From well known conspiracy site, the BBC;
Despite the wide acceptance of the conclusions reached by the Nature Medicine Paper, there are still some scientists who refuse to see it as conclusive proof that the virus wasn’t manipulated in some way.
Nikolai Petrovsky, a professor of medicine at Flinders University in Adelaide and Chairman and Research Director of Vaxine, a company leading Australia’s search for a Covid-19 vaccine, believes that laboratory manipulation has to remain under consideration for being behind as a possible explanation for Sars-CoV-2’s “surprising” ability to bind to human cells.
And he rejects the argument that if it wasn’t pre-planned by a computer model, it didn’t happen.
“In science a lot of things are done on the basis of give-it-a-go, and a lot of things happen completely by accident,” he tells me. “You know, a lot of Nobel prizes have been won on the basis of accidents.”
Others refer to Wuhan’s past experiments in which genome segments from different viruses have been stitched together to investigate how spike proteins bind to human cells.
And they point out that there is no way of knowing whether or not Wuhan does in fact have, among the hundreds of coronaviruses it has collected, anything closer in genetic make-up to Sars-CoV-2 than RaTG13.
What’s more, RaTG13 is itself the subject of some speculation.
The BBC has had it confirmed, from the researchers running a respected Chinese database, that it is the same virus as one that the WIV previously referred to as RaBatCov/4991in this paper.
There is no explanation for the change of name, but that 2016 paper makes it clear that the virus appears to be a new strain of Sars-type coronavirus.
Professor Petrovsky says it would be odd if the WIV, given its interest in such viruses, hadn’t continued to work on it. But there is no more mention of it all until this year, when RaBatCov/4991 re-emerged under its new name RaTG13 as the closest known relative of Sars-CoV-2.
“Despite the wide acceptance of the conclusions reached by the Nature Medicine Paper, there are still some scientists who refuse to see it as conclusive proof …”
C’mon BBC, use the terms ‘scientific consensus’ and ‘science deniers’. You know you want to.
This is a very interesting and informed article…thanks for posting.
One of the things glossed over by the journalist, however, was a throw away line by the sister of the man who died. She said they called for an ambulance and gave up because they were #600 in line for response. Keep in mind that this is “early” on in the exposure. Now, consider the numbers provided by the Chinese govt. of exposures and deaths in Wuhan. (about 3,800 deaths as of April).
So, a daily moment in time, 600 people were too sick to transport themselves to the hospital. Those are only the ones seeking treatment from local hospitals. The number would likely be much higher as Wuhan (despite some modern buildings) is still backwoods China. In addition, it’s mentioned that people were lined up voluminously to get into the medical facility on a daily basis, with few being seen by personnel. As described by the man who eventually died, he was receiving little to no care while in that facility.
Also, I’d love to know what the nurse told this journalist. It’s mentioned in the article that undercover police grabbed her immediately after speaking with him, and she called and asked him to delete her interview (which he did).
Saying that the Chinese Coronavirus was not created in a lab because there are no signs of genetic manipulation using Crispr and the like is like saying that Norman Borlaug didn’t genetically modify wheat because he did not use Crispr.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
We have been genetically modifying plants and animals ever since Gregor Mandel first studied it. Nature has been doing it ever since life was created.
The Chinese might have found a promising potential virus for a Bioweapon, and were working on making it better?. Or maybe they found a coronavirus and wanted to see what changes were needed to make it a disease that could attack humans successfully because then they could guess at how many and how likely spontaneous mutations would do the same?
Or maybe it was just a virus they were experimenting with by passing it through several different species, and they made something that attacks humans.
Who knows? The only thing that matters is that it came out of their Chinese Communist Party run labs in Wuhan City, whether they will admit it or not
My favourite conspiracy theory – Yes, the Chinese Communist Party was working on a biological weapon. They were also trying to design a weapon that was more harmful to non Asians, blacks and whites, than Asians. They were able to do this because we provided them with millions of DNA samples through Ancestry.com and 23 and Me – both of whom use Chinese labs for their DNA analysis. What if the Chinese official death numbers are not as under reported as we think?
I actually saw this being speculated sometime last year before anyone heard of the Wuhan Flu. (might have been an SDA link, I don’t remember)
Even Chicoms don’t trust Chicoms.
Typical Chinese workmanship.
For everyone who says my conspiracy theories (some of which are mentioned ^^^)are overblown I ask….
Did you think last February that the economy would crumble and X% of the population would be hunkered down and there would be a shortage of TP?
That gets a lot of blank stares.
There is a way to stop the next one because there will be a next one, coincidentally it will also be out of China.
All entry for everyone must stop immediately, at first sign, That includes diplomats, returning US citizens, everyone. That’s how it stops.
If you go OS that’s now the risk you take, not 3 weeks in Asia, 6 months can happen, you will need contingency money and contingency time.
Ineffective voluntary and ineffective compulsory quarantine isolation is how this spreads.
China has seen what it can do (accidentally of course) to the hysterical Westerners with a not very deadly and middling contagious virus. Western economies can’t keep taking multiple new virus hits with their existing over excited attitudes.
The Chinese will take note of that.
Apparently this is not the first Wuhan virus and nobody cried racism over previous attributions of origin for viruses originating in Wuhan. Tony Heller made a good short video on the subject.
https://realclimatescience.com/2020/07/new-video-the-wuhan-flu/