Welcome to my personal website. It contains all my web writings since 2009.

Talk: The Mojiang Miners Passage Theory and the Lab Origin Question

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On October 7th, 2021, I gave a presentation at the latest #covidunknowns workshop organised by the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The workshop was titled “Origins of Covid” and the talk was titled: “The Mojiang Miners Passage Theory and the Lab Origin Question”. I gave a brief overview of key origin questions and of the Mojiang Miners Passage (MMP) theory. I also expanded on the greatly accelerated virus evolution seen in some hospitalized long-term Covid-19 patients that is thought to give rise to new variants. Such cases appear to provide clues to what may have occurred in the infected miners in 2012.

My talk begins at 50 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLSv4Iwk_jM&t=2988s

Information on the BMJ’s Covid-19 webinar series and links to previous workshops: https://www.bmj.com/covid-19-webinars

Mojiang Miners Passage Theory :
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/a-proposed-origin-for-sars-cov-2-and-the-covid-19-pandemic/
An update based on the implications of new discoveries: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/phylogeographic-mapping-of-newly-discovered-coronaviruses-pinpoints-direct-progenitor-of-sars-cov-2-as-originating-from-mojiang/

Phylogeographic Mapping of Newly Discovered Coronaviruses Pinpoints the Direct Progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 as Originating from Mojiang, China

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by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

Back in March, the World Health Organisation’s report on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic coronavirus confirmed something that had long been widely presumed. Since the pandemic began, there has been an enormous virus hunt in China.

The purpose of this hunt has been to find the viruses intermediate between SARS-CoV-2 and its coronavirus relatives found in bats (Luk et al., 2019).More

A Chinese PhD Thesis Sheds Important New Light On The Origin of the COVID-19 Coronavirus

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by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

One of the very earliest scientific papers from the COVID-19 pandemic era now has over 11,000 citations. Appearing in the scientific journal Nature on February 3rd 2020, Zhou et al., 2020 reported the genome sequence of a novel coronavirus isolated from patients with atypical pneumonia in Wuhan, China. Its senior author was leading coronavirus researcher Zheng-li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (the WIV). Along with what we now call SARS-CoV-2, her paper also reported the genome sequence of a closely related (96.2% identical) bat virus. The authors called this virus RaTG13. To this day RaTG13 is still the closest known viral genome by far to SARS-CoV-2.

RaTG13 came from the freezers of the WIV.More

Agriculture’s Greatest Myth

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by Jonathan Latham, PhD

Sustainable, local, organic food grown on small farms has a tremendous amount to offer. Unlike chemical-intensive industrial-scale agriculture, it regenerates rural communities; it doesn’t pollute rivers and groundwater or create dead zones; it can save coral reefs; it doesn’t encroach on rainforests; it preserves soil and it can restore the climate (IAASTD, 2009). Why do all governments not promote it?More

Lecture Series: Natural Origin or Lab Escape? The Emergence of SARS-CoV-2

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Here are three new talks titled, collectively: Natural Origin or Lab Escape? The Emergence of SARS-CoV-2.
The three talks are published on the Youtube channel of Independent Science News.
The three talks describe aspects of our current thinking on the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the political/economic forces attempting to influence public perception of its origins. The talks are designed to be of interest both to people new to the virus origins discussion as well as to those who are very familiar with the arguments and the evidence.

More details and links are below.More

Why China and the WHO Will Never Find a Zoonotic Origin For the COVID-19 Pandemic Virus

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by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

In China there is a popular joke about the southern city of Guangzhou (Canton). A visiting space alien, curious to learn about Chinese customs, tours its various provinces. Arriving in Guangzhou the alien asks the locals what their interests are. The Cantonese oblige their guest by putting the alien in a soup pot and eating it. This joke hinges on the Cantonese fondness for cooking with unusual species, many obtained from far away.

This feature of Canton’s cuisine was implicated in the original SARS (Severe Acquired Respiratory Syndrome) pandemic of 2002-04, which began in Guangzhou. It is thought that the virus arrived there with palm civets imported for speciality dishes (Wang et al., 2005).More

A Proposed Origin for SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 Pandemic

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by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

In all the discussions of the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, enormous scientific attention has been paid to the molecular character of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, including its novel genome sequence in comparison with its near relatives. In stark contrast, virtually no attention has been paid to the physical provenance of those nearest genetic relatives, its presumptive ancestors, which are two viral sequences named BtCoV/4991 and RaTG13.More

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