Posted on 03/03/2023 9:18:54 PM PST by SeekAndFind
As I suggested a few days ago when writing about this topic, I think people on both sides are sounding a bit too confident. Jon Stewart and others are claiming victory over what is, ultimately, a pretty mild endorsement by one government agency based on evidence that is still classified. Maybe that evidence is really convincing but I don’t personally know that yet.
Just to frame where I’m coming from here I’ve written more posts about the lab leak theory than anyone else at Hot Air and I think I was the first to do so back in April 2020. So I’m definitely interested in the idea and have never been dismissive of it. I definitely think it’s a real contender and that China’s behavior has been extremely suspicious to say the least.
At the same time, there’s no denying that some of the scientists involved in looking into the origin of COVID are pretty confident these days that this was natural spillover. And, to be fair, they do have some points in their favor including the fact that natural spillover does happen pretty regularly, including in China.
Evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey is in a unique position because he was not a knee-jerk defender of natural spillover. In fact, he signed a letter in May of 2021 arguing the lab leak should be taken seriously. But a few months later he became convinced natural spillover was a far more likely explanation.
It’s clear-cut these wild, live animals, including raccoon dogs and red foxes, were in the market. We have photographic evidence from December 2019. A concerned customer evidently took these photos and videos of the market on Dec. 3 and posted them on Weibo [because it was illegal to sell certain live animals]. The photos were promptly scrubbed. But a CNN reporter had communicated directly with the person who took the photos. I was able to get in touch with this reporter, and they passed on those photos from the source.
Some of the photos are included at the link. They show wild animals in cages inside the market. So you have evidence from right about the time the virus was first infecting people that there were wild animals present in open cages. By itself that doesn’t prove anything but it lays some groundwork. Add to that a leaked report from the Chinese CDC which suggested there was a specific hot spot for the virus within the market.
We analyzed a leaked report from the Chinese CDC detailing the results of this environmental sampling. Virtually all of the findings in the report matched what was in the World Health Organization’s report. But there was some extra information in the leaked report. For example, there was information not just on which stalls had virus in them — or had samples positive for SARS-CoV-2 — but also how many samples in a given stall yielded positive results.
We found out that one stall actually had five positive samples — five surfaces in that stall had virus on them. And even better, in that particular stall, the samples were very animal-y. For example, scientists found virus on a feather/hair remover, a cart of the sort that we see in photographs that are used for transporting cages and, best of all, a metal cage in a back room.
What’s missing is a definite animal vector for the disease. The Chinese officials who cleaned up the market tested a bunch of animals but those tests were all negative. So, again, it’s not definitive but it is interesting.
Most significantly, Worobey points out that the wet market was the geographical center of the outbreak. That’s true even for people who got sick without ever visiting the wet market.
With a virus, such as SARS-CoV-2, that causes no symptoms or mild symptoms in most people, you don’t have any chance of linking all the early cases to the site where the outbreak started. Because the virus is going to quickly spread to people outside of wherever it started.
And yet, from the clinical observations in Wuhan, around half of the earliest known COVID cases were people directly linked to the seafood market. And the other cases, which aren’t linked through epidemiological data, have an even closer geographical association to the market. That’s what we show in our paper.
It’s absurd how strong the geographical association is [to the market].
Here’s a chart that was part of one of his papers. It shows the geographical focus of the outbreak with the market near the center. The chart on the left shows where all of the December 2019 cases were located. The one on the right shows where all of the people who got sick but who hadn’t been to the market lived. It’s worth noting the WIV, which is usually pointed to as the site of a possible lab leak, is a few miles away on the other side of the river.
Again, I’m not saying this is definitive (though Worobey is nearly saying that). There may be ways to explain this that still allow for a lab leak. All I’m really saying is that both arguments lack the kind of smoking gun evidence that would truly settle this once and for all (partly because China hasn’t been forthcoming). And both arguments have some compelling points in their favor which are pretty hard to dismiss. The fact that the US government is split and uncertain actually strikes me as pretty representative of where we actually are with the evidence. But I’d sure like to see some of that secret evidence the DOE relied on for its recent report.
Never ever believe anything that comes from any official source in the PRC. Period.
John Sexton: Moron.
Never ever believe anything that comes from any official source from this US government either....they are all liars
John Sexton: Moron.
Ginormous HUUUGE moron.
And self proclaimed important person.
Either the CCP did nothing to contain it even after knowing about it - continued allowing people to travel worldwide spreading it around. Unlike what they did with SARS-COV-1 and there was no global pandemic.
It’s not a theory. It’s a possibility. Not a likelihood or a probability. The probability is that it was deliberately released. If you were China, and you wanted to introduce a virulent pathogen into the world, how would you do it that would have been substantially different from how it was actually done? I have heard the saying to never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by ignorance, but that lets a lot of malicious people off the hook if they can say they didn’t know or didn’t mean. It’s a stupid rule. There are lots of malicious people in the world and many of them are in positions of power.
I wouldn't release it in China.
Best bet might be to release it in several of Europe's busiest airports.
I’ll bet Sexton is still not sure O.J. killed Nicole, either.
He is one of the reasons I abandoned Hot Air, he is as clueless as they come.
I have never read a single article from him that had value.
Trump called it “China flu.” He knew.
So they could narrow it down to a single stall with the virus just everywhere.
No other sellers sold bats...or whatever animal it came from ...no other places had it...sounds almost planted.
Not sure what difference it really makes where it came from other than determining if it was an accident or a deliberate act.
The results are the same: the world was introduced to global tyranny in 2020.
“ With a virus, such as SARS-CoV-2, that causes no symptoms or mild symptoms in most people, you don’t have any chance of linking all the early cases to the site where the outbreak started. Because the virus is going to quickly spread to people outside of wherever it started.”
But their argument is in fact that they say it is linked to an area around this “wet market.” This post shows two graphs.
Never ever believe anything that comes from any official source in the PRC. Period.
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There you have it. The perfect crime. The U.S.’s perfect boogeyman patsy. There is no other possible conclusion than that the Chicoms did it!! The U.S. releases the aerosolized agent in Wohan at the Games and as Trump says, you’ve got a ‘Chinese Virus’ for the history books that can’t be denied. It’s my and George Webb’s theory and I’m stricken with it. Now, if there was no bio-weapon connection to the U.S. that would be an entirely different matter.
In February 2020, there were only 2 things you could believe..
1) That it escaped from the handy dandy nearby bio lab or
2) Some guy bought the lucky bat from a barrel of water and ate it..
Gee, I wonder which one it was?????
“origin nor do they add any new information in support of lab origin.”
folks, here is the evidence of lab origin the media is too stupid to talk about.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v1
Artificial coronaviruses have been made and published about 6 times prior to Covid emerging. The process used is Golden Gate Cloning. Natural coronaviruses are all about 30k nucleotides (nt). Viruses are cloned by using the cell mechanism in E. Coli bacteria to copy the virus. That’ how viruses survive, they get into cells and replicate themselves using the equipment in the host cell. But DNA fragments longer than 7k nt cannot be easily inserted into E. Coli. So to clone a 30k virus you have to chop it up into 5 or more pieces. If you make more pieces than that, it is difficult to put all the pieces back together. To split the virus requires the use of “restriction enzymes” which recognize a pattern of nt in the virus and split the virus ONLY WHERE THAT PATTERN APPEARS. In natural coronoviruses that restriction enzyme recognition sequence appears at random places. In Covid19 the sequences appear conveniently at regular intervals, as they do in all artificilly created virures. The chance of Covid occurring naturally is less than 1%, arguably 1 in a million. Read the paper. Google “type IIs restriction enzyme” “Golden Gate cloning”, go to the website of New England biosciences..
Can this writer really be this stupid?
The writer was a chump who believed the government's bat soup BS, and now can't bring himself to admit that he was chumped.
Many Chinese cities have wet markets. In fact most do.
Now how many have biolabs that participate in gain of function experiments on corona viruses?
One. Wuhan.
See the difference?
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