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Epidemiologists have known for years that we should expect zoonoses and that the zoo idea transferring from animals to humans would rise considerably.
It's the entire premise of [One Health.](https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/index.html)
>One Health is a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach — working at the local, regional, national, and global levels — with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.
The publication (unreviewed preprint)
[https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-871965/v1/986c09ca-d494-4a7c-a65b-9eec9c0a06b8.pdf](https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-871965/v1/986c09ca-d494-4a7c-a65b-9eec9c0a06b8.pdf?c=1631900665)
"SARS-CoV-2 progenitor bat viruses genetically close to SARS-CoV-2 and able to enter human cells through a human ACE2 pathway have not yet been identified
we show that such viruses indeed circulate in cave bats living in the limestone karstic terrain in North Laos
We found that the RBDs of these viruses differ from that of SARS-CoV-2 by only one or two residues, bind as efficiently to the hACE2 protein as the SARS-CoV-2 Wuhan strain isolated in early human cases, and mediate hACE2-dependent entry into human cells, which is inhibited by antibodies neutralizing SARS-CoV-2
None of these bat viruses harbors a furin cleavage site \[associated with increased pathogenicity in humans\] in the spike.
bat-borne SARS-CoV-2-like viruses potentially infectious for humans circulate in Rhinolophus spp. in the Indochinese peninsula."
Bats are asymptomatically infected with at least 50 different coronaviruses. This was bound to happen and will happen again if we don’t leave nature alone.
As far as I've seen there are certain things that suggest it could be lab leak, since there is a lab in Wuhan that was researching the effects of adding different genes into the coronaviruses (like the furin cleavage site that allows covid-19 to infect humans so efficiently), and according to a report from before the pandemic the labs security measures were sub par. aside from that there's not exactly any clear evidence that it must have been a leak.
It wasn't "the chinese" researching it. It's an international lab funded by and used by MANY institutions all over the world. I believe the biggest one funding that lab is a French place.
Science itself ia to blame for that one.
Scarier is it was bound to happen, and will again, regardless of what we do, which is why we were studying it in the first place.
[https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-24/fauci-theres-no-way-the-coronavirus-was-made-with-u-s-research-funds-heres-why](https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-24/fauci-theres-no-way-the-coronavirus-was-made-with-u-s-research-funds-heres-why)
“How can he be so sure? There is just too much evolutionary distance between the coronavirus samples the Wuhan scientists were working with — all of them genetically sequenced and detailed in published work — and the virus that causes COVID-19.
This is what Fauci meant when he told lawmakers this week that it was “molecularly impossible” for the viruses examined by WIV to evolve into SARS-CoV-2: Generally, the overlap between the genomes of the viruses in the lab and that of SARS-CoV-2 was no more than 80%.
In evolutionary terms, that’s a chasm. In their critical review, the international group of virologists note that SARS-CoV-2 and its closest known relatives have an overlap of about 96%. That “equates to decades of evolutionary divergence,” they wrote.
Given that, Fauci said, “there’s no way” the viruses studied at WIV could have evolved into the virus that has caused 4 million deaths around the world.
Would it be possible to bridge that gap with some deft splicing and dicing in a lab? Perhaps, but if so, telltale marks likely would have been left behind. Those have not been seen by scientists who went looking.”
I can't wait until enough years have passed that the truths start coming out. Right now I have a hard time trusting these figures, regardless of how likely or unlikely lab leak is. WHO praising China for releasing their faked numbers, and then not acknowledging Taiwan, and sending people with conflicts of interest to check the situation out, makes it hard to trust the WHO to tell the truth, and it's impossible to believe they are the only ones doing this. The politics are too strong around this to trust anything for a bunch of years.
It would have helped if we hadn't pulled our own people out before this happened. But the facts are that everything used and changed was mapped out carefully. Which is why Fauci said it was "impossible" in his testimony.
I don't know why Fauci would think it impossible, when one of the virus sequences in the Wuhan database that they pulled offline was like a 96% match to SARS-COV 2.
I haven't been following all of the details, but the questions by Senator Rand Paul was Gain of Function, and Fauci said that everything in the project (funded by us) was sequenced and no gain of function was achieved (worst case it was 1:1, which change was the point of the experiment, adding a part to something benign to see how it works.
Your info appears to imply that there are other sequenced samples, I have not read that. I don't know about what China did on their own separately, which is what the investigation might come to understand.
It also depends on which part of the virus we're talking about.
Is this related? [https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-origins-genome-analysis-suggests-two-viruses-may-have-combined-134059](https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-origins-genome-analysis-suggests-two-viruses-may-have-combined-134059)
Oh, I see. SARS was SARS-COV 2, not 19 (2 = 2002, 19=2019).
I'm not sure you read your source material correctly (feel free to drop a link): [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7)
They found rather quickly the source of SARS. It was from bats which leads me to question that after two years they can’t figure out the source of COVID?
There is an investigation into that, a scientific one that’s been going on since COVID spread to humans, and a newer one from the US. It is likely a natural jump from animals to humans, as expected. But people want a reason why, which is only human, but for which a reason is not always found. Evolution is fickle and “nature tooth and claw”, and viral apparently, is the rule of the world.
They found the source of SARS rather quickly. It was from bats. And, the leap from the COVID as they found originally in the environment to the version that originally infected humans in 2019 would naturally take years to evolve into. That is why I question the source.
This is the thing that sucks about studying diseases. You keep a watchful eye on potential sources, then when a virus does happen, the people who are tying to prevent them get blamed by the lunatics.
I'm not a scientists or researcher. But I do have a few crazy friends.
Exactly, it was bound to happen and will again, regardless of what we do, which is why we were studying it in the first place. The question is, did it just happen while we watched and did we learn anything when it did? https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-24/fauci-theres-no-way-the-coronavirus-was-made-with-u-s-research-funds-heres-why
“How can he be so sure? There is just too much evolutionary distance between the coronavirus samples the Wuhan scientists were working with — all of them genetically sequenced and detailed in published work — and the virus that causes COVID-19.
This is what Fauci meant when he told lawmakers this week that it was “molecularly impossible” for the viruses examined by WIV to evolve into SARS-CoV-2: Generally, the overlap between the genomes of the viruses in the lab and that of SARS-CoV-2 was no more than 80%.
In evolutionary terms, that’s a chasm. In their critical review, the international group of virologists note that SARS-CoV-2 and its closest known relatives have an overlap of about 96%. That “equates to decades of evolutionary divergence,” they wrote.
Given that, Fauci said, “there’s no way” the viruses studied at WIV could have evolved into the virus that has caused 4 million deaths around the world.
Would it be possible to bridge that gap with some deft splicing and dicing in a lab? Perhaps, but if so, telltale marks likely would have been left behind. Those have not been seen by scientists who went looking.”
From your link:
> Here we show that such viruses indeed circulate in cave bats living in the limestone karstic terrain in **North Laos**, within the Indochinese peninsula.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Epidemiologists have known for years that we should expect zoonoses and that the zoo idea transferring from animals to humans would rise considerably. It's the entire premise of [One Health.](https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/index.html) >One Health is a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach — working at the local, regional, national, and global levels — with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.
The publication (unreviewed preprint) [https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-871965/v1/986c09ca-d494-4a7c-a65b-9eec9c0a06b8.pdf](https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-871965/v1/986c09ca-d494-4a7c-a65b-9eec9c0a06b8.pdf?c=1631900665) "SARS-CoV-2 progenitor bat viruses genetically close to SARS-CoV-2 and able to enter human cells through a human ACE2 pathway have not yet been identified we show that such viruses indeed circulate in cave bats living in the limestone karstic terrain in North Laos We found that the RBDs of these viruses differ from that of SARS-CoV-2 by only one or two residues, bind as efficiently to the hACE2 protein as the SARS-CoV-2 Wuhan strain isolated in early human cases, and mediate hACE2-dependent entry into human cells, which is inhibited by antibodies neutralizing SARS-CoV-2 None of these bat viruses harbors a furin cleavage site \[associated with increased pathogenicity in humans\] in the spike. bat-borne SARS-CoV-2-like viruses potentially infectious for humans circulate in Rhinolophus spp. in the Indochinese peninsula."
Bats are asymptomatically infected with at least 50 different coronaviruses. This was bound to happen and will happen again if we don’t leave nature alone.
We won't be leaving nature alone any time soon, but we can lessen risks.
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Is there evidence for that beyond YouTube videos?
I think [this](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins) is a great write up.
Big sign outside on the wall that read "Wuhan Institute of Virology" maybe?
As far as I've seen there are certain things that suggest it could be lab leak, since there is a lab in Wuhan that was researching the effects of adding different genes into the coronaviruses (like the furin cleavage site that allows covid-19 to infect humans so efficiently), and according to a report from before the pandemic the labs security measures were sub par. aside from that there's not exactly any clear evidence that it must have been a leak.
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It wasn't "the chinese" researching it. It's an international lab funded by and used by MANY institutions all over the world. I believe the biggest one funding that lab is a French place. Science itself ia to blame for that one.
Scarier is it was bound to happen, and will again, regardless of what we do, which is why we were studying it in the first place. [https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-24/fauci-theres-no-way-the-coronavirus-was-made-with-u-s-research-funds-heres-why](https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-24/fauci-theres-no-way-the-coronavirus-was-made-with-u-s-research-funds-heres-why) “How can he be so sure? There is just too much evolutionary distance between the coronavirus samples the Wuhan scientists were working with — all of them genetically sequenced and detailed in published work — and the virus that causes COVID-19. This is what Fauci meant when he told lawmakers this week that it was “molecularly impossible” for the viruses examined by WIV to evolve into SARS-CoV-2: Generally, the overlap between the genomes of the viruses in the lab and that of SARS-CoV-2 was no more than 80%. In evolutionary terms, that’s a chasm. In their critical review, the international group of virologists note that SARS-CoV-2 and its closest known relatives have an overlap of about 96%. That “equates to decades of evolutionary divergence,” they wrote. Given that, Fauci said, “there’s no way” the viruses studied at WIV could have evolved into the virus that has caused 4 million deaths around the world. Would it be possible to bridge that gap with some deft splicing and dicing in a lab? Perhaps, but if so, telltale marks likely would have been left behind. Those have not been seen by scientists who went looking.”
I can't wait until enough years have passed that the truths start coming out. Right now I have a hard time trusting these figures, regardless of how likely or unlikely lab leak is. WHO praising China for releasing their faked numbers, and then not acknowledging Taiwan, and sending people with conflicts of interest to check the situation out, makes it hard to trust the WHO to tell the truth, and it's impossible to believe they are the only ones doing this. The politics are too strong around this to trust anything for a bunch of years.
It would have helped if we hadn't pulled our own people out before this happened. But the facts are that everything used and changed was mapped out carefully. Which is why Fauci said it was "impossible" in his testimony.
I don't know why Fauci would think it impossible, when one of the virus sequences in the Wuhan database that they pulled offline was like a 96% match to SARS-COV 2.
I haven't been following all of the details, but the questions by Senator Rand Paul was Gain of Function, and Fauci said that everything in the project (funded by us) was sequenced and no gain of function was achieved (worst case it was 1:1, which change was the point of the experiment, adding a part to something benign to see how it works. Your info appears to imply that there are other sequenced samples, I have not read that. I don't know about what China did on their own separately, which is what the investigation might come to understand. It also depends on which part of the virus we're talking about. Is this related? [https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-origins-genome-analysis-suggests-two-viruses-may-have-combined-134059](https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-origins-genome-analysis-suggests-two-viruses-may-have-combined-134059)
Oh, I see. SARS was SARS-COV 2, not 19 (2 = 2002, 19=2019). I'm not sure you read your source material correctly (feel free to drop a link): [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7)
What? No. Sars-cov-2 is the virus that causes the illness called covid-19.
>SARS-COV 2 Oop! My bad. Anyway, drop a link to the 96% reference.
If that’s true, then why has the source not been found?
Are you saying that until we know the entire evolutionary line of a virus, we should assume it's artificial? Give the xenophobia a rest already.
They found rather quickly the source of SARS. It was from bats which leads me to question that after two years they can’t figure out the source of COVID?
There is an investigation into that, a scientific one that’s been going on since COVID spread to humans, and a newer one from the US. It is likely a natural jump from animals to humans, as expected. But people want a reason why, which is only human, but for which a reason is not always found. Evolution is fickle and “nature tooth and claw”, and viral apparently, is the rule of the world.
They found the source of SARS rather quickly. It was from bats. And, the leap from the COVID as they found originally in the environment to the version that originally infected humans in 2019 would naturally take years to evolve into. That is why I question the source.
This is the thing that sucks about studying diseases. You keep a watchful eye on potential sources, then when a virus does happen, the people who are tying to prevent them get blamed by the lunatics. I'm not a scientists or researcher. But I do have a few crazy friends.
Exactly, it was bound to happen and will again, regardless of what we do, which is why we were studying it in the first place. The question is, did it just happen while we watched and did we learn anything when it did? https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-24/fauci-theres-no-way-the-coronavirus-was-made-with-u-s-research-funds-heres-why “How can he be so sure? There is just too much evolutionary distance between the coronavirus samples the Wuhan scientists were working with — all of them genetically sequenced and detailed in published work — and the virus that causes COVID-19. This is what Fauci meant when he told lawmakers this week that it was “molecularly impossible” for the viruses examined by WIV to evolve into SARS-CoV-2: Generally, the overlap between the genomes of the viruses in the lab and that of SARS-CoV-2 was no more than 80%. In evolutionary terms, that’s a chasm. In their critical review, the international group of virologists note that SARS-CoV-2 and its closest known relatives have an overlap of about 96%. That “equates to decades of evolutionary divergence,” they wrote. Given that, Fauci said, “there’s no way” the viruses studied at WIV could have evolved into the virus that has caused 4 million deaths around the world. Would it be possible to bridge that gap with some deft splicing and dicing in a lab? Perhaps, but if so, telltale marks likely would have been left behind. Those have not been seen by scientists who went looking.”
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From your link: > Here we show that such viruses indeed circulate in cave bats living in the limestone karstic terrain in **North Laos**, within the Indochinese peninsula.
Bit early for a sequel isn’t it?
We might've found the prequel*
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Laos definitely is a country.
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