Released on Monday October 18th, 2021 on the Youtube Channel of Independent Science News: Talk titled: The Mojiang Miners Passage Theory and The Lab Origin Question
Presented by Jonathan Latham, PhD, you can watch the talk at: https://youtu.be/jIalaQcEUkw
Synopsis: Watch a 14 minute presentation given by Jonathan Latham on October 7th to the British Medical Journals’ excellent ‘#CovidUnknowns‘ webinar series. This edition of the series was about the origins of Covid-19. The talk is focused on an aspect of our Mojiang Miners Passage theory that many people have found the most difficult to accept. This is the idea that one or more bat coronaviruses evolved inside the body of one hospitalised miner into SARS-CoV-2 (or a very similar virus). Our theory requires that perhaps many hundreds of mutations (and by implication several decades of virus evolution) could have occurred in 6 months inside one body. To many, this seems far-fetched. Yet, in this talk, I point out how a number of recent studies have found that viruses within single individuals who have compromised immune systems and long term infections (and therefore are very much like the miners) can undergo startling evolutionary leaps. The classic example is the B.1.1.7 variant that arose in the UK in Sept 2020. B.1.1.7., which went on to dominate the pandemic there and elsewhere, is now thought to have entirely arisen inside just one person. B.1.1.7 carries 23 unique mutations not present in the general population. Thus, at a stroke, a virus in a single person is believed to have evolved far further than had any of the viruses comprising the entire rest of the UK pandemic, which featured millions of infections. At first glance, this seems highly unlikely. But, as I explain in the talk, the hyperevolution that led to B.1.1.7 can be readily accounted for by the unique internal dynamics of virus evolution in long term covid infections. Thus the mechanism behind the rise of the novel variants validates a key and controversial aspect of the Mojiang Miner Passage theory.
This u-tube video is a lightly edited re-recording of Dr Jonathan Latham at the BMJ #covidunknowns 2021 webinar. The original entire webinar can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLSv4… The Mojiang Miner Passage theory is published in full here: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/a-proposed-origin-for-sars-cov-2-and-the-covid-19-pandemic/. (Note: as new data has come out after its publication, the theory has been updated — please see links at the end of the original article for these updates.)
