Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before Covid-19 outbreak disclosed

Re:Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before Covid-19 outb... by justnotworthit on Monday May 24, 2021 @03:31PM (#27268664)

Can we add?: Why aren't the people behind GoF in Wuhan (from grant funders, to scientists, to CCP) shouting from the rooftops that their research (1) was necessary all along and justified their fight to protect it (2) and can now quickly lead cures and vaccines, as promised?

Instead, nothing. In their perfect moment of glory and justification, they prefer you didn't notice their work.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before Covid-19 outb... by lamontcg on Monday May 24, 2021 @04:29PM (#27269322)

There's still no evidence that WIV was doing GoF research in Wuhan. Nobody has ever come forward to say that was happening and there's no evidence that it ever happened. The simplest explanation of why nobody is defending the GoF research is that it never happened.

Researchers from WIV collaborated with UNC Chapel Hill in 2015 to do that kind of research on SARS-1-related viruses, and that happened in the US.

That gain of function experiment in mice was also to gain function in mice, it would reduce its ability to infect humans.

And if you took RaTG13 and spliced in the surface protein of SARS-1 so it bound to ACE and then ran it through mice you'd still not wind up with SARS-CoV-2. The original virus is too far distant (only 96% homology) and running it through mice would produce a virus that was poorly adapted to humans. And the spike protein would look more like SARS-CoV-1.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before Covid-19 outb... by halsom on Monday May 24, 2021 @06:37PM (#27270502)

“Researchers could have gotten infected during their collecting trips, or while working with the new viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The virus that escaped from the lab would have been a natural virus, not one cooked up by gain of function.”

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before Covid-19 outb... by lamontcg on Monday May 24, 2021 @08:06PM (#27271191)

That's at least more plausible, but the workers who farm bat guano probably have many thousands more times the human-bat contact than the WIV workers ever did. They're far from the only humans venturing into bat caves in China.

[ Parent | on HN ]