In 1986, Professor Matthew Meselson of Harvard University was granted approval by Soviet authorities for a four-day trip to Moscow where he interviewed several senior Soviet health officials about the outbreak. He later issued a report which agreed with the Soviet assessment that the outbreak was caused by a contaminated meat processing plant, concluding the Soviets' official explanation was completely "plausible and consistent with what is known from medical literature and recorded human experiences with anthrax."
Direct link to the Science paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715 I've been a big booster of the leak theory, so it's going to take a minute to process this new info. But I'm trying my best to be fair!
lol OK I'll bite. No way a lab funding gain of research function funded by an embarrassed US government and scientific community (many of which vocal in decrying the obvious fact of a lab origin - surprise pikachu face) into the same virus using live bats transported from hundreds of miles away at the same location as the outbreak was discovered could have been involved. It must have somehow been transmitted naturally to other animal and then to humans. Absolutely impossible and preposterous to suggest someone connected to the lab could have transmitted it to any of those animals at the market in the same city as the lab? Just cause we've discovered humans transmitting it to pets that's obviously not connected. [...] Yeah but no way the immaculate and trustworthy CCP could have had any hand in burying and destroying evidence, bleaching the market, destroying all the animals " increasing public safety but hampering origin hunting. ", delaying, blocking, controlling and interfering with investigations? Smacks so heavily of CCP propaganda I doubt they could have written it better themselves. I'm not implying he's been influenced at all, but he's definitely a paid CCP shill. Update: If an investigation of the lab found no evidence of a leak, the scientists involved would simply be accused of hiding the relevant material.
The incessant blame game and finger pointing has reduced the chances of finding viral origins even further.
The acrid stench of xenophobia lingers over much of this discussion
Totally agree. I put no stock in the editorial. The real question is the data in the paper I linked. On first read, it looks solid. Of course the question is whether Weibo data are accurate and trustable. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to think that the CCP could manipulate the publicly available data. Unfortunately, there's probably no way for an average person to verify any of it, so we either take them at their word or not. My biggest problem with the paper is that the authors clearly have an axe to grind, and for that reason it doesn't seem like they're setting out to test a null hypothesis, but rather prove a point.Smacks so heavily of CCP propaganda I doubt they could have written it better themselves.
I re-read my comment and wanted to say sorry. I wasn't being snarky at you, only the article. (I'm also replying to your other comment) I don't think we'll ever get scientific proof. I'm not qualified to really understand that paper, but the major issue for me is that data available now will have been vetted by the CCP. Back before the great firewall became known, I think a lot of tech people were deeply cynical about how feasible it was to control "content" or information the internet. I don't think there's any doubt about how tightly all media including the internet is being controlled now. We're all just blasting at each other from our own respective corners these days, backed-up by our own biased or tainted sources. At least in "The West" ™®©℠ you can generally find both sides and perspectives in between to get some semblance of balance... Weibo specifically: A History of Censorship on China's Weibo Social Network - The Atlantic - 2019 pre-pandemic China's most censored social media giant is fined for not censoring enough - CNN - 2021 Of course the question is whether Weibo data are accurate and trustable
The key element in this article that I have not seen elsewhere is that variants A and B both originated in the Wuhan market, separately. (In fact, they found B first, but a twist in data processing gave the other variant the "A" name as if it was first.) Anyway, they show two independent strains developed in the same place, as the same time, in the same corner of the market. So the situation was so ripe for cross-contamination between species that COVID not only spawned there, but did so twice, in a short amount of time, and went different directions. (A and B are apparently completely different variants of the same base virus, and one is not a progressive mutation of the other. As far as I can discern with my degree in Fashion Design.) That's the only bit of new information I saw in this article, and I found it interesting.
Unfortunately, one of the really frustrating things is that they obfuscated, lied and misdirected for so long that you have no idea what's true anymore. If they had this evidence in January of 2020, why are we learning it now? Fake data are a Chinese specialty (well documented in the literature), so it's not as if it's a stretch to think they could make a bunch of shit up and feed it to credulous Western scientists (thought it was really curious that there were no Chinese scientists on the author list here...seems like that's by design since only the Chinese have access to the original data). It would be hard to fake these data, but not impossible. A few months back there was an article on here (hell, maybe I even posted it) about how Xi chose obfuscation, because whatever the origin, it looks bad for his policies. So maybe these guys finally cracked the case. But the fact that it's taken 2.5 years to get these data into the world only makes it look more suspicious.
It was a foregone conclusion that the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak was wet market collateral damage until Ken Alibek defected and named the researcher who forgot to put the filters back in. Only took 20 years. We'll have a better idea what happened after the CCP falls, not before.