What evidence is destroyed? What proof do you have of that? Again, there’s two whole papers with substantial evidence. The Chinese would have had to been pretty smart to cherry pick samples for outside researchers to get the type of results they got.
Plus tons of scientific evidence that there are bats and other mammals that are infected with coronaviruses in the SARS-CoV-2 family all over China and southeast asia. In fact, they had to update the family tree because there are coronaviruses from Laos that are more related to SARS-CoV-2 than the ones that were being studied in the Wuhan Lab. I just found a paper this morning that shows that samples of people in southeast asia that live in the country are more likely to be seropositive for coronaviruses (pre-Covid) if they have encounters with bats in the area than those that don’t.
It’s stunning that someone would think that scientists findings and expertise is irrelevant regarding a pandemic. Truly mind-boggling.
[my bolding] Exactly my point this whole time. I guarantee you that if there was a lab leak, even if the Chinese were hiding it, they’d be making pretty damn sure that safety measures were tightened. On the other hand, it’s probably much more difficult, even in China, to regulate wet markets. Plus, is China the only country with live animal wet markets?
The MUCH bigger picture, which I’m trying to emphasize, with climate change and further environmental destruction, we’re going to unleash more of these viruses that may not even be related to coronaviruses.
Indeed. To the extent that China screwed up, we need to be thinking not ‘It was China’s fault’ but ‘what can we do to reduce the chances of the next pandemic a) occuring and b) having worse results than if we – worldwide – didn’t screw it up?’
Notice that I said “reduce”. I very much doubt that total prevention is possible. I also very much doubt that even with the best will in the world nobody will screw anything up about the next one. But we could certainly improve our chances. Which, the way we’ve been going, seems very unfortunately likely to happen. And I mean the way we’ve been going, not in particular the way China has.
And for any evidence not destroyed, well if it isn’t released from a source you can trust it may as well not exist. I cannot think of any good reason for China to delay releasing it in its entirety. Of course they have avoided doing so consistently since the very beginning of the outbreak and continue to do so. I assume you don’t need a cite for that do you?
Here are some anyway.
It is a matter of common knowledge that the WHO was not given full access to all the data requested and that China has been obstructive from the start.
I personally wouldn’t be confident of any conclusion drawn so far, given the lack of engagement and openness from those who control the collection and release of critical data.
It’s not like a country that would destroy evidence would think of seeding the wet markets with animals from their labs as part of a coverup. Because that would be different somehow from destroying evidence.
According to your article, the one accusing China of purposely “destroying evidence” was the highly-reliable Mike Pompeo. Meanwhile, China said the following which makes a lot of sense:
Liu said that when the pneumonia-like disease was first reported in Wuhan, “national-level professional institutes” were working to identify the pathogen that was causing it.
“Based on comprehensive research and expert opinion, we decided to temporarily manage the pathogen causing the pneumonia as Class II – highly pathogenic – and imposed biosafety requirements on sample collection, transport, and experimental activities, as well as destroying the samples,” he said.
The official said that this was standard practice in China for the handling any highly pathogenic samples.
Chinese public health laws specify that laboratories not meeting the requirements must either transfer them to a qualified depositary for safekeeping or destroy them.
And China delaying further investigations is not proof of anything, which is my point. The only data analysis we have is from the scientists which support a natural source and more than one superspreader event in the wet market. Supporting the lab leak is speculation that the Chinese cherry-picked data to make it look like two lineages came from the wet market (again, the Chinese are absolute geniuses if that turns out to be true) and intelligence that we know nothing about. The only convincing information in support of a lab leak would be the intelligence of researchers falling ill. However, we don’t know anything more than that.
Meanwhile, I don’t think you understand the strength of the science. It’s better than we usually get in these investigations.
Not only do confirmed covid cases center around the market, respiratory illnesses also centered around the market and nowhere else in Wuhan.
These districts were also the first to exhibit excess pneumonia deaths in January 2020 ([Figures 1], a metric that is less susceptible to the potential biases associated with case reporting. There is no epidemiological link to any other locality in Wuhan, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) located south of the Yangtze and the subject of considerable speculation.
The genetic data is even more convincing:
Viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been documented in bats and pangolins in multiple localities in South-East Asia, including in China, Thailand, Cambodia, and Japan (Lytras et al., 2021 ; Zhou et al., 2021), with serological evidence for viral infection in pangolins for more than a decade (Wacharapluesadee et al., 2021. However, a significant evolutionary gap exists between SARS-CoV-2 and the closest related animal viruses: for example, the bat virus RaTG13 collected by the WIV has a genetic distance of ∼4% (∼1,150 mutations) to the Wuhan-Hu-1 reference sequence of SARS-CoV-2, reflecting decades of evolutionary divergence (Boni et al., 2020). Widespread genomic recombination also complicates the assignment of which viruses are closest to SARS-CoV-2. Although RaTG13, sampled from a Rhinolophus affinis bat in Yunnan (Zhou et al., 2020b), has the highest average genetic similarity to SARS-CoV-2, a history of recombination means that three other bat viruses—RmYN02, RpYN06, and PrC31—are closer in most of the virus genome (particularly ORF1ab) and thus share a more recent common ancestor with SARS-CoV-2 Li et al., 2021; Lytras et al., 2021 ;Zhou et al., 2021). None of these three closer viruses were collected by the WIV and all were sequenced after the pandemic had begun (Li et al., 2021;Zhou et al., 2020a, Zhou et al., 2021). Collectively, these data demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that RaTG13 is not the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2, with or without laboratory manipulation or experimental mutagenesis.
His reliability is completely irrelevant, he is not the only one to accuse them of that and they have readily admitted it.
It hardly matters who said it, it only matters if it is true or not. Which it is.
China delayed investigations, blocked investigations, withheld evidence and destroyed evidence. No, none of that is proof of any particular outcome.
I understand fully that drawing firm conclusions from potentially compromised and certainly incomplete data is not a sound approach. The “strength of the science” is wholly related to the quality of the data.
Again, all based on incomplete and compromised data. It is convincing if you believe that China have shared all the relevant data needed to come to such a confident conclusion.
I’m not confident that the Chinese have done that, are you? The WHO certainly aren’t happy with what has been released.
The jumbling together of genetic material from the virus and the animal does not prove that a raccoon dog itself was infected. And even if a raccoon dog had been infected, it would not be clear that the animal had spread the virus to people. Another animal could have passed the virus to people, or someone infected with the virus could have spread the virus to a raccoon dog.
And this is still relying on the limited data that China is willing to share. e.g. (also from that article)
It also suggests that Chinese scientists have given an incomplete account of evidence that could fill in details about how the virus was spreading at the Huanan market.
It doesn’t actually move the origin story on very much it merely fails to provide convincing evidence against any of the main hypotheses.
UCSD evolutionary biologist Joel Wertheim notes that “first and foremost, this is forensic evidence that these putative host animals were present at the market. There’s no more question about that. And they were there in the same place as the virus.”
“Now, clearly, some of these environmental samples have the virus in them because of infected humans. But it strains the imagination to say it was only humans who were depositing this virus all over places where susceptible hosts were and that this is just humans giving it to animals. Given everything else we know about the early days of COVID and everything we know about zoonotic viruses, this fits. Is this going to put the lab-leak conspiracy to bed? No. Nothing will ever do that. But I think this should help convince more reasonable scientists.”
“The problem with the good faith version of a lab-leak hypothesis is that there isn’t a single one…Looking at the viral genome, we don’t see anything suspicious with regard to [some] sort of lab manipulation; we really don’t. The most charitable explanation here that’s still left is that you have some lab worker who gets infected with a virus that the lab has yet to characterize, brings it over to the Huanan market and deposits it there potentially multiple times, and then the animals that are being sold there get infected. And none of these lab workers transmit [the virus] to anyone who would help epidemiologists trace it back to them, nor do they end up being seroreactive [having antibodies to the virus indicative of previous infection] when tested later.”
In other words, this latest finding, while not conclusive, adds to the already dominant evidence of natural origin for the virus.
That statement doesn’t in the least contradict what I posted.
Added to previous research such as this, the newest evidence points even more to natural spillover.
While we likely will never know with certainty, on the one hand we have most of the scientific community favoring natural origin, while lab leak theorists are led by “experts” such as Congressional Republicans and “low confidence” Energy Department officials.
I don’t feel any pressure to “believe” any side until such time as all available data is released and China co-operates fullly with a neutrally mediated and independent investigation.
When that happens I’ll be perfectly happy to accept the conclusions.
The latter scenario can’t be considered “natural”.
And as we know, those pushing it fervently (as opposed to those acknowledging it as a possibility, however weak), are heavily motivated by perceived political gain, opposition to pandemic control measures*, or both.
*“Experts got us into this, so we should ignore everything they say!”
Samples containing viral RNA, which had been collected at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in early 2020, also contained genetic material from raccoon dogs—a foxlike type of canid apparently sold at the market—as well as other animals. The genetic material came from the same areas of the market where SARS-CoV-2 was found, suggesting that the raccoon dogs may have been infected with the virus (possibly by other animals) and could have been the first to spread the virus to humans.
Could you be more specific about samples you’re saying they don’t have?
