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

[Pathfinder]

Re-opening – additional call for experts to join the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO)

1 November 2021
Call for experts

Issued on: 1 November 2021

Re-opening call for applications from 1 to 3 November 2021

WHO is re-opening the call for applications for three additional days to encourage additional applications from the fields of social science/anthropology/ethics/political science and biosafety/biosecurity.

The call will open from 1-3 November 2021, closing at 24:00CET 3 November. Applications require a Curriculum Vitae, a cover letter, and signed DOI form.

Please note applicants who have already submitted an expression of interest for the SAGO do not need to re-apply; this re-opening of applications is intended for newexpressions of interest only.



Background


The rapid emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 has highlighted the importance of being prepared for any future event, to be able to identify novel pathogens early and to address the risk factors that contribute to their emergence and spread. In May 2020, the World Health Assembly, through resolution WHA73.1, requested the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) to continue to work closely with the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and countries, as part of the One Health approach, to identify the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the route of introduction to the human population.

There have been an increasing number of high threat pathogens emerging and reemerging in recent years with, for example, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, Lassa, Marburg, Ebola, Nipah, avian influenza, the latest being SARS-CoV-2. There is not only need for robust surveillance and early actions for rapid detection and mitigation efforts, but a need for a robust and systematic processes to establish the study around the emergence of these pathogens and routes of transmission from their natural reservoirs to humans.

To this end, the Director-General has established the WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins on Novel Pathogens (hereinafter referred to as ‘SAGO”). The SAGO will advise the WHO Secretariat on technical and scientific considerations regarding emerging and re-emerging pathogens, and will be composed of experts acting in a personal capacity. It is established in accordance with the WHO Regulations for Study and Scientific Groups, Collaborating Institutions and Other Mechanisms of Collaboration.

Functions of the SAGO


In its capacity as an advisory body to WHO, the SAGO will have the following functions:

1. To advise WHO on the development of a WHO global framework to define and guide studies into the origins of emerging and re-emerging pathogens of epidemic and pandemic potential;
2. To advise WHO on prioritizing studies and field investigations into the origins of emerging and re-emerging pathogens of epidemic and pandemic potential, in accordance with the WHO global framework described in point (1) above;
3. To provide information and views to assist the WHO Secretariat in the development of a detailed work plan of the SAGO;
4. In the context of SARS-CoV-2 origins:
   • To provide the WHO Secretariat with an independent evaluation of all available scientific and technical findings from global studies on the origins of SARS-CoV-2;
   • To advise the WHO Secretariat regarding developing, monitoring and supporting the next series of studies into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, including rapid advice on WHO's operational plans to implement the next series of global studies into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, as outlined in the Joint WHO-China Global Study of Origins of SARS-CoV-2:China Part report published on 30 March 2021 and advise on additional studies as needed; and
5. To provide additional advice and support to WHO, as requested by the WHO SAGO Secretariat, which may include participation in future WHO-international missions to study the origins of SARS-CoV-2 or for other emerging pathogens.

...


https://www.who.int/news-room/articl...athogens-(sago)

[Pathfinder]

Friday, 29 October 2021 13:10




Declassified Assessment on COVID-19 Origins




Date: October 29, 2021



The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) today released a declassified Intelligence Community assessment on COVID-19 origins.



Download the report.

Published in Reports & Publications 2021


https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/reports-publications-2021

[Emily]

https://usrtk.org/biohazards-blog/why-we-are-suing-the-nih-for-covid-19-information/

Why we are suing the NIH for Covid-19 information
Posted on November 8, 2021 by Gary Ruskin

A year ago, a fearful world was struggling to emerge from a paralyzing pandemic, a confusing health care crisis that emerged swiftly to sicken and kill millions.
Today, nearly two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, we are still struggling to find our way back from the catastrophic global consequences of the vicious coronavirus. And we are still without answers as to how and why this virus emerged seemingly out of nowhere. Scientists around the world have been seeking answers about the origin of Covid-19 because knowing how this virus moved into and through the human population could be crucial to avoiding, or preparing for, a similar event in the future.
That is why our nonprofit research group U.S. Right to Know has filed seventeen Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), asking this taxpayer-funded government agency to provide us – and the public – with correspondence, reports, and other information about the NIH knowledge of, and response to, the pandemic.
As a public interest group, our mission is focused on a fundamental tenet: Our government officials work for us, and we have a right to know what that work entails. That belief is not just sentiment; it is backed by public records laws across the country, and decades of court rulings that codify our right to know. We had hoped that the NIH would agree that there is a pressing public desire for transparency regarding Covid-19.
But after waiting and attempting to work with the NIH for more than a year, today we filed a lawsuit against the agency for violating the Freedom of Information Act regarding nine of our record requests. As an example, the NIH has not yet provided even a single record in response to a request we filed on Nov. 5, 2020, nor has the agency even provided a timeline for when it might provide documents. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, seeks a wide range of NIH records, including the following:

• Communications between the NIH and a U.S. group called the EcoHealth Alliance, which has received tens of millions of dollars in U.S. government funding, and has partnered with and funded China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The record requests seek EcoHealth grant applications, progress reports, funding agreements, and related documents.
• Communications between the NIH and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
• Documents regarding NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories.
• Documents regarding the “Preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) Program,” which is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
• Communications between the NIH and the World Health Organization concerning the origins of COVID-19.

This is our second FOIA lawsuit against the NIH regarding the origins of Covid-19. In our first FOIA suit against NIH, the NIH proposed to provide the documents it was required to provide by law in a thirty-year timeframe. Even though we filed that FOIA request on July 10, 2020, the NIH has yet to provide us with a single document it has not previously released.
We’ve been told for almost two years now to ‘follow the science,’ to look to our government institutions for the facts about Covid-19, including how this novel coronavirus came to be. We’re trying to get to those facts and to bring them to light. Why the NIH is fighting us on this is not clear.
We know this much: It shouldn’t take lawsuits to get to the truth.
(Gary Ruskin is executive director of US Right to Know.)
Creative Commons License >
Biohazards, Biohazards Blog

[sharon sanders]

bump this

[Pathfinder]

09.11.2021 09:00 AM

A Flawed, Strange Covid-19 Origin Theory Is Gaining Traction

A spate of studies claim that the disease was circulating in Italy long before the pandemic—but they struggle to support the theory.
...
Rambaut says these findings “are being used by various parties to support a particular set of narratives.” In particular, they have been covered frequently by Chinese state media, spinning the studies to suggest that China was not the country of origin for the virus. “Wuhan was where the coronavirus was first detected, but it was not where it originated,” said Zeng Guang, formerly a chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, at an academic conference in November 2020.

China is keen to shift the blame. “China is still struggling to deal with the fact that it is held responsible for the “original sin” of the outbreak, which undercuts virtually every effort to salvage its image,” Andrew Small, a senior fellow specializing in Chinese foreign policy at the German Marshall Fund told The Guardian. He referred to the reporting of potential other places of origin for the virus as a “propaganda campaign.” In a press briefing, Liang Wannian, team leader of the Chinese side of the WHO team tracing the origins of the pandemic, said the next phase of the enquiry should be conducted in other parts of the world where transmission of the virus had been identified as happening before it was detected in Wuhan. It bears a resemblance to another narrative earlier pushed by Chinese authorities, that the virus might have been brought to China on packaged frozen food.

“There is overwhelming evidence that the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic originated in China, almost certainly in Wuhan,” says Jesse Bloom, a viral evolutionary geneticist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. “Attempts by Chinese state media to argue that the pandemic might have originated elsewhere in the world are clearly scientific misinformation.”
...

https://www.wired.com/story/flawed-covid-19-origin-theory-italy/

[sharon sanders]

Thank you, Emily for the link.

It is a very cleaver strategy to define conspirator a researcher who consider legitimate an artificial origin for SARS-CoV-2. They make researchers feeling guilty in investigating this aspect.

SARS-CoV-2 combines SARS and MERS in the way to attack human cells. This is because of the inserted furin cleavage site, which is not present in this group of beta-coronaviruses. This insertion is much more likely to happen in a lab than in nature. The area around is totally conserved. It is a clean insertion.

https://www.cell.com/iscience/pdf/S2...showall%3Dtrue

Eco-Health Alliance has as goal to produce drugs and vaccine for future pandemics with the use of gain of function studies.

https://projectreporter.nih.gov/proj...&cs=ASC&pball=

The budget for these studies is enormous.

https://twitter.com/WhoWuhan/status/1262830529310625792

Given that virologists like Duehr, admit a possible artificial origin of the virus (see in his Tweets and replies)

https://twitter.com/viralphenomics

I do not understand how some many virologists could sign this letter to Lancet, where they claim that it is not possible. Daszak is one of them.

https://www.thelancet.com/action/sho...2820%2930418-9

We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.

Here is the Lancet letter pdf downloaded onto FT.

scientistssupportingchinaletter.pdf

[Shiloh]

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/h...-lab-leak.html

First Known Covid Case Was Vendor at Wuhan Market, Scientist Claims
A new review of early Covid-19 cases in the journal Science will revive, though certainly not settle, the debate over how the pandemic began.
By Carl Zimmer, Benjamin Mueller and Chris Buckley
Nov. 18, 2021, 2:00 p.m. ET

A scientist who has pored over public accounts of early Covid-19 cases in China reported on Thursday that an influential World Health Organization inquiry had likely gotten the early chronology of the pandemic wrong. The new analysis suggests that the first known patient sickened with the coronavirus was a vendor in a large Wuhan animal market, not an accountant who lived many miles from it.

The report, published on Thursday in the prestigious journal Science, will revive, though certainly not settle, the debate over whether the pandemic started with a spillover from wildlife sold at the market, a leak from a Wuhan virology lab or some other way. The search for the origins of the greatest public health catastrophe in a century has fueled geopolitical battles, with few new facts emerging in recent months to resolve the question.

The scientist, Michael Worobey, a leading expert in tracing the evolution of viruses at the University of Arizona, came upon timeline discrepancies by combing through what had already been made public in medical journals, as well as video interviews in a Chinese news outlet with people believed to have the first two documented infections.

Dr. Worobey argues that the vendor’s ties to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, as well as a new analysis of the earliest hospitalized patients’ connections to the market, strongly suggest that the pandemic began there...

[sharon sanders]

Not correct. I believe there was a doctor in Guangdong province who became sick with COVID-19 in early December 2019:

China - Doctor, 51, with severe pneumonia moved to isolation on Dec. 31 - on experimental drugs - Dongguan, Guangdong province - January 4, 2020 (This doctor became sick on December 2, 2019)

[Emily]

Sharon, do you think you should email Worobey that information?

[Emily]

https://nypost.com/2021/06/03/chines...iruses-report/
Chinese military helped create ‘humanized’ mice to test viruses: report
By Bruce Golding
June 3, 2021 6:23pm Updated

Chinese military researchers were part of a project that created mice with “humanized” lungs — apparently to test the infectiousness of various viruses, according to a blockbuster report Thursday.

The bio-engineered rodents were developed using gene-editing technology known as CRISPR and are mentioned in an April 2020 study that US government virologists flagged for National Security Council officials investigating the origin of the coronavirus, Vanity Fair said.

The study’s 23 co-authors include 11 who work for the Chinese army’s medical research institute, the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, and their project involved determining the mice’s susceptibility to the virus that causes COVID-19.

But when the NSC investigators worked backward to establish a timeline for the study, they realized that the critters were created sometime during summer 2019 — before the coronavirus pandemic exploded, according to Vanity Fair....


https://www.the-sun.com/news/3681845...stronger-leak/
SUPER VIRUS China lab created coronavirus ‘10,000-times stronger than usual’ as fears rage over Wuhan ‘leak’, scientists warn

• Patrick Knox

• 11:51 ET, Sep 17 2021
• Updated: 12:14 ET, Sep 20 2021

A WUHAN lab-created coronavirus strains that were up to 10,000-times stronger than usual — amid fears a virus could have escaped when a technician was bitten by a mouse.

Bombshell documents have emerged which reveal how Chinese research funded by a US government agency involved souping up the virus and then transmitting it to "humanised mice".
The documents — released by US Right to Know — show grant applications between 2017 and 2019 by US nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance which were lodged with White House advisor Dr Fauci Anthony's National Institute of Health (NIH).

The research was carried out in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and studied coronavirus found in bats that had been captured in a former copper mine in Mojiang, some 1,118 miles away from the lab.

Richard Ebright, biosafety expert, and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University told The Sun Online the papers show this involved dangerous experiments that may lead to one of the bugs escaping the lab.

The research appears to involve making bat coronaviruses more virulent — potentially having viral loads up to 10,000 times higher than normal.

Mice, which had been "humanised" by splicing them with human tissue, were then infected with the altered virus.

But worryingly, some of the coronaviruses were manipulated to make them extremely hazardous, Dr Ebright warned.
...
Clearly, a lab leak is the by far most likely explanation for the current pandemic which is further supported by these new documents
Dr Roland Wiesendanger,University of Hamburg...


One more for the road? There is a HUGE reservoir of rodents in intimate contact with humans in laboratories around the world. - E.

https://www.infectioncontroltoday.co...hed-in-rodents

‘You Dirty Rat’: Experts Posit That Omicron Hatched in Rodents

December 3, 2021
Frank Diamond

...
Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute, tells STAT that “I know that most people think that these [come from] immunocompromised individuals, and I do think that that’s plausible, but to be perfectly honest, I actually think this reverse zoonosis followed by new zoonosis seems more likely to me given just the available evidence of the really deep branch, and then the mutations themselves, because some of them are quite unusual…. I don’t think we should dismiss that possibility, because I think it’s definitely on the table.”
...
STAT talks to Robert Garry, PhD, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane Medical School, who says that 7 SARS-CoV-2 mutations allow it infect mice and rats, and all 7 can be found in Omicron.

Angela Rasmussen, PhD, a coronavirus virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, tells STAT that “I think it’s pretty obvious to everybody … that this virus has been on an independent evolutionary track for quite some time and it’s very surprising, which to me just kind of goes back to say well, the idea that this could be … plausible,” she said....

[sharon sanders]

bump this

[Emily]

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1467861785055309830

Alina Chan
@Ayjchan

Thorough analysis by ⁦⁦
@AshleyRindsberg
⁩ ⁦
@tabletmag
⁩ “the false narrative around the pandemic’s origins represented a tipping point—a comprehensive failure in journalistic quality and mores in a time of national emergency”


tabletmag.com
The Lab Leak Fiasco
For over a year the media enforced falsehoods about the pandemic’s origins, never evaluated the evidence, never apologized, and was never held accountable

8:21 AM · Dec 6, 2021·Twitter for iPhone


Alina Chan
@Ayjchan

·
Dec 6
Replying to
@Ayjchan
Many good lines in this article: “For Daszak, The Lancet letter was only the opening salvo in a yearlong media campaign in which the EcoHealth Alliance head would become an Ahmed Chalabi-like presence, leading the media with claims of evidence of zoonotic spillover.”


Alina Chan
@Ayjchan

·
Dec 6
“these formed what we might call Daszak’s triangle, a mental model that made lab leak a social and political impossibility for anyone who did not want to be branded as an anti-science, right-wing xenophobe.”


Alina Chan
@Ayjchan

·
Dec 6
Even as an Asian, liberal, Canadian scientist with strong expertise in working with viruses and genetic engineering, I barely got away with calling for an investigation into a lab #OriginOfCovid


Alina Chan
@Ayjchan

·
Dec 6
I’ve heard from top news & science organizations (I won’t reveal their identities) that they can’t be associated in any way with the lab #OriginOfCovid controversy. I suspect it’s because many experts have stayed silent in fear of being called racist, anti-science, right-wingers.


Alina Chan
@Ayjchan

·
Dec 6
We know how scientists, editors & journalists can be exploited to manipulate public narratives. Bad actors also know that now and have been testing these loopholes (eg #PopsicleOrigins). We need to fix these problems in research and media communities before the next crisis.


Alina Chan
@Ayjchan

·
Dec 6
As a scientist who argued that experiments funded by NIH were not obviously gain of function research of concern, I felt deceived after documents showing just that were released in Sep/Oct 2021… but not as much as the scientists who advocated strongly for natural #OriginOfCovid


Alina Chan
@Ayjchan

·
Dec 6
The
@EcoHealthNYC
needs to release all of their communications and documents relating to work on coronaviruses and their collaboration with Wuhan scientists. https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1451167948970790924?s=20

[sharon sanders]

bump this

[Shiloh]

Source: https://unherd.com/2021/12/how-china-made-covid-worse/


How China made Covid worse
The regime's deceit stalled the pandemic response
BY Ian Birrell
December 9, 2021

Two years ago this week, a middle-aged man in Wuhan caught a strange respiratory disease. The 41-year-old accountant was called Chen and he worked for his family firm, commuted to work by public transport and shopped in a sleek modern supermarket rather than a traditional market selling wild animals. He had not travelled outside the city in the days before catching the disease beyond a short trip to some hills north of Wuhan and — bar one relative working in healthcare — had no obvious links to high-risk settings.

This is the official Chinese narrative: that Covid 19 should be traced back to this “earliest onset date” when Chen visited a hospital dental clinic. The World Health Organisation promoted this story in its study group report earlier this year into origins of the virus, influencing global discussion. Yet this “first case” merely highlights the duplicity of Beijing in obscuring the truth about the birth of this deadly disease — along with the complicity of the global public health body and so much of the scientific establishment in promoting the Communist regime’s deceptive stance.

The extent of the dishonesty became startlingly obvious after the WHO’s patsy report was published in March. Data for Chen, this heavily-scrutinised patient, seemed confused since the sample sequence listed in its documents belonged to another man who had died after falling sick later in December 2019. Chen’s profile actually matched the sequence of a patient listed as becoming ill on December 16. This was one of the cases that frightened local doctors — leading ophthalmologist Li Wenliang to warn colleagues about a contagious new virus, only for him to be detained by police for “rumour-mongering”. His death several weeks later from the disease sparked an eruption of grief and fury on social media.

Chen’s case could not be hidden, since it had been highlighted by Ai Fen, another doctor at Wuhan Central Hospital, who was also reprimanded by party chiefs after sharing details about the alarming new virus. The stricken accountant, who lived in the dense residential district closest to the Wuhan Institute of Virology site in the southern part of the city, had no known links to the infamous Huanan Seafood Market. After failing to respond to treatment, he travelled some distance from his district hospital to the renowned emergency department at the major hospital where his relative worked...

[Emily]

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1479537683030499335

Alina Chan @Ayjchan

I believe that prominent people on both sides are deliberately polarizing #OriginOfCovid to block credible efforts to investigate & report on this issue. Because to them it's more important to win their side over than to find the origin of a pandemic that has killed millions.

1:37 PM · Jan 7, 2022·Twitter Web App

.
.
.

I don't have a solution to this polarization, just this question: Will it matter that your side won the #OriginOfCovid reporting battle in 2020 when in X years another potentially lab-based pandemic erupts in who knows which country and all our lives are at risk again?
.
.
.

I've gotten so many messages from scientists (including virologists) from reputable institutes around the world saying to keep digging, keep up the good work. There is a much larger network of smart people who know we need to investigate a lab #OriginOfCovid than most of us know.
.
.
.

Yet it is also a reminder that it isn't "no longer true" that the lab leak hypothesis is being silenced. There are real consequences for reputable scientists to publicly go against their colleagues, reviewers & funders who claimed a lab #OriginOfCovid is a conspiracy theory.

[Pathfinder]

Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab - but feared debate could hurt ‘international harmony’

Sarah Knapton

Tue, January 11, 2022, 3:14 PM·4 min read

...
An email from Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, on February 2 2020 said that “a likely explanation” was that Covid had rapidly evolved from a Sars-like virus inside human tissue in a low-security lab.

The email, to Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins of the US National Institutes of Health, went on to say that such evolution may have “accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans”.
...
In the emails, Sir Jeremy said that other scientists also believed the virus could not have evolved naturally. One such scientist was Professor Mike Farzan, of Scripps Research, the expert who discovered how the original Sars virus binds to human cells.
...
Summarising Professor Farzan’s concerns in an email, Sir Jeremy said: “He is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time (to) explain that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature but highly unlikely.
...
The emails also show that Bob Garry, of the University of Texas, was unconvinced that Covid-19 emerged naturally.

“I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature,” he said.

Professor Andrew Rambaut, from the University of Edinburgh, also said that furin cleavage site “strikes me as unusual”.

He added: “I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan.”


The emails show that by February 2 2020, scientists were already trying to shut down the debateinto the laboratory leak theory.

An email from Dr Ron Fouchier to Sir Jeremy said: “Further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”

Dr Collins, former director of the NIH, replied to Sir Jeremy stating: “I share your view that a swift convening of experts in a confidence-inspiring framework is needed or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.”
...

https://news.yahoo.com/scientists-believed-covid-leaked-wuhan-211452513.html