Part 3 of 3
Comments37
Kurt Thomas
JULY 15, 2020 AT 9:50 PM REPLY
Very convincing arguments for the provenance, thank you for researching and sharing.
Lifeguard Larry
JULY 16, 2020 AT 11:01 AM REPLY
If lungs are such great places for the virus to better adapt to human hosts what chance do we have against it now that so many millions of lungs are infected?
M
JULY 16, 2020 AT 7:50 PM REPLY
What is the source of the translation? How did you become aware of the Master’s Thesis?
Jonathan Latham
JULY 17, 2020 AT 12:35 AM REPLY
We hired a Chinese speaker to translate the Chinese Master’s thesis for us quickly, but clearly enough so we could understand the diagnosis and treatment of the miners’ illnesses. The translator was not a doctor, so a doctor kindly checked the English translation to improve clarity/accuracy of the medical terms. We became aware of the Chinese Master’s thesis and later the Chinese PhD thesis (that both reported on the mine incident) after reading the two extremely informative preprints — Rahalkar and Bahulikar 2020 and Segreto and Deigin 2020 — both referenced in the our article. Both are well worth reading.
Charlie Knoll
JULY 16, 2020 AT 9:50 PM REPLY
Your assumption “…BtCoV/4991 and RaTG13 are both from the same bat faecal sample and the same mine. They are thus sequences from the same virus” is suspect at best. BtCoV/4991 only has 373 base pairs. How can you be sure that there were no significant mutations between the unpublished BtCov/4991 portion and RaTG13?
Jonathan Latham
JULY 16, 2020 AT 9:53 PM REPLY
The sequences of both are publicly available so it’s not an assumption. They are identical.
Timothy Jones
JULY 16, 2020 AT 10:38 PM REPLY
excerpt
“As we noted in our earlier article, the most important of the questions surrounding the origins of SARS-CoV-2 could potentially be resolved by a simple examination of the complete lab notebooks and biosafety records of relevant researchers at the WIV.”
Why haven’t these people reconciled the issue with the Bat Woman?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... onavirus1/
excerpt
“Back in Wuhan, where the lockdown was finally lifted on April 8, China’s bat woman is not in a celebratory mood. She is distressed because stories from the Internet and major media have repeated a tenuous suggestion that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally leaked from her lab—despite the fact that its genetic sequence does not match any her lab had previously studied. Other scientists are quick to dismiss the allegation. “Shi leads a world-class lab of the highest standards,” Daszak says.”
Either she’s lying or the virus is natural.
Charlie Knoll
JULY 16, 2020 AT 11:17 PM REPLY
Ah, sorry I didn’t realize they had published the entire BtCoV/4991 sequence.
Jonathan Latham
JULY 17, 2020 AT 12:39 AM REPLY
Your question is not silly though. Sequencing can have errors, for example. But even if it was a tiny bit different most people would still say it was the same virus on the grounds that its not different enough to be a new strain or species.
Allison Wilson
JULY 17, 2020 AT 12:21 AM REPLY
We hired a Chinese speaker to translate the Chinese Master’s thesis for us quickly, but clearly enough so we could understand the diagnosis and treatment of the miners’ illnesses. The translator was not a doctor, so a doctor kindly checked the English translation to improve clarity/accuracy of the medical terms. We became aware of the Chinese Master’s thesis and later the Chinese PhD thesis (that both reported on the mine incident) after reading the two extremely informative preprints — Rahalkar and Bahulikar 2020 and Segreto and Deigin 2020 — both referenced in the our article. Both are well worth reading.
Dave
JULY 17, 2020 AT 1:05 AM REPLY
Preprint by Xiaoxu Sean Lin and Shihong Chen “Major concerns on the identification of bat coronavirus strain RaTG13 and quality of related Nature paper” doi:10.20944/preprints202006.0044.v1
Jonathan Latham
JULY 17, 2020 AT 1:33 AM REPLY
Excellent question. We agree that questions can be asked about RaTG13. The main one for us is that it is not an infectious clone. I.e. it has not fulfilled Koch’s postulates of being able to infect a bat, cause disease, and fulfill its lifecycle. Therefore it may be a mutant or defective in some way.
M
JULY 17, 2020 AT 2:23 AM REPLY
” Rahalkar and Bahulikar 2020 and Segreto and Deigin 2020″
Have you contacted the authors?
Crocodilite
JULY 17, 2020 AT 6:26 AM REPLY
(Looks like the comments I left yesterday didn’t make it for some reason–perhaps you misunderstood my enthusiasm. I’ll rephrase, be less “colorful,” and try again.)
I think this is an amazingly well-researched and well-thought out coherent piece! Thank you!
(1) About this whole miner saga, this is the first time I’ve heard about the existence of the human tissue and blood samples! If proved true, I think this is incredibly significant!
Do you have witnesses and/or paper trails that could testify to the existence of these samples?
If true, the degree of deception involved in hiding this fact seems mind-boggling to me and this culpability should be highlighted.
In all their public utterance, Shi and company have only cryptically mentioned a tiny sample of bat poop. And have indirectly claimed that the sample is in fact used up, so all traces of anything are gone!
At no place was there ever mention of a big stash of human tissue samples that are, at least according to this piece, likely heavily laden with the virus(es) in question!
The whole legend surrounding the “batwoman” mystique would have been almost an entire fraud, since the most important information was in the abundant and readily available human samples that were shipped to her labs with industrial efficiency, not in the tiny, potentially heavily contaminated poop bits that needed to be painstakingly coaxed out of stinky dark caves!
Exactly what has happened to these samples, I hope, will at some point, become a focal point of inquiry!
Exactly which strain(s) of the virus are in these samples is an incredibly intriguing question. To what extent, if at all, are they different from today’s SARS-CoV-2 or its bat ancestors? Does it include the all-important furin site?
If the samples were destroyed, who did it? Why?
(2) Just WHY?!
The all-important question of why, why did Shi and company hide this entire saga and the existence of the samples, for all these years, the all-important question of *motive*.
I understand it’s kind of beyond the scope of this scientific piece so it was probably prudent for the authors not to go there. But it’s an obvious question at least a reader should ask!
BSL4 is a means; it’s not an end. Waiting for BSL4 is waiting for a means to do what?
The work required for publication, if indeed deemed to be too risky to be carried out in China at the time, could easily be done at any number of overseas facilities, with the aid of Shi’s many international collaborators. Even more dangerous viruses had been studied safely and surely the means existed.
Shi’s entire career is built on the premise that another bat virus after Sars could one day jump from bats to human. She’s been jumping up and down telling the whole world about it. The miner saga is the holy grail! To sit on this for half a decade and keeping quiet about it is not in her character. Sitting on such a dangerous time bomb and being quiet about it is not the best way to warn the world about its impending doom.
And after the miner incident in 2013, she continued splicing experiments, creating worse and worse hybrids. The justification for the splicing experiments was that, since they couldn’t find actual natural cases of bat viruses jumping into humans, they could benefit from artificially creating them so they could study them. The miner incident showed that such jumps did in fact occur in nature and it was indeed as bad as it could get and they had all the samples they needed. That should have removed the excuses for continued splicing experiments.
In summary, I fail to see what legimate work they could possibly have intended that justified waiting for so long and so patiently to perform!
(3) “RaTG13” is a term whose meaning is no longer clear.
It could have been from the bat poop, which, critically, could be very different from what’s in the miner samples, especially in light of the main thesis of this piece, that there had been significant adaptation inside the miner lungs.
It could have come from the miners’ samples.
It could be a hodge-podge of several things in the bat poop.
And, of course, it could even have been faked!
Considering a strong condemnation has been brought against the conduct of Shi and company, the sole source of the dubious information concerning RaTG13, we can no longer confidently invest any meaning or trust in even the existence of RaTG13, let alone the finer details of its essential characteristics.
Reading this piece on its first day of publication has been a privilege and an eye-opener! Thank you!
Philip Ward
JULY 17, 2020 AT 8:48 AM REPLY
One question that immediately comes to mind is that if these patients in 2012 had CoViD-19 then why did this not lead at least to wider local outbreaks – for example in the places where they were treated or amongst their families or the people who transported them to doctors and hospitals. Is there any information about that available?
Lance
JULY 17, 2020 AT 7:14 PM REPLY
Brilliant and very intriguing analysis. Came here through https://swprs.org/covid-19-virus-origin ... ypothesis/
They link to another worrying article: https://armswatch.com/project-g-2101-pe ... s-in-bats/
So “Eco Health Alliance” was working with both the WIV and the Pentagon.
Allison Wilson
JULY 17, 2020 AT 10:29 PM REPLY
To answer Philip Ward: Good question. Our best guess is that it took a while for virus to evolve to be highly transmissible from human to human — this most likely happened later, after the miner(s) were in hospital. Also, once the miners were in the hospital the thesis is clear they were treated as if they had infectious diseases — perhaps even SARS or other very deadly diseases. Thus we expect the hospital staff were taking every precaution. There are other possibilities — the others were infected but had no symptoms or that infections were not made public or that we just have not encountered the data yet.
Dob
JULY 18, 2020 AT 12:24 AM REPLY
Being a scientist but not a research scientist, it seems from the evidence so far that the miners were infected by an undeveloped strain of Covid-19. Even assuming that RaTG13 is natural and its postulated genome is correct and not a hypothesised extrapolation from the 370 nucleotide sample from BAT4991 (neither of which appears to have any surviving examples despite being listed as being used for research numerous times in 2017 and 2018 in the Chinese research database) there is ample scientific evidence in related research quoted in the above article that it would have taken between 20 -50 years for the RaTG13 genome to have mutated naturally to the C0vid-19 genome.
However, in 2013 previous coronoviruses had not had the human to human transmission of Covid-19 and you would not have expected doctors, nurses, ancilliary staff, let alone simple porters, stretcher bearers and good samaritans to have taken the infection precautions we now take automatically – and yet none appears to have been infected. This means at that time human to human transmission was not possible – because that part of the virus’s genome had not come to fruition.
From 2013 to 2019 various Gain of Function processes were actioned on Bat samples in the Wuhan lab to make the samples more infectious to humans in order, as the researchers are quick to explain, to enable vaccines or preventative infectious measures to become readily available. In seven years what sort of experiments could have been done to arrive at Covid-19 – look at what has been done just in the last 8 months to counter the infection. See Timothy Stout’s comments for the range of options.
What I would like to know is how the infections in Wuhan, mostly type B virus with some A and the infections in Guangdong, all type A tie up and the timeframes involved. Did researchers from Wuhan travel to Guangdong and infect locals and did the virus then mutate from A to B as A was less infectious in the Chinese hosts (possibly from previous coronavirus infections) and therefore the virus had to change. Much to be discussed.
Madeleine Love
JULY 18, 2020 AT 1:05 AM REPLY
Thank you so much for the effort to find and translate a very interesting thesis, and developing a new hypothesis.
I had questions on the time related epidemiology, and also on the question raised by Philip above. I have questions about the ability to extract full sequences some months after the infection event, based on government reporting from my home state.
The article read as though all miners passaged RaTG13 for the same outcome. One would think there’d be an infection precedent. On the hypothesis that the miners suffered from Sars-Cov-2, I would think that one would’ve passaged it first.
[The typcial reported course of the virus… There is average of 6 days from infection to mild symptoms (2-26?). Another week to symptoms becoming “serious” enough to require hospitalisation.]
Patients were admitted 26/4 (1), 25/4 (2), 27/4 (3), 26/4 (4), 2/5 (5), 26/4 (6). Patients (1)-(4) began at the mine on 2/4 and worked 2 weeks. Patients (5) and (6) began on 22/4, supposedly after (1)-(4) had left. I would ask questions about residence and contact. It’s possible the one of the first miners passaged the most successful virus, and working an enclosed space passed it to the others within a few days. Certainly patient (6) proceeded more rapidly to hospital (patient (5) quite quickly), so it would suggest they already had the virus. I’d be asking questions about where they lived – local or fly in/fly out? Do they live in a town with others? Is there any local report of doctors/hospital staff becoming infected? I suppose China had been through sars and were highly precautionary – this didn’t apply in Wuhan where there were many infections in medical staff, but perhaps this was a consequence of an avalanche of cases and low ppe availability. It’s said that 80% of cases pass the virus on to no-one and that 20% are the super-spreaders. Perhaps the 6 weren’t the spreading types?
If this was the Sars-Cov-2 virus, one would be looking for the greater prevalence of low symptom sufferers, understanding that the miners were a relatively unwell population.
Regarding the ability to extract full sequences some months after the infection event. Here in Victoria Australia there is a general view that people are non-infectious 10-14 days after first symptoms. They explain subsequent positive tests as being related to viral particles, not whole live viruses. They may not be right, or it may relate specifically to the tests they are using, but they lead me to ask questions about the extraction of full viral material from the thymus so long after the infection events.
Jonathan Latham
JULY 18, 2020 AT 12:18 PM REPLY
I hope I have understood your question correctly but our contention is that, while normal coronavirus passes through a person quickly, these miners had the disease continuously for months. They did not manage to clear it and there was a kind of stalemete between the virus and the immune system that took a long time to resolve, either in death or recovery. We don’t rule out that they may have passed it to each other. Jonathan
Madeleine Love
JULY 18, 2020 AT 4:46 AM REPLY
The fact that the miners were sick with Covid-19-like symptoms doesn’t preclude lab development to enhance human affinity. What they presented with may have been the symptoms of BtCoV/4991 and RaTG13. Although these coronaviruses may not have strong human affinity it may have been sufficient in damaged lungs. This could explain the lack of a public epidemic/health care worker report of illness. Are there any reports of anyone having been infected with BtCoV/4991 and RaTG13?
Aksel Fridstrøm
JULY 18, 2020 AT 1:41 PM REPLY
Thank you for a very interesting article, and for providing a link to my interview with Birger Sørensen in Minerva.
I have recently written two more articles on the works of Sørensen, you might find them interesting.
This one is about the struggle to publish his article:
https://www.minervanett.no/angus-dalgle ... cle/362519
The second one contains an upload of his full thesis:
https://www.minervanett.no/angus-dalgle ... rus/362529
Allison Wilson
JULY 18, 2020 AT 2:34 PM REPLY
Lance thank you for the link to Arms Watch and the excellent article connecting EcoHealth Alliance (which has links to the Gates Foundation) to the US Military. I hope many people will read this article and the Arms Watch website http://armswatch.com/. EcoHealth gets the vast majority of its money from the government but it also has corporate funding and foundation funding which it would be useful to know more about.
Brin
JULY 18, 2020 AT 4:28 PM REPLY
@Jonathan and Allison: Prof Balloux notes that “4 out of 7 known hCoVs have furin cleavage site”, including “common cold” viruses OC43 and HKU1. Is this correct or is there a difference to SARS2 and MERS that makes them special or requires “special explanation”?
https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/sta ... 5746233344
Allison Wilson
JULY 18, 2020 AT 4:31 PM REPLY
There may exist other reports on the Mojiang Mine Outbreak, or reports of people other than the miners being infected. However, the only reports we are aware of are 1. The Master’s thesis by Xu,Li (2013) 2. The Huang, Canping (2016) PhD thesis(chapter 3). 3. The Science news item “A New Killer Virus in China?” (this report only mentions the three miners who died) and 4. the short scientific report by Wu et al. 2014. The originals and/or translations of these documents are all linked to in the text and/or cited in the references of our article. We would like to hear about any other documented reports on this outbreak that people can find.
Brin
JULY 18, 2020 AT 4:35 PM REPLY
alright this seems to answers it: no other CoV has ACE2/FCS combination:
https://twitter.com/flavinkins/status/1 ... 3676516352
https://twitter.com/flavinkins/status/1 ... 7473904640
So FCS not unique in general but in hCov group 2B.
Crocodilite
JULY 18, 2020 AT 6:29 PM REPLY
This excellent piece has at least three key ideas or revelations. (1) The mine saga and human samples, a bombshell! (2) Significant and rapid adaptation by the virus in miner lungs. (3) ALL, not just some, features of the virus (including the all-important furin site) were acquired solely in miner lungs. Some may deem (2) and/or (3) controversial.
But one of the greatest contributions this piece could make is to alert people to a line of possible forensic inquiry that has a clear origin and narrative that should be pursued. We now have a solid lead, starting with the mine, to the hospital, to WIV. A lot of people were involved in this chain of events. There should be witnesses, paper trails, and medical samples. That these leads need to be pursued is entirely independent of whether one believes Idea (2) or Idea (3). The corrupt forces will likely want to confuse the matter. They would point to the potential controversies of Idea (2) or Idea (3) to discredit the entire piece and therefore obstruct an inquiry that starts with just Idea (1). People need to be aware of that and call that out if/when it happens.
And for people who believe an entirely man-made narrative, please be mindful that Idea (1) and Idea (2) are still compatible with later human manipulation. You wouldn’t want to go out of your way to discredit this piece just because you don’t believe in Idea (3). Unlike the disgraceful Andersen piece, this piece is your friend, not your enemy. The mine origin story could be one of the very few, if not the only, credible forensic leads that could be the starting point of an inquiry. If an investigation that starts with the mine ultimately leads to uncovering crimes that more closely resemble your pet theory than Idea (3), I believe the authors of this piece would have no problem, neither should you. We should be objective and critical about scientific details, but we should be united in our call for an inquiry that follows the trail leading from the mine, to the hospital, to WIV, and hopefully, to the ultimate truth!
Paul Jackson
JULY 18, 2020 AT 6:34 PM REPLY
How about the presence of a snippet of HIV in SARS-CoV-2? Does that exist? Does it point to some manipulation in the WIV lab?
Alan
JULY 19, 2020 AT 8:32 PM REPLY
The story is convincing in detail, but fails to support the conclusions. The story says that Covid19 evolved naturally in miners lungs in a hospital, then they concluded that it originated from a lab. According to the detail, the lab merely stored the virus and did no significant originating work on it before it escaped. this does NOT make the lab the origin of the virus, merely a multi-year storage point during which time it seems to have been eradicated elsewhere.
M
JULY 20, 2020 AT 7:06 AM REPLY
SARS-CoV-2, viruses that are suspected to have caused a COVID-like illness in 2012 and which may be key to understanding not just the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic but the future behaviour of SARS-CoV-2. Well said as Dr Yan limeng in the Fox News interview warn us we need find the truth.
Jonathan Latham
JULY 20, 2020 AT 7:47 PM REPLY
PS Apologies that the “REPLY” function seems not to be working. Attempting to fix this.
Jonathan Latham
JULY 22, 2020 AT 3:41 PM REPLY
A kind reader (John) has made this available as a Talking Paper to download and listen to. Hear his nice English accent at:
https://soundcloud.com/talkingpapers/pr ... r-sarscov2
Also available on youtube:
https://youtu.be/l3gQdkWn9u0
(link updated)
Paul Zhao
JULY 23, 2020 AT 9:38 AM REPLY
Would it be possible to publish the paper on mainstream science journals? If not, it’s unlikely to lead to an unbiased investigation, and the article will be ignored, as Dr. Sorensen’s.
Jonathan Latham
JULY 23, 2020 AT 12:40 PM REPLY
The conundrum of peer review is that it can take a long time and may not be fair. One of the things we have noticed in submitting ‘challenging’ papers is that editors (and/or reviewers) often take even longer than normal. It can take six months to get a “No” and that No is sometimes based on a trivial critique. We therefore don’t cite Sorensen just because he says it. We have personal experience. This paper of ours, for example ended up never being published even though no one (including peer-reviewers, editors, etc) has ever advanced a serious and substantive critique (https://2k4vbx44lajeo2rag2seu29o-wpengi ... Wilson.pdf).
But the other aspect is that, even if it becomes part of the published literature, it can still be ignored.
Lifeguard Larry
JULY 23, 2020 AT 11:01 PM REPLY
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... onavirus1/
Notice
1) China says it has less infections and deaths now than it had in April
2) Shi says that the Mojiang miners suffered from a fungal infection when it was known almost immediately that they suffered from coronavirus.
3) Daszek is not willing to suspend his dangerous experiments despite the huge risks now evident to everyone.
4) Scientific American did not revise the numbers or comment on any of this when it republished the article. Nor has the scientific community subsequently.
Bob Clyatt
JULY 24, 2020 AT 4:51 PM REPLY
Following these papers and discussion with great interest. Thank you for your courageous and intellectually honest efforts. One question that I did not see addressed: what would explain the highly stable nature of Covid-19 in humans? Does that suggest some sort of passaging process might have been undertaken on the original miner’s samples at WIV during the past few years, and that one of those more evolved/stable versions, rather than the raw miner samples, was what leaked?
Will Lar
JULY 24, 2020 AT 7:45 PM REPLY
If it’s from the lab samples of WIV as suggested, it’s naturally to think that the workers especially the ones in the Shi lab in the institute were the first to be exposed and possibly infected. Do you have any information or data regarding the number of infected cases or deaths within WIV? Any information regarding the possible pathway of virus traveling from the lab to the outside world?