Why reach so hard to link this to a Wuhan wet market vs a generic leak? They didn’t sell bats at the market as far as I have read, and what’s the difference? Lab leak is a lab leak.
It’s an interesting question though. Working off of a lab leak theory, how did the first known cases all come from the wet market?
Is it just coincidence that an infected scientist traveled to the outdoor market and infected others?
With human to human transmission, you’d think it would have spread more rapidly among a scientist’s friends & family in an indoor setting.
When the US was doing contact tracing early on, I think the number of outdoor transmissions was extremely low.
It's a 45min drive between the Hunan market <> WIV building:
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/30%C2%B022%E2%80%B235%E2%80%...
* In and around WIV
* In and around the scientist’s homes, families and neighborhoods
From the news I’ve seen all of the initial known cases were traced back to the market.
And China does have the world's largest annual human migration, in the Spring Festival.
Placing the most prestigious and well funded lab studying dangerous human transmissible viruses at the world's most likely place to originate such a virus is an obvious choice.
So this seems like low-effort trolling.
That's patently false.
I don‘t know what to say.
Why not just say it came from North Korea? There's just about as much publicly available evidence for that as there is that it came from a lab leak in China.
I can and I will, because of the fact that there is some evidence that the Chinese Government made efforts to hide evidence around Covid 19’s origins and their history regarding uncomfortable truths.
You can not argue in good faith on grounds of evidence or no evidence if not all parties are playing open and fair. A totalitarian Government with an overarching system of controlling it‘s population and information is certainly not supporting good scientific research and discovery.
Covid-19 was bred in a Chinese lab. It escaped. And the world shut down for years.
This would cause a world war if it came to light so our “leaders” are doing everything they can to obfuscate the origin.
I don't think this holds. Such freak mutations happen all the time.
Note that this doesn't discredit lab leak either. It's entirely possible they were testing a new, entirely natural strain they found in some weird cave somewhere. And because that lab had terrible safety protocols (which has been documented extensively), possibly some got out.
It's not really possible to rule out or confirm the lab leak hypothesis without inside information that we are unlikely to ever get. Other than as vague "intelligence report says this", which you can hardly trust.
I’m not sure I beleive in Dead Internet Theory so much as I believe in some form of unknowing indoctrination theory.
That if you take the people with these hardline defensive of authority opinions away from the internet for a bit, explain a new event to them, when they get back on the internet, none of the people they normally deal with have the same opinion of what they learned about “offline” at first.
I think we unintentionally have created a mind control device.
According to the Swamp, Trump cannot be right about anything ever, therefore the virus' origin is unknown and don't call it the Chinese flu because that's racist - even if the early Chinese accounts of the disease literally called it the "Wuhan pneumonia".
This whole thing has been disgusting and if we were a serious society thousands in leadership positions would have been fired or resigned in disgrace. Instead, Hollywood made fan films about people who quite easily fit the definition of having committed crimes against humanity, Tedros still has a job, and the WHO won't see any reform - it will see a major expansion of its power.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/donald-trump...
It might be true that no bats were sold in Wuhan wet markets, but this methodology doesn't seem the slightest bit credible.
Imagine if you were selling bats (is that legal in China?) from a likely illegal source (probably illegal in China?). Would you give honest information about the animals you were selling, particularly knowing how criminals can be treated in China?
You might as well ask suspected drug dealers how much crack they're selling in schools: you'll get the same quality of answer.
Are those activites illegal in China, or just in your mind? If it is not the former, then your point collapses like a two legged stool.
When you have imperfect information, trying to understand a complicated world can never be perfect, but we all still do that anyway because we have to. There's no other way to reason about the world because we're always going to have imperfect information about so many topics.
But I can use my limited knowledge of China, and a reasonable understanding of human nature, to understand that the polling methodology seems unlikely to yield trustworthy results.
Until proven otherwise, I think it is a perfectly reasonable to think that people in China who might deal in some quasi-legal trades wouldn't be perfectly honest in a poll due to concerns about what might happen to them if they admit to something that might be seen as illegal.
Interesting strategy!
This is going to hurt China’s long term influence. Countries are diversifying their strategic supply chains, on shoring capacity for thinks like chip fabs. This weakens China’s geopolitical clout because they won’t be able to control the bottleneck.
(I do not believe in the intentional malicious leak theory, to be clear)
I’m curious. What motivation for purposefully leaking such a virus would ‘they’ have?
There's a hanful of ways you can look at that:
Wuhan International couldn't be closed without consent from Beijing.
Beijing didn't grant it because
A) Poor information propagation Or B) Someone made a weighty geopolitical decision that in order to best serve China's interests, it was time to make this everyone's problem, leaving the International Airport open as a result. Or C) some combo of the two.
I don't know your particular balance in regards to the actual Overton Window as extended to humanity as a whole, but I damn well know where it registers on mine.
If we recall, initially China downplayed how widespread the virus was and made it out as if it were contained. Perhaps they did not know how widespread the issue was either. Further, at that time there was complete uncertainty regarding Covid-19's virulence (it was after all, a completely brand new virus; and there was a ton of uncertainty around in January 2020).
Regarding to the communication from the US government of how contained the issue was, as a reference, the president at the time wrote:
"Jan. 24, Twitter:
“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”"
- https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/15/trump-china-coronav...
Basically, the entire world needed to start quarantine in early January of 2020 to effectively nip this in the bud (shutting down international travel, regional travel, etc). Perhaps that needed to have even started in December. I would suggest then that Beijing didn't shut down international travel at that time for the same reasons that the rest of the international community did not. In part they were still downplaying it as was the public oration from the US government was downplaying it as well. It wasn't until late February and into March that it became well known publicly that this was a new pandemic.
Hence, by March China was fully shut down, and at that point there is no hiding the issue (why is all of China locked down?), and at that time it was everyone's problem.
> A) Poor information propagation
There was some info released that the CIA assessed the virulence opportunity to easily be a pandemic as early as November 2019. That poor information propagation wasn't necessarily just a problem with the Chinese government.
Citation: "Intelligence report warned of coronavirus crisis as early as November: Sources" - https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-c...
The clamp down on information exchange does not strike me as the actions of a group with everyone else's best interests in mind. And given that we have hitherto been pretty chill with China on the whole, I really think if they had gone "screw it, international travel lockdown"; you'd have seen materials and humanitarian relief being flown in in order to help out with citizens stranded overseas. We may not even be having this conversation, because to be frank, how China did decide to react just doesn't make any sense except in the context of someone with something to hide.
Because it's a virus that doesn't discriminate based on race or geography? Yeah, I have doubts (to put it mildly.)
https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html
75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. How many of those do we have start to finish routes from animals to humans? And if we don't have that route, how many of those are we suspecting of being lab leaks?
If they wrote in their conclusion that it was "low confidence" I think they have good reason for saying that.
None, as far as I know. Nor should it be particularly surprising that no animal origin for COVID-19 has yet been found. The animal origin for SARS was only discovered in 2017: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 The first outbreak was in 2002. We're less than 4 years away from the first known outbreak of COVID-19, so dismissing a wild animal origin at this point is extremely premature at best.