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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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Wasn't this known already? Weren't there all kinds of discussions about shutting down wet markets because of this?
There's a bunch of indications / conspiracy theories that it might have been a lab leak. Basically there's not really a way to know unless the Chinese government starts being more forthcoming with information.
The main reason the conspiracy theory started is because the city where it started had a world renowned virus research facility in it.
Of course, the reason the facility is there in the first place is because Wuhan province is a place where a lot of viruses originate naturally (in bat colonies), so it makes sense you research the viruses close to their natural reservoir.
This is disingenuous. RaTG13 was sourced in Tongguan in Mojiang Hani Autonomous County 1800km from Wuhan.
... what? Bats are virus factories due to how their biology/immune system works. They opened a lab in Wuhan to study any novel viruses coming out of the local bat population. That's what that person is referencing. Your counter is basically a non sequitar.
My point is that the word local is both incorrect and misleading. Bats from 1800km away are not local.
I don't have any information to add one way or the other, but it kinda sounds like you're saying the fact that one bat-bourne illness was found elsewhere, it's impossible that Wuhan has many or any such viruses too, which seems pretty fallacious.
No. Its pretty fallacious to imply WIV was only looking at local bats.
The wuhan area certainty has many viruses, but none were anywhere close to the sample found 1800 km away, which WIV certainty had a copy of because they sequenced it.
I don't think anyone said they were only looking at local viri. The original comment said (emphasis mine)
So Wuhan was ideal because it's where a lot of viri originate. That doesn't imply they only looked at viri from nearby just that the location was chosen because there were so many nearby.
The prior paragraph is also important
Left on its own this implies that the lab is the source. However, the next paragraph counters that view. It erroneously implies the local area is full of bats and their species hopping coronaviruses. Not even "China's Bat Woman" thinks that is likely:-
“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir.
Yeah but the US media was too busy implying that China manufactured the virus in a bio lab.
Funnily enough China still suffered because it failed to lock down early enough because the government tried to ignore and detain doctors in an effort to control the narrative that everything would be fine.
The US suffered because they nuked their Pandemic emergency pla only like a few years before covid because Trump thought Spanish Fever wouldn't reincarnate to finish the job on its 100th anniversary lol.
So it was easy to vaguely point at China instead of actually solving the problem.
I don't know what US media you were consuming in 2020/21, but it was pretty much understood it came from something exotic in a wet market.
Most of us didn't know what a wet market existed or what it was until COVID. There was some conspiracy shit that the right ate up, and some editorial and opinions on the idea, but the whole bioengineered super virus escaping a lab wasn't taken that seriously
Excellent evidence why there is such a battle over misinformation.
Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.
I do recall that story. What I don't get is why the intelligence agencies had any say in the likely origin. It's not a factor of "if the virus was in a lab." It could have been. The fact is that even back then when they had the virus sequenced, they could clearly see it came from a zoonotic source, probably the same one with SARS.
The thing that irked me so bad about it is that it highlights the discrepancy between science and suspicion. Think of how vital DNA has been to crime prosecutions or exonerations. The same thing applies here.
If it did originate during the development of a bioweapon then you would want the intelligence agencies to be as informed as possible. Thankfully none believe that to be the case.
Yes. 96% zoonotic. It's that latest 4% that is of interest. Particularly the fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction.
Wasn't this disproven already? Covid has been detected in human waste matter samples from Autumn 2019 in Italy.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8778320/
I don't really understand what this is actually saying?
Surely, if this were saying "covid started in italy" or "covid was around in 2019" that would rate more song and dance than a single obscure research paper?
There's a lot more than a single obscure research paper but that's the best one in terms of science in my opinion. It was quite broadly covered news (in Europe at least?) when the virus was first found in waste water samples from Milan from the same period.
We knew it was in Europe before 2020 all the way back in June 2020: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/italy-sewage-study-suggests-covid-19-was-there-in-december-2019-idUSKBN23Q1J8/
By November 2020 it was pushed back as far as September 2019: https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2020-11-17/COVID-19-was-spreading-in-Italy-by-September-2019-study-indicates-VuSqUttP8s/index.html
As someone else replied, it isn't saying Covid started in Italy, but rather that it definitely didn't start because someone ate bat soup from a wet market in Wuhan in December 2019. Well, the science is just stating as a fact that Covid was in these samples from Italy in 2019. Everything else is inferred.
It was 2020. We had people shouting about "the China Virus" and others defending the cultural importance of wet markets and others saying it was a bioweapon from a lab and others saying it didn't exist at all.
It seemed to suit absolutely nobody's narrative that