Does Chinese scientific paper hold clue about origins of coronavirus pandemic?

[Diana]

Buck,

More information, less speculation and opinion, please.

Acer wrote:
I'd prefer a link to the paper itself. Anyone who watched this able to parse a link for the good of the order?

Acer,

I believe I found it. If you cannot get to this site, let me know and I will try another way to get the pdf to whoever wants it.

Chan World

Note that it is not a peer-reviewed published paper, but rather a "pre-print" uploaded to researchgate.net. While the link is there, ResearchNet no longer hosts it. Scientific papers are NOT just deleted; retracted papers are splashed with "RETRACTED" on them, but are still available for inspection. From a scientific standpoint, if you want to cut you nose off this is a way to do so.

Here is how I found it. If you don't care, skip it.

The "report" as stated above by Buck is nothing more than an opinion piece, with very little to no substance given. The guy in the video talks about a paper, uploaded on 6 Feb, by someone with the South China University of Technology, but doesn't say who wrote the paper nor the publisher.

A google search using the terms "South China University of Technology" and "horseshoe bat" yielded information getting me to this paper; however, it does not reference horseshoe bats, nor is it coming from anyone associated with the South China University of Technology. It was published online on 3 Feb, not 6 Feb as the "report" states, and was published in Nature, a highly regarded journal.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7#Sec12 paper

Further searching got me to a National Review article: url=https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-china-trail-leading-back-to-wuhan-labs/] here[/url]. Further in the National Review article a name is given and the appropriate location is named. I am unsure of the veracity of the article; I am taking it on "faith" that it is correct. The wayback machine has a copy of the preprint:

preprint

but the actual paper cannot be retrieved from ResearchGate, where it was originally published. It was "retracted", i.e., deleted, in its entirety, which by itself is rather suspicious. I am not one for conspiracy theory (or theories), and if it was indeed a valid scientific paper it should be findable. A retracted paper is not just summarily deleted. I decided to further investigate, using scholar.google.com. While it isn't all-inclusive, it is better than PubMed as it doesn't restrict the fields of research.

If you wish to fall down the rabbit hole, here you go: scholar.google.com search on "The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus" (the name of the article). It has some 1630 hits associated with it. Restricting the search to just the title (using quotes around it) yielded the site where I found the pre-print.

That's it.

Diana

[Acer]

Thanks, Diana, very much.

[Diana]

No problem.

D

[Wags]

Most likely came from bats or pangolins, both sold in Chinese markets

The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2

... Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.

... the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone20. Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer. We also discuss whether selection during passage could have given rise to SARS-CoV-2.

.... More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another. Obtaining related viral sequences from animal sources would be the most definitive way of revealing viral origins. For example, a future observation of an intermediate or fully formed polybasic cleavage site in a SARS-CoV-2-like virus from animals would lend even further support to the natural-selection hypotheses. It would also be helpful to obtain more genetic and functional data about SARS-CoV-2, including animal studies. The identification of a potential intermediate host of SARS-CoV-2, as well as sequencing of the virus from very early cases, would similarly be highly informative. Irrespective of the exact mechanisms by which SARS-CoV-2 originated via natural selection, the ongoing surveillance of pneumonia in humans and other animals is clearly of utmost importance.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

[hal]

Thanks for showing your work Diana

[Diana]

Hal,

No problem. How you get to the information (or conclusion) can be more important than the information itself, but not everyone wants to see it.

Diana

[Wags]

Acer wrote:
I'd prefer a link to the paper itself. Anyone who watched this able to parse a link for the good of the order?

No offense, but how hard is it to put a couple words in search engine and look for a reliable source, in this case from a science-based source that is peer reviewed.

[Diana]

No offense is intended here, but:

The deal is to use the right search engine, or at least the one that is most likely to give you what you are looking for, and knowing how to get information out of it. Not all search engines are created equally. As an example, I looked up the term 'allergic reaction' and 'cytokine storm' (without quotes) to see if anyone had reported increased incidence of patients who have normal every-day allergies who also have been victims of the cytokine storm that has been reported as a COVID-19 reaction. PubMed gave me 20 hits; scholar.google.com gave me over 7,000. None of the PubMed hits looked promising, and I didn't have time to go through the 7,000 others. Curiosity often sidetracks me.

Another deal is to know which sources are peer-reviewed, and which ones are not likely to be so. Researchgate.net sounds like it would be peer reviewed, but it isn't; it is just a depository for papers the authors want to allow others to see and/or get. I often use it to get scientific papers that are behind a paywall, which could cost either $5 or $150 (or more; some publishers are proud of their stuff), or things that are otherwise not easily available.

I have spent the last two weeks searching for scientific papers, both in the field that I studied in graduate school and the (totally different) one that I currently work in. Even with this work, I sometimes come across "papers" that haven't been critically examined, albeit they are supposedly peer reviewed. Not all peer reviewed sources are believable.

Welcome to science.

Diana

[deckeda]

Buck wrote:
Steve you need to calm down. Reading your posts full of inflammatory comments is alarming. You're gonna blow a gasket.
I understand you don't like Trump, Fox News, etc. and that is perfectly fine. We'll agree to disagree amicably.
Just so you know, I watch Fox AND CNN. I read the Washington Post AND Washington Times.

Tucker is reporting on this Chinese scientific paper and he makes valid observations. But, he also says we have no way of verifying. There is an origin to this virus, and to discuss it is normal.

Please inform me of how a "valid observation" can be made about a thing the presenter admits he can't verify? Is this Bizzaro World, where it's OK to spout just anything and then draw meaning from it?

That is to say, either you care about what may be true, or not so much enough to think about it.

Carlson is not, and has never been credible. I suppose I can just keep typing that word until it's understood not to mean "a bad person" per se, or whatever else you might interpret my criticism of him to mean.

[deckeda]

Yes -- I also thank you Diana.

You're truly a bright star on this forum.