Bat Lady & The Dark Knight

 

 

 

_{Courtesy WIV website, 2005 (now deleted): Cohorts Cahooting}.  _{From left: Don't know, (i'd like to), Hume Field (Aus), Bat Lady, The Dark Knight, Batty Man}

 

ABC interview at the Bat Lab, 2011:  Waiting on the secure side is Dr Linfa Wang - leader of the group known as the "bat pack" - and personally known as the bat virus man.  He's been working at the Animal Health Lab for 20 years.

Yeah, Bat Virus Man is pretty good - i still like Dark Knight - now i'm in a quandary.  Bat Pack though, that's great - can i use that?

As published by Formosahut in May 2020, there was a pivotal Bat-Pack GoF experiment in 2008 (same year Bat Virus Man was promoted to Head Scientist at CSIRO) that inserted a SARS S sequence into a bat virus to enable ACE-2 binding.

The experiments were conducted at WIV, led by Bat Lady & The Dark Knight - with Meng Yu, his wife, also employed by CSIRO.

Differences in Receptor Usage:  ACE2-binding activity of SL-CoVs was easily acquired by the replacement of a relatively small sequence segment of the S protein from the SARS-CoV S sequence.

Easy-peasy.

Differences in Receptor Usage: This work was jointly funded by .. a special fund from the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (no. 1009), the Knowledge Innovation Program Key Project  (KSCX1-YW-R-07) to Z. Shi (Bat Lady), .. and the Australian Biosecurity CRC for Emerging Infectious Diseases (project 1.026RE) to L.-F. Wang (the Dark Knight)

(Aside: This is how rabbit-holey everything is: CRC, the funding arm for Linfa, was set up in 2002 (so pre-SARS) - one of its supporting members is Consortium for Conservation Medicine - which was one of Daszak’s & Epstein’s first incarnations of EcoHealth. What are they doing on an Australian bio-security org in 2002? CRC: The threats may be natural, accidental, or deliberate (as in bioterrorism). (CRC’s brackets))

So how did Linfa and Zhengli meet?

Their relationship, like most things Covid, goes back to SARS. Technically, Anthrax ignited the funding explosion, but SARS provided a new rallying point once it became clear the whole Anthrax bioterrorism attack was literally a(/some) Fort Detrick scientist(s) drumming up business for vaccines.

Science:  After WHO declared the epidemic over in July 2003, it put together a mission of eight scientists, including Wang, to investigate the origins of the virus in China. 

Cool.  Linfa was an original WHO investigator representing CSIRO, Australia.  Dominic E. Dwyer (Westmead, Aussie) was also a WHO investigator for SARS - wonder if he was one of the eight?

Science:  Wang had a hunch bats could be the source, but the rest of the team was skeptical.  At a meeting in Beijing, Wang met the head of WIV, who suggested he collaborate with a scientist at her institute: Shi Zhengli, who was then studying viruses in fish and shrimp.

Linfa: She was the only virologist who believed me and was willing to collaborate with me.

So a legend was born: Bat Lady & the Dark Knight.  Bound by science - but also belief.

As Science notes, they took bat viruses from a fringe theory to an industry where the two have co-authored dozens of papers.  

In 2005, they published a landmark paper with Daszak, Epstein (EHA) and other scientists from WIV/CSIRO, the original Bat Packers, titled Bats are Natural Reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses - which established their reputations in virology.

Zhengli & Linfa then shot to fame (along with Daszak) for finding the SARS-1 bat virus from the famous Yunnan caves. Though in fact, it was nothing of the sort - less than 97% - same range as RaTG13 & the Lao sample but typical zoonati - never let facts get in the way of a good zoonosis narrative. As Linfa admits in a different article:

Nature, Feb 26 2020: Even a 99% similarity between the RBDs of the two viruses is not necessarily enough to link them, says Linfa Wang, .. who was part of the team that found the origin of the SARS virus.

(A neat example of how blithely Nature pedals misinformation  - If 99% isn’t definitive, then how does nearly 97% = found the origin of SARS?)

In 2006 Linfa won: CSIRO Award for Excellence in Partnership, (SARS Team) (with Bat Lady),

Together they launched a worldwide bat virus hunting movement (with Dazza coming on as PR guy), often funded under the PREDICT umbrella. They were especially attracted to the Yunnan caves - but also SE Asia & Africa - the WIV website from 2016 says: WIV has also played a key role in the development of the CAS-African Research Center in Nairobi. (What are they up to there i wonder?)

NPR: Daszak says the China bat sampling project has already racked up quite a number of successes (to the tune of) 15,000 samples from bats. From these they have already identified ...about 50 (that) fall into a category that caused SARS and ... COVID-19, including all the building blocks for SARS.  

Technically, i doubt Linfa was/is traipsing through the batcaves of SE Asia collecting samples - he doesn't like plants or animals for a start - Bat Lady does - loves the outdoors.  Not Linfa's cup of tea though.  His job starts when the samples get to the Bat Lab - that's where the magic begins.

So our duo are a slight odd couple - but they are old friends - and they do click:

Science: They also like to team up in karaoke bars to sing classic Chinese ballads, says Peter Daszak, a researcher at the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City nonprofit, and a longtime collaborator with Wang and Shi. 

Pete: Linfa is an excellent singer and to see him and Shi Zhengli do a duet is very special.

I’m sure it is!  I’m wondering if we haven’t just seen a masterful performance.