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

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

The Case Is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin

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By Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

If the public has learned a lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic it is that science does not generate certainty. Do homemade face masks work? What is the death rate of COVID-19? How accurate are the tests? How many people have no symptoms? And so on. Practically the lone undisputed assertion made so far is that all the nearest known genetic relatives of its cause, the Sars-CoV-2 virus, are found in horseshoe bats (Zhou et al., 2020). Therefore, the likely viral reservoir was a bat.More

Forthcoming appearances

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Catch me at:

Title: “The Politics of Pesticides”
at Buffalo St Books
Ithaca, New York.
5pm, March 19th, 2020
A book talk with Mitchel Cohen, Robin Falk and myself.
We will be introduced by Emily Adams

Panel on Gene Editing
With Dag Falk and Lucy Sharratt of CBAN
Organic Connections Conference
Saskatoon, Canada
Friday Nov 6th, 2020.

Recent:

Title: “The Meaning of Life”. A  workshop.
The 2019 Biodynamic Conference (Lake George, NY) Nov 20-24, 2019

Title: “The EPA: Friend or Foe?”
at: Soil Not Oil September 9-10, 2019
San Francisco, California
September 9th 7-8pm.

Title: “Are Conservatism and Genetic Determinism the Same Thing?”
Oslo, Norway ISHPSSB 2019
Date: July 7-12th, 2019

Title: “The Politics of Pesticides”
The Golden Notebook (Confirmed)
Woodstock, New York.
April 27th, 2019
A book talk with Mitchel Cohen and others.

 

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