SARS-1 - was it also a lab escape?

Lin-fa Wang/Gary Crameri (co-authors on EcoHealth/WIV bat-virus papers), Aus, CSRIO, 2013:
Prior to the emergence of SARS, coronaviruses had been detected in both human and livestock populations. But all previously known human coronaviruses only caused mild respiratory symptoms and had never been associated with severe human disease.

This was an article cited by Dominic Dwyer (thanks Dominic) that supposedly proved the provenance of SARS. It doesn’t, but it points out that prior to SARS, coronaviruses “had never been associated with severe human disease”. Never.

We know the common cold is a coronavirus but SARS was unprecedented in terms of severe disease - in the history of humanity. There’s your first red-flag right there. Why did coronaviruses suddenly become lethal in late 2002?

19 years later, we know that no-one has identified a definitive provenance for SARS - the closest we’ve got (from papers by Shi/Daszak and the above authors) is that it’s closely related to horseshoe bats, sampled 10 years later - in Yunnan province - 1000 km away from the site of the first SARS infections. So there are missing pieces to the puzzle.

What’s the explanation for the missing few percent in genomic identity?
How did it get from Shitou Cave, Yunnan to Guangzhou province - without infecting anyone in Yunnan?
Why was SARS the only lethal coronavirus up to that point in time?

Daszak/Shi/Wang would have ready-made answers - 1. natural evolution, 2. wet market trading, 3. increased co-mingling of humans and wildlife - but all this is dubious speculation - there’s no proof. Why is there no proof?

Yanzhong Huang, Seton Hall University (2004): According to the Implementing Regulations on the State Secrets Law regarding the handling of public health–related information, any occurrence of infectious diseases should be classified as a state secret before they are “announced by the Ministry of Health or organs authorized by the Ministry” .. (meaning) any physician or journalist who reported on the disease would risk being persecuted for leaking state secrets (Li et al., 1999). A virtual news blackout about SARS thus continued well into February.

As a result, according to a WHO/China CDC report:
(I)nformation on several earlier cases was incomplete or may be unreliable .. and some persons are no longer traceable.

When you enforce a cover-up as part of normal operating procedure, then don’t complain when people suspect something fishy is going on. If Daszak/Shi et al are allowed to speculate, then so can we. As did others at the time.

Richard D. Fisher, Jr., Jamestown Foundation (Apr 2003): The vast weight of reporting thus far on the origins of SARS .. holds that the virus most likely jumped from animals to humans somewhere in China’s Guangdong Province.

19 years later it's an even vaster weight of reporting - but there’s still no definitive science re the mechanics of how that might have happened.

Richard Fisher: But there are compelling reasons, however unsettling, to at least ask whether there might be any linkage between SARS and China’s biological warfare efforts.

Ok, that sounds familiar. Looks like Mr. Fisher was a conspiracy theorist ahead of his time!

Dr. Julie Gerberding, Director U.S. CDC (Apr 17, 2004): (The SARS virus) didn’t look like much of any of the viruses we already had in our reference strain collection.

Sergei Kolesnikov, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences: The propagation of .. SARS may well be caused by a leak (from).. a bacteriological weapons labs. .. We can only get that in a laboratory.

Hmm, so there were suspicions even at the time. The difference from SARS-2 is that SARS-1 fizzled out relatively quickly. Apart from a bunch of lab-leaks in 2004 - it was all over in a few months. That would have also taken the steam out of the conspiracy theories as well. Doesn't make them right. Doesn't make them wrong either.

We don’t know what happened - that's a fact - the state cover-up operation took care of that - then it faded from public interest. But it’s worth scrounging around to see what fragments there are left lying around that can still be pieced together.

And what role did some of our SARS heroes play in the above? Lipkin and Dwyer were there almost from the beginning - Daszak came along shortly after.

Here’s some pure speculation: if they did know something funny had happened but were persuaded to keep it hush-hush for the ‘common-good’ - that would be a powerful incentive to cover up the origin of SARS-2.

Eric Croddy, Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program, 2001: (F)ormer members of the Japanese Imperial Army .. (say) the total number of Chinese killed by .. biological warfare (BW) was about 21,000 people, most of these from cholera (not including the more than 3,000 Chinese, Korean, and other prisoners of war who died in Japanese BW experiments.) Chinese estimates are much greater.

Dr. Liu Huaqiu: During Japan’s invasion of China, BW was carried out among 20 or more provinces and cities in China, killing more than 200,000 Chinese people.

Croddy reasons the Chinese estimate is probably too high, but there’s no dispute Chinese people were the victims of systematic biological warfare.

Makes sense you’re gonna react to that - develop your own fucking bio-defense/weapons program. No-one could blame China for doing that.

U.S. Office of Secretary of Defense: China is believed to possess an offensive biological warfare capability based on technology developed prior to its accession to the BWC [Biological Warfare Convention].

Richard Fisher: While China suffered horribly from Japan’s chemical and biological warfare activities during World War II, Communist China has since built defensive and offensive chemical warfare capabilities. It may therefore be unwise to rule out human error.

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