That SARS-1 had a natural origin is believed by nearly everyone - even lab-leakers. Scientists unanimously assert it is fact. Could they all be wrong? The answer lies in PLA doctrine.
I do agree we should not assume natural origins of SARS. Barics early work on Coronaviruses is worthy of mention. I was in China during SARS early days although I spent much of the time in Hong Kong/Taiwan before returning when they reopened. Many in China believed it was a bioweapon created by US
It’s a possibility I can’t exclude - especially given the reluctance of people and agencies involved to provide information. It’s as if both the US and China are trying to cover something up.
If that was the case, the motive may have been to draw China more actively into the Global War on Terror. North Korea was another US concern at the time.
I suspect China and US are partners in this field and like Sars-Cov-2 if the US developed the virus Chinas higher ups ok’d the field release. Barics 2006 paper was quite revealing on how relatively benign synthetic viruses may be useful tools to terrorize populations to control them
The trend towards "kinder" (i.e. less lethal) weapons is also a theme in the PLA manual Unrestricted Warfare. They would have noted that while "Amerithrax" only killed five people, it was massively disruptive and caused immense public fear.
I speculate on Russian involvement too. Aerosolization technology might be as important as the agent in the case of SARS-1. My previous article hints at this - I'll have to rewrite it - it's a repurposed X thread.
Interesting observations and unique collection of evidence/activities in this space. Thank you for sharing. I agree with the questionable veracity of Chinese official reports on all matters, including genomes reportedly sequenced, humans/animals surveyed, and more. There's ample potential for deception, although the potential for deception doesn't imply there was deception. Further analyses could clarify this, if only external countries had a reliable, verifiable pipeline for natural samples that could be used for forensic evolutionary analyses.
This is a core problem - and perhaps what PREDICT was meant to provide,
Even if it's possible to gain access to the same cave site, the incidence of cov infection seems highly dependent on time of sampling, or perhaps just luck. As an example - 3 independent groups sampled the Mojiang mine over 8 separate trips. Only one claimed found a sarbecov - in just one bat. But it turned out to be particularly important, the first SARS-CoV-2r ever discovered - if true. Another Chinese group went back in 2020, they failed to find RatG13, claimed no SC2rs anywhere in China. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Not falsifiable, not reproducible -> not science. It's information of a sort, but not scientific. It needs extra scrutiny.
"There's ample potential for deception, although the potential for deception doesn't imply there was deception"
For the PLA, there's also enormous incentive for deception. They're already at war with the US, but don't yet want to risk open confrontation and full-scale retaliation. The current strategy is to undermine - economically, technologically, societally.
Very good points here. Surveillance is indeed a matter of chance, and the PLA did have incentive for deception for SARS-CoV-2 and would have similar incentive for any similar accident.
A challenge to adoption and canonization of this theory may be providing the evidence of deception. For SC2, several PRC-published genomes are fabricated in ways that appear intended to mislead evolutionary analyses and there is other additional evidence that the PRC sought to deceive the world on COVID. I don’t have similar analyses from SC1 and it may be difficult if not impossible to do so given the lack of a genomic record prior to that event. Even if we prove deception, that doesn’t prove exactly what the virus was used for and what intentional or accidental actions caused its release, but it does add evidence to the non-natural origin assessment and specifically to the assessment that the non-natural origin was known to the PRC, and thus the virus derived from a product in their research portfolio.
All of this underscores the challenges of bioattribution, and the significance of improving global capabilities to do so. It’s not just about the US attributing non-natural pathogens as such, but every country keeping a watchful eye on the other to deter risky research and intentional or unintentional releases of enhanced pathogens.
In a nutshell - they used recombination breakpoints which are almost precisely those determined in earlier experiments relative to the protein sequence. Recombination, being an RNA process, should occur at effectively random breakpoints - not precisely bracketing the RBD as is apparent from the WIV sequences.
As for SARS-CoV-2rs: the most important -RaTG13, pangolin covs and BANALs - are characterized by extremely negative selection pressure relative to each other - as measured by dN/dS. This is particularly pronounced in the domains we expect to be most variable - the NTD and RBD of spike. E.g. the NTD of RaTG13 has 55 synonymous mutations and just 3 amino acid difference compared to SC2. The RBD of pangolin cov MP789 has ~60 synonymous mutations and just 2 amino acid differences compared to SC2.
This is evolutionary nonsense! We expect that tropism changes should increase, not decrease, selection pressure - especially in immune-exposed attachment domains.
You and I think alike, I’m grateful to have found you on here. The string of silent mutations in RaTG13 is indeed almost certainly evidence of fabrication, and other analyses of other PLA-published genomes adds weight to this assessment.
Most scientists don’t live in a counter-adversarial analytic environment, they just try to go with standard methods and sources to make their next paper, making their underlying methods data sources vulnerabilities in an information war from an adversary eager to manipulate scientific publications.
As mentioned, grateful to find you here. May I ask - what’s your background? Where are you based? The community of open source scientists pushing the front lines of analyses is small, it’s a pleasure to be acquainted with a fellow free scientist powered by healthy skepticism
I'm an epistemic trespasser from Computer Science. I became enormously interested in biology and have asked a professor or two who if they would supervise me in converting my bioinformatics work into a PhD thesis. I sensed this made them uncomfortable. I'm lobbing accusations of scientific fraud after all - it is easier to do this as an outsider. Also questioning One Health is a bit like questioning anthropogenic climate change, it's become embedded in funding arrangements etc.
I do agree we should not assume natural origins of SARS. Barics early work on Coronaviruses is worthy of mention. I was in China during SARS early days although I spent much of the time in Hong Kong/Taiwan before returning when they reopened. Many in China believed it was a bioweapon created by US
It’s a possibility I can’t exclude - especially given the reluctance of people and agencies involved to provide information. It’s as if both the US and China are trying to cover something up.
If that was the case, the motive may have been to draw China more actively into the Global War on Terror. North Korea was another US concern at the time.
I suspect China and US are partners in this field and like Sars-Cov-2 if the US developed the virus Chinas higher ups ok’d the field release. Barics 2006 paper was quite revealing on how relatively benign synthetic viruses may be useful tools to terrorize populations to control them
The trend towards "kinder" (i.e. less lethal) weapons is also a theme in the PLA manual Unrestricted Warfare. They would have noted that while "Amerithrax" only killed five people, it was massively disruptive and caused immense public fear.
I speculate on Russian involvement too. Aerosolization technology might be as important as the agent in the case of SARS-1. My previous article hints at this - I'll have to rewrite it - it's a repurposed X thread.
https://www.sarsisterrorism.org/p/geopolitics-in-the-age-of-terror
Yeah. The point is these kinder weapons are for domestic populations not foreign, hence the partnership
Interesting observations and unique collection of evidence/activities in this space. Thank you for sharing. I agree with the questionable veracity of Chinese official reports on all matters, including genomes reportedly sequenced, humans/animals surveyed, and more. There's ample potential for deception, although the potential for deception doesn't imply there was deception. Further analyses could clarify this, if only external countries had a reliable, verifiable pipeline for natural samples that could be used for forensic evolutionary analyses.
This is a core problem - and perhaps what PREDICT was meant to provide,
Even if it's possible to gain access to the same cave site, the incidence of cov infection seems highly dependent on time of sampling, or perhaps just luck. As an example - 3 independent groups sampled the Mojiang mine over 8 separate trips. Only one claimed found a sarbecov - in just one bat. But it turned out to be particularly important, the first SARS-CoV-2r ever discovered - if true. Another Chinese group went back in 2020, they failed to find RatG13, claimed no SC2rs anywhere in China. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Not falsifiable, not reproducible -> not science. It's information of a sort, but not scientific. It needs extra scrutiny.
"There's ample potential for deception, although the potential for deception doesn't imply there was deception"
For the PLA, there's also enormous incentive for deception. They're already at war with the US, but don't yet want to risk open confrontation and full-scale retaliation. The current strategy is to undermine - economically, technologically, societally.
Very good points here. Surveillance is indeed a matter of chance, and the PLA did have incentive for deception for SARS-CoV-2 and would have similar incentive for any similar accident.
A challenge to adoption and canonization of this theory may be providing the evidence of deception. For SC2, several PRC-published genomes are fabricated in ways that appear intended to mislead evolutionary analyses and there is other additional evidence that the PRC sought to deceive the world on COVID. I don’t have similar analyses from SC1 and it may be difficult if not impossible to do so given the lack of a genomic record prior to that event. Even if we prove deception, that doesn’t prove exactly what the virus was used for and what intentional or accidental actions caused its release, but it does add evidence to the non-natural origin assessment and specifically to the assessment that the non-natural origin was known to the PRC, and thus the virus derived from a product in their research portfolio.
All of this underscores the challenges of bioattribution, and the significance of improving global capabilities to do so. It’s not just about the US attributing non-natural pathogens as such, but every country keeping a watchful eye on the other to deter risky research and intentional or unintentional releases of enhanced pathogens.
Thanks.
The SARS-1r genomes of most interest are WIV's Rs336, RsSHC014 and WIV1. In an earlier article I explain why I believe them to be fraudulent:
https://www.sarsisterrorism.org/p/update-how-wiv-csiro-ecohealth-fraudulent
And some more nuance in this pre-print:
https://zenodo.org/records/13476370
In a nutshell - they used recombination breakpoints which are almost precisely those determined in earlier experiments relative to the protein sequence. Recombination, being an RNA process, should occur at effectively random breakpoints - not precisely bracketing the RBD as is apparent from the WIV sequences.
As for SARS-CoV-2rs: the most important -RaTG13, pangolin covs and BANALs - are characterized by extremely negative selection pressure relative to each other - as measured by dN/dS. This is particularly pronounced in the domains we expect to be most variable - the NTD and RBD of spike. E.g. the NTD of RaTG13 has 55 synonymous mutations and just 3 amino acid difference compared to SC2. The RBD of pangolin cov MP789 has ~60 synonymous mutations and just 2 amino acid differences compared to SC2.
This is evolutionary nonsense! We expect that tropism changes should increase, not decrease, selection pressure - especially in immune-exposed attachment domains.
https://www.sarsisterrorism.org/p/the-batshit-evolution-of-sars-cov
https://www.sarsisterrorism.org/p/the-truth-lies-under-a-deep-pile
Why are scientists prepared to make exceptions to well-established principles, instead of questioning the data?
You and I think alike, I’m grateful to have found you on here. The string of silent mutations in RaTG13 is indeed almost certainly evidence of fabrication, and other analyses of other PLA-published genomes adds weight to this assessment.
Most scientists don’t live in a counter-adversarial analytic environment, they just try to go with standard methods and sources to make their next paper, making their underlying methods data sources vulnerabilities in an information war from an adversary eager to manipulate scientific publications.
As mentioned, grateful to find you here. May I ask - what’s your background? Where are you based? The community of open source scientists pushing the front lines of analyses is small, it’s a pleasure to be acquainted with a fellow free scientist powered by healthy skepticism
Hi Alex.
I'm an epistemic trespasser from Computer Science. I became enormously interested in biology and have asked a professor or two who if they would supervise me in converting my bioinformatics work into a PhD thesis. I sensed this made them uncomfortable. I'm lobbing accusations of scientific fraud after all - it is easier to do this as an outsider. Also questioning One Health is a bit like questioning anthropogenic climate change, it's become embedded in funding arrangements etc.
Bioinformatics is a powerful field. Where are you based, and would you like to hop on a call sometime to chat more about careers in bioinformatics?