Bat and pangolin coronaviruses. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200529161221.htm

That paper/memo/lInk. Essentially says Sars CoV 2 is closest genetically to a particular coronavirus found in bats. By itself it lacks a receptor binding site and can not infect humans. Researches believe the bat coronavirus exchanged critical genetic material with a virus that infects pangolins allowing it to gain a receptor binding site and jump to humans.

Nature article from February:
Did pangolins spread the China coronavirus to people?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00364-2

Quote:

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I think it's the pale of statistical probability that the WIV lab didn't play a role in creating this virus, as it exists today (and I don't think it was a natural viral exchange/mutation process).

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Doctor, if you don't want to touch this question, I understand. But, how and why do you think this virus escaped the lab? What happened for it to encompass the whole world the way it has??

Marcus Aurelius said:

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7457603/

Covid-19 has a furin cleavage insert which renders it more infective into mammals. These odds of this 4 nucleotide sequence addition occurring by chance are zero. This isn't a naturally occurring virus. It was created by the Wuhan lab IMO. Shi Zenghli.

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Can you elaborate on this? I'm no molecular biologist but I was under the impression these furin cleavage sites were found naturally occurring in many viruses in the coronavirus family. Not trying to be argumentative, just genuinely want to learn if my current understanding is wrong.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165

nortex97 said:

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I think it's the pale of statistical probability that the WIV lab didn't play a role in creating this virus, as it exists today (and I don't think it was a natural viral exchange/mutation process).

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The paper cited here is from a group called Rule of Law & Rule of Law Foundation, an anti-Chinese Communist Party organization. Now I always found it fun to encourage my fellow grad students from China to google Tiananmen Square, but I wouldn't go to this group for a non-biased study.

Marcus Aurelius said:

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7457603/

Covid-19 has a furin cleavage insert which renders it more infective into mammals. These odds of this 4 nucleotide sequence addition occurring by chance are zero. This isn't a naturally occurring virus. It was created by the Wuhan lab IMO. Shi Zenghli.

---

From https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 :

Quote:

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It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone20.

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It's not too unbelievable for a virus to pick up new genetic material and evolve quickly as it's what they literally do. Cancer too to a degree. When your goal is to replicate as much as possible, you're going to pick up some deleterious mutations but you'll also pick up some adventitious copies as well.

Here is a very good piece today (quite lengthy) discussing the prospect that this was created in a lab in NY Magazine, hardly a bastion of Q/conspiracy theories;

Quote:

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High-containment laboratories have a whispered history of near misses. Scientists are people, and people have clumsy moments and poke themselves and get bitten by the enraged animals they are trying to nasally inoculate. Machines can create invisible aerosols, and cell solutions can become contaminated. Waste systems don't always work properly. Things can go wrong in a hundred different ways.

Hold that human fallibility in your mind. And then consider the cautious words of Alina Chan, a scientist who works at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "There is a reasonable chance that what we are dealing with is the result of a lab accident," Chan told me in July of last year. There was also, she added, a reasonable chance that the disease had evolved naturally both were scientific possibilities. "I don't know if we will ever find a smoking gun, especially if it was a lab accident. The stakes are so high now. It would be terrifying to be blamed for millions of cases of COVID-19 and possibly up to a million deaths by year end, if the pandemic continues to grow out of control. The Chinese government has also restricted their own scholars and scientists from looking into the origins of SARS-CoV-2. At this rate, the origin of SARS-CoV-2 may just be buried by the passage of time."

I asked Jonathan A. King, a molecular biologist and biosafety advocate from MIT, whether he'd thought lab accident when he first heard about the epidemic. "Absolutely, absolutely," King answered. Other scientists he knew were concerned as well. But scientists, he said, in general were cautious about speaking out. There were "very intense, very subtle pressures" on them not to push on issues of laboratory biohazards. Collecting lots of bat viruses, and passaging those viruses repeatedly through cell cultures, and making bat-human viral hybrids, King believes, "generates new threats and desperately needs to be reined in."
"All possibilities should be on the table, including a lab leak," a scientist from the NIH, Philip Murphy chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology wrote me recently. Nikolai Petrovsky, a professor of endocrinology at Flinders University College of Medicine in Adelaide, Australia, said in an email, "There are indeed many unexplained features of this virus that are hard if not impossible to explain based on a completely natural origin." Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, wrote that he'd been concerned for some years about the Wuhan laboratory and about the work being done there to create "chimeric" (i.e., hybrid) SARS-related bat coronaviruses "with enhanced human infectivity." Ebright said, "In this context, the news of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan ***screamed*** lab release."

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Quote:

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SARS-2 seems almost perfectly calibrated to grab and ransack our breathing cells and choke the life out of them. "By the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission," Alina Chan and her co-authors have written, whereas SARS, when it first appeared in 2003, underwent "numerous adaptive mutations" before settling down. Perhaps viral nature hit a bull's-eye of airborne infectivity, with almost no mutational drift, no period of accommodation and adjustment, or perhaps some lab worker somewhere, inspired by Baric's work with human airway tissue, took a spike protein that was specially groomed to colonize and thrive deep in the ciliated, mucosal tunnels of our inner core and cloned it onto some existing viral bat backbone. It could have happened in Wuhan, but because anyone can now "print out" a fully infectious clone of any sequenced disease it could also have happened at Fort Detrick, or in Texas, or in Italy, or in Rotterdam, or in Wisconsin, or in some other citadel of coronaviral inquiry. No conspiracy just scientific ambition, and the urge to take exciting risks and make new things, and the fear of terrorism, and the fear of getting sick. Plus a whole lot of government money.

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Clearly, our money has played a big role (via NIH and DoD) in the technology/knowledge of how to do this;

Quote:

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On January 8, 2012, the New York Times published a scorcher of an editorial, "An Engineered Doomsday." "We cannot say there would be no benefits at all from studying the virus," the Times said. "But the consequences, should the virus escape, are too devastating to risk."

These gain-of-function experiments were an important part of the NIH's approach to vaccine development, and Anthony Fauci was reluctant to stop funding them. He and Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, along with Gary Nabel, NIAID director of vaccine research, published an opinion piece in the Washington Post in which they contended that the ferret flu experiments, and others like them, were "a risk worth taking." "Important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory," they wrote; the work can "help delineate the principles of virus transmission between species." The work was safe because the viruses were stored in a high-security lab, they believed, and the work was necessary because nature was always coming up with new threats. "Nature is the worst bioterrorist," Fauci told a reporter. "We know that through history."

Soon afterward, there followed some distressing screwups in secure federal laboratories involving live anthrax, live smallpox, and live avian influenza. These got attention in the science press. Then Lipsitch's activists (calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group) sent around a strong statement on the perils of research with "Potential Pandemic Pathogens," signed by more than a hundred scientists. The work might "trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control," the signers said. Fauci reconsidered, and the White House in 2014 announced that there would be a "pause" in the funding of new influenza, SARS, and MERS gain-of-function research.

Baric, in North Carolina, was not happy. He had a number of gain-of-function experiments with pathogenic viruses in progress. "It took me ten seconds to realize that most of them were going to be affected," he told NPR. Baric and a former colleague from Vanderbilt University wrote a long letterto an NIH review board expressing their "profound concerns." "This decision will significantly inhibit our capacity to respond quickly and effectively to future outbreaks of SARS-like or MERS-like coronaviruses, which continue to circulate in bat populations and camels," they wrote. The funding ban was itself dangerous, they argued. "Emerging coronaviruses in nature do not observe a mandated pause."

Hoping to smooth over controversy by showing due diligence, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, founded in the BioShield era under President Bush, paid a consulting firm, Gryphon Scientific, to write a report on gain-of-function research, which by now was simply referred to as GoF. In chapter six of this thousand-page dissertation, published in April 2016, the consultants take up the question of coronaviruses. "Increasing the transmissibility of the coronaviruses could significantly increase the chance of a global pandemic due to a laboratory accident," they wrote.

The Cambridge Working Group continued to write letters of protest and plead for restraint and sanity. Steven Salzberg, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins, said, "We have enough problems simply keeping up with the current flu outbreaks and now with Ebola without scientists creating incredibly deadly new viruses that might accidentally escape their labs." David Relman of Stanford Medical School said, "It is unethical to place so many members of the public at risk and then consult only scientists or, even worse, just a small subset of scientists and exclude others from the decision-making and oversight process." Richard Ebright wrote that creating and evaluating new threats very seldom increases security: "Doing so in biology where the number of potential threats is nearly infinite, and where the asymmetry between the ease of creating threats and the difficulty of addressing threats is nearly absolute is especially counterproductive." Lynn Klotz wrote, "Awful as a pandemic brought on by the escape of a variant H5N1 virus might be, it is SARS that now presents the greatest risk. The worry is less about recurrence of a natural SARS outbreak than of yet another escape from a laboratory researching it to help protect against a natural outbreak." Marc Lipsitch argued that gain-of-function experiments can mislead, "resulting in worse not better decisions," and that the entire gain-of-function debate as overseen by the NIH was heavily weighted in favor of scientific insiders and "distinctly unwelcoming of public participation."

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Quote:

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This proved, Baric and Shi believed, that you did not need civets or other intermediate hosts in order for bats to cause an epidemic in humans and that therefore all the SARS-like viruses circulating in bat populations "may pose a future threat." Peter Daszak, who had used Predict funds to pay Shi for her work on the paper, was impressed by this conclusion; the findings, he said, "move this virus from a candidate emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger."

Richard Ebright was trenchantly unenthusiastic. "The only impact of this work," he said, "is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk."

Early in 2016, Baric and Shi again collaborated. Shi sent Baric a fresh bat virus spike protein, and Baric inserted it into the backbone of a human SARS virus and then used that infectious clone to attack human airway cells. "The virus readily and efficiently replicated in cultured human airway tissues, suggesting an ability to potentially jump directly to humans," reported the UNC's website. This time, they also used the bat-human hybrid virus to infect transgenic humanized mice that grew human ACE2 protein. The mice, young and old, lost weight and died, proving, again, that this particular bat virus was potentially "poised to emerge in human populations." It was "an ongoing threat," Baric wrote. But was it? Civets and camels that are exposed to a lot of bat-guano dust may be an ongoing threat and a manageable one. But the bats themselves just want to hang in their caves and not be bothered by frowning sightseers in spacesuits who want to poke Q-tips in their bottoms. This 2016 "poised for human emergence" paper was supported by eight different NIH grants. In 2015, Baric's lab received $8.3 million from the NIH; in 2016, it received $10.5 million.

Gain-of-function research came roaring back under Trump and Fauci. "The National Institutes of Health will again fund research that makes viruses more dangerous," said an article in Nature in December 2017. Carrie Wolinetz of the NIH's office of science policy defended the decision. "These experiments will help us get ahead of viruses that are already out there and pose a real and present danger to human health," she told The Lancet. The NIH, Wolinetz said, was committed to a leadership role with gain-of-function research internationally. "If we are pursuing this research in an active way, we will be much better positioned to develop protection and countermeasures should something bad happen in another country."

A reporter asked Marc Lipsitch what he thought of the resumption of NIH funding. Gain-of-function experiments "have done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics," he said, "yet they risked creating an accidental pandemic."

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(Above is actually only a small fair use excerpt of the article.)

NYMag isn't a highly credible source for scientific research either. I could imagine NYMag has never been used as a citation in a scientific article. Here's another segment of the story:

Quote:

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[...] Could this new virus, she wondered, have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records and found no exact matches. "That really took a load off my mind," she said. "I had not slept a wink for days."

If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab. [...]

---

Such circular logic. Reminder the title of the story you posted is called "The Lab-Leak Hypothesis For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if ?" A bunch of the stories you posted had a question mark in their titles. Even the author of the story says "Here's what I think happened." Look, it's fine to have a hypothesis or ask the question, but there also needs to be proof. We may not get it or likely it'll be years before we have an answer.

OK? I have my opinion, and you have yours. The literature/opinions are split (as stated in the link) but I'm not sure why you think the article is somehow invalid as an explanation of the history, and personalities/organizations/funding behind the investigation/concerns for a lay person.

This isn't The Lancet/a medical journal message board, after all; we should be able as Aggies to discuss and share information pertaining to the virus freely. The question in this thread is if the virus is man-made or not. I find the NY Magazine piece informative to the discussion/analysis.

Quote:

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Our goal is to highlight some of the helpful information from doctors, public health experts, and others that is already appearing in other forums and to give our community a specific place to ask questions and get helpful, accurate answers.

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I linked the article, and didn't indicate the sources, nor discussion, nor various opinions are anything but what it asserts. Please don't take this as an ad hominem attack but rather a request to address...the data/information laid out therein. Have a great day!

Marcus Aurelius said:

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7457603/

Covid-19 has a furin cleavage insert which renders it more infective into mammals. These odds of this 4 nucleotide sequence addition occurring by chance are zero. This isn't a naturally occurring virus. It was created by the Wuhan lab IMO. Shi Zenghli.

---

This is simply not true...feline (cat) coronaviruses contain the exact same furin cleavage site as SARS-COV-2.

The issue is we simply have not sequenced enough naturally occurring coronavirus isolates to have seen this cleavage site in bat populations. The exact work that Shi and Daszak were doing whose funding was pulled in April. This is why more resources need to go into detecting and studying potential reservoirs of new outbreaks so we can prevent outbreak of these pandemics in the future.

All I know is bill gates and his ilk were war gaming a Corona virus outbreak in October of 2019 that came from Wuhan. The odds of this occurring two months before the world became aware of the Wuhan flu has to be astronomical.

Ranger222 said:

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Marcus Aurelius said:

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7457603/

Covid-19 has a furin cleavage insert which renders it more infective into mammals. These odds of this 4 nucleotide sequence addition occurring by chance are zero. This isn't a naturally occurring virus. It was created by the Wuhan lab IMO. Shi Zenghli.

---

This is simply not true...feline (cat) coronaviruses contain the exact same furin cleavage site as SARS-COV-2.

The issue is we simply have not sequenced enough naturally occurring coronavirus isolates to have seen this cleavage site in bat populations. The exact work that Shi and Daszak were doing whose funding was pulled in April. This is why more resources need to go into detecting and studying potential reservoirs of new outbreaks so we can prevent outbreak of these pandemics in the future.

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How many pandemics has the research stopped? How does this research actually prevent an outbreak? I'm not disputing the statement, but there's a lot of money going into this and potentially creating some nasty bugs in the process.

They were ****ing around with something in the Wuhan lab, didn't take proper precautions, and it got away from them.

Doesn't matter what they were mixing it with.

WarAGle said:

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Bat and pangolin coronaviruses. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200529161221.htm

That paper/memo/lInk. Essentially says Sars CoV 2 is closest genetically to a particular coronavirus found in bats. By itself it lacks a receptor binding site and can not infect humans. Researches believe the bat coronavirus exchanged critical genetic material with a virus that infects pangolins allowing it to gain a receptor binding site and jump to humans.

---

Bat Soup for the win!

The gain-of-function research is mischaracterized. In order to study a lot of these viruses, we need a model animal system to do so. We can't test them on humans -- that is unethical. Its hard for basic sciences to use a macaque (monkey) model as its incredible expensive and also borders on unethical for large numbers. Thus we need to study these viruses in common model organisms like mice or hamsters or other rodents. Additionally, we use these models to test new drug candidates as well. A lot of the drug candidates that originate out of the university system will not get a sniff from major players unless there is in vivo (animal) data to back up that they work. Tissue culture is not enough. So the gain-of-function research like Ralph Baric does at UNC is to manipulate the virus so they can then use it in animal models -- not to infect humans. None of these viruses would actually infect humans because the receptors are different. SARS-COV-2 doesn't infect mice because the mouse ACE2 receptor is different enough it just doesn't bind and enter. So if you want to study SARS-COV-2 in mice or any other virus, you have to engineer it to do so and that is work that these scientists do. They then can infect the animal, study how the virus causes disease by dissecting the animal and studying its pathology. That is how we learn about disease. They can then try experimental drugs on animals before they reach humans.

The surveillance programs that Daszak and Shi were a part of were very simple -- they went to caves in China, caught bats in nets, took blood, fecal and urine samples from the bats and tried to find out what viruses they had. They then went back to the lab and sequenced them to find out what genes they carried in their genomes. If we had put more resources into work like this, we could have found the coronaviruses carries furin cleavage sites like that in SARS-COV-2 and made drugs that target viral entry. We could have had a therapeutic ready to combat a virus like this that would have been delivered to prevent infection/replication.

The problem is the economics of developing a drug like this doesn't work for drug companies -- why spend millions on a drug that is going to sit on a shelf. But we need to re-think how we view drug design/discovery for these issues and instead see it as insurance instead of a profit generator. Nobody wants to pay for insurance until they get in an accident. Well, we're in an accident right now without insurance and boy do we wish we had it instead of all the lives lost and economy destroyed. This also applies to other potential problems that are coming very soon down the road. Let me tell you about bacterial antibiotic resistance and how very soon we are going to run out of effective antibiotics with drug-resistant bacteria on the rise.............

Rock1982 said:

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Marcus Aurelius said:

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7457603/

Covid-19 has a furin cleavage insert which renders it more infective into mammals. These odds of this 4 nucleotide sequence addition occurring by chance are zero. This isn't a naturally occurring virus. It was created by the Wuhan lab IMO. Shi Zenghli.

---

Dr. Aurelius' assertion could be correct. The implications should be terrifying, but 99% don't recognize how close we were to "The Stand" come true.

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President Trump should possibly arrest him before leaving office. And abolish all this. Do that service at least.

Marcus Aurelius said:

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7457603/

Covid-19 has a furin cleavage insert which renders it more infective into mammals. These odds of this 4 nucleotide sequence addition occurring by chance are zero. This isn't a naturally occurring virus. It was created by the Wuhan lab IMO. Shi Zenghli.

---

impossible.

I have been told by very concerned moderates on here that COVID was not created in a lab. that it had been studied extensively and that all scientists agree that it was a naturally occurring mutation.

Ranger222 said:

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Marcus Aurelius said:

---

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7457603/

Covid-19 has a furin cleavage insert which renders it more infective into mammals. These odds of this 4 nucleotide sequence addition occurring by chance are zero. This isn't a naturally occurring virus. It was created by the Wuhan lab IMO. Shi Zenghli.

---

This is simply not true...feline (cat) coronaviruses contain the exact same furin cleavage site as SARS-COV-2.

The issue is we simply have not sequenced enough naturally occurring coronavirus isolates to have seen this cleavage site in bat populations. The exact work that Shi and Daszak were doing whose funding was pulled in April. This is why more resources need to go into detecting and studying potential reservoirs of new outbreaks so we can prevent outbreak of these pandemics in the future.

---

essentially this comes across as "we must create these pandemics in order to understand how to stop them".

you do realize how asinine that sounds right?

That lab should be destroyed.

Ranger222 said:

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The gain-of-function research is mischaracterized. In order to study a lot of these viruses, we need a model animal system to do so. We can't test them on humans -- that is unethical. Its hard for basic sciences to use a macaque (monkey) model as its incredible expensive and also borders on unethical for large numbers. Thus we need to study these viruses in common model organisms like mice or hamsters or other rodents. Additionally, we use these models to test new drug candidates as well. A lot of the drug candidates that originate out of the university system will not get a sniff from major players unless there is in vivo (animal) data to back up that they work. Tissue culture is not enough. So the gain-of-function research like Ralph Baric does at UNC is to manipulate the virus so they can then use it in animal models -- not to infect humans. None of these viruses would actually infect humans because the receptors are different. SARS-COV-2 doesn't infect mice because the mouse ACE2 receptor is different enough it just doesn't bind and enter. So if you want to study SARS-COV-2 in mice or any other virus, you have to engineer it to do so and that is work that these scientists do. They then can infect the animal, study how the virus causes disease by dissecting the animal and studying its pathology. That is how we learn about disease. They can then try experimental drugs on animals before they reach humans.

The surveillance programs that Daszak and Shi were a part of were very simple -- they went to caves in China, caught bats in nets, took blood, fecal and urine samples from the bats and tried to find out what viruses they had. They then went back to the lab and sequenced them to find out what genes they carried in their genomes. If we had put more resources into work like this, we could have found the coronaviruses carries furin cleavage sites like that in SARS-COV-2 and made drugs that target viral entry. We could have had a therapeutic ready to combat a virus like this that would have been delivered to prevent infection/replication.

The problem is the economics of developing a drug like this doesn't work for drug companies -- why spend millions on a drug that is going to sit on a shelf. But we need to re-think how we view drug design/discovery for these issues and instead see it as insurance instead of a profit generator. Nobody wants to pay for insurance until they get in an accident. Well, we're in an accident right now without insurance and boy do we wish we had it instead of all the lives lost and economy destroyed. This also applies to other potential problems that are coming very soon down the road. Let me tell you about bacterial antibiotic resistance and how very soon we are going to run out of effective antibiotics with drug-resistant bacteria on the rise.............

---

Or perhaps we could stay outta bat caves. Problem solved eh?

Trying for brevity here...

Analyzing samples without manipulation from live bats in caves = ok scientific research to better understand potential risks. Even this carries risk though. Humans are imperfect beings with imperfect control mechanisms that are rife with potential for error and abuse.

As the above poster said... Maybe mankind should stay the hell outta bat caves? Akin to: "Don't start ****, won't be ****".

GoF research = creating non-existent and unnecessary risks

The "scientific" community should really stop thinking they're smart enough to outwit mother nature.

Lots of great info....

That shows what many of us felt all along.... China made virus.

We're not terribly far from being able to simulate most of the research and project outcomes versus having to do it experimentally. When we create live dangerous pathogens to study the potential that they exist or evolved, we're sort of creating the short cut for that to happen by in fact doing it ourselves. If it is to be done, it must be done with only the most extreme care and supervision. Coronaviruses will be an ongoing threat, as they have several variants and vectors to jump to human populations.

MouthBQ98 said:

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We're not terribly far from being able to simulate most of the research and project outcomes versus having to do it experimentally. When we create live dangerous pathogens to study the potential that they exist or evolved, we're sort of creating the short cut for that to happen by in fact doing it ourselves. If it is to be done, it must be done with only the most extreme care and supervision. Coronaviruses will be an ongoing threat, as they have several variants and vectors to jump to human populations.

---

You'd think AI would be able to model all the possible gene sequences without much trouble these days...

Agreed....WE are encroaching on the animals and forcing these interactions to occur that then cause "jumps" of pathogens between species. Its our own doing. Some people will not accept that fact.

A perfect example is Nipah virus....a virus from fruit bats that first infected pigs and then it jumped into humans to cause disease. Pigs and bats were never supposed to interact....they don't in the natural world....but our practices led them to by placing pig farms in the bat territory. The bats would come to the trees to eat fruit, ****, and the pigs underneath the trees became infected with the virus after it jumped into a new host (pigs). So, we either step back, look at what we are doing to ourselves and be more cautious about our expansion and prevent these type of unnatural interactions between mammals, or if you want to say **** that, then we need to amp up our surveillance programs and drug discovery pipelines as previously described because these issues will only continue to occur. Ebola was the same....Nipah is the same...these type of viral pandemics will only continue to occur because of what WE are doing. We got lucky before because these viruses were not easily transmitted and we could contain spread...we got an unlucky roll of the dice with SARS-COV-2 and now have to deal with it.

Quote:

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It is probable that initial transmission of NiV from bats to pigs occurred in late 1997/early 1998 through contamination of pig swill by bat excretions, as a result of migration of these forest fruitbats to cultivated orchards and pig-farms, driven by fruiting failure of forest trees during the El Nino-related drought and anthropogenic fires in Indonesia in 1997-1998. This outbreak emphasizes the need for sharing information of any unusual illnesses in animals and humans, an open-minded approach and close collaboration and co-ordination between the medical profession, veterinarians and wildlife specialists in the investigation of such illnesses. Environmental mismanagement (such as deforestation and haze) has far-reaching effects, including encroachment of wildlife into human habitats and the introduction of zoonotic infections into domestic animals and humans.

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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19108397/

I think the problem is testing the real world effects.