Slack / Private Message Drop — page 794

If you are wondering about circumstantial information in support of a lab spillover... --First human cases were in Wuhan The wildlife trade is known to have brought susceptible animals to the Huanan Market as well as other markets in Wuhan. --Closest known (not that close) viral relatives in nature are ~1000 miles from Wuhan A similar situation occurred in the West Afrivan Ebola outbreak. Prior to the outbreak all but one known spillover was in Middle Africa. --Largest known collections in the world of related coronaviruses, and samples containing related viruses, are located in laboratories in Wuhan City This is not a coincidence -WIV was constructed to study CoV after the first SARS pandemic. There is no known CoV close enough to SARS-CoV-2 to have served as the backbone to generate SARS-CoV-2. . If you believe that SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor was in WIV and being actively worked on and not being revealed then again you are supposing a cover up and conspiracy. --Possible lab accident scenarios include a virus isolation experiment with an animal sample that turned out to contain SARS-CoV-2, conducted by an unwitting, unknowing, well-intentioned lab worker, where there was limited growth but no CPE and no follow-up characterization, and where there was inadvertent and asymptomatic infection of the worker, who then transmitted unknowingly. We know that virus isolation efforts using bat samples with uncharacterized coronaviruses were routinely undertaken at WIV. To call this scenario a "conspiracy theory" is inappropriate and unfair to everyone involved. We have not called this particular limited scenario a conspiracy theory. What is proposed here is unknowable and unfalsifiable. It is also much more unlikely than a spillover involving a nonlaboratorian in high-risk situations (ie. no PPE) in nature or during participation in the wildlife trade. You are comparing dozens of lab workers {with some level of PPE] to literally millions (or more) people with high-risk exposures to animals in nature or while trapping or curating wildlife. --Lab accidents are much more common than any of us would like to think or that we know, including at BL4 and BL3 labs, and including (especially?) at US labs. (For example, I had to help deal with the inadvertent shipment of supposedly radiation-inactivated but in reality, viable, virulent B anthracis spores to a colleague at Stanford by CDC/US Army several years ago.) For just an inkling of what goes on at US labs... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/17/reports-of-incidents-at-bioterror-select-agent-labs/1414048 3/ What is mentioned here and in the USA Today article are lab accidents involving know pathogenic viruses. Yes those incidences happen with known pathogens including SARS-CoV. Marburg virus and Monkey B virus have infected lab workers and were previously unknown but these infections were due to animal exposures and specifically not in the course of doing virus-hunting fieldwork, laboratory manipulation of viruses or GoF research. Furthermore, what you imply here, excepting the "unknowing" caveat scenario above, is that WIV was working on SARS-CoV-2 or something very close to SARS-CoV-2 and then when COVID-19 case emerged told the world instead that the closest virus they had was RaTG13. If somehow true, this is a the very essence of a devious cover-up and conspiracy. --WIV investigators have not been entirely forthcoming, complete or timely with their data: as just one example, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2951-z In fact the addendum to the Nature paper demonstrated Dr. Shi and her team were in fact publishing papers in the scientific literature on the viruses isolated from the mine. The Nature paper was rightly focused on SARS-CoV-2. Concocting some sort of a narrative that they were covering up the provenance of RaTG13 and other viruses for the mine, while previously publishing Ge et al. etc seems a bit over-blown. And the scant info in the WHO report about a possible lab accident was just a series of declarations of negative results without provision of any primary data: if a student came to you with a research conclusion, wouldn't you ask to see the data, the methods and the controls? (As an aside, many scientists all around the world are not entirely forthcoming, for all kinds of reasons.) What your letter gets wrong is that the WHO report significantly adds to the large volume of epidemiological and genomic data that support emergence of SARS-CoV-2 from a zoonotic reservoir, either wildlife or farmed animals. Furthermore the Annexes D5-7 contain data on Wuhan labs (more than the only 4 of 313 pages cited in your letter). Among the data there is the report that serum samples for Dr. Shi's team were negative for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.