Lol.
Well, I've got a better conspiracy theory. Seeing as both speedy and tsmokies are saying let's move on, there's nothing to see here... that tips me off to the real source!
Covid-19 must have been created & released by the Democrats as a scheme to defeat Donald Trump in 2020! Remember how they started howling early in 2020 about turning the pandemic into "Trump's Katrina"? Well, that's exactly what they did, with help from the MSM. They blew up every trump mis-statement and blamed him personally (instead of China) for every covid death. Covid provided the excuse for the Dems to hide their "Weekend at Bernie's" zombie candidate in a basement in Delaware for most of the campaign, and it enabled them to flood the country with millions of mail-in ballots waiting to be "harvested" by all those Mark Zuckerberg activists!
I mean, why else would speedy and tsmokies be so eager for everyone to move on... that's part of the Dem cover-up plan!
Seriously, where are you on the origin question? If you had $100 to put on a zoonotic versus a lab-leak source, would your bet be 50/50 or what?
Originally Posted by lustylad
When texassapper started this thread I might have put the probability of a lab leak at 60%. After reading your Science article, and a paper the article links to, and searching for "COVID origin lab leak zoonosis" in Google Scholar, I'll revise that to 60% natural origin / 40% lab leak. Looking at the literature, I believe the majority or most people who really know this subject and the science behind it favor the natural origin hypothesis.
Here's an analogy. Say somebody asks me to estimate the relative contribution of Fed policy and Biden's American Rescue Plan to U.S. inflation in 2021. I have to assign a number from one to ten for each choice and the two numbers have to add up to ten.
I could pick something out of the air. Or I could ask you and TC for your guesses and average them. I'd trust your guesses better than my own so I'd go with the average over my guess. Similarly, I'd go with the expert's consensus over my own intuition for zoonotic origin vs. lab leak.
Here's the paper that's linked in your Science article,
https://zenodo.org/records/7754299
They found COVID RNA associated with both human and animal genetic material, providing strong evidence that both infected people and infected animals were at the market. So yes, you could be right that the COVID was transmitted from humans to animals at the market.
The reason this is a potential game changer is because the local Chinese government earlier claimed that the only live animals in markets in Wuhan were fish, reptiles and amphibians. The closest known animal virus to SARS-CoV-2 was from bats several hundred miles away from Wuhan. So the Wuhan virus institute stood out like a sore thumb, as a possible source of the earliest infections. If memory serves me correctly, researchers at the institute had visited and gotten samples from the bat cave in question. The bat virus, however, lacked the furin cleavage site. So there were suspicions of gain-of-function research, prior to a lab leak. Virologists however said that SARS-CoV-2 irrefutably was not derived from any of the virus backbones they were using. The Chinese would have had to go out of their way to mask the genetic manipulation of the bat virus so they weren't leaving a trace. Add the idea that the Chinese military was involved and you've got a full blown conspiracy theory.
Now though we're pretty sure there were animals with COVID at the Wuhan market before January 1, 2021. The wild animals would have come from all over China. And there's a good bit of evidence linking a large number of early human infections, around 25% I think, to the Hunan Seafood Market.
Here are the arguments for a zoonotic origin in the concluding section of the linked paper,
1. A preponderance of the earliest hospitalized COVID-19 patients were linked to a single location, one of just four locations in a city of 11 million people where plausible intermediate hosts of SARS-CoV-2 were sold live. There are hundreds or thousands of other sites that would have been equally or more likely than this wildlife market to have the first-detected and largest cluster of early cases had
the outbreak there not been associated with wildlife sales.
2. The locations of early, severe COVID-19 cases without a clear epidemiological link to the Huanan market nevertheless were so centered on and close to the Huanan market that it is clear that community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 began in this local area and only later expanded across Wuhan, and the rest of the world. Importantly, this includes those infected with lineage A viruses (and not just lineage B), indicating that early community spread of both early lineages of the virus radiated out from the market.
3. The locations of SARS-CoV-2-positive environmental samples in the Huanan market were close to or exactly where susceptible live mammals were sold.
4. The early genetic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 suggests multiple spillovers, and both early lineages, “A” and “B”, were directly observed at the market geographically associated with the market’s location in a way not expected by chance.
5. Live susceptible animals such as raccoon dogs had been reported to be on sale in this market, including during the month (November 2019) when the first human SARS-CoV-2 infection is estimated to have occurred
6. Evidence collected and generated by China CDC and analyzed here shows that genetic material of such potential intermediate hosts was detected in SARS-CoV-2-positive environmental samples.
These arguments stand in stark contrast to the absence of evidence for any other SARS-CoV-2 emergence route.
Lineage A and B refer to two lineages of the virus that were slightly different genetically. Earlier on people were hypothesizing that the two lineages originated at two different markets in Wuhan. The researchers believe both actually originated at the same Wuhan Seafood Market.
One other comment, you brought up the furin cleavage site earlier. Apparently that's not nearly as uncommon as some thought in coronaviruses. See
https://pubs.asahq.org/monitor/artic...searchresult=1