A team of scientists say it is “beyond reasonable doubt” the Covid pandemic started with infected animals sold at a market, rather than a laboratory leak.
They were analysing hundreds of samples collected from Wuhan, China, in January 2020.
The results identify a shortlist of animals – including racoon dogs, civets and bamboo rats – as potential sources of the pandemic.
Despite even highlighting one market stall as a hotspot of both animals and coronavirus, the study cannot provide definitive proof.
The samples were collected by Chinese officials in the early stages of Covid and are one of the most scientifically valuable sources of information on the origins of the pandemic.
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Their analysis was published last year and the raw data made available to other scientists. Now a team in the US and France says they have performed even more advanced genetic analyses to peer deeper into Covid’s early days.
I would love to see a picture of that ONE STALL that is thought to have been a hotbed. Whoever runs that stall must be quite a character, too. Golly it’s fun to visit markets in new countries.
Unless… a plausible alternative to my imagination is that it looks like any other open air fresh meat stall, just with more exotic flesh… And if that’s the case you can keep your photos.
But just in case. Anyone?
I’m not into conspiracy theories, but I find the confidence that is used in the defense of this origin just as Shakey as the lab leak theory.
The lab location and research done means there is a lot of potential incentive for the Chinese government, the lab and even researchers in the field to not have it be a lab leak… As this would potentially cause an entire (important) field of study and their methods be regulated into oblivion by poorly written knee jerk laws.
I’m fine with this as the accepted consensus on the subject, but I’ll keep my reservations for whatever good those do me.
So how’s the abolishing of wet markets going? And the reduction of antibiotics use in industrial scale farming?
We’ll never hear the true story thanks to geopolitics.
Frankly, the lab leak theory IMO is the most plausible. There are wet markets all over China and have been for…ever? I get that nobody can really predict a zoonotic crossover event, but they were literally experimenting with highly infectious coronaviruses in Wuhan at the time of the initial outbreak.
People have been saying for decades before covid that the wet markets were a ticking time bomb. There has probably been viral outbreaks in the past, but the local population could have died off before it spread.
I think a lab leak of a natural virus is plausible, but irrelevant.
I think lax saftey when experimenting with highly infectious coronaviruses is very relevant.
Either improve the protocols or don’t experiment.
As someone currently down with covid I thought that was state of knowledge long time ago.
Conspiracy theorists have still been spreading the lab leak theory without proof for awhile now because China is the current scary boogeyman. I get that there was lab there studying these diseases, but guessing isn’t how science works, and the wet markets have been known to be a possible source of diseases for a long time now by scientists. I remember warnings about this scenario coming up awhile ago.
Lot of diseases come from China probably for similar reasons: it’s crowded and close contacts with lots of animals. No one thought the 1956 flu could be a lab leak, or SARS, or H7N9, etc. People just have conspiracy theories about this one because it turned into the biggest pandemic of them all, which is just the roll of the dice of all the diseases coming out of there.
People just have conspiracy theories about this one because it turned into the biggest pandemic of them all,
No, it’s because leaked gain of function research is a plausible scenario
which is just the roll of the dice of all the diseases coming out of there.
Maybe we should be more careful when manufacturing thousands of dice with sixes all over them.
Off topic, but “Genetic Ghosts” would be a sweet band name. I’d go see them.
Wasn’t this known already?
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.
Wuhan province is a place where a lot of viruses originate naturally (in bat colonies)
This is disingenuous. RaTG13 was sourced in Tongguan in Mojiang Hani Autonomous County 1800km from Wuhan.
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.
… 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.
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
the whole bioengineered super virus escaping a lab wasn’t taken that seriously
Excellent evidence why there is such a battle over misinformation.
Wasn’t this disproven already? Covid has been detected in human waste matter samples from Autumn 2019 in Italy.
Overall, the results of this blind retesting of a selected set of samples indicate the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in some SMILE samples collected in the prepandemic period. The oldest samples found positive for IgM by both laboratories were collected on 10 October 2019 (Lombardy), 11 November 2019 (Lombardy) and 5 February 2020 (Lazio), the latter with neutralizing antibodies. Two additional samples collected on 17 December 2019 (Campania) and 28 January 2020 (Lombardy) tested as IgG positive by VisMederi and positive for IgG S1 and IgG S1+NP by Erasmus. Additional IgM positive cases could have been detected also by Erasmus by lowering the cut-off of the commercial IgM assay. The older among these putative additional IgM positive samples was collected on 3 September 2019 in the Veneto region, one of the first and mostly severely affected COVID-19 regions.
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?
These findings do not at all suggest that the virus originated in Italy, but they endorse the idea that the virus was likely spreading in China before the first known cases and that could have been circulated by travelers given direct the connections between China and European and US countries, particularly the Northern West and East Italian regions, which are among the most industrialized and connected areas of Italy.
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
- it took longer to be detected than previously thought, and lots of doctors missed it
- we don’t really know where it started exactly, and can’t really ever know without a concerted investigation of the same sort done in Italy
- international travel and globalisation as well as illegal trade of exotic animals and their carcasses makes it all pretty much guesswork, since Indonesian civit poachers on Filipino boats in the South China Sea don’t submit wastewater samples
- ultimately its source was inconsequential compared to how we actually responded and what we retained afterwards (nothing, it seems)
