SARS-1 - MERS

The more you delve into the murky world of sino-western science collaborations the more suspicious the origin of SARS-1 becomes.

The Curious Case of Dominic Dwyer & SARS-1

A standard intro for Dwyer is:

ABC: An Australian scientist with direct experience in dealing with an outbreak of this type, is Professor Dominic Dwyer, who worked with the WHO on SARS.

Dwyer published SARS papers with Chinese researchers, he was a SARS WHO investigator around the time it twice escaped from a Beijing lab.

Let’s forget the conspiracy theories for a moment re your proximal origin to those lab-leaks - but bare-bones we can agree:  you’re a world-leading expert on SARS-1, right?  Indeed, you embrace the mantle of international expert, and trade off your experience with SARS to support the case that a lab-leak was extremely unlikely.

Your alternative truth:  SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, most likely arose in bats, and then spread to humans via an as-yet unidentified intermediary animal.

This conclusion is based on an oft-repeated premise:

Dwyer: (Timestamp 0:00) Well look uhm - that’s always been the pattern of the spread of these viruses you know from bats from some sort of animal into humans - it happened with SARS, it’s happened with MERS ... uhm … so therefore uhmm ... that’s always been the pattern .. you know - from bats from some sort of animal into humans.

I’m detecting a pattern, Dom, of behaviour by scientists who’ve built careers out of collaborating with CCP-run institutions - but let's stay on point. For the record, your premise is:

Covid has a natural zoonotic origin because it’s always been the pattern - from bats - some sort of animal into humans - just like SARS and MERS - whilst pushing any meaningful conclusion back into the never-never:

Dwyer: (O)rigins - studies of diseases - those sorts of studies can take many many years (many many billions in public money).

(Even then) we may never find virus zero. .. Same with SARS - it took 10 or 15 years before the causative sort of virus in animals was found - so it can take time.

So Dominic, SARS expert-extraordinaire, what was it? 10 years? Or 15? They’re quite different numbers. And what was this causative sort of virus in some sort of animal exactly?  Or you really don’t know?

This is the curious part - considering you’re a world-leading expert on SARS - it all sounds terribly vague.  But from this vague premise you then claim:

Dwyer: There is evidence that suggests the virus jumped from a natural reservoir, such as bats, to an intermediary animal host, possibly triggering an outbreak among animals in the Wuhan wet market.

For perspective, the above quoted interview was conducted on May 28, 2021.  All the fattest rats jumped ship two months prior - Tedros, Fauci, then the whole effluent of experts sludged their way off to reconfigure themselves - but not you.  It’s admirable in a way - you and Eddie are good Aussies, right?  Sticking by your (CCP) mates when they’re down?

Last chance Dominic:

ABC: (0:00) Professor Dwyer, thanks for joining us - you’ve been to the Wuhan institute of Virology - do you still think it’s ‘extremely unlikely’ it escaped from there?

Dwyer (0:10):  Look, I do .. I mean we have many other viruses that have clearly gone from bats into animals into humans .. it happened with SARS, it's happened with MERS.

There it is - straight from the expert's mouth for the umpteenth time.  So if we can agree that your premise, it’s always been the pattern from bats to animals to humans is false, then we can deduce that your conclusion is false.  Sound fair?  Let’s take a look at SARS first.

SARS Origin of Scio-Celebrity

by dulan drift, Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 13:20

Sir Jerremy Farrar (2014): Ten years ago, China blocked access (re SARS investigation). But now China is transparent and superb.

ABC interviewer, 29 Jan, 2020:  Are you seeing a different response from Chinese authorities with this coronavirus crisis?

Dominic Dwyer, WHO SARS-1/Covid Investigator:  Oh, look we've certainly seeing a different response.  Back then, there was no doubt that things were slow to come out, and no doubt that that contributed to a worse SARS epidemic than we should have actually had.  We certainly know a lot more, more quickly than we did back then.

Paradoxically, several of our Scio-Celebrities tell us the CCP was a lot more open transparent this time than they were during SARS-1 - meaning the origin of SARS-1 is even murkier than SARS-2, and yet, from that premise, they go onto insist that SARS-1 proves a natural origin for SARS-2!  How does that work? 

For the record - the origin of SARS-1 is still unknown.

Dominic (SARS Boy), Bat Lady (Shi Zheng-li), Batman (Daszak), and Virus Hunter (Lipkin) all rose to fame through their SARS-1 involvements.  Coincidentally, they've played the roles of highest-platformed advocates of the CCP’s version of everything ever since.

Unlike SARS Boy and Virus Hunter, Bat Lady and Batman were convinced that civets had nothing to do with SARS-1. Here is their evidence from a 2006 paper written along with Wang Lin-fa (Aust CSIRO/Duke/WIV):

During the 2002–2003 outbreaks, none of the animal traders surveyed in the markets, who supposedly had very close contact with live civets, displayed SARS symptoms. .. The lack of widespread infection in wild or farmed palm civets makes them unlikely to have been the natural reservoir host.

They argue, convincingly for a change, that it's far more likely the few civets that did test positive for SARS contracted it from humans rather than the other way around - exactly the same scenario that has happened with Covid.

Then in 2013, another Shi/Daszak/Linfa Wang (NIH funded) collaboration announced in an EcoHealth Press Release: that they had:
...uncovered genome sequences of a new (bat) virus closely related to SARS (thereby) .. precluding civets from playing a part in the transmission process.

The paper states: Our results provide the strongest evidence to date ...that intermediate hosts may not be necessary for direct human infection by some bat SL-CoVs.

Even Lipkin, like Dwyer, a pro-intermediate zealot, is quoted as admitting:

This paper hasn’t resolved the provenance of SARS CoV; nonetheless, it does provide compelling evidence that an intermediate host was not necessary.

Bat Lady/Batman’s ‘discovery’ of the closest known match to SARS (nearly 97 percent according to Scientific American - strangely, that's the only ref i can find), is marginally higher than RaTG13’s 96.3% match with SARS-2.

Finally in 2017, the same researchers triumphantly proclaimed they'd found all the building blocks in a cave in Yunnan - 1000 km away from Guangdong.

Meaning: they could theoretically piece together SARS from different bat samples they'd collected.

But still no explanation of how that theoretical bat traveled 1000km, without infecting anyone on the way, and no demonstration of this theoretical virus being able to jump from bats to humans (or civets, or anything).

Intriguingly, we can deduce that they must have spent a lot of lab-hours trying to piece this bat virus together to prove their theory. Is that how SARS-2 was created?

Nature* claims it was the smoking gun for SARS-1 - it wasn't - but it may be for SARS-2.

So what do we know?

Therefore, your premise, Dominic - it’s always been the pattern - from bats to some sort of animal into humans, is:

wrong.

Therefore, your conclusion, based on this premise, is:

wrong. Sorry.

It's 'wrongness' does raise some questions though.

Although Shi's/Daszak's Yunnan bat was 1000 km from Guangdong, it was only a few km's from Kunming Biological Products Factory, which according to Eric Croddy (2001), specialized in "Research and cultivation of various bio-weapons agents." (p28)

Did SARS also involve engineering scientists and a lab accident?  We don’t know.  Why don’t we know?  Same reason as this time:

the SARS response/investigation was a cover-up from go to woe - so -

there's no evidence.

(Note: follow up to SARS-1 origin has been split from the Dwyer thread. It continues here.  On this thread we'll next take a look at MERS.)

MERS

Dwyer: (0:00) Well look uhm ..it's happened with SARS, it’s happened with MERS ... uhm … so therefore uhmm ... that’s always been the pattern.

Well, no, it hasn’t, Dominic - we saw that the provenance of SARS is still unresolved, so that’s the end of the pattern theory. But for interest’s sake, what about MERS - the other example of a lethal coronavirus that you bring up?

Firstly, the ‘evidence’ of MERS's origin comes from a study conducted by none other than Lipkin and Daszak that claims MERS traveled from bats to camels to people. That’s a worry straight-off-the-bat.

Lipkin (and his team) was the sole external investigator invited by the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia to assist in identifying reservoirs and vectors for transmission of the MERS coronavirus.

If you're on sole-investigator terms with the Saudi regime, that's a worry. 

Daszak was also on that team.  Talk about patterns emerging  - if you’re a murderous totalitarian regime wanting to bury the origin of a coronavirus, better call Ian & Pete!

The fact that those two researchers were involved, is enough to dismiss their report, but let’s take a look anyway.

New York Times: In a paper published online by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a research team comprising veterinarians from EcoHealth Alliance, virologists from Columbia University and Saudi health officials said they had found a stretch of viral RNA in the feces of a bat that matched similar stretches of viral RNA found in humans infected with ..MERS.

Sounds ok on the surface.

New York Times:  But the matching fragment was found in only one bat. And it was a tiny sample: from a genome composed of about 30,000 base pairs, building blocks of genetic material, the matching fragment was only 190 base pairs long.

Why was it a tiny sample? According to:

Lipkin/Daszak et al’s paper: The Oct 2012 shipment was inadvertently opened at customs in the United States and sat at room temperature for 48 hours before transfer to Columbia University. At arrival, all samples had thawed.

Whoops! That sounds not good.

Lipkin/Daszak paper: (T)he sensitivity for viral nucleic acid detection in samples collected in October 2012 was probably reduced because of failure in cold chain transport. We were unable to recover additional sequences beyond the 190-nt RdRp fragment.

None of which stopped them from proclaiming: We are confident in the fidelity of the finding.

I’m not confident. Neither was Stanley Perlman, a virologist at the University of Iowa (or several other virologists). In the NYT article he said he:

...would have been more convinced by a match of at least 400 of the base pairs that encode the virus’s surface spikes, which mutate frequently; the 190-pair match was for viral replication machinery, which mutates less.

Hmm, so, a shady trip to Saudia Arabia at the exclusive invitation of a totalitarian regime - where the samples thawed out and were rendered useless in terms of making a definitive conclusion. But you made one anyway.

There were other MERS studies claiming a bat-camel-human provenance - but they're also mired in controversy.

Science: The Saudi scientists said they had .. sequenced the virus directly from samples taken from the patient and the camel—and those two were also 100% identical. But the two sets of sequences differed in two positions.

That's impossible to explain, (Christian) Drosten says; a virus can change slightly when put into cell culture, but why would the camel and the human virus show exactly the same two changes when cultured, changes never seen before?

Good question.

Science: Drosten suspected that contamination had happened, and that what the researchers called the camel virus was actually the human virus as well.

Thomas Briese, virologist at Columbia University, Lipkin colleague (One Health editorial board), said although the duplication seemed unlikely he "can not exclude the possibility". In other words, offering partial support to the Saudi scientists.

Science: Frustrated, Drosten stopped working with Madani’s group in mid-December.

Michael Osterholm, University of Minnesota: It really is a sign of the overall scientific investigation dysfunction that has occurred to date in Saudi Arabia.

The kindest thing you could say is that the Saudi MERS studies have been bungling affairs.

An alternative conclusion is that it was scientific deceit. 

So why have Dwyer, Lipkin, Daszak, and Saudi scientists been fudging data to try and pin the MERS origin on the bat-camel-human transmission chain?  I don't know. But there will be a good reason.  Not say that camels may not be involved, but it's a sci-lie to saying it's certain.  That's far from the truth.

Therefore:

Dwyer’s conclusion that it was: Extremely unlikely the virus escaped from a lab (and that it) .. most likely arose in bats, and then spread to humans via an as-yet unidentified intermediary animal ...

because:

(0:10) we have many other viruses that have clearly gone from bats into animals into humans .. it happened with SARS, it happened with MERS ...

Is: demonstrably wrong.

Not only is it wrong, it’s inconceivable that Dwyer, a supposed expert in coronaviruses, didn't know it was wrong when he was repeatedly advancing it on all major media platforms.

On the flip-side, we can still draw conclusions from Dwyer’s deceitfulness:

You are using your power/privilege, funded by the public's money - to lie - on the world's biggest stage - about the origin of Covid - at a time when we needed our experts to tell the truth.   These lies cost millions of lives.  What would make a person do that?