Bat Lady & The Dark Knight

 

 

Photo credit: The Australian (puff-piece Sep 2022)

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 but i'm sticking with Dark Knight.  Bat Pack though, that's great - can i use that?

As second-published by Formosahut in May 2020, there was a pivotal Bat Pack GoF experiment in 2008 that inserted a SARS S sequence into a bat virus to enable ACE-2 binding. The first publishers:

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.

Linfa Wang and Meng Yu (his wife), both employed by CSIRO, were a part of that GoF frontier virology team.  2008 is the same year he was promoted at CSIRO to Head Scientist at CSIRO.

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, working at CSIRO)

(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))

As Science notes, the two (Wang-Shi) have co-authored dozens of papers.  

They both rose to fame for finding the SARS-1 bat virus from the legendaryfamous Yunan caves. 

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?

Together they launched a worldwide bat virus hunting movement (with Dazza coming on as PR guy). They were especially attracted to the Yunnan caves but also SE Asia & Africa. Together they  ...racked up quite a number of successes (to the tune of) 15,000 samples from bats.bats (thought to be more like 17 000)000 currently).

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.   (Drastic: p7 There are estimated to be at least 100 unpublished sequences of bat betacoronaviruses in Batvirus.whiov.ac.cn)

Technically, i doubt Linfa isiwas/s 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.tea though. His job starts when the samplesamples getsget to the lab-cave. cave For Linfa- that's where the magic begins.

SlightSo our duo are a slight odd couple - but 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.  

So how did they meet?

Their relationship, like most things Covid, goes back to SARS. Technically, itAnthrax goesignited backthe tofunding Anthrax, technically technically, maybe Hendra, let me keep looking)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?

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. 

CCPIn loyalists2005, atthey heart,published goinga intopaper with Daszak, Epstein (EHA) and other scientists from WIV/CSIRO, the worldoriginal toBat spreadPackers, titled Bats are Natural Reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses - their sharedfame vision.and funding took off from there.