Original link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/covid-pandemic-origin-wuhan-lab/2021/07/07/41fbbf9e-d560-11eb-b39f-05a2d776b1f4_story.html
In the search for the pandemic’s origin, the trail officially ends with Patient S01, China’s first confirmed covid-19 case, whose sparse details were outlined in the joint WHO-China report released in March.
"China's first," not the world's. Just right there, the implication is that it is known definitively that the virus originated in China and that there is no need to look further. Because, what if someone did look further? What might they find?
Meanwhile, in the cited WHO report:
3.3. Evidence for the early occurrence of SARS-CoV-2 from other studies
It remains to be determined where SARS-CoV-2 originated. Although the virus was first identified as the cause of a cluster of cases of severe pneumonia in Wuhan, to date it is uncertain from where the first cases originated. A few studies suggest that cases may have occurred before December 2019, the time when circulation of SARS-CoV-2 was thought to have started in Hubei Province. In a retrospective survey, sewage samples collected on 12 March 2019 in Barcelona, Spain, were positive for SARS-CoV2 RNA, but other samples collected between January 2018 and December 2019 were all negative. The PCR signals has not been confirmed by sequencing and could be false-positive signals.(43)
In Italy, the first known COVID-19 case was reported in the town of Codogno in the Lombardy region on 21 February 2020. Since then, a few studies have suggested evidence for earlier circulation. La Rosa and others (44) found the first positive sewage sample in northern Italy mid-December 2019, using a sewage testing protocol with nested PCR. In the same region, SARS-CoV-2 was detected by PCR in a throat swab from a child with suspected measles early in December.(45) Gianotti et al. (46) reported reactivity by in situ hybridization with a range of probes for SARS-CoV-2 in skin biopsies from a 25-year-old woman sampled in November 2019. She tested negative by PCR but in June 2020 was serologically positive. A serological survey among participants in a lung cancer screening programme described finding a few persons with neutralizing antibodies as early as October 2019.(46a)
In France, an oropharyngeal sample from a haemoptysis patient who was admitted to hospital on 27 December 2019 was identified positive by RT-PCR for SARS-CoV-2 RNA.(47) A separate, serological study found evidence for a significant increase in prevalence of neutralizing antibodies in mid-December, suggesting considerable earlier circulation of the virus.(47a) In Brazil, testing of sewage by RT-PCR yielded SARS-CoV-2-positive results in samples collected on 27 November 2019, much earlier than the first reported case in the Americas.(48, 49)
In the United States of America,
a serological survey of 7389 archived donated blood samples collected between 13 December 2019 and 17 January 2020 from nine states identified 106 positive samples, suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 might have been introduced into United States of America before the first identified case in the country.(50)
Collectively, these studies from different countries suggest that SARS-CoV-2 circulation preceded the initial detection of cases by several weeks. Some of the suspected positive samples were detected even earlier than the first case in Wuhan, suggesting that circulation of the virus in other regions had been missed. So far, however, the study findings were not confirmed, methods used were not standardized, and serological assays may suffer from non-specific signals. Nonetheless, it is important to investigate these potential early events.
Damn, it really seems like "the trail" might just have some paths that stretch beyond China's patient S01!
I think the mainstream media constantly banging the drums for confrontation/war with China does matter because I constantly hear echoes of Iraq in this shit.
It does matter, but I think trying to stretch what I would consider "reasonable doubt" into some sort of "proof" that the virus originated elsewhere would do little to tip the scales.
Can you explain where you see me doing pointing to anything as "proof" (you put it in quotes, even!) of anything?
The point is that "the trail" in the Bezos Post's words clearly does not simply end in China. But, juxtapose that to WaPo's phrasing that "the trail officially ends with . . . China's first confirmed case". They refuse to look beyond China. That the virus originated there is now treated as a given fact. It is now assumed.
THAT is what I'm pointing out as a problem, and I'm using the WHO report to show that even by the WaPo's own sources, it's fucking bullshit.
The trail ends with China's first "confirmed" case because there are literally no confirmed cases before it. That's the problem that they're having with determining the origins of the virus. It also doesn't mean that the first case of a human infected with covid-19 in Wuhan was December 1st, which is when patient 01 (not patient zero) got sick. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that the virus was being transmitted in the area of Wuhan before this individual was confirmed as having covid-19. But, so far there hasn't been any testing of blood samples taken from the population of Wuhan before that date, because China hasn't allowed it. They have done blood sample testing in other countries, which is how they found out that covid-19 was in those countries earlier than the first "confirmed" cases in those countries.
So unless China got extraordinarily lucky and managed to identify and confirm covid-19 earlier than every other country, the most likely scenario is that covid was being spread in China for the same amount of time prior to their first confirmed case as it was in every other country, which would still put China at the start of the timeline.
Then the phrasing should be "the trail officially ends with the world's first confirmed case," because that would be more accurate and more relevant to the story about a global pandemic.
Yeah, totally agree, because virus nationalism is stupid.
This is a post about manufacturing consent. Nobody here except WaPo is doing "virus nationalism."
If the US government wants to start a war with China it's going to happen regardless of where the virus originated from. China is exerting its influence in countries all around the world, that's all the justification needed for the United States and the mainstream media to drum up support for a new cold war.
At this point, there's no way of conclusively proving that the virus came from another country, and it's extraordinarily unlikely anyways, because community spread was happening in Wuhan before it was happening anywhere else. Maybe, if Trump was still president, the US would be pushing some stupid bullshit about how China sent us the virus to kill us all as a warmongering tactic, but Biden and his administration don't need to make such a stupid argument when they have the traditional neoliberal warmongering tactics available to them.