Virus Hotspot

Background:

EcoHealth loved making hotspot maps of where they thought a zoonotic virus spillover would occur. The one place that doesn’t appear on any of these maps is: Wuhan.

It should have been, though - with the darkest most foreboding red shading at the location of Wuhan Institute of Virology. Severe storm warning.

From 2004-2019, EcoHealth-CSIRO-UC Davis-WIV were collecting bat viruses from around the world like they were going out of style.  

Many were shipped back to WIV.  

Daszak’s grandiose plan was to:

catalogue the majority of coronaviruses throughout the world - for - one or two billion dollars.

Why?

Daszak: (T)o find out which of the viruses in the wild even possibly could infect people so we know where they are and we can stop them from emerging.

How about you leave well alone? Before the Anthrax biodefense funding explosion - i don’t remember being terrorized by the common cold virus 

It’s a little bit like if you listen to phone calls from Afghanistan. 

Oh, really?

To find the terrorists, you have to listen to all the phone calls. Only when you’ve heard the phone call do you then go in and find out who these people are and disrupt those networks.

It’s hard to know if your talking about the common cold or conspiracy theorists.

Even Andersen thought the idea was preposterous. He/Holmes/Rambaut had a 2018  paper in Nature, arguing, convincingly, that it was a silly waste of time and money.  (Their alternative - real-time surveillance of human populations - is equally problematic due to ethical/privacy-rights concerns.) 

Funny then that they would come to be bound together so tightly on the natural-origin offensive a year later.

Dazza’s phone call listening operations took place mainly in SE Asia (incl. Yunnan, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia). Samples were shipped to WIV - amongst other places - UC Davis? - The Pasteur Institute, Cambodia. (PREDICT report - huge PDF file)

Daszak: I visited the labs (in Wuhan) frequently … over 15 years.  ..(paraphrased by NPR)  The team and its collaborators at WIV have collected about 15,000 samples from bats (and) .. identified ...about 50 (that) fall into a category that caused COVID-19 (including) some that ..are capable of infecting a human cell in a petri dish. (Especially when GoFed-up.)

So: a bunch of glorified bug-hunters scouring the world on the public dime to gather up all the world’s bat viruses and store them at WIV.

Where their building blocks can be reassembled through GoF/serial passaging to create a super-bug - in order to:

develop therapeutics for future control of emerging SARS-like infections

...to keep us safe.