The Wuhan lab at the center of the US-China blame game: What we know and what we don't

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/06/asia/coronavirus-china-wuhan-lab-origins-explainer-intl-hnk/index.html

The laboratory at the heart of the Trump administration's allegations belongs to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an affiliate of the central government-run Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is the only lab on the Chinese mainland equipped for the highest level of biocontainment, known as Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4). .

 

The Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory was designed and built with help from France. Construction wasn't finished until the end of 2014, and the lab went into full operation in January 2018 -- an event celebrated in the media as worthy of national pride

A third source, also from a Five Eyes nation, told CNN that there remains a possibility that the virus originated from a laboratory, but cautioned there is nothing to make that a legitimate theory yet. The source added that "clearly the market is where it exploded from," but how the virus got to the market remains unclear.

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Trump lashes out at attack ad by George Conway’s Lincoln Project: ‘Disgrace to Honest Abe’

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-lashes-out-at-attack-ad-by-george-conways-lincoln-project-disgrace-to-honest-abe

President Trump lashed out overnight after a group led by Kellyanne Conway’s husband released an ad criticizing his administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The grim ad, titled “Mourning in America,” was a riff on former President Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” and accused the president of ignoring the crisis early on. It was released by The Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans.

“A group of RINO Republicans who failed badly 12 years ago, then again 8 years ago, and then got BADLY beaten by me, a political first timer, 4 years ago, have copied (no imagination) the concept of an ad from Ronald Reagan, 'Morning in America’, doing everything possible to get even for all of their many failures,” Trump tweeted early Tuesday morning.

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Is there any evidence for lab release theory?

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52318539

 What kinds of security failures were the cables describing?

The short answer is we don't know from the information provided in the Washington Post. But, generally speaking, there are multiple ways that safety measures can be breached at labs dealing with biological agents.

According to Dr Lentzos, these include: "Who has access to the lab, the training and refresher-training of scientists and technicians, procedures for record-keeping, signage, inventory lists of pathogens, accident notification practices, emergency procedures."

Dr Lentzos said the issue of the virus' origin was a "very difficult question", and added that "there have been quiet, behind-the-scene discussions... in the biosecurity expert community, questioning the seafood market origin that has come out very strongly from China".

Amid this war of words between the countries, the painstaking - and largely unseen - scientific work to trace the origin of the virus will continue.

Mike Pompeo Defends U.S. Funding For Wuhan Virology Lab

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/coronavirus/mike-pompeo-defends-us-funding-wuhan-virology-lab-149436

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended U.S. funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a program “to protect American people from labs that aren’t up to standard” in a Fox and Friends interview on Wednesday.

Pompeo then addressed a Tuesday report in the New York Post pointing the finger at NIH infectious disease chief Dr. Anthony Fauci for $7.4 million in U.S. government grants to the now-controversial coronavirus research.

“I don’t know the details of the NIH grants,” Pompeo told Fox News. “Look, the United States, for a long time and continuing today, tries to help countries around the world who are conducting research on highly contagious pathogens.”

The research involved both collecting bat coronaviruses from the wild and running “gain-of-function” experiments aimed at determining whether the viruses could jump between species.

The NIH has defended its research as necessary for public health.

“Most emerging human viruses come from wildlife, and these represent a significant threat to public health and biosecurity in the US and globally, as demonstrated by the SARS epidemic of 2002-03, and the current COVID-19 pandemic,” the organization told Newsweek.

Potential Risks and Benefits of Gain-of-Function Research: Summary of a Workshop.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK285579/

The field of virology, and to some extent the broader field of microbiology, widely relies on studies that involve gain or loss of function. In order to understand the role of such studies in virology, Dr. Kanta Subbarao from the Laboratory of Infectious Disease at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) gave an overview of the current scientific and technical approaches to the research on pandemic strains of influenza and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronaviruses (CoV). As discussed in greater detail later in this chapter, many participants argued that the word choice of “gain-of-function” to describe the limited type of experiments covered by the U.S. deliberative process, particularly when coupled with a pause on even a smaller number of research projects, had generated concern that the policy would affect much broader areas of virology research

ALTERNATIVES TO GOF RESEARCH

The essence of the debate around the risks and benefits of GoF research and the concerns it raises have naturally encouraged virologists on both sides of the debate to consider alternative methodological approaches. During his talk, Kawaoka discussed alternatives to GoF research mostly applicable to influenza research, such as loss-of-function research, use of low pathogenicity viruses, and phenotypic analyses. He further cited a review paper in which Lipsitch and Galvani (2014) stated that “alternative scientific approaches are not only less risky, but also more likely to generate results that can be readily translated into public health benefits.” However, Kawaoka argued through specific examples that alternatives do not always provide the full answer to key questions. For instance, he cited work by Tumpey et al. (2007) and Imai et al. (2012) on mutations responsible for the loss of transmission capabilities of the 1918 influenza strain between ferrets and noted that this work required GoF research because a loss-of-function approach did not provide the complete picture. In addition, although working with low pathogenic avian influenza viruses provides a safer approach, Kawaoka explained that “highly pathogenic avian influenza differ from low pathogenic viruses in their kinetics of virus replication and tropism” and therefore the data can be misleading. Other alternatives discussed by Kawaoka and Dr. Robert Lamb, Northwestern University, in Session 8 of the symposium were cited from the recent review paper by Lipsitch and Galvani (Box 3.3). Kawaoka concluded that even if these approaches offer safer alternatives to GoF research of concern, for some questions researchers cannot rely solely on them because the phenotype of and the molecular basis for these new traits have been identified by GoF research but not by alternative approaches.

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פסק דין תקדימי בעליון: 'הגביר המעגן' חויב לשלם כמיליון שקלים

https://www.bhol.co.il/news/1097385

 תקדים היסטורי: שופטי העליון פסקו פה אחד כי על 'הגביר המעגן' לשלם 5,000 שקלים עבור כל יום עיגון. הקנס מצטבר לכמיליון שקלים | השופט מינץ: "נדמה שפרשה זו מגלה שיאים חדשים של פגיעה כואבת בחייה של אישה אשר לא שפר עליה גורלה" | וגם, הביקורת על הפרקליט