Discussion: Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Wuhan has been working with bats and coronavirus for many years - DNA manipulations, cloning....

[JJackson]

This is true the reason there is no vaccine but because there is no funding. All the work on SARS-1 stopped when it disappeared in humans despite the fact there was a know reservoir of SARS like viruses in bats that was very likely to cause a re-emergence of SARS or something like it. Ecohealth knew it was still a danger and kept working to evaluate it. They will keep up this important work, just without NIH funding. Had the funding not dried up we would have been much better prepared to deal with this outbreak.

[bertrand789]

Kathy
I completely agree. Even if the consensus bodies at the global level all seem weakened, as they seem to be the only solution, this will be temporary.

Now, for what needs to be done, at the state level, America shows us a path of its own:

https://www.bfmtv.com/international/...e-1928927.html

it seems indeed in the United States, it is necessary, by their culture and their right, to destroy to rebuild.

As they do not have only faults, it must be noted. Except that, they should not impose it on others, because frankly in terms of management, there are other possibilities ...

***********************************

je suis tout ? fait d'accord. M?me si les instances de consensus au niveau mondial semblent toutes affaiblies, comme elles semblent la seule solution, cela va ?tre provisoire.

Maintenant, pour ce qui doit ?tre fait, au niveau des ?tats, l'Am?rique nous montre une voie qui lui est propre:

https://www.bfmtv.com/international/...e-1928927.html

il semble en effet aux Etats Unis, il faut, de par leur culture et leur droit, d?truire pour reconstruire.

Comme ils n'ont pas que des d?fauts, il faut en prendre acte. Sauf que cela, ils ne doivent pas l'imposer aux autres, car franchement en terme de management, il y a d'autres possibles...

[Kathy]

@bertrand789 I am not sure if I have understood your question. For me a perfect example of money bad invested in prediction of future pandemics is SARS-CoV-2. Despite the enormous budget used in the last almost twenty years there are no vaccines for SARS, MERS and you see what it is happening now with SARS-CoV-2.

[bertrand789]

Kathy for those who still advocate massive and poorly managed investment, because it is unmanageable, in predicting, here is an exercise:

I would like to glimpse a human and animal prevention plan drawn up, for such an agent, unidentified, and having characteristics, different from 25%, in one way or another, occurring in India?

If the copy is deemed relevant after a real public consultation, example in this place (one of the rare places, which by protecting its sources, allows those knowing how to glimpse), then YES. But I have great doubts ...

[bertrand789]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0kasJuNDTw&t=50s

si la premi?re ?tait bien, la seconde est d?solante.

C'est amusant, dans cette vid?o les scientifiques sont en tenue de cosmonaute dans les grottes, donc ils peuvent faire, ou plus de pr?tendre... Il est vraiment urgent qu'un vrai audit des managements des programmes chinois et am?ricians qui ont eu lieu en Chine soit fait

C'est pas dans ces grottes que l'on trouve aussi des nids d'hirondelle , par exemple ?

[Kathy]

It is my pleasure Sharon!

I found also quite interesting this article in Nature from 2018

COMMENT
07 June 2018
Nature 558, 180-182 (2018)

doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-05373-w

Pandemics: spend on surveillance, not prediction

Trust is undermined when scientists make overblown promises about disease prevention, warn Edward C. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut and Kristian G. Andersen.


Forecasting fallacy
Supporters of outbreak prediction maintain that if biologists genetically characterize all of the viruses circulating in animal populations (especially in groups such as bats and rodents that have previously acted as reservoirs for emerging viruses), they can determine which ones are likely to emerge next, and ultimately prevent them from doing so. With enough data, coupled with artificial intelligence and machine learning, they argue, the process could be similar to predicting the weather.

This is misguided. Determining which of more than 1.6 million animal viruses are capable of replicating in humans and transmitting between them would require many decades’ worth of laboratory work in cell cultures and animals. Even if researchers managed to link each virus genome sequence to substantial experimental data, all sorts of other factors determine whether a virus jumps species and emerges in a human population, such as the distribution and density of animal hosts. Influenza viruses have circulated in horses since the 1950s and in dogs since the early 2000s, for instance⁷. These viruses have not emerged in human populations, and perhaps never will — for unknown reasons.
...
In short, there aren’t enough data on virus outbreaks for researchers to be able to accurately predict the next outbreak strain. Nor is there a good enough understanding of what drives viruses to jump hosts, making it difficult to construct predictive models.
Even if it were possible to identify which viruses are likely to emerge in humans, thousands of candidates could end up being identified, each with a low probability of causing an outbreak. What should be done in that case? Costs would skyrocket if vaccines and therapeutics were proposed for even a handful of these.

[JJackson]

That 2.7%% sero-positive equates to over a million people who have been infected with bat CoVs one of whom, not surprisingly, caught SARS-1 and another caught SARS-2 and others will catch further SARS like strains in the future. Wouldn't it be nice is we had researchers out in the field trying to find out what dangerous pathogens are circulating in the bat population? If you want to understand what Peter Daszak and the Ecohealth alliance do then listen to this interview with him https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-623/ which was recorded after their de-funding, or this one recorded last Dec. when SARS-2 was circulating but no one knew yet https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-615/

This is exactly the sort of science that should be the highest priority for funding as it is the most useful in making sure we are not blindsided by the next zoonotic emergence. Had we done this earlier we could have had broadly acting pharmaceuticals capable of helping patients with a wide range of SARS like infections. We would also be further ahead in vaccine development. Most importantly we would know about human wildlife interactions that are high risk and how to avoid them.

[JJackson]

Emily Gain of Function experiments are not scientifically trivial, they are very important in understanding the changes need to make a virus circulating pathogenic. If you know that certain changes convert a CoV from not being able to bind to human ACE2 to being able to bind then you know which of the circulating strains are likely to be a danger to us. When used in conjunction with the sampling (that has, stupidly, just been de-funded) you would know how prevalent those mutations are in the gene pool.

[sharon sanders]

Thanks for posting that. This site was bashed for having a thread about the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 started as a lab escape. And some media contacts and professionals silently withdrew from us - a few who have been long time friends of FluTrackers. Oh well. It is fortunate by design that we do not depend on any financial sources to run this site. We are free to be objective.

A search for the truth is always uncomfortable.

Thank you to everyone who has stuck with us.

[Kathy]

NATURE

NEWS
05 June 2020


The biggest mystery: what it will take to trace the coronavirus source

https://www.nature.com/articles/d415...52569-44881153

In mid-May, the World Health Assembly, the World Health Organization’s key decision-making body, passed a resolution that calls on the agency to work with other international organizations to identify the animal source. But scientists say that the nature of the evidence required means it’s going to be hard to track down the animal source — and also difficult to completely rule out the facility in question, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), as the source.

The WIV hosts a maximum-security lab that is one of a few dozen biosafety-level-4 (BSL-4) labs around the world. Although there’s no evidence to support the suggestion that the virus escaped from there, scientists say that completely ruling it out will be tricky and time consuming.

The lab does hold coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2, so it is possible that one could have escaped, perhaps if a lab worker accidentally became infected from a virus sample or animal in the facility and then passed it on to someone outside the facility. It is also theoretically possible that scientists at the lab tweaked the virus’s genome for research purposes before it escaped, but, again, there is no evidence that they did. Shi declined to respond to Nature’s questions about her experiments, saying that she has been inundated with media requests.

[Emily]

Paraphrasing Dr. Latham -
Gain of function research: trivial scientifically, on a global scale potentially disastrous. So they are doing research that panics people without learning anything.

[Kathy]

An interview to Jonathan Latham on the current topic

https://www.bitchute.com/video/fQEndCVFIPA5/

[Kathy]

Then the team sampled the blood of people in China who live near various bat caves. They found evidence that for some time now, these bat coronaviruses have been spilling over into the human population

This is the study they refer to:

Serological Evidence of Bat SARS-Related Coronavirus Infectionin Humans, China

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29500691/

They found 6 slightly positive individual out of 218 tested (2.7%) living in close proximity to bat colonies.

The antibody used targeted the nucleocapsid protein (np) and not the spike of the virus. The spike of Rp3, used for this test, is not able to infect human cells. They most probably based the test on the np because it cross-reacts with the first SARS and the bands can be compared, but the test is less sensitive than the one based on the spike.

https://jcm.asm.org/content/jcm/early/2020/03/27/JCM.00461-20.full.pdf

It is not possible to exclude also cross-reaction with other coronaviruses and previous unknown exposure to the first SARS.

If bats would be so dangerous, we would see spill-over and coronavirus pandemic all the time, but luckily this is not the case.

These claims are done just to get grants for their studies.

[Emily]

https://www.nationalreview.com/corne...investigation/

NIH: We Can’t Release Our Papers about the Wuhan Institute of Virology Because of a Pending Investigation
By Jim Geraghty

June 1, 2020 11:40 AM
Back on April 15, White Coat Waste, an organization that opposes government funding for medical research that involves animal experimentation, filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. National Institutes of Health requesting all correspondence with State Department officials regarding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as well as all emails, text messages, memos, and reports related to WIV.

Starting in 2014, NIH provided grants to EcoHealth Alliance; part of that group’s research included studies of viruses in bats in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. On April 19, Michael Lauer, NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research, wrote to EcoHealth, “There are now allegations that the current crisis was precipitated by the release from Wuhan Institute of Virology of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19. Given these concerns, we are pursuing suspension of Wuhan Institute of Virology from participation in federal programs.”...

It looks like NIH stopped funding Wuhan on the pretense of an ongoing investigation so they had an excuse to ignore the FOIA request from White Coat Waste. Even though the Predict funding had been ended in Oct of 2019, the Wuhan project was still being funded. Daszak appears blindsided when NIH suddenly defunded Wuhan.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsan...and-coronaviru

Daszak adds that NIH approved the five-year renewal unusually quickly. "When you submit those grants, they get reviewed independently by scientists, and they're assigned a score," says Daszak. "We received a really extremely high priority for funding."
What results has the project yielded so far?

Daszak says the China bat sampling project has already racked up quite a number of successes. The team and its collaborators at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have collected about 15,000 samples from bats. From these they have already identified about 400 wholly new coronaviruses. About 50 of those fall into a category that caused the 2002 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and, now, the COVID-19 pandemic.

The researchers were also able to demonstrate that at least some of the new bat coronaviruses they have found are capable of infecting a human cell in a petri dish. Then the team sampled the blood of people in China who live near various bat caves. They found evidence that for some time now, these bat coronaviruses have been spilling over into the human population.

But a totally human adapted virus did not evolve in people who live near the caves.

[Kathy]

Another article on the topic:

A New Scientific Study Provides Evidence of Genetic Manipulation in COVID-19

https://ccnationalsecurity.org/a-new-scientific-study-provides-evidence-of-genetic-manipulation-in-covid-19/