Part of the reason that consensus is eroding is because they keep not finding any evidence to support it in the places they expect to find it. They found SARS in palm civets just a few months after the first outbreak, and lots of other animals subsequently. They found MERS in camels in a similar time frame with only a few dozen cases worldwide. We’re now 18 months deep and 3.5M dead, and they haven’t found a damn thing despite massive efforts. The only other species that have contracted Covid seem to have gotten it from humans.
Nobody can find the zoonotic links everybody (except dipshit conservatives) wants to be true. Investigations into other very plausible vectors are being actively blocked. Its problem.
Also, bitey bats from the bat caves are still a natural origin, basically. Lab-linked and lab-engineered are separate arguments. You can have the former without the latter. Personally, I’m >50% for lab linked, <50% for lab leaked, and don’t have an opinion for human engineered.
Wat? It took over a decade and extraordinary effort to nail down precisely where the '02 SARS outbreak came from. Also they’ve found viruses very closely related to COVID-19 circulating in the wild but there’s still a crapload of research to be done.
Meanwhile, everything in WIV’s inventory and published research has been ruled out as a precursor.
By WIV. Because WHO didn’t actually look at the inventory or records themselves.
Also, the first SARS case was in November 2002, and by March 2003 they had found civets in the nearby market that carried it. They didn’t find the reservoir that infected the civets until much later, but the point here is that we haven’t found ANY animals that are infected at any of the markets identified as super spreader sites. If we had infected livestock at the market, but we just couldn’t find the bat cave where the virus originated, I don’t think anyone here would be discussing the lab theory at all.
lol, people were tossing out the lab theory from day one, of course you’d still be running with it. How would you know it went from animal to human and not human to animal (this is one of the reasons it actually took years to trace the '02 SARS outbreak)?
So far the only thing supporting the lab leak idea is this Sherlock Holmesian process of elimination idea that we’ve eliminated all the animals at this marketplace, therefore it must have been the lab. Except no one who actually studies this for a living thinks we’ve tested nearly enough to rule out the markets. Also you’re completely ignoring the community’s main theory that it originated on a farm outside Wuhan. There’s extremely strong evidence that COVID can spread, mutate, and spillover via mink farms. There are several thousand small mink farms in China that haven’t been tested at all, each one of which is a mini unregulated biolab. Somehow the bros on substack have dismissed this possibility because reasons.
According to theSunday Times, British spies believe claims that the coronavirus pandemic may have originated from a leak out of a laboratory in Wuhan are “feasible”.
