9 ms·

Closest known relatives of virus behind Covid-19 found in Laos

85 points by MKais 5y ago

thaumasiotes 5y ago
I eagerly await the discussion of how we need to start imposing accountability on the country behind it all.
- Tostino 5y ago
  That's been something I've barely seen discussed. Why are you bringing it up?
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Because it's discussed all the time, and somehow I suspect that suddenly no one will be interested in it if "the country behind it all" is Laos.
    - slg 5y ago
      You can't exactly put a country in jail so the only real way to punish a country is economically. Once we start talking economics, it is a lot easier to punish Bill Gates than a homeless man. China is #2 in the world in GDP and Laos is #118. Beyond that, it wouldn't even make sense to punish Laos if the virus did have zoological origins there. The first outbreak didn't occur in Laos so there is little validity to accusations of a coverup or mishandling of that non-existent outbreak. The only reasons people have wanted to punish China is because they believe that China either created this virus and let it leak or that their initial reaction to the virus is what allowed it to spread globally. There would be fault in the case of China. There would be no fault in the case of Laos.
basicplus2 5y ago
Laos is no where near wuhan
sega_sai 5y ago
It is good there is more data being collected, so we can discuss actual facts with evidence, as opposed to pure speculations 'I believe it is a lab leak' vs 'I believe it is natural'.
- labster 5y ago
  It could easily be a natural virus that was collected, but leaked from a the lab that studied it. To me, it makes sense to look at biohazard lab safety procedures if there was even a chance the lab was a factor in its spread. It’s possible to make mistakes while following best practices, or that those practices themselves need improved. It’s sad that it’s become a blame game of who caused the pandemic, when what we really need is an impartial account to prevent the next pandemic.
  - MoreenDichele 5y ago
    The only thing that's sad is that you're a gullible cunt. This was obviously part of a plan to establish the new world order, as multiple world leaders have literally been scripted to tell you already in plain english. Die you fucking moron.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    A blame game is only sad if it was a true accident. If both the US and China were actually trying to develop such a virus and one of them accidentally released it, neither will be able to tolerate transparency because it would lead to international blame and desire for revenge.
    - newacct583 5y ago
      You powered that comment with two "if's" and a "would"! At what point should we expect you guys to start using "because" and "did"?
    - labster 5y ago
      The bio weapon theory just seems crazy, because why would a nation make a highly transmissible virus that it has no tools to control the pathogen? I’m working on the assumption that states like stability, workforce not dying, and strong economies. The Trumpist attacks on China make the most sense as being for the domestic political audience. The Chinese coverup of anything that makes CCP rule seem imperfect is SOP. I mean seriously, that guy in charge is afraid of a talking teddy bear.
danw1979 5y ago
> The study also doesn’t clarify how a progenitor of the virus could have travelled to Wuhan, in central China, where the first known cases of COVID-19 were identified — or whether the virus hitched a ride on an intermediate animal. “The main problems that the Institute of Virology has is that the outbreak occurred in close proximity to that Institute. That Institute has in essence the best collection of virologists in the world that have gone out and sought out, and isolated, and sampled bat species throughout Southeast Asia. So they have a very large collection of viruses in their laboratory. And so it’s — you know — proximity is a problem. It’s a problem.” - Ralph Baric (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...)
- lubos 5y ago
  They could have been infected by locals in regions they've been travelling to. Many possibilities. Why do we have to speculate? Let's just wait for more data. The timeline of HIV pandemic has been established decades after pandemic started. This will take time. I'd assume that virus originating anywhere in SEA region would be detected in China first. Just like many other viruses originating in America continent would be first detected in USA.
  - cm2187 5y ago
    We may have to wait for the fall of chinese communism to know what happened though, like for Katyn. Might take a few decades. And assuming the chinese haven't destroyed the relevant Wuhan lab samples. That's what I would do in their place. Better never know than take the risk that a technician leak such sensitive information.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      Soviets had a number of either accidents or sabotage incidents with lethal biological agents. Afaik, there was zero additional clarity around those after USSR dissolved, so don't hold your breath.
cblconfederate 5y ago
i hope Laos doesnt have an institute of virology nearby
- goldenkey 5y ago
  Those damn conspiracy theorists with their reasonable observations! I mean, it's not like a fire ever started near a forest! /s
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
_3u10 5y ago
Oh good, I was worried that it came from a lab where they were working on changing the RNA of the virus with the exact changes present in COVID-19 as proposed in their grant applications and weren’t wearing masks when working with modified corona viruses. Glad we can finally rule the lab out.
- newacct583 5y ago
  > changing the RNA of the virus with the exact changes present in COVID-19 Sorry, not sure what you're reading, but this isn't remotely correct. Wild mistruths like this are precisely why no one takes you people seriously.
farmerstan 5y ago
It’s weird how people are trying so hard to convince others that the virus came from nature sources when it’s obvious now it didn’t. The amount of propaganda is really scary. All other viruses from animals were found very soon after an outbreak. It’s been almost 2 years now and the closest they could find is thousands of miles away and kind of sort of similar. Let’s not look for a zebra when all we have is a horse.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  "thousand miles away" in Yunnan (right on the border with Laos) is where the "Bat Woman" was sent to investigate an pneumonia oubreak with case fatality rate of 50% in 2012. At the very minimum samples would've been brought back to WIV. Were they manipulated/gain-of-function enhanced since? I do not have enough back ground in bio to say, but what are the odds they'd just let samples sit and do nothing with them for years in a research lab? is that something they normally do? "Lethal Pneumonia Cases in Mojiang Miners (2012)" https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.702199/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.7021... Shi Zheng-Li's research, 2017: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bat-cave-solves-mystery-of-deadly-sars-virus/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bat-cave-solves-m...
- ch4s3 5y ago
  > All other viruses from animals were found very soon after an outbreak. It took a long time to find the animal source for HIV and if memory serves, swine flu took some time to be tracked down. > obvious now it didn’t I’m open to the lab leak origin as a possibility, but it seems far from obvious either way. The evidence is still pretty circumstantial. It’s worth further investigation, but I don’t think we should rush to a conclusion.
  - adventured 5y ago
    HIV was a very different context and isn't remotely comparable to SARS2. It took many decades for HIV to spread to a consequential base of infected persons, from which it was then able to explode across the globe (due in part to the difference in travel then vs now of course). The reason it took so long to find the animal source, was because it wasn't perceived to be a critically important virus to deal with - it wasn't a priority - in the early decades due to the very low number of cases and related deaths. Depending on which origin theory you believe, it took anywhere from ~20 years to ~60 years, for HIV to go from a small number of cases to being globally threatening. SARS2 did that in a matter of months, so the priority is far different. SARS2 has killed 5+ million people in under two years, it took many decades for HIV/AIDS to do that. The US is still seeing more annualized Covid deaths than the world had total HIV/AIDS deaths annually circa 1990/1991, and that's with 64% of the US population having taken at least one vaccine dose. The reason we haven't tracked SARS2 back to a starting animal source, is likely because there isn't one in that it didn't spread directly from an animal to humans without modification (they sampled it from bats, then they modified the virus, from which it was able to more easily infect humans); and if there were one, China aggressively blocked all efforts to discover the origins there (including destroying vital early data about the virus), which is beyond incriminating.
JetSetWilly 5y ago
> To make the discovery, Marc Eloit, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and his colleagues in France and Laos, took saliva, faeces and urine samples from 645 bats in caves in northern Laos. In three horseshoe (Rhinolophus) bat species, they found viruses that are each more than 95% identical to SARS-CoV-2, which they named BANAL-52, BANAL-103 and BANAL-236. The most scary thing about this research is scientists creating a non-zero risk of another zoonotic virus transfer by getting up close and personal with live bats. The benefits of the research (extremely minor) don't seem to justify the risk. We should just defund not only gain of function research but also trips to remote bat caves that have no particular benefit but a lot of downside risk.
- ch4s3 5y ago
  Sampling seems reasonable to me, especially now that we can spin up vaccines so quickly. In this new age of rapid mRNA vaccines it may make a lot of sense to catalog and sequence viruses before they jump the species barrier. This is off the cuff so I’m not sure.
- br-g 5y ago
  I’m curious to know what 95% identical means in this context. How similar is Covid to HIV, for example? Chimp DNA is 99% identical to human, for reference.
  - Enginerrrd 5y ago
    Excellent question. For viruses, 95% is VERY similar. To give you some calibration, SARS-COV-1 and SARS-COV-2 are like 79% similar.
  - scantis 5y ago
    Let me give you the scope of the problem. The genetic code is a redudant code, small difference in the code can still yield the same information. There are 64 triplets, start is one and stop are 2 and there are 20 coded amino acids coded with the rest. So 22 out of 64. There is a direct similarity and a similarity of information. For redudant code the former is useless. You can have a direct similarity of 30% and a similarity of information of 100%. (Considering a 1:3 redundant code at its worst, DNA performs much better) There is also a third layer of redundancy, that is still under investigation, where certain sequences of triplets can be permuted and still yield the same result. The order of assembly is redundant for some big projects also, allowing for the code to be permuted in chunks as well. So we are looking for the similarity of a redundant code that allows for permutations on two scales. Without considering how the measure of similarity is taken, something being X percent identical means absolute BUNK. It can not be a direct comparison of the code. SARS COV2 ~ 30000 pairs HIV ~ 10000 pairs Spike ~ 4000 pairs The SARS COV 2 virus has 3 times the code of HIV. You are also dealing with different sizes. But one can cut everything between start and stop, translate it to amino acids and permute the result into oblivion. Whatever is left can be compared by a huge variety of measures. But when working with it, you just sequence your stuff, feed it into the commerical software and click compare.
fsckboy 5y ago
with the recent revelation that there was a grant proposal for a "Furan site gain of function experiment" (in the recent past just before Covid-19), and the extreme lengths experts went to stop consideration of the lab leak hypothesis, here's where I stand: they could find actual Covid-19 in a population of bats, and I'm going to ask for proof that they didn't plant it there, since its first appearance was outside the Wuhan lab.
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  What you would expect to find in a natural zoonotic origin is a series of close ancestor relatives of the pandemic version, some capable of causing mild disease in humans (as with MERS and SARS for example). See this 2013 description for example: "We hypothesize that the direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was produced by recombination within bats and then transmitted to farmed civets or another mammal, which then transmitted the virus to civets by faecal–oral transmission. When the virus-infected civets were transported to Guangdong market, the virus spread in market civets and acquired further mutations before spillover to humans." For someone to fabricate a plausible natural origin story, they'd have to create a similar series of genetic variants based on ancestral bat strains, intermediates on the way to Sars-CoV-2. So, it'd be very difficult if even possible.
  - fsckboy 5y ago
    first of all, you're agreeing with me, I said I'd want to see proof, and you're saying what the proof would need to consist of. However, you are not addressing that there has been zero natural origin evidence, but they've all along been saying it's the likeliest, despite the Wuhan lab, and they've not been considering gain of function even though the US has been funding it in China at that lab.
    - photochemsyn 5y ago
      The fact that the virus just popped out of nowhere more or less without the normal pedigree is strong evidence against a natural origin theory. It's pretty clear at this point that it was a lab escape, in my opinion.
EGreg 5y ago
Also this https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03217-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03217-0
photochemsyn 5y ago
Very interesting stuff. The article itself doesn't make any claims about the origins of the pandemic, however, that's just the Nature News spin. For example: "Regarding the spike, we identied a breakpoint at the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 RBD, resulting in a downstream fragment composed of the RBD, the furin cleavage site, and ending in the N-terminal region of S2. Despite the absence of the furin site in these novel bat sarbecoviruses, phylogenetic reconstruction of this fragment, key for the virus tropism and host spectrum, revealed that Laotian R. malayanus BANAL-52, R. pusillus BANAL-103, and R. marshalli BANAL-236 coronaviruses are the closest ancestors of SARS-CoV-2 known to date." Basically, the human furin cleavage site that allows for human cell infection is lacking in these newly discovered viruses. Speculation that the site was introduced into a progenitor bat coronavirus deliberately as part of gain-of-function research is still valid, i.e. the question remains open.
Jorge1o1 5y ago
> “I am more convinced than ever that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,” agrees Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke–NUS Medical School in Singapore. >The Laos study offers insight into the origins of the pandemic, but there are still missing links, say researchers. For example, the Laos viruses don’t contain the so-called furin cleavage site on the spike protein that further aids the entry of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses into human cells. Nobody’s saying that COVID-19 was built atom-by-atom from carbon and hydrogen. We’re saying that virologists inserted the furin cleavage site into an existing coronavirus since that’s what they said they would do in their own leaked grant papers. 100% a bad-faith article, shifting the goalposts and spinning like there’s no tomorrow.

85 points by MKais 5y ago

thaumasiotes 5y ago

I eagerly await the discussion of how we need to start imposing accountability on the country behind it all.

Tostino 5y ago
That's been something I've barely seen discussed. Why are you bringing it up?
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Because it's discussed all the time, and somehow I suspect that suddenly no one will be interested in it if "the country behind it all" is Laos.
  - slg 5y ago
    You can't exactly put a country in jail so the only real way to punish a country is economically. Once we start talking economics, it is a lot easier to punish Bill Gates than a homeless man. China is #2 in the world in GDP and Laos is #118. Beyond that, it wouldn't even make sense to punish Laos if the virus did have zoological origins there. The first outbreak didn't occur in Laos so there is little validity to accusations of a coverup or mishandling of that non-existent outbreak. The only reasons people have wanted to punish China is because they believe that China either created this virus and let it leak or that their initial reaction to the virus is what allowed it to spread globally. There would be fault in the case of China. There would be no fault in the case of Laos.

basicplus2 5y ago

Laos is no where near wuhan

sega_sai 5y ago

It is good there is more data being collected, so we can discuss actual facts with evidence, as opposed to pure speculations 'I believe it is a lab leak' vs 'I believe it is natural'.

labster 5y ago
It could easily be a natural virus that was collected, but leaked from a the lab that studied it. To me, it makes sense to look at biohazard lab safety procedures if there was even a chance the lab was a factor in its spread. It’s possible to make mistakes while following best practices, or that those practices themselves need improved. It’s sad that it’s become a blame game of who caused the pandemic, when what we really need is an impartial account to prevent the next pandemic.
- MoreenDichele 5y ago
  The only thing that's sad is that you're a gullible cunt. This was obviously part of a plan to establish the new world order, as multiple world leaders have literally been scripted to tell you already in plain english. Die you fucking moron.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  A blame game is only sad if it was a true accident. If both the US and China were actually trying to develop such a virus and one of them accidentally released it, neither will be able to tolerate transparency because it would lead to international blame and desire for revenge.
  - newacct583 5y ago
    You powered that comment with two "if's" and a "would"! At what point should we expect you guys to start using "because" and "did"?
  - labster 5y ago
    The bio weapon theory just seems crazy, because why would a nation make a highly transmissible virus that it has no tools to control the pathogen? I’m working on the assumption that states like stability, workforce not dying, and strong economies. The Trumpist attacks on China make the most sense as being for the domestic political audience. The Chinese coverup of anything that makes CCP rule seem imperfect is SOP. I mean seriously, that guy in charge is afraid of a talking teddy bear.

danw1979 5y ago

> The study also doesn’t clarify how a progenitor of the virus could have travelled to Wuhan, in central China, where the first known cases of COVID-19 were identified — or whether the virus hitched a ride on an intermediate animal. “The main problems that the Institute of Virology has is that the outbreak occurred in close proximity to that Institute. That Institute has in essence the best collection of virologists in the world that have gone out and sought out, and isolated, and sampled bat species throughout Southeast Asia. So they have a very large collection of viruses in their laboratory. And so it’s — you know — proximity is a problem. It’s a problem.” - Ralph Baric (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...)

lubos 5y ago
They could have been infected by locals in regions they've been travelling to. Many possibilities. Why do we have to speculate? Let's just wait for more data. The timeline of HIV pandemic has been established decades after pandemic started. This will take time. I'd assume that virus originating anywhere in SEA region would be detected in China first. Just like many other viruses originating in America continent would be first detected in USA.
- cm2187 5y ago
  We may have to wait for the fall of chinese communism to know what happened though, like for Katyn. Might take a few decades. And assuming the chinese haven't destroyed the relevant Wuhan lab samples. That's what I would do in their place. Better never know than take the risk that a technician leak such sensitive information.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    Soviets had a number of either accidents or sabotage incidents with lethal biological agents. Afaik, there was zero additional clarity around those after USSR dissolved, so don't hold your breath.

cblconfederate 5y ago

i hope Laos doesnt have an institute of virology nearby

goldenkey 5y ago
Those damn conspiracy theorists with their reasonable observations! I mean, it's not like a fire ever started near a forest! /s
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

_3u10 5y ago

Oh good, I was worried that it came from a lab where they were working on changing the RNA of the virus with the exact changes present in COVID-19 as proposed in their grant applications and weren’t wearing masks when working with modified corona viruses. Glad we can finally rule the lab out.

newacct583 5y ago
> changing the RNA of the virus with the exact changes present in COVID-19 Sorry, not sure what you're reading, but this isn't remotely correct. Wild mistruths like this are precisely why no one takes you people seriously.

farmerstan 5y ago

It’s weird how people are trying so hard to convince others that the virus came from nature sources when it’s obvious now it didn’t. The amount of propaganda is really scary. All other viruses from animals were found very soon after an outbreak. It’s been almost 2 years now and the closest they could find is thousands of miles away and kind of sort of similar. Let’s not look for a zebra when all we have is a horse.

inter_netuser 5y ago
"thousand miles away" in Yunnan (right on the border with Laos) is where the "Bat Woman" was sent to investigate an pneumonia oubreak with case fatality rate of 50% in 2012. At the very minimum samples would've been brought back to WIV. Were they manipulated/gain-of-function enhanced since? I do not have enough back ground in bio to say, but what are the odds they'd just let samples sit and do nothing with them for years in a research lab? is that something they normally do? "Lethal Pneumonia Cases in Mojiang Miners (2012)" https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.702199/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.7021... Shi Zheng-Li's research, 2017: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bat-cave-solves-mystery-of-deadly-sars-virus/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bat-cave-solves-m...
ch4s3 5y ago
> All other viruses from animals were found very soon after an outbreak. It took a long time to find the animal source for HIV and if memory serves, swine flu took some time to be tracked down. > obvious now it didn’t I’m open to the lab leak origin as a possibility, but it seems far from obvious either way. The evidence is still pretty circumstantial. It’s worth further investigation, but I don’t think we should rush to a conclusion.
- adventured 5y ago
  HIV was a very different context and isn't remotely comparable to SARS2. It took many decades for HIV to spread to a consequential base of infected persons, from which it was then able to explode across the globe (due in part to the difference in travel then vs now of course). The reason it took so long to find the animal source, was because it wasn't perceived to be a critically important virus to deal with - it wasn't a priority - in the early decades due to the very low number of cases and related deaths. Depending on which origin theory you believe, it took anywhere from ~20 years to ~60 years, for HIV to go from a small number of cases to being globally threatening. SARS2 did that in a matter of months, so the priority is far different. SARS2 has killed 5+ million people in under two years, it took many decades for HIV/AIDS to do that. The US is still seeing more annualized Covid deaths than the world had total HIV/AIDS deaths annually circa 1990/1991, and that's with 64% of the US population having taken at least one vaccine dose. The reason we haven't tracked SARS2 back to a starting animal source, is likely because there isn't one in that it didn't spread directly from an animal to humans without modification (they sampled it from bats, then they modified the virus, from which it was able to more easily infect humans); and if there were one, China aggressively blocked all efforts to discover the origins there (including destroying vital early data about the virus), which is beyond incriminating.

JetSetWilly 5y ago

> To make the discovery, Marc Eloit, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and his colleagues in France and Laos, took saliva, faeces and urine samples from 645 bats in caves in northern Laos. In three horseshoe (Rhinolophus) bat species, they found viruses that are each more than 95% identical to SARS-CoV-2, which they named BANAL-52, BANAL-103 and BANAL-236. The most scary thing about this research is scientists creating a non-zero risk of another zoonotic virus transfer by getting up close and personal with live bats. The benefits of the research (extremely minor) don't seem to justify the risk. We should just defund not only gain of function research but also trips to remote bat caves that have no particular benefit but a lot of downside risk.

ch4s3 5y ago
Sampling seems reasonable to me, especially now that we can spin up vaccines so quickly. In this new age of rapid mRNA vaccines it may make a lot of sense to catalog and sequence viruses before they jump the species barrier. This is off the cuff so I’m not sure.
br-g 5y ago
I’m curious to know what 95% identical means in this context. How similar is Covid to HIV, for example? Chimp DNA is 99% identical to human, for reference.
- Enginerrrd 5y ago
  Excellent question. For viruses, 95% is VERY similar. To give you some calibration, SARS-COV-1 and SARS-COV-2 are like 79% similar.
- scantis 5y ago
  Let me give you the scope of the problem. The genetic code is a redudant code, small difference in the code can still yield the same information. There are 64 triplets, start is one and stop are 2 and there are 20 coded amino acids coded with the rest. So 22 out of 64. There is a direct similarity and a similarity of information. For redudant code the former is useless. You can have a direct similarity of 30% and a similarity of information of 100%. (Considering a 1:3 redundant code at its worst, DNA performs much better) There is also a third layer of redundancy, that is still under investigation, where certain sequences of triplets can be permuted and still yield the same result. The order of assembly is redundant for some big projects also, allowing for the code to be permuted in chunks as well. So we are looking for the similarity of a redundant code that allows for permutations on two scales. Without considering how the measure of similarity is taken, something being X percent identical means absolute BUNK. It can not be a direct comparison of the code. SARS COV2 ~ 30000 pairs HIV ~ 10000 pairs Spike ~ 4000 pairs The SARS COV 2 virus has 3 times the code of HIV. You are also dealing with different sizes. But one can cut everything between start and stop, translate it to amino acids and permute the result into oblivion. Whatever is left can be compared by a huge variety of measures. But when working with it, you just sequence your stuff, feed it into the commerical software and click compare.

fsckboy 5y ago

with the recent revelation that there was a grant proposal for a "Furan site gain of function experiment" (in the recent past just before Covid-19), and the extreme lengths experts went to stop consideration of the lab leak hypothesis, here's where I stand: they could find actual Covid-19 in a population of bats, and I'm going to ask for proof that they didn't plant it there, since its first appearance was outside the Wuhan lab.

photochemsyn 5y ago
What you would expect to find in a natural zoonotic origin is a series of close ancestor relatives of the pandemic version, some capable of causing mild disease in humans (as with MERS and SARS for example). See this 2013 description for example: "We hypothesize that the direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was produced by recombination within bats and then transmitted to farmed civets or another mammal, which then transmitted the virus to civets by faecal–oral transmission. When the virus-infected civets were transported to Guangdong market, the virus spread in market civets and acquired further mutations before spillover to humans." For someone to fabricate a plausible natural origin story, they'd have to create a similar series of genetic variants based on ancestral bat strains, intermediates on the way to Sars-CoV-2. So, it'd be very difficult if even possible.
- fsckboy 5y ago
  first of all, you're agreeing with me, I said I'd want to see proof, and you're saying what the proof would need to consist of. However, you are not addressing that there has been zero natural origin evidence, but they've all along been saying it's the likeliest, despite the Wuhan lab, and they've not been considering gain of function even though the US has been funding it in China at that lab.
  - photochemsyn 5y ago
    The fact that the virus just popped out of nowhere more or less without the normal pedigree is strong evidence against a natural origin theory. It's pretty clear at this point that it was a lab escape, in my opinion.

EGreg 5y ago

Also this https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03217-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03217-0

photochemsyn 5y ago

Very interesting stuff. The article itself doesn't make any claims about the origins of the pandemic, however, that's just the Nature News spin. For example: "Regarding the spike, we identied a breakpoint at the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 RBD, resulting in a downstream fragment composed of the RBD, the furin cleavage site, and ending in the N-terminal region of S2. Despite the absence of the furin site in these novel bat sarbecoviruses, phylogenetic reconstruction of this fragment, key for the virus tropism and host spectrum, revealed that Laotian R. malayanus BANAL-52, R. pusillus BANAL-103, and R. marshalli BANAL-236 coronaviruses are the closest ancestors of SARS-CoV-2 known to date." Basically, the human furin cleavage site that allows for human cell infection is lacking in these newly discovered viruses. Speculation that the site was introduced into a progenitor bat coronavirus deliberately as part of gain-of-function research is still valid, i.e. the question remains open.

Jorge1o1 5y ago

> “I am more convinced than ever that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,” agrees Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke–NUS Medical School in Singapore. >The Laos study offers insight into the origins of the pandemic, but there are still missing links, say researchers. For example, the Laos viruses don’t contain the so-called furin cleavage site on the spike protein that further aids the entry of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses into human cells. Nobody’s saying that COVID-19 was built atom-by-atom from carbon and hydrogen. We’re saying that virologists inserted the furin cleavage site into an existing coronavirus since that’s what they said they would do in their own leaked grant papers. 100% a bad-faith article, shifting the goalposts and spinning like there’s no tomorrow.