ayjchan

In that April slack conversation, the lead author expressed strong, persistent concern about a lab cultured virus that had adapted and become pandemic-ready through that process. Lab culturing = lab manipulation.

Authors have taken their names off papers for much less.

The lead author of Proximal Origin wrote this in slack on April 17, a month after the letter had been published in Nature Medicine:

"Okay, so about the current news. Is there any reason to believe that they might be onto something, or is it all smoke and mirrors? Eddie Holmes - any insights on the China side? The main things from my perspective:

1. Bioweapon and engineered totally off the table

2. If there is no engineering and no culturing, then it means that somebody magically found a pre-formed pandemic virus, put it in the lab, and then infected themselves. The prior on that vs somebody coming into contact with an animal source infected with the virus is as close to zero as you can get. Humans come into contact all the time with SARS-like CoVs, but the likelihood of somebody finding exactly that pandemic virus and infecting themselves is very very low (make no mistake - if they did find that pandemic virus. then they would get infected if they grew it in the lab - but the likelihood of them finding it in the first place is exceedingly small (or so one would hope - otherwise, good luck World avoiding future pandemic).

3. But here's the issue - I'm still not fully convinced that no culture was involved. If culture was involved, then the prior completely changes - because this could have happened with any random SARS-llke CoV of which there are very many. So are we absolutely certain that no culture could have been involved? What concerns me here are some of the comments by Shi in the SciAm article ("I had to check the lab" etc) and the fact that the furin site 1s being messed with in vitro. Yes, it loses it but that could be context dependent. Finally, the paper that was shared with us showing a very similar phenomenon (exactly 12bp insertion) in other CoVs has me concerned...

I really really want to go out there guns swinging saying "don't be such an idiot believing these dumb theories - the president is deflecting from the real problems" but I'm warned that we can't fully disprove culture {our argument was mostly based on the presence of the O-linked glycans - but they could likely play a different role... We also can't fully rule out engineering (for basic research) - yes, no obvious signs of engineering anywhere, but that furin site could still have been inserted via gibson assembly (and clearly creating the reverse genetic system isn't hard - the Germans managed to do exactly that for SARS-CoV-2 in less than a month)."

And:

"Shi didn't do any GOF work that I'm aware of - but GOF work isn't the concern here. She did A LOT of work that involved isolating and culturing SARS-like viruses from bats (in BSL-2) and that's my main concerning scenario (we cite several of those in the paper - if you have a look at those original publications, it's definitely concerning work, no question about it - and is the main reason I have been so concerned about the 'culture' scenario)."

I don't think much more needs to be said. The above messages are self-explanatory.

Re: weakening of their claim, not only did Worobey et al. have to remove these instances of unscientific language, but they also had to insert a new study limitations section and this clarification in their article:

“However, the observation that the preponderance of early cases were linked to the Huanan market does not establish that the pandemic originated there.”

Thanks for the feedback.

On the unlinked cases - if you read my medium post, it explains that even the cases with no connections to the market had been identified with ascertainment bias. Local investigators had searched hospitals and the neighborhood near the market for cases even if they had no link to the market.

On your 2nd point, I've clarified that it was not a rewording but a removal of both claims of dispositive and incontrovertible evidence from the preprint. This means that peer review flagged both of these strong assertions in the manuscript and the authors had to remove both of them.

Here is my evaluation of a recent Science Magazine publication, "The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic".

I'm still an early career scientist so I do not have a way to contact Bill Gates.

We cover this quite extensively in our book. I also have a manuscript that will soon be in peer review describing the relationship between SARS-CoV-2 and other known viruses. None of the publicly disclosed viruses could have plausibly been the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.

However we now know that when news emerged of a novel SARSrCoV with a novel cleavage site causing an outbreak in Wuhan… scientists in Wuhan did not tell us that they were working with 9 of its closest relatives, linked to mysterious pneumonia cases, and that they had been collecting 1,000s of unpublished high-risk samples from animals & humans across 8 countries, with a clear roadmap for synthesizing consensus SARSrCoV genomes and inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARSrCoVs. Their database meant to inform pandemic prediction & response remains inaccessible.

Hi, My perspective is that, if the pandemic started due to the virus hunting program which was a very international collaboration (US, China, several European, African, Asian, Middle Eastern countries), then it's not really a China-specific thing. It could just be that China is so much further along in their virus discovery and characterization pipeline (as the scientific literature points out) that unfortunately they were the first to leak one of these pandemic level viruses either found in the wild and sent to the lab or created in the lab during the process of characterization.

I don't think that a country should be singled out for punishment for having a lab accident (unless it can be demonstrated that they do not have proper biosafety protocols and accountability mechanisms in place; a case of reckless negligence). But I do think there should be new international agreements and penalties for suppressing information about an emerging outbreak, e.g., transmissibility of the virus, its genomic sequence, number of cases and geographic spread etc., and costing other countries time in preparing to respond to the outbreak.

Hi Jamal, Yes, there is quite a bit of evidence (photos and interviews of the scientists) showing that the virus hunters in Wuhan did not always wear appropriate protective equipment while hunting for potential pandemic viruses in remote areas. We describe this and provide citations in VIRAL (will be on page 127 in the paperback). In any case, even with full PPE, you can get bitten or exposed to animals and their pathogens. Accidents happen, especially in an uncontrolled environment, e.g., a cave swarming with millions of live bats that you're trying to catch and sample.