Latest covid origins stuff, for our more conspiracy brained comrades. Twitter thread with short explanations
I'm still not convinced that it wasn't American soldiers from Fort Detrick coughing on the raccoon dogs at the Huanan Seafood market that started this whole thing. Those fuckers will eat anything, even Altoona-style pizza.
page is blocked in europe lol. Would just google it, but I think this is the GDPR jumping in front of the psychic bullet you fired at me
Some call it “Altoona Style” while others call it “Altoona Sicilian.” What makes it so different? Instead of using mozzarella, the Altoona Style uses a slice of American cheese, with genoa salami and green peppers underneath.
:visible-disgust:
honestly that's not as bad as I thought it'd be. like, if you're already into american cheese, that's fine, and while the toppings under the cheese is a pretty questionable decision it hardly destroys the meal. it's basically a shitty grilled cheese sandwich and there's plenty of worse food crimes on this earth...
Mild cognitohazard:
https://archive.ph/dSY2jThere's a variant where they use Velveeta instead of American cheese. (If you're unfamiliar, it's basically processed vegetable oil that is vaguely cheeselike in flavor, but has the texture of room temperature silicone.)
Altoona-style pizza
lemme just make up a new name for every kind of slop I dish out
weren't blood samples taken from italy in like september of 2019 tested positive for covid?
kinda hilarious how so many users even here think it came from China.
it so very clearly didn't https://imgur.com/a/CRwan3n
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-timing/researchers-find-coronavirus-was-circulating-in-italy-earlier-than-thought-idUSKBN27W1J2
Also France.
I'm confused about why these papers don't cite those results given that I've never seen any real attempt to debunk or dismiss them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200410111500/https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/covid-19-genetic-network-analysis-provides-snapshot-of-pandemic-origins
Variant at Wuhan was newer than the one found in Europe.
That article says something different, which is that the predominant variant in Wuhan at the time of the study wasn't the presumed earlier variant, but a later one. Predominant means there are also other variants there, including the presumed earlier variant.
This is consistent with an origin in China, under the assumption that there was a larger infected population there, so initial spread outside of China would look like the early variant (small numbers of infected outside of China means slower evolution in those places) and the most likely origin of new variants would be the largest infected population, probably at the "source".
there was a larger infected population there
Strange assumption considering that are quite a bit of studies examining wastewater testing showing covid was in Europe early 2019. Also consider that China's healthcare system is better at detecting weird flu-like illnesses because they had to deal with SARS. I can easily imagine the US healthcare system not acknowledging it or finding out about it for years.
I'll entertain a coverup possibility but it seems unlikely since the first official announcement of anything covid-like was done by their CDC. Unless China are masters at propaganda (they aren't they suck at it), their initial response seemed to show that covid was a new thing there.
Strange assumption considering that are quite a bit of studies examining wastewater testing showing covid was in Europe early 2019.
It's the assumption of the paper... which doesn't say what the prior comment claimed.
And the study claiming that early is transmission just had one (1) positive PCR amplification, which is unfortunately easy to get false positives for - and other labs also got false positives for tests on similar wastewater samples (and gaps in positivity - earlier samples positive, later negative, then positive again) trying to do the same thing. At least, unless one wants to believe that SARS-CoV-2 was hopping around Europe in 2017. But there are a number of overlapping tests for antibodies in Europe from late 2019 (but still before being discovered in Wuhan) that are more convincing.
Also consider that China’s healthcare system is better at detecting weird flu-like illnesses because they had to deal with SARS.
Could be. I wouldn't know how to compare on this exact thing, particularly since the now-famous first reporter of COVID had to lobby for weeks to get it recognized by local officials and the government started making changes to how it handles such reports as a result. It wasn't recognized via some highly efficient systemic process, but by the advocacy of a relatively small number of people + increasing cases rolling in with severe illness. She got the hero treatment in China.
I can easily imagine the US healthcare system not acknowledging it or finding out about it for years.
Well yeah the US healthcare system is disorganized garbage. You can see it doing a shit job at even half-assedly monitoring monkeypox right this second, and they had a full heads-up on that just like they did with COVID.
I’ll entertain a coverup possibility but it seems unlikely since the first official announcement of anything covid-like was done by their CDC. Unless China are masters at propaganda (they aren’t they suck at it), their initial response seemed to show that covid was a new thing there.
A cover-up by China is super unlikely given how it all played out. The only thing anyone can point to is that delay I mentioned, which is very small in the grand scheme of things. Perfectly in line with a bureaucracy that couldn't respond to this kind of report as fast as it probably can now and nothing that looks like an active attempt to suppress. Well I guess there was that one nerd that prematurely called it SARS and was firmly ordered to STFU so as not to cause a panic based on guesswork, which is also a really dumb way to do a cover-up, lol, since they let him keep talking to the press shortly after.
Those Italian studies are complete dogshit. Unreviewed preprints from nobodies.
Completely and utterly contrary to the actual genomic data.
