URGENT: The newest effort to claim Sars-Cov-2 has natural origins is even more cynical than it first seems

And the scientists involved with this charade must know the truth, because they know raccoon dogs are a near-impossible animal host - and what real evidence of a natural virus would look like.

(NOTE TO READERS: THIS PIECE TURNED OUT LONG. I TRY TO WRITE SHORT, BUT I WANTED TO TAKE THE TIME TO LAY OUT THE TIMELINE AND FACTS CONCLUSIVELY. I HOPE YOU THINK THEY ARE AS COMPELLING AS I DO…)

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I am not making this up.

Last week, The Atlantic hyped a new research preprint as the “Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic.”

The actual evidence the paper offers:

That in late 2019 raccoon dogs shit (or bled, or maybe sneezed) at the market in Wuhan where they were sold for slaughter. And that human beings were infected with Sars-Cov-2 at the same market.

That’s it.

By the way, these raccoon dogs that the paper’s authors want to blame for the epidemic? They have never - as in, not once - been found to be infected with Sars-Cov-2 in the real world.

Not making that part up either.

This new preprint is the scientific equivalent of Alex Murdaugh’s decision to take the stand at his double-murder trial last month. Murdaugh was arrogant enough to believe he could outsmart the jury, but as soon as he started dry-crying about “Pawpaw,” he might as well have put the cuffs on himself. He should just have kept his mouth shut.

(A raccoon dog. Not a raccoon. Not quite a dog. Also probably not the source of Sars-Cov-2.)

Worst of all, the people who ginned up this nonsense know exactly what they’re doing. They know what strong evidence of animal origins of Sars-Cov-2 would look like.

How can I be so sure? Because we have been through this drill before, with the original SARS.

So what would strong evidence of animal origins be? What are we getting instead? And how did we get here?

(ANSWERS BELOW, PAYWALLED FOR 72 HOURS - OR SIGN UP FOR A TRIAL AND READ THEM NOW.)

When the original SARS virus emerged from southern China in late 2002, researchers realized quickly that civet cats had spread it to people.

By May 2003, barely six months after the first human case, researchers had found civets infected with the virus in a live animal market. They also found that workers who killed civets and other wild animals for food were disproportionately represented among early SARS cases.

In December 2003, months after the initial outbreak had ended, a waitress and a diner in a restaurant that served civets both became ill with SARS, China responded by killing more than 10,000 civets. The United States banned civet imports.

(Real evidence of a coronavirus with natural origins, from Shi Zhengli - the Bat Woman of the Wuhan Institute of Virology - herself!)

SOURCE

The evidence was not merely that civet-human contact led to SARS infections. Researchers checked SARS viruses that had infected human patients against those they extracted from civets. They found the viral genomes - the RNA sequences that contain the genetic building blocks for SARS - were nearly but not completely identical in human and civets, as they expected.

They also found evidence of a specific mutation in the part of the genome that coded for the virus’s spike protein. The mutation was “important in the adaptation of SARS-CoV to human cells,” according to a 2008 paper.

In other words, the virus mutated in civets in a way that helped it jump to humans - and the researchers could track that change.

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The scientists also found wild civets were much less likely to be infected with SARS than those caged at markets. They realized that civets were likely an “intermediate” host that had been infected by another animal, the ultimate source of the virus. Bats, which live in dense colonies and have frequent viral infections, were the most likely candidates.

By 2005, multiple groups of Chinese researchers had found precursors to the SARS virus in horseshoe bats. Those viruses shared about 90 percent of their genes with SARS.

Those findings more or less settled the debate. Civets were the intermediate host, and bats the ultimate source. Researchers then began the painstaking process of trying to find the precise location from which SARS might have emerged.

Amazingly, they eventually found a cave in China’s Yunnan Province where bats were infected with 11 different coronaviruses that included nearly all the genetic material found in SARS. “All of the building blocks of SARS-CoV genome… could be found in the genomes of different SARSr-CoV strains from this single location,” they wrote in a 2017 paper.

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This successful hunt contrasts with the mess of the last three years.

The search for the origins of Sars-Cov-2 began promisingly. Only weeks after Covid emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, Chinese scientists isolated Sars-Cov-2 as its cause. On Jan. 11, 2020 a Shanghai researcher made the Sars-Cov-2 genome available.

Almost immediately, Western virologists privately speculated the virus had been engineered in a lab. Both its genetic code and its structure - especially a part of its spike protein called the “furin cleavage site” - appeared unnatural.

Most famously, on Jan. 31, 2020, a prominent virologist named Kristian Andersen emailed Dr. Anthony Fauci that Sars-Cov-2 has “unusual features… some of the features (potentially) look engineered.”

SOURCE

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The next day, Fauci - along with Dr. Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist of the World Health Organization - set up a conference call with Andersen and other top virologists to discuss their concerns. No one has ever produced a recording of that call, so exactly what Fauci and the boys talked about has been lost to history. (For now.)

But within days, Andersen and the others on the call had reversed their view, at least publicly. They argued - loudly - for the natural origins of the virus.

“We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” Andersen wrote in a paper published in Nature in mid-March 2020.

Even to suggest otherwise risked inflaming prejudice against China, Farrar and other researchers wrote on Feb. 19 in a “statement in support of the scientists… of China.”

Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.

Lurking behind these efforts was Peter Daszak, a British zoologist. Daszak’s New York-based nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, had in 2018 proposed the United States fund research inserting furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.

SOURCE

Daszak helped craft the Feb. 19 statement without disclosing his ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese lab that worked on coronaviruses, much less his group’s proposal to do research that could have produced a virus like Sars-Cov-2.

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The virologists largely succeeded in stifling discussion of the possibility that Sars-Cov-2 might have leaked from a lab.

They had the field to themselves to find an animal host (Chinese scientists seemed to lose interest in the chase after a couple of months, no points for guessing why).

So far they have failed.

A short history of that failure:

Nature, May 18, 2020: Animal source of the coronavirus continues to elude scientists

MIT Technology Review, March 26, 2021: No one can find the animal that gave people covid-19

Nature, March 17, 2022: Scientists struggle to probe COVID’s origins amid sparse data from China

The Lancet Microbe, July 2022: Searching for SARS-CoV-2 origins: the saga continues

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Noticing a trend?

The virus hunters have two huge problems in proving Sars-Cov-2 occurred naturally. Bats are supposedly the ultimate source of the virus, but the only coronaviruses they have found in bats that have a “furin cleavage site” are otherwise nothing like Sars-Cov-2. The coronaviruses that are like Sars-Cov-2 don’t have the site.

As Science explained in 2021, “all close relatives of SARS-CoV-2 are missing a signature component of the pandemic virus known as the furin cleavage site.”

Meanwhile, some other animal is supposed to be the intermediate host, as civets were with SARS. But virologists can’t even figure out what the intermediate host might be, much less find a plausible link to it.

They have never found any close precursor viruses in animals. And although Sars-Cov-2 itself is well adapted to human respiratory tracts, it’s lousy at infecting most animal species. (Again, no points for guessing why.)

How human-centric is Sars-Cov-2?

In November, Harvard researchers estimated that more than 300 million Americans had been infected with Covid.

Meanwhile, the Department of Agriculture tracks Covid animal infections in the United States. That number - for cats, dogs, and all other companion and zoo animals- now stands at 399.

Not 399 million.

Three hundred. And ninety-nine.

Plus three types of wild or farmed animals - two kinds of deer and minks, which may be the non-human species that Sars-Cov-2 hits hardest.

(Maybe it was the spotted hyenas?)

(SOURCE)

Finally, in early 2020, when it was still apparently cooperating with efforts to find the source of Sars-Cov-2, China tested raccoon dogs, minks, foxes, and other animals at fur farms for the virus.

It found none.

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Against this backdrop, the origins “search” - now well into its fourth year - appears less like a good-faith effort to find a natural host for Sars-Cov-2, more like a distraction from the evidence of a lab leak.

The most recent scene in this ongoing farce was played last week, with the preprint that the Atlantic called the “strongest evidence yet” for natural origins.

Since 2021, natural origins theorists have focused their energies on a massive live animal market in Wuhan called the Huanan Seafood Market. Chinese authorities shut the market on Jan. 1, 2020, after finding that many early cases of Sars-Cov-2 were apparently connected to it.

This theory has any number of problems.

One is that in early 2020, Chinese researchers took 457 samples from animals in (and in a few cases around) the Huanan Seafood Market. Not one sample was found to contain Sars-Cov-2.

Another issue is that in February 2020, Chinese scientists reported in the Lancet that the first case of Sars-Cov-2 they had found in Wuhan was unconnected to the market.

By May 2020, Chinese officials had rejected the Huanan Seafood Market as the source of animal-to-human Sars-Cov-2 transmission.

“It now turns out that the market is one of the victims,” Dr. George Fu Gao (Chinese media typically report his name as Gao Fu), the head of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control, told a Chinese state-controlled media outlet on May 26.

The fact that the market was the apparent source of so many early Covid infections resulted from its density and poor ventilation, Gao and other Chinese scientists argued.

In addition, cases in people connected to the market were more likely to be reported - because doctors in Wuhan knew that animal markets had fueled the original SARS outbreak and were looking for potential connections to them. Epidemiologists call this second factor “ascertainment bias.”

(SOURCE)

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Yet Western scientists still insist the Huanan Seafood Market was the most likely source of the virus.

It is almost certainly no coincidence that these efforts accelerated after June 2021, when the media wall of silence around the lab leak cracked with a Vanity Fair article.

On August 18, 2021, Andersen and other virologists argued in Cell that “there is currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a laboratory origin,” dismissing the very “engineered” features of the virus that he had highlighted to Fauci.

Three months later, an Arizona biologist named Michael Worobey claimed the fact early Covid cases (reportedly) clustered around the market was practically all the proof anyone needed.

Three months after that, in February 2022, the natural origins theorists published new studies showing that some early Covid cases in the market were not just in the market… they were in a section of the market focused on raccoon dogs and wildlife!

Boom.

Case closed.

Seriously, that was pretty much all they had. As The Scientist magazine wrote:

[Kristian] Andersen speculates that raccoon dogs, a mammal used for food and fur in China, could be the long-sought intermediate host. Raccoon dogs can harbor several coronaviruses. One of the studies shows that raccoon dogs were sold in a section of the market where coronavirus samples were detected, reports Nature.

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Then, last week, came the “strongest evidence yet.”

Which turns out to be a preprint - a paper that has not undergone peer-review - from all the usual suspects showing that - wait for it!- raccoon dogs had left their DNA in some environmental swabs taken from the market.

Proving that raccoon dogs were at the market as Sars-Cov-2 spread in it.

A fact NO ONE HAS EVER DISPUTED.

Plus, some of the same environmental swabs that included raccoon dog DNA also contained Sars-Cov-2 mRNA.

Proving (I repeat) that raccoon dogs were at the market as Sars-Cov-2 spread inside it.

A fact (I repeat) NO ONE HAS EVER DISPUTED.

In other words, the “new” and “powerful” evidence was neither.

What the study didn’t prove was that any raccoon dogs at the market had Covid. (It bears repeating that none of the swabs taken from animals were found to be infected with any coronavirus genetic material.)

Much less that they infected anyone else with it. Much less that they had transmitted it to humans rather than being infected by humans.

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The focus on raccoon dogs is odd because raccoon dogs - and dogs in general - are especially unlikely intermediate hosts for Sars-Cov-2. The language natural origins theorists like to use is that raccoon dogs “are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection.”

Technically, they are correct, in the way that buying a Powerball ticket makes the buyer susceptible to winning a billion dollars.

Here’s what those words mean. In 2020, German scientists sprayed Sars-Cov-2 in the noses of nine raccoon dogs. Three were not infected at all. Six became mildly infected. Very mildly infected.

How mildly?

None of the animals had any signs of illness, such as fever or weight loss. None shed intact viral particles for more than four days. And none had virus in their longs when they were euthanized and autopsied.

Meanwhile, Chinese scientists studying Sars-Cov-2 in domestic animals reported in April 2020 that dogs “appeared not to support viral replication well and had low susceptibility to the virus.” (Raccoon dogs are in the same broad biological family as domestic dogs, though they are genetically closer to foxes.)

But the best evidence comes from the real world.

Last year, German scientists looked for Sars-Cov-2 in raccoon dogs. They found no active infections or viral antibodies and concluded that they had not even theoretically demonstrated that the animals had “susceptibility to the virus.” And, again, when Chinese scientists tested farmed raccoon dogs for Sars-Cov-2 in early 2020, they found none.

As Francois Balloux, a British geneticist (and no friend of yours truly) explained on Twitter on Tuesday:

SOURCE

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It should go without saying that an animal that cannot be naturally infected with Sars-Cov-2 cannot transmit Sars-Cov-2 to humans.

A fact that raises maybe the most interesting questions of all: why do Kristian Andersen and other virologists continue to beclown themselves this way? With each passing day, the chances they will find a viable animal reservoir for Sars-Cov-2 decrease, yet they keep doubling down. Why? Why will they not admit that their initial suspicions were almost surely correct?

But this article is already too long.

And the answers to those questions lie in the realm of politics. Not science.