The Godfather of Bat Viruses
In the Covid Conspiracy card pack, Chinese-Australian Linfa Wang* is up there - Jack of Diamonds territory. Don’t know why he hasn’t had more attention. Let’s give him some love …
Science, Sep 30, 2020: The work (on Covid) is a natural next chapter for Wang, who has been tracking viruses from bats to humans for more than 2 decades.
More than two decades - so before even SARS. That’s uncanny. As soon as Linfa starts studying bat coronaviruses, humanity, at the exact same point in history, is plagued with a series of bat virus events. We’re fortunate Linfa came along when he did! Right in time to save us all. Don’t think Linfa is religious but i’d like to ask him if he had some kind of premonition - a revelation from God?
Science, Marion Koopmans (WHO investigator/Feb 1 Teleconferencer), a virologist at Erasmus Medical Center, credits him for essentially launching the field of bat immunology and developing the tools to pursue it.
Koopmans: He has made a heroic effort to establish a very challenging research line, which needed to start from scratch.
Holy Bat Cave! Mr. under-the-radar-Lin-fa invented bat viruses - from scratch. Can’t get more proximal origin than that - to the whole shebang. I’m upgrading his card to Joker in the pack.
Science, Sep 30: By pure chance, Linfa Wang, one of the world's foremost experts on emerging viruses, was in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January.
The biologist was visiting collaborators at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) just as SARS-CoV-2 was starting to spread from the city to the rest of the world.
So, by pure chance, Linfa Wang was in Wuhan in early Jan at the lab with Shi Zhengli, which is situated, by pure chance, right in the vicinity of Covid ground-zero.
Then, by even more pure chance, Linfa Wang got involved in drafting the Lancet Statement straight after he returned to Singapore. We’ll explore those juicy details directly. But first some backstory …
(* His surname is Wang - in China he’s Wang Lin-fa - (Wung Lin-far - not Linffer) in the west he’s Linfa Wang - Wang is a super-common Chinese surname - so Linfa is more distinctive - it’s pretty cool that he kept it - a lot of people (George Gao) adopt an English name.)