US Senate, lab origin most likely

warm welcome to today's talk is Monday, October 31. Now I'm going to start with a quote from this United States Senate review. The emergence of the SARS II coronavirus that resulted in the Covid-19 pandemic was

most

likely

the result of It is

most

likely

a research-related incident and I have looked at the evidence quite a bit today and I must say that the evidence is quite strong. , so let's take a look at this now. This is from this report here. Get it yourself. Check it out. It is an eminently readable report. It's not in any pretentious jargon.

It deals with some pretty complex concepts. So it's not a casual read by any means, but it's worth it, it's worth a good look, so let's dive into it now. this is the first piece of evidence here now this is before we get to the kind of proper epidemiological evidence this is quite interesting here now this is the Hunan seafood market where the outbreak supposedly started this is the river here in Wuhan and this is the Institute of Virology here and these gray areas and crosses indicate the number of searches done for flu-like symptoms on the main local search engine and this starts in December, December 20, 2019.

So we see that the Most of the searches were initially conducted in this early period around the Wuhan Institute of Virology, not around the Hunan Seafood Market, where the outbreak supposedly

origin

ally started, so I think it's quite interesting, it's on the other side of the river and I mean, that's the river down there and it's quite a few miles away of course, so okay, that's circumstantial, maybe there are just more people connected to the Internet over the Wuhan Institute of Virology instead of the Hunan seafood market, but I thought it was a pretty interesting test just to get started, but there are better things than that, so the model thought Casey probably started this in mid-October, so when people started making these searches on eh, December 20, 2019, the virus had already spread quite a bit and probably a lot of human-to-human transmission was already occurring around the epicenter of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, now the next line of analysis of evidence of natural zoonoses.

The

origin

s hypothesis now is a pretty interesting severe acute respiratory syndrome, that's what we were used to, what kind of what we call SARS, one that was in 2002 2003. and the Middle East respiratory syndrome that emerged around 2009 and both are coronaviruses and both are known to be natural spillover events. The epidemiology of the epidemic is identified. The serology is there. The intermediate species are there. There are still a few cases a year. Actually, a Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome occurs in Saudi Arabia, mainly in Saudi Arabia, from camels, where people often keep camels. Well, that is well known, but as we will see the completely different SARS coronavirus 2, there is no in-between.

Between now, this almost certainly came from Bastion, but no intermediate species have been identified. This is quite interesting here, this screen, here, now, this is the area. where the virus or the device or the genetic similarities are about a thousand miles from Wuhan, which is up here, now it's also possible that it came from Seven there or from 11 or 10 in these other provinces, but the most genetically similar viruses I hear about a thousand miles from Wuhan now, while influenza travels in birds, of course, it seems like mammals are the vector for coronaviruses, so it's going to be a long way for an animal to walk a thousand miles without um. leaving any intermediate infection along the way, so I'm already starting to sound a little unlikely, but let's move on now, the virus needed to circulate in an intermediate host so that the virus doesn't jump directly from bats to humans, but instead passes through an intermediate host and it does not do so instantly, it has to circulate in the intermediate host for a period of time because an animal virus must evolve to acquire infectious potential for humans, so it has to be in the intermediate species for a period of time. and of course that gives it plenty of time to propagate into the intermediate species.

The closest virus is a horseshoe bat resident in southern China and Southeast Asia, so it most likely came from there now because it would have to be circulating in the intermediate species. Over a period of time, it would have spread extensively to the intermediate host, there would have been mutations in the intermediate host and the mutations have not been found and the intermediate host has not been found, which is surprising if this were a natural spillover event . So as we say, the main area where the virus probably came from a thousand miles, but there are no infections in this area, for example, since the virus would have spread from one intermediate animal to another, but there is no evidence of that and as We say from here.

The area here to Wuhan is about a thousand miles, so it's a long way for an animal to walk. I think we can be pretty sure it didn't spread from bats to birds, but from bats to birds. It is almost certainly a viasonic mammal, so the epidemiology of the SARS coronavirus outbreak differs from previous natural zoonotic spills. Now there are no dead end species here with an epidemiological train in other animals, so presumably if it had been spreading for a while, there would have been antibodies in other animals, viruses would have been identified in other animals, and we don't just know that infected humans They can infect other animals like cats and gorillas, for example, and dogs, hamsters and minks, these things are well known, so why if this intermediate species walked a thousand miles east didn't it infect anyone? other animals there is simply no trace, it does not make much sense that there was an intermediate species for this reason now if we take the example of poultry infected with influenza and birds are always found now the exception to this is the 1977 Russian flu outbreak that it probably arose in a laboratory in Russia, but other than that, as we know, we see these terrible images of mass calls of birds, chickens, other poultry and we see terrible images of wild birds dying also from influenza, I mean.

Now there is avian influenza, fortunately it has not spread to humans, but this example here from 2019 was h7n9 and there were multiple independent introductions in multiple regions, so what we normally see with a natural contagion event, be it influenza or SARS coronavirus . is that there is no incidence of human infection, there are many over a period of time, that is what we would expect, but it is also not what we see with the SARS coronavirus, so independent and geographically disparate contagion events occurred in H7 N9, these are documented so that avian influenza 2019 and circulated in bird populations, this is known for certain, virology was performed on birds and poultry.

Fortunately, this 2019 influenza outbreak only ended in about 500 human infections being identified, it did not become a pandemic, but it just shows the way. that the virus can jump from animals to humans in the natural environment, but we have these multiple events, not a single event, over time in several provinces in China before the first known human infections occurred. Here is the graph for that. So what is this? shows that these are the different provinces of China, so it's probably about a thousand miles or more wide there and there was an outbreak here in this there was an outbreak in Hunan there was a joke in Fujan it didn't break in Shandong there was an outbreak in hendang these numbers here are the number of cases and the blue ones are the number of deaths, so there are outbreaks over a period of several months in many geographic areas, but it is not what we saw with the SARS coronavirus.

We also saw a single origin in a single place at a single time and this is not what we normally see with normal zoonotic infections. This is unusual, so there is a graph showing that it started at various times and in various places with influenza, so we have seen this be true with influenza. and we have seen this to be true with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, which is a coronavirus of multiple origins, multiple relapses, in fact, still, as we said, there are still some cases now, the SARS coronavirus seems to have completely disappeared, there's no um it doesn't look like there will be some residue of SARS coronavirus on the planet, which is good, but Middle East Respiratory Syndrome keeps popping up, so looking at this SARS epidemic in 2002-2003, there were at least five at a time. least five independent billing human events in at least five, probably more, that's only five that are documented now, um live animal markets followed by human to human transmission, so again this SARS coronavirus won at least the SARS coronavirus , one that we know originated from these miserable markers, uh, wet, wet, wet, that have where they live and dead animals all together and things in China, but there are a lot of animals all together spreading viruses, um, and whether in the air, in feces, whatever, infecting other animals and humans, and that's what happened at least five different times, transmission to humans and here's the graph that shows this actually this is um this is this is uh where it really started this is Guangdong province in China now this is a hundred kilometer scale here so we see that where there is an outbreak here and there is another outbreak what three four 400 500 kilometers away so we see multiple outbreaks during a period of time, okay, it's all within one province, but multiple airborne outbreaks, multiple outbreaks over a period of time in the SARS coronavirus 1 2002 2003 and again not what we see in the southern coronavirus two um, so there's the graph. for that it shows the diffuse area of ​​different overflow events, now the reason here is that um, the, the sieve, cats and the other, the other vectors, the ones that had this disease, these would be everywhere, so they would be transmit to humans from a large animal Reservoir of infection exactly the same as we would have obtained with the large animal Reservoir in this case of birds from the avine situation, so in this situation here there would be birds everywhere the place that is infected because the virus had already spread everywhere in Birds um, so it spread from bird to bird all over here and then you end up with potentially millions of infected birds, tens of millions of infected birds, all infecting humans here and here and here and here and listening here everywhere because there is a large reservoir of animals, um, of the virus is no longer what we see with the SARS coronavirus as well, so going back to the uh, the SARS coronavirus, the original, many animals infect everyone. all over the place, so we have these multiple outbreaks in humans and, in fact, later, the original outbreak there was in 2002 2003. but then in 2003 2004, basically, a year later, there were more additional independent outbreaks, so that if the SARS coronavirus 2 has arrived from an animal an intermediate animal a natural spillover event why have we not seen more spillover events in humans why it only happened once because if it were from an animal we would have expected to see spillover events in humans that time in multiple areas and multiple times and there are still some new overflow events now because the animal warehouse would be full of viruses, but we don't see it indicating that there is no animal warehouse.

Here's the problem, there doesn't seem to be an animal tank, so on top of these extra spills. Events in humans after the original SARS Civic cats were identified as the intermediate host animal within a few months, six months and now we have had three years and nothing early saw samples from humans containing genetic mutations that reflected the previous circulation, so When the original SARS coronavirus won in 2002, 2003 came, the virus was already evolved and had mutated, there were many different strains of the virus indicating that the virus had been circulating for a long time in the animal reservoir giving rise to genetic variations in the virus. that indicated there had been prior evolution of the virus over time in animal hosts is not what we see with SARS coronavirus 2.

Therefore, the case actually becomes quite convincing, so in complete contrast, now the Chinese government claimed that SARS coronavirus 2 originated from a natural zoonotic transmission that occurred in the Hunan market. I've now backtracked on the claim that it came into the country via frozen food, and by the way, this doesn't tell us anything about any collaboration between the NIH and Wuhan, we just don't know about that, although we know there was funding there. but this indicates that the virus originated in China, so they backtracked on that, but it was not the Chinese government who actually claimed this.

Virologists and epidemiologists also claim that there was a single origin in a single place, notthat we Expect to see you by any means with natural overflow infections. Now, this graph here is. I know you won't be able to see this, but this is geotemporal propagation, so play around a little, so basically it starts in a very small area. here it gets bigger, it gets bigger, the darker area with more cases, it gets bigger, it gets bigger, it gets bigger and because the World Health Organization, when we said stop flights Outside of China, the World Health Organization said move on, so we had a pandemic, too bad they didn't.

I didn't stop the flights at an earlier stage but they didn't so here we go it started in this just this area of ​​uh this area of ​​Wuhan in Hubei here just in that area once there was an initial initial event and then it spread more and more. more cases to other parts of China from a central location we didn't see, we don't see multiple contagion events as we would expect to see, also the first SARS 2 coronavirus was well adapted for human-to-human transmission, we would expect this to develop over time as it evolved into the intermediate species, this started to work so to speak, that's how it was fully formed, well we don't have fully formed viruses, there has to be an evolutionary process unless it comes from human manipulation, so so there is more evidence that it was already well suited for human-to-human transmission that began early in the South coronavirus. 2 variants that were identified had little genetic diversity two nucleotides in the samples taken there were only two nucleotides of difference uh so there are 29,900 almost 30,000 nucleotides in the virus and the nucleotide remember the ACG and U that these there are only four nucleotides that make up the ribonucleic acid chain, the RNA that codes for the amino acids and proteins of the virus, so there are only two variants, while now we see multiple variants, these two variants could have mutated just after some transmissions of the virus between people, but if they come from animals, we would have expected multiple mutations as we saw with the SARS coronavirus and we didn't, we don't see that initially there were only two forms of the virus that started the pandemic and all these others than the alpha delta the Omicron all this came after it started to spread from human to human, so, again, there is more compelling evidence that all early viruses were the same, there is no evidence of previous intermittent circulation of the host, as we have said, genetic similarities between environmental samples and human samples, so the environmental samples from Wuhan, what happened here was where they went.

They did some initial research in the Wuhan market and the animals had organs, but they found them on surfaces and on the floor. They found SARS coronavirus 2, they found the virus, but the viral genomes were essentially identical, just like we said, just one or two nucleotides different than the ones that were causing early infections in humans, so this means that the early um virus in The market in Wuhan could well have come from humans, so it could have been humans that infected the market, and not the other way around, because, as we saw, the original searches for cases were done more around the Institute of Technology from Wuhan, so this idea supports the likelihood that the virus found in who knows the market was eliminated by humans and the market then became a smaller epicenter, so that's part of the science, now there's a lot more , so there's not going to be much more science to come, but I'm going to do it.

I'll leave it there for now for sizing, but I want to tell you why this is important. We can keep track of this. You could do something because the science is pretty convincing, but this is approved by Richard Burr, senator for health. education, work and pensions committee to address the issue, this is the kind of terms of reference really to address pandemic preparedness and response programs because we need to know what went wrong, otherwise next time a pandemic hits , the virus is probably 50 or 100 times more deadly, we have to get it right immediately, not this nonsense for months like what happened with this one, the human race became completely pig here, the initial handling of this virus we must get it right next time because We were lucky that although this virus is deadly for some, it could have been for many more.

Middle East respiratory syndrome, for example, the case fatality rate is that the mortality rate is around 50 and the infection mortality rate is much higher. and this could be the next virus, it could be a much deadlier virus that could kill half of humanity. This sounds like hyperbole, but it really isn't. The bubonic plague killed between 40 and 60 of the European populations it infected. A new virus could potentially do the same thing unless we get it right next time and that means we have to learn from it. um, they've been studying this for 15 months, they've seen hundreds of scientific studies, they've interviewed dozens of experts in the field, they've analyzed previous reports, but they also say the lack of transparent collaboration from the Chinese government and the public health offices of the Republic Popular China regarding the origins of the SARS coronavirus 2 prevents us from reaching a more definitive conclusion, so this is based only on the information that they have and uh, the senator says I'm Richard Burr, sir, since I hope that the report guide the World Health Organization to other interested national international institutions.

I agree with him, so here we go, this is the problem and in fact the PRC is prohibited from sharing. or publish any information about coronavirus 2 from the South without State review and approval, so basically all we have now is the official line, so it probably started in October 2019. That is some of the evidence that indicates or some of domestic consistencies indicating that this probably happened. it has a laboratory origin that is from another Senate committee and that is now my opinion as well and not just the evidence that I have provided here, I will give more probably tomorrow, but for now, thanks for watching.