Greg.D.

To me, the most Interesting part was reviewing the three papers by the bat virus expert written in the last six or seven years in which she describes building human infective bat coronavirus. So much so, that Obama blocked any virus engineering in the US that included gain of function, and it turns out she had a collaborator in North Carolina.

it’s a rehash of a Nature Medicine letter that said, based on sequence, it had no evidence of human engineering. That’s important because many people, including headline writers, say that is proof it did not come out of a lab before infecting humans in Wuhan. That fails any logic test. National Review is not important. A naturally-occuring virus infected humans causing a pandemic. It began in Wuhan. There are two labs there that study those viruses. Despite people continuing to quote an unknown source that the virus moved from bat to another host before infecting humans, there is no evidence for that. Nor an explanation. China has kept everyone out of those labs and not made the staff available for interviews. Instead, they have launched an internal (in Chinese) and international propaganda campaign to say the Americans brought it to Wuhan. And, Randy, what’s your point here: Are you saying there is a remote possibility this was virus came out of one of those two US labs?

The virus CAN come from a lab without being a manipulated virus, what a garbage title on that article which is, again, just a rehash of the first article in Nature Medicine. A lot of hand waving in that article but it was very early and does not reference the article by the chinese virologists, I don’t think. The two labs in Wuhan had collections of viruses and needed to culture them in animal hosts merely to study them, which is what their jobs were. Easy to infect a worker or have an escape of a bat or some diseased tissue. it is still the most likely explanation and is a repeat of the first SARS coming out of a Beijing lab. last week people were saying “let’s don’t start throwing the blame word around”. Well, now it’s time to start throwing the blame word around.

Winston May have an ax to grind but his above video is very, very good. He does not need to move along to other topics and he is still very much in touch with modern China. Anything published in SCMP must fulfill the obligation of all state media (and there no longer is any media other than state media): Would not expect the party count everybody anyway.

Okay, so SCMP is a propaganda arm of the Chinese communist party, so I am surprised to see their commentary in the “Stateside” section of this website. There is no reason to lump Taiwan and China together as one style of culture and governance: seriously? China will come out of this uniquely tainted and seen with fresh eyes as a reprehensible system of governance. And their numbers can’t be averaged in with free countries’ numbers. China’s are totally cooked. S Korea has done better than anyone due to their greater use of testing, reporting and isolating. Taiwan can’t even be included with China as they blocked the exported cases and had a more manageable (numbers wise) population than China. Singapore and Japan actually have a resurgence of infections A better comparison would be American state or city against other American states or cities. NYC is devastated while Boston, not far away, is not overwhelmed. Ohio - already renown for early shelter at home practices - is not overwhelmed but Michigan, with a dense urban center, is. Enough of this F’ing Chinese state propaganda. Watch Winston’s video: https://youtu.be/KQaNdTKQyLY for a brief and to the point analysis of what the worst and most despicable regime since Mao has wrought and continues to perpetrate on the world.

Fish? Turtles, snakes, crabs ... seafood in general? I guess it depends on whom you ask

Great photo. Looks like a page out of “Where’s Waldo?” Saw an article that 50 recovered, testing-negative church goers in Korea are now testing positive again. There have been similar anecdotes from China since early in the epidemic. Really really hoping that China has a calm summer.

I got through 5 minutes and then had to put a kid to bed. Though it is an ugly thing the CCP is is doing there, the Uyghur contribution to terrorism was being whitewashed (as usual). I could watch it on their website but I can’t be bothered. Maybe another time.

Yes, until that Al-jazeera article I had only seen bio-safety level 2 china is coming out of this pretty damaged

Yeah, Budweiser in China is a weird, sweet fizz thing. Randy posted a video showing locals, who had scavenged used cans and bottles from KTVs and the like, refilling them with knockoff beer and resealing them. I mean, an incredibly tricky thing to re-seal a can. Agree re Heineken and a few others (Stella Artois, etc). Making a lager at home is hard. That’s why the bearded ones here make Ales - and primarily IPAs - it’s just easier. It wasn’t long ago that contract brewers in Wisconsin could make anything in the style of a european lager. Almost don’t want to know if that has died.

Tonight (April 7): Frontline “China Undercover) about the situation in Xinjiang On Amazon Prime: “The Farewell”, an American-made in China 2019 film that is basically an autobiographic story about NaiNai’s 3 month prognosis, the family gathering in China - and why they don’t tell NaiNai herself.

I really like Tsingtao: it’s an old German recipe and I really prefer lagers. We’ve kind of settled on Corona for our house beer. If you can recommend a domestic that is similar to Tsingtao or Corona, please suggest it.

My wife did our Costco run at 7 AM. Even though we were only running out of eggs and half and half, she still spent over $100, which is good news because they were stocked up on meat again. Nearly all people and staff were wearing masks and/or gloves. The coffee grinder was missing. She asked and they said they got rid of it (temporarily) because of the pandemic. Might be an excuse for us to buy a better coffee grinder off of Amazon. Hardest thing so far is keeping our 3.3 year old on the good track he was on from 2.5 months of pre-school. We’re having great weather in Denver and can’t enjoy much of it, though we do have smallish back and front yards. The kid is getting plenty of (too much) IPAD time. There are the regular weChat vid sessions to China but he is forgetting the Chinese grandma pounded into him. Working from home.

Yeah, but getting across the border to Hong Kong seemed very real. Like they said, if you’re a foreigner you will always be a foreigner there. A long term tourist. Go away. Good they’re outta there

I studied biochemistry at Cornell. A famous dude there named Ephram Racker said “Dont resort to extraordinary explanations for ordinary events”. The simplest and far and away most likely explanation is that one of the two research centers in Wuhan had an escape, a breakdown of their safety protocols. The transport via non-existent bats or the more ludicrous jump from a bat to a second host to human (each, but especially the second, being a rare event) is not impossible but highly unlikely ..... why go there? The first SARS was from an escape from a virology center in Beijing and in 2019 there are two - not one - bat coronavirus research centers in Wuhan where SARS-2 breaks out. Antibodies to Covid-19 in Yunnan people who live near the bat caves? Not surprising. I looked for, but couldn’t find, a reference I read that said for now we have to consider the human antibodies to be cross-reactive among various, highly related strains of the covid virus. Anyway, nothing changes whether it is a completely natural phenomenon or a lab accident that has caused this.

Every Flight of mine into China was filled by at least 95% Chinese people. Why would they think that “imported cases” should be anything other than Chinese people?

Husband of Florida woman who bought all the masks and “left none for the Americans” contacts Winston/SerpentZA to explain their side of the story: https://youtu.be/ImmRjT74i-c You can judge. Poor guy.

I don’t personally know anybody who needs to be persuaded about physical distancing. But, I am surprised that Colorado - of which I’m a resident - has the lowest vaccination rate in the country. I see a lot of reckonings to come after this. As in, what kind of country are we that we can’t _______ (fill in the blank)?

Almost 40,000 people have traveled directly from China to the U.S. since Trump imposed travel restrictions. On New Year’s Eve, Chinese officials disclosed the existence of a pneumonialike illness to international health experts. Since then, at least 430,000 people have arrived in the United States on direct flights from China, according to an analysis of data collected in both countries. The bulk of the passengers, who were of multiple nationalities, arrived in January, at a time when American officials were beginning to grapple with the risks of an outbreak. Nearly 40,000 of the people traveled directly from China to the U.S. in the two months since President Trump imposed travel restrictions. In total, 279 passenger flights have arrived from China since then, carrying Americans and others exempt from the restrictions. Even this past week, data shows, the flights have continued. Mr. Trump has heralded the restrictions as one of his administration’s most important decisions in light of the outbreak. But the analysis of the flight and other data by The New York Times shows the travel measures, however effective, may have come too late, particularly in light of recent statements from officials that as many as 25 percent of infected people may never have symptoms. And even with the restrictions, screening procedures have been uneven, interviews show. “I was surprised at how lax the whole process was,” said Andrew Wu, 31, who landed at Los Angeles International Airport from Beijing on March 10. “The guy I spoke to read down a list of questions, and he didn’t seem interested in checking out anything.”

Thanks for the National Review article. Head spinning. Both labs in Wuhan were up to their eyeballs in coronaviruses. And the few accounts we have so far say the seafood market had neither bats nor pangolins. Don’t know what it would take to ever get full and forthright disclosure from people in charge in Wuhan. Something about pigs flying first.

No, Francis Collins is just reviewing the first article from Nature Medicine. There is zero evidence for a mildly virulent ancestor of Covid-SARS-2 occurring in humans (which would later become super virulent). They said extant serological evidence of covid infection isn’t specific for one of the SARS like coronaviruses. Both articles just try to assure you that they aren’t lab-created Frankenstein strains. The David Ignatious WaPo article I quoted in the previous post clearly says nobody thinks that but instead invites you to consider that it is an accidental release from the Wuhan Virology lab collection. Which is very possible, especially compared to the likelihood of a multiple locus set of mutations in a single Pangolin.

How did covid-19 begin? Its initial origin story is shaky. U. S. intelligence officials don’t think the pandemic was caused by deliberate wrongdoing. The outbreak that has now swept the world instead began with a simpler story, albeit one with tragic consequences: The prime suspect is “natural” transmission from bats to humans, perhaps through unsanitary markets. But scientists don’t rule out that an accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat virus that had been collected for scientific study. .... To be clear: U.S. intelligence officials think there’s no evidence whatsoever that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory as a potential bioweapon. Solid scientific research demonstrates that the virus wasn’t engineered by humans and that it originated in bats. But how did the outbreak occur? Solving this medical mystery is important to prevent future pandemics. What’s increasingly clear is that the initial “origin story” — that the virus was spread by people who ate contaminated animals at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan — is shaky. Scientists have identified the culprit as a bat coronavirus, through genetic sequencing; bats weren’t sold at the seafood market, although that market or others could have sold animals that had contact with bats. The Lancet noted in a January study that the first covid-19 case in Wuhan had no connection to the seafood market. ... There’s a competing theory — of an accidental lab release of bat coronavirus — that scientists have been puzzling about for weeks. Less than 300 yards from the seafood market is the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers from that facility and the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology have posted articles about collecting bat coronaviruses from around China, for study to prevent future illness. Did one of those samples leak, or was hazardous waste deposited in a place where it could spread? Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and biosafety expert, told me in an email that “the first human infection could have occurred as a natural accident,” with the virus passing from bat to human, possibly through another animal. But Ebright cautioned that it “also could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with, for example, an accidental infection of a laboratory worker.” He noted that bat coronaviruses were studied in Wuhan at Biosafety Level 2, “which provides only minimal protection,” compared with the top BSL-4. Ebright described a December video from the Wuhan CDC that shows staffers “collecting bat coronaviruses with inadequate [personal protective equipment] and unsafe operational practices.” Separately, I reviewed two Chinese articles, from 2017 and 2019, describing the heroics of Wuhan CDC researcher Tian Junhua, who while capturing bats in a cave “forgot to take protective measures” so that “bat urine dripped from the top of his head like raindrops.” .... And then there’s the Chinese study that was curiously withdrawn. In February, a site called ResearchGate published a brief article by Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao from Guangzhou’s South China University of Technology. “In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high risk biohazardous laboratories,” the article concluded. Botao Xiao told the Wall Street Journal in February that he had withdrawn the paper because it “was not supported by direct proofs.” Accidents happen, human or laboratory. Solving the mystery of how covid-19 began isn’t a blame game, but a chance for China and the United States to cooperate in a crisis, and prevent a future one.

Wasn’t sure what you meant on the first read. Has she also posted a video featuring herself at the store saying “I didn’t leave any beans for the Americans?” Anyway, try to keep her on the good side. Good luck there. We’re looking at a Costco trip any day now.

I’ve not seen anything supporting that (yet). Wouldn’t necessarily be a shock or a failure. Fairly common and certainly natural. Pretty clear that the official numbers are low. But, doesn’t matter now.

Wow, she could be the next Bond villain. Fresh off the boat mainland immigrants can be that way but after a month or so of seeing that people here don't take all the toilet paper out of the public rest room, etc they calm down and do the take what you need thing. Anyone who walks around doing selfie videos (Gweilo?) extolling their accomplishments is already a hardcore narcissist so to do that with masks is just a little extra step.