Category: Origins
Evidence of two global Covid waves in 2020, and estimating the pandemic start date
Global Covid waves have been easy to spot in 2021 with their distinctive sine wave pattern, but what about 2020, when testing was largely limited to those with symptoms until late into that year? More...
Preprint: Coronaviruses with a SARS-CoV-2-like RBD isolated from bats of the Indochinese peninsula
“We found that the RBDs of these viruses differ from that of SARS-CoV-2 by only one or two residues”
Here we show that such viruses indeed circulate in cave bats living in the limestone karstic terrain in North Laos, within the Indochinese peninsula. More...
Preprint: Molecular evidence for SARS-CoV-2 in samples collected since late summer 2019 in Lombardy
435 samples from 156 cases were investigated. RNA isolated from oropharyngeal swabs and urine was screened by hemi-nested PCRs targeting key sites for viral typing. More...
Shi Zhengli: We need to learn to live with the virus
Shi Zhengli, China’s ‘Bat Woman’, has said that new variants of Sars-Cov-2 will continue to emerge, but that vaccines are ‘effective’. More...
USA: Republican Mike McCaul’s final report into the origins of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic
Mike McCaul’s final report on the origins of the pandemic can be downloaded here. More...
Moderna founder: “I am convinced that the coronavirus came out by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan”
The Canadian biologist Derrick Rossi (Toronto, 1966) is one of the founders of Moderna , one of the pharmaceutical companies that has managed to develop one of the coronavirus vaccines. More...
Preprint: Recovery of deleted deep sequencing data sheds more light on the early Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus epidemic
“Here I identify a data set containing SARS-CoV-2 sequences from early in the Wuhan epidemic that has been deleted from the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive. More...
China: Thousands of wild animals for sale in Wuhan wet markets prior to the coronavirus pandemic
Horrendous new report: “Here we document 47,381 individuals from 38 species, including 31 protected species sold between May 2017 and November 2019 in Wuhan’s markets. More...
Russia: WIV “did absolutely insane things in my opinion, for example, insertions into the genome”
“In China, scientists at the Wuhan Laboratory have been actively developing various variants of the coronavirus for more than 10 years. More...
India: Shi Zhengli, October 2019 – Filovirus antibodies in humans and bats imply zoonotic spillover
India, October 2019, Zhengli Shi et al: “We present evidence for prior exposure of bat harvesters and two resident fruit bat species to filovirus surface glycoproteins… Our results indicate circulation of several filoviruses in bats and the possibility for filovirus transmission from bats to humans. More...