New studies point to animal origins for Covid-19

The following was written by Betsy McKay, Pulitzer Prize Winner, who covers U.S. and global public health for the Wall Street Journal.

Neither of the papers described and linked below settles the question of whether Covid 19 was the result of gain of function research in the Wuhan laboratory. But they highlight that it's foolish to assume with certainty that the virus did come from the lab, and so we're safe if we just stop the research.

In the future more viruses will jump from animals to humans. As Bill Gates and George W. Bush shouted from the rooftops in years past, we need to be prepared. Someday if there's a virus that's as infectious as the Delta variant and as lethal as Ebola or SARS, we're going to be up shit creek if we're not ready for it.

I've still got some of my surgical grade N95 masks I acquired back in 2005, after SARS. N95 masks should be an essential part of your survival kit, along with food, water, light sources, fuel, weapons and ammo.


New Reconstruction Points to Animal Origins for Covid-19

A scientist known for investigating viral origins has reconstructed the first known weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, adding to a growing body of evidence that the virus behind it jumped from infected animals to humans rather than emerging from laboratory research.

In a paper published Thursday in the academic journal Science, Michael Worobey concludes a wholesale seafood market in Wuhan, China, where live mammals were sold is very likely to be the site of the origin of the pandemic.

The precise role of the Huanan market in the pandemic has been debated by scientists. Dr. Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who previously unearthed clues about the origins of the 1918 pandemic flu and HIV, showed that most of the known Covid-19 cases in December 2019 had a direct or indirect link to the Huanan market. These infected people worked at the market, visited it, had contact with someone who was there or lived nearby, he found by piecing together genetic data, reports and accounts of early patients....




Researchers at the Pasteur Institute, a French nonprofit, reported in September that they had found three coronaviruses in bats in caves in northern Laos, close to the Chinese border, that very closely resemble SARS-CoV-2 and can infect human cells. The portion of the bat viruses that attach to cells, called the receptor binding domain, differs from that portion of SARS-CoV-2 by only one or two amino acids, the researchers said. Their findings were reported on a preprint server, and are being reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.

One of the viruses, collected in 2020 and dubbed in their study “Banal-52,” is so close that it is “essentially the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2,” Dr. Garry said during a webinar this week hosted by the Global Virus Network, a coalition of virologists.

The discovery of these viruses undermines the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 was created or adapted in a laboratory, he said. The differences between these viruses and SARS-CoV-2 show that the latter circulated in another animal after bats, adapting other properties such as a furin cleavage site that made it more transmissible among humans, he said.

The viruses in Laos and another close relative of SARS-CoV-2 found years ago in China, called RaTG13, support the idea that close ancestors of the pandemic pathogen probably came from a bat in southern China or northern Laos, said Dr. Bloom.

Dr. Bloom was among 18 scientists who signed a letter published in May calling for a deeper investigation into both the hypothesis that the pandemic resulted from a laboratory leak as well as from a spillover from infected animals to humans.

“It’s still unclear where the first infection happened and how the outbreak originated in Wuhan,” he said.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-rec...19-11637262041

Here are links to the papers described in the article,

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-871965/v1

Get a life...

Get a life... Originally Posted by Redhot1960

Thanks for the advice IIFFy.

Good article, Tiny.

Hopefully, people will eventually realize the enemy has always been the virus.

Assigning blame and arguing hypotheses haven't prevented a single death.

The virus is still out there and cases are increasing again. Other countries are moving toward renewing restrictions. We can avoid that here, not by "debating" but by acting.

the true origins of the death plague

Good article, Tiny.

Hopefully, people will eventually realize the enemy has always been the virus.

Assigning blame and arguing hypotheses haven't prevented a single death.

The virus is still out there and cases are increasing again. Other countries are moving toward renewing restrictions. We can avoid that here, not by "debating" but by acting. Originally Posted by Yssup Rider

Agreed Yssup. I don't know why it all became political. If cases start to spike again I'll go back to wearing a mask and social distancing. It's easy to do, although people where I live think it looks odd.

I saw a quote from one of the head people in public health in Germany, who said by the end of the winter most people there will have gotten vaccinated, gotten infected, or died from COVID. That's probably overly dramatic, the "dead from COVID" part. But anyway here in Texas, where more people have been infected, maybe we've already gotten to that point. Perhaps enough people have developed enough immunity through vaccinations and infection so the next wave, if it happens, won't be as bad as the previous ones. I hope so anyway.

Attachment 877591

Muppet rights have just know taken small steps forward!

Now we have a caustic title for a thread.

For the record. No muppet has gotten the wuhan virus. No muppet has taken the jab or will.

How many threads and posts have we seen from the leftwing nuts on here that blamed Trump...GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK WITH THIS "IT SHOULDN'T BE POLITICAL BULLSHIT!!

Agreed Yssup. I don't know why it all became political. If cases start to spike again I'll go back to wearing a mask and social distancing. It's easy to do, although people where I live think it looks odd. Originally Posted by Tiny

My closest Trump loving friend called me the other day and said Covid was over and gone. I called him an idiot and told him to stop listening to his idiot family in East Texas that never believed it existed and to stop believing everything he sees or hears on Fox news. I gave him another low blow when I told him to stop taking everything that fucking quack Tucker Carlson says as gospel.

It became political because the regime in power at the time made it so. More concerned with saving face than saving lives.

In the end, it lost both.

Hopefully this year a lot more families will be able to enjoy Thanksgiving together than last year. The airports are a shit show right now and gas prices are through the roof (I just paid 4.65/gal.). It’s unbelievable how badly this virus fucked up our country.

How many threads and posts have we seen from the leftwing nuts on here that blamed Trump...GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK WITH THIS "IT SHOULDN'T BE POLITICAL BULLSHIT!! Originally Posted by bb1961

At the time you posted, you were the only one who had mentioned Trump in this thread.

Trump ramrodded Operation Warp Speed. He pushed the vaccine through the FDA in record time. We know today that many lives were saved as a result. I seriously doubt Hillary Clinton would have done as well.

However last year Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and some other Democrats said they were afraid to take a vaccine developed under Donald Trump's watch. And in the early stages of the rollout, I believe some Black Democrats in particular were behind the curve in getting vaccinated. Some died as a result.

Fast forward to 2021. Biden becomes president and pushes the vaccine. And you had Republicans who wouldn't get it because Biden was pushing it.

The politics should have been irrelevant to a person's decision whether to get vaccinated, or wear a mask, or social distance.

Agreed Yssup. I don't know why it all became political. Originally Posted by Tiny

You mentioned it becoming political...yssup has blamed Trump for everything and now he is spewing his lying bullshit.
If you want I'll list you posts of his and other leftwing nuts blaming this on him. Don't tell me you haven't seen the hundreds of posts and threads Trump being responsible for the over inflated deaths...don't play stupid, unless you are

are you spying inside the house

The OP links to 'Science' - one of teh most respected peer review journals in teh World.

the article is a good read
It is information - not definitive - but is data added to the many publications on teh topic, and to help clear teh confusion over teh wuhan virus origin.


Given teh secrecy of teh CCP - there will never be an open investigation into teh wuhan facilities.

We may never know for sure the origin of teh wuhan virus.



Regadless - it is clear that whether naturally and spontaneously originated - or created in a CCP Wuhan Lab - the Wuhan virus originated in Wuhan , China. And was not appropriately managed by Chinese authorities.

They took this virus from bats and were doing gain of function "research" when it got "out"""