Update: WHO team visits P4 lab in Wuhan Institute of Virology - February 2021

[Mary Wilson]

As the National International Collaboration Center, WIV facilitate medium- and long-term international collaboration with the approach to strengthen science and technology ties with European countries, to extend its collaboration with developing countries, as well as to explore the model of collaboration with developed countries like U.S.A, and to enhance collaboration and dialog with relevant international organizations.
After years of development, we have establishes a lot of international partnerships.
USA
University of Alabama
University of North Texas
EcoHealth Alliance
Harvard University
The National Institutes of Health, the United States
National Wildlife Federation
Canada
International Development Research Center
Europe
Um? University
Novo Nordisk Research Centre
Universit? d’Aix-Marseille
University of Duisburg-Essen
Institut Pasteur, France
University of Southampton
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Campus Univ, Spain
St George's University of London
Wagenigen Agriculture University
Lyon P4 Laboratory, France
AFSSAPS
AFNOR
INSERM Jean Merieux
Asia
Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore
Biological Research Center, Defense Science and Technology Organization, Pakistan
National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Japan
Institution Novartis, Singapore
National Engineering and Scientific Commission, Islambad
Africa
Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology
Kenya National Museum
Australia
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization
International Organizations
European Union
Food and Agriculture Organization, UN
World Health Organization

http://english.whiov.cas.cn/International_Cooperation2016/Partnerships/

__________________________________________________ ___________________
Does a Doctor/Scientist's citizenship really matter?
We have seen lots of discrediting done on research, scientists, etc this past year.
I suppose the bickering over the coronavirus will continue for those who choose.

[Emily]

Is Daszak a US citizen? I thought he was British. I don't think you need US citizenship to lobby for US taxpayer funding.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9244211/WHO-attacks-AMERICA-Wuhan-whitewash.html

...
His expertise, which includes a hand in more than 300 scientific papers, has won prominence in global scientific and public health circles. He has, however, been the target of abuse over his stance and had suspicious white powder sent to his home.

Yet he is accused of bullying opponents by those that have clashed with him, who include Colin Butler, honorary professor of environmental health at the Australian National University. Butler edited a scientific journal with Daszak for three years.

‘He probably sincerely believes in his work but he has built an empire around the idea that zoonoses [animal to human infections] are the most important thing in the world,’ said Butler.

‘He has also worked with the Wuhan Institute in what is reportedly gain of function research.’

Butler, a former WHO adviser who has worked in China, published a paper last month in the Journal Of Human Security highlighting inconsistencies in the lab’s response and ‘striking’ circumstantial evidence giving credence to the possibility that Covid-19 escaped from a lab – including the location of the outbreak in Wuhan...

[Treyfish]

American on World Health Organization coronavirus investigation team dismisses US intelligence

• Peter Daszak suggests President Joe Biden was only sceptical about the WHO’s trip to Wuhan because he ‘has to look tough on China’
• Observers have criticised the inclusion of Daszak as the WHO mission’s sole American because he was affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology

The lone American on the
World Health Organization
coronavirus fact-finding mission in China dismissed US intelligence on the virus’ origins and urged the Biden administration to trust the WHO’s work amid criticism that the organisation is insufficiently independent from Beijing.
The comments from Peter Daszak, president of the research organisation EcoHealth Alliance, came after the Biden administration said on Tuesday that the US would
not accept
the WHO’s findings without first independently verifying them with its own intelligence and conferring with allies.
In a series of tweets responding to a South China Morning Post report on the administration’s comments, Daszak suggested President
Joe Biden
was only sceptical about the WHO’s trip to Wuhan because he “has to look tough on China”....

According to the science magazine Nature, Daszak has professional ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and had funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) suspended last year as a result.

Yun Sun, director of the China programme at the Stimson Centre think tank in Washington, said Daszak was “famous” for his prior relationship and cooperation with the institute in Wuhan.

“I think people have legitimate concerns coming to his objectivity and comments,” she said. “His comments will certainly make Beijing happy.”....https://www.scmp.com/news/china/arti...ion-team-urges

[bertrand789]

?J’ai d? enterrer mes rats vivants, raconte l’?leveur de 36 ans, qui vit dans un petit village du Guangdong, dans le sud de la Chine. J’ai creus? un trou et je les ai ensevelis. Je n’ai pas eu le choix: on m’a subitement interdit de les vendre et je n’avais plus les moyens de les nourrir.?

Depuis mars, quelque 20 000 ?levages ont mis la cl? sous le paillasson. Le manque ? gagner pour les ?leveurs atteint 11 milliards de yuans (1,4 milliard de francs).

https://www.letemps.ch/sciences/chine-cherche-se-defaire-passion-animaux-exotiques

un tout petit Monsieur

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%92%9F%E5%8D%97%E5%B1%B1

Le rat de bambou a ?galement ?t? soup?onn? par Zhong Nanshan, le chef du groupe d'experts de haut niveau de la Commission nationale de la sant? de Chine , comme l'une des sources de la nouvelle pneumonie ? coronavirus , mais il n'y a aucune preuve claire pour le prouver

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8...AB%B9%E9%BC%A0

je me demande s'il n'avait vraiment pas de preuve

2006-2011: Pr?sident de l'Association m?dicale chinoise

c'est quand m?me mieux que prof de philosophie, non ?

[JJackson]

Just to be clear I am not a Dr. nor do I have any qualifications I have just been learning for my own interest. Most of the information on this has come from TWiV interviews with Linfa Wang and Peter Daszak both of whom have been on multiple times both before and after the pandemic started.

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv

[etudiant]

Dr JJackson has posted the most detailed summary that I've seen about the origins of the famous RatG13 virus sample, which puts its discovery and evaluation into context.
He also points out that reanalysis of older blood samples should hopefully give a better understanding of the origins and spread of the virus among people.
He notes that Peter Daszak's analysis suggests over a million bat to human CoV transmissions annually, overwhelmingly duds, but by the evidence, one was not.
To me, that is the murky part of the process, the Covid spike mutation is large and so very human specific that it seems implausible, even with a million plus tries annually.

That aside, I thank Dr JJackson for his very helpful input, I just wish he could present the actual facts as above on Fox News and such, sites where the WHO report is already getting dismissed simply because the messenger has no credibility with many.

[bertrand789]

recherche chez l'animal en Chine c'est pour rire.

" Ainsi, d'apr?s Xiong Fuqiang, chef adjoint du Parti de l'Ecole de m?decine v?t?rinaire de l'Universit? agricole de Nanjing, jusqu'? 10 000 ?tudiants sortent dipl?m?s dans cette sp?cialit? chaque ann?e en Chine, mais il manque encore plus d'1 million de v?t?rinaires."

http://french.peopledaily.com.cn/Economie/n3/2017/0830/c31355-9262223.html

Donc, comme ils avouent qu'il leur en manque plus d'un million, on leur envoie un prof de philosophie.

La profession de v?t?rinaire en Chine c'est pour faire les papiers dans un bureau ?

[JJackson]

etudiant
I do not think RatG13 came from the cave where the farmers collecting guano for their fields got ill. I think the RatG13 sequence was collected by Ecohealth alliance who were not looking for SARS but Nipah. The sequences were checked for Nipah but none was found so the expedition was deemed a washout. About 2 years later Linfa Wang working at the ABSL lab in Australia phoned Peter Daszak to say he had been working on the RNA found in the guano and discovered they had found the most SARS like sequences discovered in the wild to date.
Daszak in collaboration with WIV also found from sero-prevalence data, from small clinics they had trained to do the work, in the areas around the caves that there are likely to be over a million bat to human CoV jumps annually which just go nowhere. SARS1, MERS and SARS-2 all have a very large, but different, insertions in the spike protein which includes a RBD that can bind to a human receptor. This is not normal, or needed, in the bat host and is therefore very rare. All those dud bat to human jumps are likely to be of bat alpha or beta CoVs that had normal, for bats, spikes that could not bind efficiently. Unfortunately someone met one with some variant of this addition in 2003 and again in 2019 which could sustain h2h.
If I had to make a guess, and it could only be a guess, how it got from bats to humans it would have been directly bat to human via droppings. It may have stuttered in humans for a while until one of its quasi-species hit lucky and all the sequences we have found to date flow from that one individual. Wuhan, WIV and the fish market are a bit of a red herring as it is where the first cluster large enough to attract attention against the background of undiagnosed pneumonia was found. We are already beginning to see the date for early cases being pushed further back in various countries as pre-pandemic blood samples are being PCRed with SARS-CoV-2 primers, this is already beginning to show SARS-2 silently spreading before Wuhan told us about it and with a bit of luck we may able to generate sequences showing us what it looked like before WH01 which is the current route sequence of the phylogenic tree. This process will continue and hopefully Ecohealth Alliance will be able to get back into the caves to find out just how many bats do carry beta-CoVs with RatG13 like insertions. To date RATG13 is still the closest bat sequence to SARS-1 but I expect that to change once we start to look again.

[Treyfish]

No indication of COVID-19 virus in Wuhan before December 2019: WHO team

Updated : February 09, 2021 05:14 PM IST
The team arrived in Wuhan on January 14 and visited key sites like the Huanan seafood market and Wuhan Institute of Virology
It’s unlikely that any substantial infection of SARS-CoV2 took place between October and December 2019, an expert said....Liang Wannian, an expert with China’s Health Commission, said that unpublished data suggests that virus that causes COVID-19 could have been circulating in other regions several weeks before the first reported cases in Wuhan at the end of 2019.

Wannian added that the records of 76,000 episodes in Wuhan health centres were analysed. “It’s unlikely that any substantial infection of SARS-CoV2 took place between October and December 2019,” he said....https://www.cnbctv18.com/healthcare/...am-8257691.htm

[JJackson]

Re ABSL4. I do not fully understand exactly which lab you need for each type of experiment but they seem to come in two flavours either you can house the animals in cages and be separated by a barrier, as in cabinet work, or the work directly with the animals reliant on your suit. The bat lab in Australia is very large and can take horses (intermediate host for Hendra) and pigs (for Nipah) simultaneously and for this I assume they need the latter. For mice I can envisage most work could be done with the caged/barrier method.

Humans are the weak link in all these systems and they are made as idiot/tamper proof as we can. In addition to the list of lab errors you have catalogued there is the US researcher who post anthrax around the country and the Baxter lab in Austria that shipped HP H5N1 to several European labs labelled as seasonal H3N2 which was well covered here.

What is the alternative to these labs? It is miraculous that we have one highly effective vaccine, let alone several, to a disease we did not have a sequence for a year earlier. The first vial was made 66 days after the sequence release. None of this would have been done if the basic research had not already been done with SARS-1 and MERS, and various modified versions of these viruses, in high containment facilities and we would have had to start from scratch with no safe way of working with SARS-2. The result would have been years of delay and millions of additional deaths. If you think you have a vaccine candidate you have to try it in cell culture and if it works small infected mammals then primates. At each level it may well fail as you get closer to a true human test and each level needs different containment only then can you go to phase 1, 2 and then 3 human trials. Any experiment, even outside BSL labs, has to be agreed with a safety officer who will need to know all the reagents you are planning to use, how they are to be stored & handled who will have access to them, how the experiment is to be performed etc. etc.

[sharon sanders]

Expected result....

So over 2 million human deaths without any animal intermediary identified. After a year the best scientists in the world can not identify and prove an animal host. This does not make any sense.

I assume we are the host.


WHO says Covid ‘most likely’ originated in animals and spread to humans, dismisses lab leak theory


PUBLISHED TUE, FEB 9 20216:19 AM ESTUPDATED TUE, FEB 9 20217:51 AM EST


snip


He added it was not yet possible to pinpoint the animal intermediary host for the coronavirus, describing the findings after nearly a month of meetings and site visits as “work in progress.”

“In terms of understanding what happened in the early days of December 2019, did we change dramatically the picture we had beforehand? I don’t think so,” Ben Embarek said.

snip

“The laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population,” Ben Embarek said. “Therefore, [it] is not in the hypotheses that we will suggest for future studies.”

The team had reached the conclusion that a lab leak should be regarded as extremely unlikely “on the basis of a serious discussion and very diligent research,” added Liang Wannian, head of the expert Covid panel at China’s National Health Commission.


https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/09/who-...-pandemic.html

[etudiant]

The Feb 5 input by JJackson is significant imho, as it suggests that the RatG13 virus was just one of many collected during the expedition that was studying a fatal viral disease outbreak in southern China. Moreover, his comment suggests this virus was not fully sequenced until after the epidemic raised its profile. If all of that is correct, it would be very reassuring.
The concern is of course that several people died in 2013, the Institute was charged with finding out why and their team collected fecal samples, one of which carried a virus fairly closely analogous to the Covid 19 vector..
Obviously people were concerned about a potential pandemic and researchers were actively pursuing 'gain of function' experiments on potentially hazardous viruses to understand what we might need to cope with in the future, The CDC funded part of the lab afaik for exactly this reason.
So there are two scenarios, one where the Institute recovers a lot of fecal samples with many viruses, one of which is a close match to the Covid 19 virus, but they only find out later.
The other is where they know that there is a lethal virus, because it has killed several locals, they pick up samples and then work on the most promising, presumably including the RatG13, to improve their functionality. Then an accident happens, human error or just sloppiness and we get where we are.
My money is on the latter scenario, simply because that is the one that explains the lack of plausible animal intermediary as well as the frantic efforts by the Chinese leadership to sanitize the Institute files. But of course that might be a mistaken view, JJackson is vastly more knowledgeable in this space than am I, but the lack of cooperation of the Chinese leadership is telling, imho.

[Treyfish]

Health experts find evidence of origins of coronavirus during investigation in China


They said 'they can't rule anything out'

• Matt JarramSenior Digital Reporter and Crime Correspondent
• 14:11, 7 FEB 2021

....British zoologist Peter Daszak told CNN his team of investigators had submitted a list of places to visit and people to speak to, receiving no opposition from the Chinese authorities.

He added that evidence has been found about the virus' origins and is being "pieced together," reports The Mirror.

He said: "We are not running rogue here, we are talking to our hosts. We are in a foreign country, we are guests of China right now.

"This is a good, collaborative, scientific approach to understanding more about the origins of Covid."

When asked if it was possible that virus was engineered from within Wuhan's Institute of Virology lab, he replied: "There's no evidence of that at all - but it something that we talked about with people at Wuhan lab.
.......
......https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/...rigins-4976841

[Treyfish]

WHO continues probe into initial coronavirus spread in Wuhan, finds key clues into role of seafood market

By: FE Online |
February 7, 2021 5:40 PMThe purpose of this mission is to understand how the virus transmitted from animals to humans.

.....While team experts have said that they have uncovered important clues, they have refused to elaborate on what these clues are until the official is released, likely some time this month. The purpose of this mission is to understand how the virus transmitted from animals to humans, since the closest known relative of this virus came from bats who are not even native to Wuhan. WHO wanted to understand what happened in Wuhan so such a widespread outbreak can be prevented in the future....

......The experts stated that they have three different threads as a part of the investigation. One of them came from the genetic sequencing data that is trying to identify the links of similarities between the patients and wildlife, the second being important insights from the visit to Huanan fresh produce market where seafood is sold majorly. This market was the early focus of the outbreak of cases, which were reported in workers and shoppers, indicating that the virus jumped from the seafood sold here to the patients who consumed it. The third thread is the fact that the earliest cases reported of the virus had no link to the market, which led to the undermining of this theory....https://www.financialexpress.com/lif...arket/2189887/

[sharon sanders]

JJackson commented
Yesterday, 08:53 AM
Etudiant
I was not aware that WIV had an ABSL4 lab or a bat colony. I know a number of ABSL labs do have bats but they are all large fruit bats and the research was on Hendra and Nipha. SARS like viruses are in micro insectivorous bats which are very difficult to keep as they need to feed on the wing and their biology is very unusual as their resting heart beat is orders of magnitude lower than when active. If you meant the RatG13 sample this was a partial sequence generated to look at the RdRp protein and was of little interest at the time as it was normal at RdRp and no one knew, or had reason to suspect, that its odd insertion in Spike would have have an significance. The pandemic was the catalyst to dig out old sequences and generate more sequence data from old samples. WIV nor anyone else ever had a bat with RatG13 in it as it was a sample from bat guano collected in a cave and an RT PCR generated partial sequence. The only way WIV could have performed any lab experiments with it was to create the 30,000 NT strand from scratch and infect a bat with it then make over a thousand experimental changes until they found one that they could test on humans and that worked.
To believe a BSL4 lab anywhere in the world would go to that much trouble on a Hail Mary play when every second of research time in a BSL4 lab is gold dust for the researchers takes conspiracy theories to a whole new level. The BSL4 lab is very highly respected by the community and has, or at least had, visiting US researcher working there who would have been aware if it was just a bio-weapons research lab or even if it had very poor safety standards. I would recommend any one watch this video on the BSL4 lab in Boston to see exactly what you have to do to reach BSL4 certification and just how difficult it is to get an accidental release. If you drop an empty petri dish on the floor you have to log it as a lab accident, if you use a BSL4 pathogen from the freezer you have to account for ever mg and the whole lab is ring fenced by a BSL3 area into which any escape would occur.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqAj...ature=youtu.be

----------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for the very interesting lab tour video.

So can't the BSL-4 lab in Wuhan operate as a BSL-3 too? SARS work with animals can be done in a BSL-3 I believe. BSL-4 level precautions are not required. link The CDC lab in Wuhan is a BSL-3? There are two high level labs in Wuhan - the CDC lab and WIV.

Humans make mistakes.


Human error in high-biocontainment labs: a likely pandemic threat
By Lynn Klotz | February 25, 2019

snip

Among other things, the GAO report called attention to a well-publicized incident in which a Defense Department laboratory “inadvertently sent live Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax, to almost 200 laboratories worldwide over the course of 12 years. The laboratory believed that the samples had been inactivated.” The report describes yet another well-publicized incident in China in which “two researchers conducting virus research were exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus samples that were incompletely inactivated. The researchers subsequently transmitted SARS to others, leading to several infections and one death in 2004.”

The GAO identified three recent releases of Ebola and Marburg viruses from BSL4 to lower containment labs due to incomplete inactivation.

A fourth release in 2014 from the CDC labs occurred when “Scientists inadvertently switched samples designated for live Ebola virus studies with samples intended for studies with inactivated material. As a result, the samples with viable Ebola virus, instead of the samples with inactivated Ebola virus, were transferred out of a BSL-4 laboratory to a laboratory with a lower safety level for additional analysis. While no one contracted Ebola virus in this instance, the consequences could have been dire for the personnel involved as there are currently no approved treatments or vaccines for this virus.”

The CDC has issued a report on this mixup, and the steps they have taken to avoid this particular error in the future.

All these incidents confirm the role of incomplete inactivation that would lead to an increased likelihood of release into the community from a BSL2 lab. These are all human errors, some involving BSL4 pathogens. Along with the observation that other human errors are the cause of more than two-thirds of potential exposures in BSL3 labs, it is clear that state-of-the-art laboratory design will not prevent release into the community.

https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/huma...ndemic-threat/