7 ms·
Seven year coronavirus trail from mine deaths to a Wuhan lab
- gvpmahesh 6y agocan someone post the story, it's behind a paywall
- totetsu 6y agohttp://archive.fo/LPCD1 http://archive.fo/LPCD1
- blackrock 6y agoLOL. Now the western media is just making sh*t up, as an excuse for their failures at handling the virus. Hey don’t look at my problem here, look over there!
- chvid 6y agoIt is election time in the US ...
- jacquesm 6y agoIt's a UK publication. That said this is a very low quality article that seems to have only one goal: to drive sign ups for the paywalled articles.
- lnsru 6y agoI don’t know why this gets downvoted. It’s sad, but very true. Western countries had all the needed time to close borders on time and stop the spread.
- neetrain 6y agoMaybe because of their sarcastic manner. We have to be careful of what opinion to share, and how to share.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y agoThis article is written in a highly conspiratorial tone, but the author does not appear to understand several basic things about coronavirus research. > Evidence seen by The Sunday Times suggests that a virus found in its depths — part of a faecal sample that was frozen and sent to a Chinese laboratory for analysis and storage — is the closest known match to the virus that causes Covid-19. This has been publicly known for months. It was published in biorRxiv in January and appeared in Nature in early February.[1] > The virus was a huge discovery. It was a “new strain” of a Sars-type coronavirus that, surprisingly, received only a passing mention in an academic paper. RaTG13 was one of hundreds of SARS-like coronaviruses discovered in these bat caves. In 2013, it was not considered a major discovery. One reason is that it is only 80% similar to the original SARS. At the time, researchers were much more interested in viruses that were more like 99% similar to SARS. Those viruses were studied much more intensively, and were the subject of numerous papers. > What happened to the virus in the years between its discovery and the eruption of Covid-19? Why was its existence tucked away in obscure records, and its link to three deaths not mentioned? The article never provides any evidence that these people became sick from RaTG13. There are hundreds of known SARS-like coronaviruses, and there are estimated to be thousands of as-of-yet undiscovered ones. The author of this article seems to be under the impression that RaTG13 is the only known SARS-like coronavirus. > These produced a remarkable finding: while none had tested positive for Sars, all four had antibodies against another, unknown Sars-like coronavirus. There was a study published in 2016 that found that 3% of people tested in a region of the countryside in Yunnan province had antibodies against SARS-like coronaviruses.[2] The sorts of spillover events described in this article are probably not uncommon at all. It has always just been a question of when a spillover event would lead to sustained transmission, instead of petering out. The rest of the article goes on to try to suggest that RaTG13 leaked from a lab. RaTG13 is separated from SARS-CoV-2 by decades of evolution. It's the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, but not its ancestor. It's sad that tabloids are going after the people who have spent decades trying to understand these types of viruses, so that we would be prepared for new outbreaks. 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/
- totetsu 6y ago
- roenxi 6y ago1) It doesn't matter whether or not this virus is a lab escape. Much more important is to note that it could have been a lab escape and our modern transport networks and logistic networks leave us very vulnerable to viruses in multiple concerning ways. If borders stay open to tourists and business as they were pre-COVID, this will happen again in our lifetimes whatever the source was. 2) > Researchers in China have been unable to find any news reports of this new Sars-like coronavirus and the three deaths. There appears to have been a media blackout. Why on earth would China do this? Surely it is easier to get people to help control a new virus if they know about it.
- mnky9800n 6y agoYes. In a normal world, American scientists and healthcare researchers would be available to help in any sort of catastrophe.
- rjvs 6y agoHas anyone done any studies on the level of similarity of the viewpoints between various arms of the Murdoch media outlets (Sky/Fox/Star & various newspapers such as The Times) around the world when compared to say, their nearest competitors in each market?
- sradman 6y ago> But the bats in Yunnan are 1,000 miles from her laboratory, and one of the most extraordinary coincidences of the Covid-19 pandemic is that ground zero happened to be in Wuhan... Yunnan is also about 1,000 miles from southern Guangdong where SARS-1 broke out. The source in both cases is horseshoe bats that live in the Lancang/Mekong River basin. The intermediate hosts are humans that enter the bat roosting caves and the nocturnal arboreal mammals that live where bats perch feed (pangolins, civets, and raccoon dogs). > Shi and her team had already collected hundreds of samples of the coronavirus — including RaBtCov/4991 — from their work on bats across Yunnan province, and they were running controversial experiments... This is sloppy. It conflates collecting RNA samples with virus isolates. There is no evidence that gain-of-function experiments were being performed on a variation of a SARS-CoV-2 isolate. It is plausible but very unlikely.