All up not the worst outcome.
Best outcome would have been that it was already spreading globally (as suggested by wastewater analysis) and China just detected it first.
Next best would be that it was brought into the wet market, but by a person.
Slightly worse is if it jumped from animals at the market, as that vindicates the racists. <— we are here
Worse than that is accidental lab leak of natural virus.
Worse still is accidental lab leak of manufactured virus.
Worst of all is intentional release of manufactured virus.
Really worrying amount of conspiracy in here about COVID; y'all even made me stop lurking and actually log in.
Without breaking some opsec, I've a PhD in genomics and direct contacts to foundational researchers in viral evolution - the science on this is incredibly clear. SARS-CoV-2 originated somewhere in/or linked to Huanan. The genomic evidence that we have is what shows us this. Genomic evidence that we only have because Chinese epidemiologists worked incredibly rapidly and effectively to trace and sequence a novel zoonotic disease within days/weeks of it's emergence. It was truly incredible work that they did and awe-inspiring to an epidemiologist in a crumbling post-imperial nation.
But what these scientists are saying is completely in line with what the data are telling us. The papers which claimed genomic evidence in Italian sewage in mid-2019 were absolute dogshit un-reviewed preprints.
I can understand a reflexive belief that things feel off.
But we’ve known for a long time that SE/E Asia generally is an absolute hotspot for zoonotic diseases; mostly fairly inconsequential- but it’s a numbers game; SARS-CoV-2 happened to he extremely effective at what it does; infact passing into and out of various different hosts with apparent ease (eg. human-cat, human-mink-human). But it’s not a unique event, only very, very unlucky.
Ultimately the failure of COVID lies not on China for being a point of origin of an incredibly unlucky event, but rather the utter hubris with which Europe and “the west” reacted with in response. Whilst China did the most effective public health action I have ever seen, Europe was focused on denying it was even a problem.
The best case scenario is that people recognize "the truth" and that somehow acts as a bulwark against bad actions. If we act on good information, then our actions must also be good. Even if they're not good, at least we started from the right place.
The crucial point here is that we don't live in a world where everyone on this site believes in the good information and it results in some kind of actual change in something. It's not even worth talking about actions because it won't even go that far. The only action is posting. It's not like us being correct means something outside of some personal preference for what one views as the truth. Wrong or right, we're in the same situation.
Therefore it's a purely abstract strategy. We live in the world where saying the virus came from China does have real political implications, though not from us saying it. Not even really from your chud neighbor or coworker saying it. Because the powers that be will take any excuse they can and people accepting that it came from China helps that despite decisions of global politics not being in their control. As a leftist who likes China, why admit it came from there at all? China doesn't need us to stand up for it. They don't even know we exist. They're not depending on Western leftists to make communism happen for the world. They're already doing it. So us spreading conspiracies has no real impact there. Might as well refuse to admit purely out of spite for American propaganda. Sure it's petty but it doesn't get you any further away from communism than trusting the science.
Saying it came from China can only hurt, with little gain for us. Saying it came from Ft Detrick makes people mad online and stubbornly refuses to play along. Also little gain for us but it also doesn't really hurt anything outside of some personal preference of shared cultural values, which are rationality and science.
I know I'm not being rational. I'm doing it on purpose.
Because even doing that in bad faith perpetuates complete falsehoods. Basically it’s tainting the well.
It’s pretty well characterised that people who go for some conspiracy, either choose to consume much more or are at least primed to engage with and be less skeptical of further conspiratorial ideas.
From a purely pragmatic point of view, a base of conspiratorially minded comrades who aren't able to critically assess information are probably a lot more susceptible to ops and targeted disinfo.
The paper says it jumped to humans in November, but hasn't it been confirmed the Virus was in Italy in September?
There is a paper that says this - I work in the field (PhD) and the paper is complete dogshit. Very bad interpretation with evidently no knowledge of bioinformatics or metagenomics which has caused a river of shit ever since.
Edit: It's actually been so long since I had to read the original COVID in Italy sewage that I think it might even just have been a single PCR positive in a lab where they were already testing positive samples - which was clearly contam./bad lab practice - at best.
What about that sharp increase in pneumonia cases in the Washington area throughout 2019, or that sudden "vaping sickness", which included symptoms such as loss of taste and smell, which mysteriously disappeared after covid was discovered?
This is why we have epidemiologists; we look for reasons for these things all the time.
If you want a good recent example - the clusters of hepatitis in children, some of whom required liver transplants. Multiple extremely experienced public health agencies and academic colleagues looking at sequencing data, PCR data, biopsies, good biological tissue samples. And it's still not fully clear exactly what caused them; after months of hard scrutiny. There was a paper this week which has posited that the commonality between them all was a rare adeno-associated virus. But we're still not entirely sure on the mechanisms at play.
Sometimes clusters happen, and they're not always easily explicable. However - it's certain that the most parsimonious explanation for those incidents you listed above is not that all the genomic and phylogenetic information we have amassed on COVID is incorrect and there is some kind of mass cover up by international evolutionary virologists.
I know it's anecdotal, but in November of 2019 my partner caught a respiratory illness from a coworker who had recently gone on a European vacation
It lasted over three weeks, she was in severe respiratory distress, couldn't taste anything and could barely move around
I took her to the hospital a couple of times, her doctors ran a bunch of tests and basically shrugged it off since they didn't know what it was (one of them prescribed her cough medicine that just ended up making things worse)
Even after the worst of it, she couldn't breathe well for almost three months afterwards and would hack up little mucousy blood clots if she did anything more strenuous than basic walking
We got no real evidence that it was COVID-19 or some precursor variant, but it certainly seemed like it
They determined that the pandemic, which initially involved two subtly distinct lineages of SARS-CoV-2, likely arose from at least two separate infections of humans from animals at the Huanan market in November 2019 and perhaps in December 2019.
This part still gives me pause without reading the actual paper
Funding for the research was provided by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
Yeah I'm gonna wait for China to sign off on this
NIH and NSF are fairly hands-off funders, probably the least problematic funding you can get in the US.
Doesn't mean the paper is right, though.
As someone who receives funding from NIH (and possibly NSF too, can’t remember) this is very true. They hardly even care that you actually do the study you told them you were gonna do with their money, as long as it’s vaguely related.
Which is how research funding should be imo. Just give researchers money.
Yep, exactly. They're basically the only "basic X" funders in the country, where X is biology, physics, anthropology, mechanical engineering. And since "basic X" can be just about anything non-applied and has to be flexible, they do the right thing and let researchers wander as necessary.
In contrast, one time I worked on a project funded by DARPA and it was a pain in the dick. We had to give them progress reports every couple months, they were constantly up our asses, and they constantly changed what they wanted. My PI eventually dropped them because they were a pain and also the ethics of doing research for the military.
The good news is we discovered absolutely nothing, and wasted a lot of their money to build a table where a rat could basically play the “Simon says” game, which only got used like twice.
:rat-salute:
Yeah DARPA is the worst and dominates entire fields of engineering. They're always looking for an applied military angle and many people delude themselves into thinking their research could never help the military, but even with the MIC run by bumblefucks they know what they want to get out of these relationships.
And yeah they're notorious for having multiple on-site visits per year + several intermediate reports. Just to check in, eh?
I'm still on board for the serial passaging theory for the emergence of covid, if only because it IS something the US academia does (including with human smallpox in lab monkeys) and the team in the Wuhan virology lab was funded in some way by the US? I never checked too closely on this whole thing because the only thing that really matters to me is that you still need a vaccine, wear a mask, social distance.
I was hoping one day they'd prove it one way or the other. I guess the article confirms it was spread by the wet market.
You don't need passaging when you have millions upon millions of interactions with wildlife reservoirs to allow for that ridiculously small chance that a novel zoonotic disease with the ability to transmit human to human to emerge.
What we're not seeing is the possibly billions of failed interactions humans are having with wildlife reservoirs of various viruses which do not result in any successful transmission or infection of humans at all. This is happening all around the world (particularly where people are engaged directly with and often in conflict with remaining healthy wild ecosystems) every single day. COVID (SARS-CoV-2) was just a horrifically unlucky event; especially given its efficacy of human to human transmission even when it had barely diverged/evolved from the initial lineage that jumped the species barrier.
You know what, that's true. I hadn't thought about it in terms of how often humans come into contact with animals, especially with climate change and ecosystem destruction. I mean, for me, it doesn't change anything about how I deal with covid because that's still down to vaccines, masking, etc.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. Destroying our planets remaining intact and vibrant ecosystems is increasing the chances that something else will cross the species barrier again.
I think it was CDC money that was spread all over the world to various labs researching "gain of function" in virii.
COVID was already in Europe by mid 2019
Cambridge study shows the variation found in Wuhan was newer than the one found in the US and Europe. Check the covid sub where I made a post about it
I would've loved it if my flu from 2019 would've been the source, then I could proclaim Germany delenda est!
'Respiratory outbreak' being investigated at retirement community after 54 residents fall ill July 11, 2019, 11:32 PM
"One of the things about skilled nursing facilities and assisted living facilities is [that] when you have a lot of people in close proximity, who have underlying medical conditions, there is an increased risk for outbreaks," he said. "Seeing a respiratory outbreak in a long-term care facility is not odd. ... One thing that's different about this outbreak is just that it's occurring in the summer when, usually, we don't have a lot of respiratory disease."
Of those initially hospitalized, seven have returned to the retirement home, said Courtney Benoff, regional communications manager for Erikson Living, which owns the retirement home.
The health department said that although there had been no new hospitalizations in the "past couple of days," residents were still getting sick in the outbreak.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/respiratory-outbreak-investigated-retirement-community-54-residents-fall/story?id=64275865
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Fort+Detrick,+Frederick,+MD+21702,+USA/Greenspring+Senior+Living+Community,+7410+Spring+Village+Dr,+Springfield,+VA+22150,+United+States/@38.8946764,-77.4698547,10z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x89c9db1c3d5541e3:0xba3034573ad0d966!2m2!1d-77.4286011!2d39.4347477!1m5!1m1!1s0x89b652b1445232eb:0x8e45edfb2ee98809!2m2!1d-77.20405!2d38.7691!3e0 :soviet-hmm:
