Post by Admin on Feb 21, 2021 4:57:34 GMT
Ferret-badgers and rabbits — "natural hosts" that a World Health Organization (WHO) inspector says could have been vectors for the first transmission of COVID-19 to humans — were experimented on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published on Thursday (Feb. 18), British zoologist and EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak backed China's theory that frozen meat could have brought the coronavirus to Wuhan. After pangolins and mink were dismissed by many researchers as vectors for human transmission, Daszak claimed ferret-badgers and rabbits could instead have transmitted the disease at Wuhan's Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
China's claim that the coronavirus is easily spread through frozen food has been challenged by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which says there is "no credible evidence" that COVID-19 is transmitted through contaminated food or food packaging.
Furthermore, there are no independent reports of anyone contracting COVID-19 through frozen foods, according to Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "There have been zero well-documented cases where a human has been infected by a respiratory pathogen from frozen packaging or meat."
Transmission pathway
As for the wet market, Liang Wannian, head of the Chinese National Health Commission's Expert Panel of COVID-19 Response, stated that no animals or "animal products" had tested positive for the virus there and that early cases of individuals contracting COVID had not visited the market.
Even so, Daszak claimed that ferret-badgers provide "a pathway for how the virus could have gotten into Wuhan," and their carcasses were found in the wet market's freezers. He conceded, however, that all those carcasses had tested negative for the virus.
Liang's more statement in his WHO report is that 50,000 samples of wild animals from 300 different species (including bats) as well as 11,000 farm animals in 31 Chinese provinces — taken between November 2019 and March 2020 — had all tested negative for SARS-CoV-2.
Meanwhile, an Australian geneticist who publishes scientific papers under the name Zhang Daoyu told Taiwan News in an email that the ferret-badger ACE2 receptor cannot bind to the S1 subunit of the spike protein. He added that animals cannot be infected with the disease in-vivo, and adaptations in them give a very different receptor-binding motif (RBM) than what is currently seen in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Another of Daszak's claims is that rabbits were sold at the wet market and the animals "turn out to be quite susceptible to SARS-CoV-2." However, Zhang said that since the currently observed RBM of SARS-CoV-2 does not efficiently use ferret-badger ACE2 and is not optimal for binding to rabbit ACE2, this rules out the possibility the virus may have "naturally" adapted to these two species.
"Transmission could occur in a laboratory with mice or rabbits that had been genetically modified to express the human ACE2 protein and had severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID)," Zhang said. He added that even this is unlikely "since the current RBM is not optimal to rabbit ACE2 binding, and a history of either ferret-badger or rabbit ACE2 adaptation would have resulted in very different RBM than observed."
An open-source intelligence consultant who asked to remain anonymous told Taiwan News they had uncovered scrubbed webpages from the WIV that describe in detail the rabbits, ferrets, mice, rats, and other animals that have been experimented on at the facility for decades. An introduction to the WIV's Laboratory Animal Center, which has been scrubbed from the internet, states the building was constructed in 1999 and received a license to house rabbits, rats, and mice in 2005.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published on Thursday (Feb. 18), British zoologist and EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak backed China's theory that frozen meat could have brought the coronavirus to Wuhan. After pangolins and mink were dismissed by many researchers as vectors for human transmission, Daszak claimed ferret-badgers and rabbits could instead have transmitted the disease at Wuhan's Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
China's claim that the coronavirus is easily spread through frozen food has been challenged by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which says there is "no credible evidence" that COVID-19 is transmitted through contaminated food or food packaging.
Furthermore, there are no independent reports of anyone contracting COVID-19 through frozen foods, according to Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "There have been zero well-documented cases where a human has been infected by a respiratory pathogen from frozen packaging or meat."
Transmission pathway
As for the wet market, Liang Wannian, head of the Chinese National Health Commission's Expert Panel of COVID-19 Response, stated that no animals or "animal products" had tested positive for the virus there and that early cases of individuals contracting COVID had not visited the market.
Even so, Daszak claimed that ferret-badgers provide "a pathway for how the virus could have gotten into Wuhan," and their carcasses were found in the wet market's freezers. He conceded, however, that all those carcasses had tested negative for the virus.
Liang's more statement in his WHO report is that 50,000 samples of wild animals from 300 different species (including bats) as well as 11,000 farm animals in 31 Chinese provinces — taken between November 2019 and March 2020 — had all tested negative for SARS-CoV-2.
Meanwhile, an Australian geneticist who publishes scientific papers under the name Zhang Daoyu told Taiwan News in an email that the ferret-badger ACE2 receptor cannot bind to the S1 subunit of the spike protein. He added that animals cannot be infected with the disease in-vivo, and adaptations in them give a very different receptor-binding motif (RBM) than what is currently seen in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Another of Daszak's claims is that rabbits were sold at the wet market and the animals "turn out to be quite susceptible to SARS-CoV-2." However, Zhang said that since the currently observed RBM of SARS-CoV-2 does not efficiently use ferret-badger ACE2 and is not optimal for binding to rabbit ACE2, this rules out the possibility the virus may have "naturally" adapted to these two species.
"Transmission could occur in a laboratory with mice or rabbits that had been genetically modified to express the human ACE2 protein and had severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID)," Zhang said. He added that even this is unlikely "since the current RBM is not optimal to rabbit ACE2 binding, and a history of either ferret-badger or rabbit ACE2 adaptation would have resulted in very different RBM than observed."
An open-source intelligence consultant who asked to remain anonymous told Taiwan News they had uncovered scrubbed webpages from the WIV that describe in detail the rabbits, ferrets, mice, rats, and other animals that have been experimented on at the facility for decades. An introduction to the WIV's Laboratory Animal Center, which has been scrubbed from the internet, states the building was constructed in 1999 and received a license to house rabbits, rats, and mice in 2005.