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PAGE A10, KEIZERTIMES, JUNE 11, 2021 The case that the virus emerged from nature is falling apart PUBLIC SQUARE welcomes all points of view. Published submissions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Keizertimes Editorial Cartoon You are not alone Graduates, when you are handed your diploma, that moment will mark the end of this leg through your educa- tion journey. Those of you who graduated from high school this week will either con- tinue your education at college, others of you will forgo further education and enter the workforce or the military. You young adults graduating from college this spring likely have your next step in mind, be it graduate school or starting a career in your chosen field. Whatever school you graduated it is important to know that you are not alone. You are not alone because millions of others of your age have shared the same things over the past 15 months. Much like the Greatest Generation, you and your peers have a shared experi- ence that has changed you for the rest of your lives. Similar experience fosters empathy, a trait that is currently in too short of supply in our world. You are not alone; your loved ones, friends and mentors have a stake in your success. There is no one who wants to stand in your way. There will always a hand ready to help you climb to the next rung of life. Don't shy away from asking for assistance. Tap into the knowledge and wisdom of those who have gone before you. Few things are more validating for a person than when you ask them to share what Editorial they know. The world becomes much less uncertain and scary with people who have your back. Listen to the people who want you to succeed, they, too, have been where you are upon graduation. They, too, have lived through a global pandemic that upended our way of life. You are not alone. We all need each other as we go through live, one step at a time. You've completed one step. Let others help you onto the next step and every step after that. None of us are alone if we but dare to reach out and grab a helping hand. —LAZ WHEATLAND PUBLISHING CORP. 142 Chemawa Road N, Keizer, Oregon 97303 Phone: 503.390.1051 • www.keizertimes.com PUBLISHER & EDITOR Lyndon Zaitz publisher@keizertimes.com FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook Instagram Twitter NEW DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION PRICING: $5 per month, $60 per year PUBLISHED EVERY FRIDAY Publication No: USPS 679-430 YEARLY PRINT SUBSCRIPTION PRICING: $35 inside Marion County $43 outside Marion County $55 outside Oregon POSTMASTER Send address changes to: Keizertimes Circulation 142 Chemawa Road N. Keizer, OR 97303 Periodical postage paid at Salem, Oregon By MARC A. THIESSEN Anthony Fauci told Congress last week that, despite growing support for the case that the pandemic emerged from the Wuhan lab, he still believes it came from nature. “I have always said that the high likelihood is that this is a natural occurrence,” Fauci said, “and I still maintain that.” Like so many things Fauci has told Americans about the pan- demic, it looks increasingly like he could be proven wrong. Not only is there still zero evidence to support the theory that the virus emerged from nature, there are mounting signs that it did not. In the 15 months since the pandemic began, despite an exhaustive search, no intermediate host—an animal that caught the virus from bats and then spread it to humans—has been found. Nicholas Wade, a science reporter for nearly 50 years at Science, Nature and the New York Times—points out in his exhaustive report for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that during the SARS1 epidemic, the intermediate host (civet cats bred for human consumption) was identified in just four months. Is it possible the virus jumped from bats to humans without an intermediate host? Perhaps. But a bat coronavirus is known to have directly infected humans only on one known occasion—in April 2012, when six people cleaning bat guano from a mine in China’s Yunnan province fell ill. However, it’s implausible that bats infected people in Wuhan. The city is more than 900 miles from the bat caves of Yunnan, and the bats’ range is just 30 miles. Moreover, temperatures in Wuhan in the winter of 2019, when the pandemic hit, would have sent the bats into hiber- nation. But what if a person infected in Yunnan brought the virus to Wuhan? As Wade explains, that individual “must have traveled . . . without infecting any- one else. No one in his or her family got sick. If the person jumped on a train to Wuhan, no fellow passengers fell ill.” That scenario is also highly unlikely. Furthermore, if SARS2 jumped directly from bats to people, then it should still be good at infecting bats. But it isn’t. Studies show that “tested bat spe- cies are poorly infected by SARS-CoV-2, and they are therefore unlikely to be the direct source for human infection.” In fact, Wade writes, there is no evidence the virus ever infected bats. No original bat population has been found. Indeed, he points out, researchers have found no evidence showing any creature—animal or human—had ever been exposed to the virus before the winter of 2019. Then there is the structure of the virus itself. Pandemic viruses don’t become highly transmissible or deadly in a single jump. As Wade explains, “The coronavi- rus spike protein, adapted to attack bat cells, needs repeated jumps to another species, most of which fail, before it gains a lucky mutation.” In the case of SARS1, the virus mutated before it made the jump from bats to civets, then it made six further documented changes before it became a mild pathogen in humans, then made 14 more changes to become more adapted to people, and then four more before it was able to cause an epidemic. other VOICES But, Wade continues, “when you look for the fingerprints of a similar transition in SARS2, a strange surprise awaits. The virus has changed hardly at all, at least until recently. From its very first appear- ance, it was well adapted to human cells.” This would make perfect sense if it was engineered in a lab to become transmis- sible to humans, but not if it emerged from nature. Not only is SARS2 missing these nat- ural mutations, Wade writes, but it also includes a surprising addition: a “furin cleavage site” on its spike protein that allows it to invade human cells. Why is this surprising? Because SARS2 is the only known SARS-related coronavirus that has a furin site; the rest use a dif- ferent mechanism to infect humans. It’s improbable that SARS2 picked up its furin site naturally, but Wade cites an academic paper that points out “at least 11 gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infec- tive, are published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” That’s right, the “bat lady” of the Wuhan lab—the one who received funding via a U.S. contractor from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—experimented with furin sites to make coronaviruses more infectious for humans. Bottom line? As former FDA commis- sioner Scott Gottlieb recently explained, evidence for a lab leak is mounting, while the evidence for natural origin “has con- tracted.” At this point, he says, the burden should be on Beijing to “provide evi- dence that would be exculpatory,” such as virus samples, blood samples from lab workers hospitalized with covid-like symptoms in November 2019, and unfet- tered access to the lab and its person- nel. So long as the Chinese Communist Party fails to provide that exculpatory evidence, and obstructs an impartial international investigation, then the assumption should be that the Wuhan lab was the source of the pandemic -- and that Beijing must be held to account. (Washington Post) SHARE YOUR OPINION TO SUBMIT a letter to the editor (300 words), or guest column (600 words), email us by noon Tuesday: publisher@keizertimes.com
