Origins of COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2

Hoopoe

Hoopoe

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Original thread title: Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a
 
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I'm not sure why the US Energy Department's opinion on the origin of covid-19 carries much more weight than 'Hutan's opinion on the origin of covid-19'. What's the connection between the origin of a virus in China and a department that presumably is responsible for keeping the lights on in the US?

For what it's worth, I agree with the Energy Department.
 
The US Dept of Energy is in charge of the nuclear weapons programme as well as domestic nuclear energy production, so presumably has interest in the wider security sphere. I think the relevant committee in Congress is Energy and Commerce. According to Wikipedia —

The Energy and Commerce Committee has the broadest jurisdiction of any authorizing committee in Congress. It legislates on a wide variety of issues, including:
  • health care, including mental health and substance abuse
  • health insurance, including Medicare and Medicaid
  • biomedical research and development
  • food, drug, device and cosmetic safety
  • environmental protection
  • clean air and climate change
  • safe drinking water
  • toxic chemicals and hazardous waste
  • national energy policy
  • renewable energy and conservation
  • nuclear facilities
  • electronic communications and the internet
  • broadcast and cable television
  • privacy, cybersecurity and data security
  • consumer protection and product safety
  • motor vehicle safety
  • travel, tourism and sports
  • interstate and foreign commerce
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Hutan said:
I'm not sure why the US Energy Department's opinion on the origin of covid-19 carries much more weight than 'Hutan's opinion on the origin of covid-19'. What's the connection between the origin of a virus in China and a department that presumably is responsible for keeping the lights on in the US?

For what it's worth, I agree with the Energy Department.
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It's an intelligence assessment, not a scientific one. Several departments contributed, then those assessments are collated and presented to the politicians. This is more about security analysis, diplomacy, etc. It's to guide policy.

US government agencies are more open about it now because of the Iraq war intelligence debacle but it should be taken as merely the input of this and that department as far as they know. It's presented this way because news media love clicks and eyeballs. Pure sensationalism.
 
SNT Gatchaman said:
The US Dept of Energy is in charge of the nuclear weapons programme as well as domestic nuclear energy production, so presumably has interest in the wider security sphere.
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Thanks, I did assume it was something like that, but having a Dept of Energy in charge of nuclear weapons just adds weirdness. Perhaps it's politically more acceptable for the Energy Department to say this than the CIA.
 
Columbia University Virology Professor Vincent Rancaniello discussed its origin on one his TWIV podcasts many moons ago debunking the lab leak theory. He said the virological markers of the SARS Co-V-2 virus mean that it could not have been produced by humans in a lab.

I trust the majority of virologists who, knowing the minutiae of tracing the lineage of viruses, say that it most likely came from the favorable and horrendous conditions of animals at the Wuhan market. As in civets. And long before that, from bats

The Energy Dept making a pronouncement of low confidence is pretty silly on the face of it.
 
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For those keen on the theory, this piece from ProPublica gives a good background on how it could have happened.

COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab (Oct 22)
-- The Wuhan lab at the center of suspicions about the pandemic’s onset was far more troubled than known, documents unearthed by a Senate team reveal. Tracing the evidence, Vanity Fair and ProPublica give the clearest view yet of a biocomplex in crisis.

I'd always thought it was likely a natural event, with a smaller possibility of having been an accident, though I haven't looked into the signatures that shak8 references above and I'm sure they're beyond me anyway. I presume there will be more novel viruses and who knows what lurking in the tundra, as climate change and human encroachment into natural habitats create more risk.

There was the paper A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence (2015, Nature Medicine) which predicted SARS-CoV re-emergence, and indeed they found a chimera had unexpected pathogenicity and poor therapeutic response.
 
shak8 said:
Columbia University Virology Professor Vincent Rancaniello discussed its origin on one his TWIV podcasts many moons ago debunking the lab leak theory. He said the virological markers of the SARS Co-V-2 virus mean that it could not have been produced by humans in a lab.
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I have two caveats to that.

Firstly this sounds like a denial that Covid19 was the result of some deliberate genetic engineering. That might indeed be unlikely but it isn't the point. The point is whether sloppy technique at the lab allowed a virus to escape. We have pretty good evidence, as I understand it that the technique was substandard at the lab. It seems likely that the work being done, partly funded by the US I think, was being done there because it was out of sight of US regulations.

Culpability is already proven here - the set up was bad enough to produce a pandemic.

I am also sceptical that anything can be excluded from the viral nucleic acid pattern. There are accounts that fit nicely with this arising as part of an increase of function study. We also have to remember that if things were being handled as irresponsibly as seems the case the academic virology profession has a lot to answer for. In simple terms academic virology has screwed up as big time as it could have by encouraging work that was sloppy enough for this to be possible.

Add to that the fact that this is altogether a very remarkable coincidence if not from the lab and I think it is naive not to come to the conclusion of the energy department.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
Add to that the fact that this is altogether a very remarkable coincidence if not from the lab and I think it is naive not to come to the conclusion of the energy department.
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From an earlier long piece, this time New York Magazine: The Lab Leak Hypothesis (Jan 2021) —

The zoonoticists say that we shouldn’t find it troubling that virologists have been inserting and deleting furin cleavage sites and ACE2-receptor-binding domains in experimental viral spike proteins for years: The fact that virologists have been doing these things in laboratories, in advance of the pandemic, is to be taken as a sign of their prescience, not of their folly. But I keep returning to the basic, puzzling fact: This patchwork pathogen, which allegedly has evolved without human meddling, first came to notice in the only city in the world with a laboratory that was paid for years by the U.S. government to perform experiments on certain obscure and heretofore unpublicized strains of bat viruses — which bat viruses then turned out to be, out of all the organisms on the planet, the ones that are most closely related to the disease. What are the odds?
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This is where the uniquely peculiar furin insert and/or the human-tuned ACE2-receptor-binding domain may come in — although it’s also possible that either of these elements could have evolved as part of some multistep zoonotic process. But in the climate of gonzo laboratory experimentation, at a time when all sorts of tweaked variants and amped-up substitutions were being tested on cell cultures and in the lungs of humanized mice and other experimental animals, isn’t it possible that somebody in Wuhan took the virus that had been isolated from human samples, or the RaTG13 bat virus sequence, or both (or other viruses from that same mine shaft that Shi Zhengli has recently mentioned in passing), and used them to create a challenge disease for vaccine research — a chopped-and-channeled version of RaTG13 or the miners’ virus that included elements that would make it thrive and even rampage in people? And then what if, during an experiment one afternoon, this new, virulent, human-infecting, furin-ready virus got out?
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Yea, what's the chance that this happened in the one(?) city in the world/primary centre doing research into these virus's ---
They were collecting material from a wide range of sources --- bats in caves ---
Then there's the issue of tweaking [genetically manipulating] the natural virus ("function study")
 
shak8 said:
Review in Cell, 2021 on the origins of the virus, also a section on whether lab leak or not.
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I can't follow all the detail of the molecular biology but there seem to be some disingenuous sections in this. They say that although viruses have escaped from labs before (actually tons including the lady who died of smallpox, and SARS-1) this would be the first leak of a new virus. Which does not seem to mean much if this particular lab is working on making new viruses.

Having been around when discussions around BSE were going on in our institution I became very aware of how much microbiologists are prepared to be economical with the truth in order not to rock the boat. One particular virologist who explained to me just how disastrous the situation looked in his office was on the radio saying not to worry the same week.
 
shak8 said:
Columbia University Virology Professor Vincent Rancaniello discussed its origin on one his TWIV podcasts many moons ago debunking the lab leak theory. He said the virological markers of the SARS Co-V-2 virus mean that it could not have been produced by humans in a lab.
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I don't think there's a real issue with an artificial virus, or artificially modified, so much as whether it escaped from a biolab that had samples vs. organic infection from contact with wildlife.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
We have pretty good evidence, as I understand it that the technique was substandard at the lab. It seems likely that the work being done, partly funded by the US I think, was being done there because it was out of sight of US regulations.
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IIRC, this lab was part-funded by the US government so they could have better surveillance, it followed the swine flu (or another strain but it was def a flu) outbreak I think. Obama created a unit high up in the government dedicated to possible pandemics. There was also an Ebola scare around this time, it was more about having better overall ability to react quicker.

So more like a joint operation where the lab is run by the Chinese government, but is part of the broader pandemic surveillance network.

That program was defunded by the past administration, including this lab. When COVID happened, they were cut out of it. So there's both an element of geopolitics and, let's say, poor decision-making domestically.
 
here is a TWIV I recall about the SARS-CoV-2 origin. I suspect this subject will forever be fervently debated.

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TWiV 876: Spillover market with Michael Worobey
March 17, 2022

Michael Worobey joins TWiV to explain evidence that SARS-CoV-2 emerged via the wildlife trade and that the Huanan market was the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-876/
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here is a description the curriculum vitae of Michael Worobey:

https://eeb.arizona.edu/person/michael-worobey
 
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