ownership for sensationalism, blatant advocacy, and conservative bias. " Yeah, it shows.

I tracked down the article on the Chinese site where it mentions:
"the packaging mechanism of the 2019 coronavirus will also differ from most other Beta coronaviruses such as SARS, and may be the same as the packaging mechanism of murine hepatitis coronavirus, HIV, Ebola virus and some avian influenza viruses."
http://chinaxiv.org/abs/202002.00004

Nowhere does it suggest that the virus is man made or escaped from a lab. It says "maybe" the same packaging mechanism as a number of other viruses.

Also, the source article mentions a paper, written by some scientists in India, who had to withdraw the paper after their findings were heavily criticized by other scientists (that darned peer review will get you every time) !
It seems their ideas (and supporting science) were somewhat lacking in the eyes of their fellow scientists.

While searching for corroborating stories and references, it turns out everything links back to the article on CCN.com. NOT to be confused with CNN.com (which I think is the idea.)

This is common on certain types of sites, where they use automated programs (called spiders) to scan stuff posted on  other sites. If they find keyword matches, the stories are copy/pasted to the site running the spider bot.
They usually have to limit their searches to sites that either don't have copyright protection or have the means to prevent bots from copying their materiel (or actually allow it to spread their stories further).

Lol - got to love an article that tries to justify itself by linking to another article, written by the same writer on the same site ! 

I'm currently reading an article on the Lancet that was linked in one of the CCN stories: (The Lancet is a well respected medical journal established in 1823.)
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext

The article is dated 24 Jan but it appears that the data was collected up to 2 January. Back then they didn't have a lot of data as there weren't many (reported) cases. The study seems to be based on the data of just 41 people.
One thing that does stand out is that of those 41, 14 had no exposure to the wet market (which was being described as a sea food market, not a live animal or "wet" market).
 

 That little tidbit, from back in January, helps squash the idea that this virus was directly transmitted to humans by animals. At least not from animals sold at that market.
Interestingly, supposedly only 3 of the 30 males were current smokers. I would have expected a much higher number.

They also stated that the evidence indicated human to human transmission back then. 

[ChouDoufu]

2 hours ago, Kerryd said:

One theory is that an infected bat infected another animal (possibly a pangolin) and the virus mutated in that animal and then transmitted it to a human. (Hard to imagine that many bats infecting that many pangolins and the virus mutating the same way in all of them and then suddenly jumping into humans and mutating once more (but just once) to enable human to human transmission. The sheer odds of that happening must be astronomical.)

the specific chain only needs to occur once.  one bat infects one pangolin, one bit of virus inside the pangolin mutates in such a way it can infect a human, that one pangolin gets captured, the immune system of one human somewhere along the way is unable to respond adequately....and so on until we get human-human transmission.

 

the odds may seem astronomical when you calculate for each link in the chain.  absolutely impossible.  but the odds for an event that happened are 1.

 

i don't think anyone is saying the virus mutated just once more within humans.  aren't we already dealing with 3 distinct strains of the virus?  and don't we have to tweak vaccines annually because mutating is what viruses do.

[candide]

6 hours ago, candide said:

Below a link to an article in Nature, one of the world most reputed scientific publication.

"It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone20. Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer. We also discuss whether selection during passage could have given rise to SARS-CoV-2."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

 

4 hours ago, ChouDoufu said:

it's much too early in the investigation to be certain of anything.  the origin is tentatively assumed to be the wuhan market, but there were some early cases with no link to the market.  we now know there is human-human transmission, so cannot rule out the current patient zero, a shrimp vendor, may have contracted the virus elsewhere and then proceeded to infect dozens at the market.

 

other researchers are looking into alternative means of intermediate transmission.  this week, stray dogs that had eaten dead bats was proposed as the link to humans.  probably not going to be widely accepted, but at this point it does merit consideration.

 

Coronavirus may have spread to humans by dogs not bats, bombshell new research claims

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/coronavirus-spread-humans-dogs-not-21867728

 

the #3 trending hot topic in the right column on their site is the "michael jackson alive conspiracy", so the "bombshell" is looking more like a dud.  but don't discount the research simply because it gets picked up and misused by disreputable clickbait purveyors.

Obviously you did not read the article. Your comment is interesting, but is not related to the content of the article.

[ChouDoufu]

20 minutes ago, candide said:

 

Obviously you did not read the article. Your comment is interesting, but is not related to the content of the article.

no, not referencing your article.   you had asked about other papers offering other hypotheses.  the article in the star, although clickbaity, could lead to the scientific paper if interested.

[StreetCowboy]

9 hours ago, digger70 said:

I would like to know if this is True. Good for DT to investigate this .  

Biological Warfare ?????????

 

HIV & Ebola-Like Mutations Suggest Coronavirus Leaked From a Lab. 

Researchers have found shocking similarities between the Wuhan coronavirus and HIV and Ebola. These mutations suggest the virus is manmade.

Most people try to dress their fake stories up witrh a semblance of credibiity.  
How do these mutations suggest that the virus is man-made?  Where is the evidence that COVID-19 is mutated from HIV, Ebola, or any other disease?

<deleted>!

 

<deleted>!

 

SC

Edited April 16, 2020 by metisdead
Unknown acronym removed.

[candide]

54 minutes ago, ChouDoufu said:

no, not referencing your article.   you had asked about other papers offering other hypotheses.  the article in the star, although clickbaity, could lead to the scientific paper if interested.

Ok I understand the misunderstanding now. For me, the key point of the article I linked was that it rejects the hypothesis that the virus was created in a lab. For me, the various hypotheses you mention are not alternative as they are compatible with the article's conclusion. I may not have phrased it clearly enough. Nevertheless, I found your comments interesting, as I mentioned before.

[metisdead]

Some posts with unsubstantiated claims have been removed as rumours or conspiracy theories.

[Tagged]

17 hours ago, wasabi said:

 

I will be voting for Trump and the more it upsets people the more I enjoy doing so. Biden is about mid way through Dementia. I don't like Trump's style but the media narrative about what he has and hasn't accomplished does not drive my decision.

And it will be your downfall! No respect!

[Tagged]

17 hours ago, J Town said:

Even like the broken watch, though. I saw a Youtube investigative report, about an hour long, about China developing this virus and it looked VERY convincing. Bottom line, NO one will ever really know where this thing came from. Even if a White House report comes out stating that indeed China created it, nobody could possibly believe it because of the MOUNTAIN of lies this administration uses as its foundation.

Amen

 

You know when you start believing in China and Russia before USA, there have gone terrible wrong with the Great Amrica

Edited April 16, 2020 by Tagged

[Virt]

No matter if it was man made or jumped from species to species by accident , the scary part is that the Chinese government knew that this virus was a major concern, but didn't react in a proper manner, until the first case was discovered in Thailand. 

 

Then the troll was out of the box and they couldn't hide it anymore. 

 

Valuable time was lost because of that. 

 

And now we all pay the price. 

 

[Tagged]

18 hours ago, hydraides said:

 

 

This virus has been tweaked in a lab

As much as it could have been Russia and China made virus, it as much likely an USA virus. If this continues with Mr Trump, USA will have no credibillity in the future! They will be lost in mistrust. Many, or most around the world is getting pretty fed up of The American Monthy Python show. Have lasted to long now. 

[Mavideol]

17 hours ago, rvaviator said:

You could say the same about winning the lottery ... 'Why not me' ????  ...  Chance ...

in order to win the lottery one needs to play/buy a ticket, I don't....the theory was about the proximity of the lab to the market, thus in that case the market or the lab (chose one) had bought a lottery ticket