The Quiet Corona-can

Zero apparent SARS-CoV-2 circulation in England in 2019 convinces the author that the virus "emerged" from Wuhan.

Child and teen volunteers in multiple regions of England show zero antibodies for the SARS-CoV-2 Spike or N proteins in late 2019 or early 2020. Brian acts like this is news.

Also, a trial was conveniently launched by the Oxford Vaccine Group in October 2019 to collect blood samples from volunteering kids in England and measure them for antibodies over time. That… might be news.

What? The Virus Came From China?!

That SARS-CoV-2 “came from China” is hardly material for headlines in 2022.

And yet, accepting this three years-old, worldwide media and scientific consensus as fact has alway been a stream I could not force my stubborn brain-horse to cross. Too few efforts have been made to either illuminate or rule out early, global circulation of SARS-CoV-2.

And if there had been early, global circulation; it wouldn’t be clear without boatloads of additional forensic work which of the two scenarios had really taken place:

1. The virus was developed from a southwestern China (edit, November 9: rather, NW Laos) bat virus at some point, whether in the US or in China, then released or leaked in Wuhan in 2019.¹ It may have been shipped to Wuhan last minute (à la the October Military Games Release theory), though it would have already been spreading in sporadic, limited form before then.

2. The virus was developed from a southwestern China (NW Laos) bat virus at some point, in the US, was released or leaked, and then shipped over to Wuhan to seed a phony “ground zero” outbreak well-after it was already global.

This probably seems like a trivial distinction, since I am presuming US involvement in the release in either case. Fair enough, I could say. I plead guilty to nitpicking on the subject of the greatest act of false-flag terrorism since… well, the last one.

But there are actually some subtle distinctions between the two scenarios, in terms of how the role of Ralph Baric and the other publicly visible members of the SARS Meddler Crew is appraised, as well as the suspicious emergences of B.1, the autumn 2020 Greek letter variants, and the Omicron family.² So I have wanted to get a handle on this question.

And there it is. That is the context for today’s post: “Please don’t hit me for treating old news like new news.”

A note of thanks to commenter Pete, who debated my last post and made an interesting remark about one of the authors, which inadvertently led to my encounter with the paper discussed in this post.

This paper shows that kids and teens in England had no antibodies for SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019. Thus, the virus did not become “worldwide” until 2020; which means it almost certainly sporadically emerged in 2019; which maybe means it was probably definitely from Wuhan, kind of.

Context Part 2

Prior studies have shown that the virus was circulating in 2019 in some areas (duh). These include PCR-based studies; but PCR cannot give us any idea of the extent of transmission — just that there was “some.”

For this we need seroprevalence, and it is lacking. Basavaraju, et al. looked at 7,389 archived blood donations from various American states, testing for ELISA reactivity to the Spike protein. For the 1,912 specimens from mid-December, 2019:³

In west coast donors December 13 - 16, 2019

OR and WA: 2.1% (16 of 763) S positive

CA (north): 2.4% (12 of 508) S positive

CA (south): 1.7% (11 of 641) S positive

Samples in mid-January in the east coast and midwest show lower, but still way above zero rates (~1.4%). The authors further report IgM rates (to discern between active, recent, and less-recent infections), but not by time and location of collection, so the rate of “less-recent” for the west coast set is unknowable. Overall, it’s a murky picture.

But the real problem I have with this picture is that it doesn’t show the bottom: How far back do we have to go before there are no antibodies? Shouldn’t Basavaraju, et al. have taken their results as a prompt to keep testing further in the past? When you are sounding water you don’t stop right below the hull and say “no ground here;” you keep going until you hit something.

Alternately, is there somewhere that didn’t have antibodies in late 2019? This would be evidence that the positives in the Pacific coast were reflective of recent, sporadic spread, corroborating the PCR-based studies. Without that evidence, it has been impossible to tell that SARS-CoV-2 didn’t for all practical purposes exist “forever,” and there was no way to consider its “emergence” as anything other than a figment of human imagination.

A counter-argument is that if there were zeros in early 2020, that proves there were zeros in 2019 — the antibodies could not disappear (well, they can; but probably not that quickly). For reasons detailed in the footnotes, no evidence of this type strikes me as satisfactory.⁴ In particular I don't think we can base any conclusions off of Australia or East Asia, where cases never took off until much later.

What I have wanted, is to either see zero antibodies in an earlier sample for places that had positivity in late 2019, or somewhere that was zero at the same time and went on to have plenty of cases in 2020. Finally, I have that place.

The Set-Up: What, Indeed is the Story?

The study:⁵

Ratcliffe, H. et al.

The setup on this one is fairly incredible. The Oxford Vaccine Group, who only months later would be involved in developing the AstraZeneca vaccine (“the clots mean it’s working!™), decided to try out, as they put it, “a new way of surveying how well protected we are from infectious diseases by collecting blood samples from people who represent different groups across society.”

whatsthestory.web.ox.ac.uk

Oxford Vaccine Group launched this volunteer-sampling immunity surveillance project in, when else, October, 2019.

(Meanwhile, in a warehouse on the other side of town.)

Still from World Economic Forum, “We ran a massive viral pandemic simulation. Here's what we learned about managing Coronavirus.” youtube.com

STORY, which stands for Serum Testing Of Representative Youngsters, is spearheaded by the Oxford Vaccine Group's Matthew Snape. A prolific, hard-core pediatric vaccine researcher, Snape oversees a large grant to reappraise the current UK immunization schedule, and in the SARS-CoV-2 era has been substantially involved in evaluating the Oxford-Astra-Zeneca vaccine in trials and after authorization, including a trial in a few hundred kids 6 and up which was tanked when the vaccine was no longer recommended for young adults.⁶

Ostensibly, STORY was pitched as a "test run" to evaluate whether collecting blood from young volunteers would offer insights into population immunity to who-knows-what.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200527163540/https://whatsthestory.web.ox.ac.uk/files/whatsthestoryprotocolv2103-oct-2019cleandocx This version is the February, 2020 revision. I haven’t been able to find an older version yet.

There is definitely no reason to be suspicious about the Oxford Vaccine Group just happening to want to figure this out in October, 2019!

By February of 2020, the trial protocol had been rewritten to accommodate SARS-CoV-2 (as linked above), and by May the current public-facing url for STORY was online, announcing that NIHR (the UK’s NIH) had granted the trial “National Public Health Emergency Priority status.”⁷

But recruitment and sample-taking was already off the ground in October, with 125 “pre-pandemic” samples from four different regions of England available for retrospective testing for antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 spike and nucleocapsid protein. Zero were positive.

And so that is how evidence has finally been published to convince me that the virus wasn’t worldwide well before the end of 2019.

The Results

Ratcliffe, H. et al. Fig. 1 (annotated)

And so, that’s that.

• SARS-CoV-2 was leaking from China in 2019 (via college students in California; and migrant workers in Italy). But it had not been rampantly, globally circulating in later-susceptible areas before then, or kids in England would have had antibodies by late 2019.

• B.1, per the illuminating measles PCR study,⁸ may have originated in Italy before the end of 2019. In this case the Italian winter-vintage B.1 is in effect the virus that seeds worldwide transmission; with Wuhan models still being distributed throughout 2019 and early 2020 but being less effective at spread (by the spring, seropositivity was above 5% in New York City but still only 1% in San Francisco⁹, supporting the theory that pre-B.1 variants were not fit for causing waves of infection).

Related:

(Refining the) "Deep State Origin" case

Cover image: Google maps for England. I was going to mark up the map to show that STORY covers a comprehensive footprint of the country; however, the coverage is less comprehensive in the pre-pandemic sample set.

If you derived value from this post, please drop a few coins in your fact-barista’s tip jar.

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1. Obviously, natural origin and the wet market are not being seriously considered here.

I have left out mention of the controversy over RaTG13, as I do not yet have a decided take on it. Obviously the RaTG13 genome could be a fiction doctored after the fact; but it seems partly corroborated by a wild virus found in Laos later in 2020 (BANAL52).

2. See “Omicron Origins: Summary / Spoiler.”

3. Basavaraju, SV. et al. “Serologic Testing of US Blood Donations to Identify Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)–Reactive Antibodies: December 2019–January 2020.” Clinical Infectious Diseases, Volume 72, Issue 12, 15 June 2021, Pages e1004–e1009.

4. In fact, in a review of seroprevalence studies by Saeed, et al. there are early zeros reported in Mexico, Saudia Arabia, Jordan, and Libya.

Saeed, S. et al. “Current challenges of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 seroprevalence studies among blood donors: A scoping review.” Vox Sang. 2022 Apr;117(4):476-487.

Referenced studies:

Mexico

Jordan, Libya, Saudi Arabia

China, Australia

The problem with the results in Mexico is a low sample size for those early months; the problem in the other three is that two of them mis-report their own results. Saudi Arabia found 10 positives in January.

Lastly, the near-zero results for Australia (0.29%) and some parts of China (0.09%) in early 2020 have to be treated with caution, given how that side of the Pacific seemed shielded by some sort of pre-existing immune “dark matter” throughout the year that followed.

This protection contributes to the impression that there was some “stealth” version of the virus that circulated before 2019, conferring immunity without detectible antibodies to the Wuhan version of spike, as in “Ethical Skeptic’s” provocative theory.

“Ethical Skeptic.” “China’s CCP Concealed SARS-CoV-2 Presence in China as Far Back as March 2018.” (2021, November 15.) theethicalskeptic.com

For now, I am setting that possibility aside.

5. Ratcliffe, H. et al. “Community seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 in children and adolescents in England, 2019–2021.” Arch Dis Child. 2022 Jul 20;archdischild-2022-324375.

6. https://www.ovg.ox.ac.uk/team/matthew-snape

https://fundingawards.nihr.ac.uk/award/PR-R17-0916-22001

And from the disclosures in Ratcliffe, et al.:

MDS acts on behalf of the University of Oxford as an investigator on studies funded or sponsored by vaccine manufacturers, including AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Novavax, Janssen, Medimmune and MCM. He receives no personal financial payment for this work [that doesn’t sound… true…?].

7. https://web.archive.org/web/20200507132645/https://whatsthestory.web.ox.ac.uk/

8. Amendola, A. et al. “Molecular evidence for SARS-CoV-2 in samples collected from patients with morbilliform eruptions since late 2019 in Lombardy, northern Italy.” Environ Res. 2022 Aug 25;215(Pt 1):113979.

9. Havers, FP. Reed, C. Lim, T. “Seroprevalence of Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in 10 Sites in the United States, March 23-May 12, 2020.” JAMA Intern Med. 2020 Jul 21.