On the Origins of Covid

Politics & News
1163

Next up they run a poll asking Americans if Dark Matter is a particle or the lightest superpartner.

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1164

yeah I get that this is what they meant. I guess I’m just ultra nitpicky, but making something on purpose and it being a little bit stronger than you thought it would be is not “accidentally creating” something in my book.

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Worth reading:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337

Cliffs: The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic

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1166

I know everybody is reporting this like the results are groundbreaking, but all they’ve done is re-re-re-reconfirmed things we’ve known for more than 2 years.

However, the observation that the preponderance of early cases were linked to the Huanan market does not establish that the pandemic originated there.

In this study, we obtained data from a range of sources to test the hypothesis that the COVID-19 pandemic began at the Huanan market. Despite limited testing of live wildlife sold at the market, collectively, our results provide evidence that the Huanan market was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic and suggest that SARS-CoV-2 likely emerged from the live wildlife trade in China. However, events upstream of the market, as well as exact circumstances at the market, remain obscure, highlighting the need for further studies to understand and lower the risk of future pandemics.

They still have no idea where or how the zoonotic jump occurred.

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I mean I don’t want to be rude, but you’re guilty of the ultimate sin here: hyperbole.

Summarizing these papers as ‘reconfirmed things’ as if that’s a bad thing is weird. That’s how scientific work is done.

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Who’s saying that?

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I saw a new study this morning that I can’t seem to relocate. It found that the the two early lineages (I think they refer to them as A & B) independently jumped to humans within weeks of each other in 2019. That seems rather astonishing to me.

Edit: Found it

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abp8337?et_rid=644476322&utm_campaign=1stRelease&af=R&et_cid=4332732&utm_medium=email&utm_content=alert&utm_source=sfmc

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The two lineage thing was reported a while back, it’s certainly an important finding.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454

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Actually, you’d be surprised!

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Question for those that know more and read the new paper:

Aren’t we just getting selective data from the CCP?

What stops the CPP from scrubbing data and just giving infection data in Nov 2019 that is around the market.

Were these researchers allowed to physically go to these wet markets to gather data? And when did they go there? I thought the CPP locked all foreign researchers out.

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Data is being pulled from a lot of sources. I think it would be quite difficult to fake this data effectively or scrub details that would effectively hide a lab outbreak or significantly earlier outbreak source. Can’t be 100% on that though.

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Absolutely, and that’s been a huge problem from the very start that the WHO/CDC and other world bodies have been complaining about regularly. China’s been very opaque, I don’t believe their COVID statistics for a second like ~zero cases in their Uyghurs prison camps? jlawok.gif

What this tells us about the origins of COVID is unclear. A totalitarian state is going to be secretive by default, they’re not going to let foreigners poke around their biolabs without heavy restrictions regardless of whether or not they were up to some shady shit. Certainly the US wouldn’t give China unrestricted access to sensitive biolabs if it was suspected of being up to something. China also isn’t super excited at the possibility that their mink trade might have been responsible for the outbreak.

What stops the CPP from scrubbing data and just giving infection data in Nov 2019 that is around the market.

I just look at data like this and go jlawok.gif:

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There’s a reasonable argument to be made that this country is just incredibly good at locking down, but I still gotta go willferrilidontbelieveyou.gif lanoiredoubt.gif. Lots of gif-based memes have informed my thinking on this.

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It seems quite convincing though that it is from wuhan market from the new study.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

The only caveat is how trustworthy their data is. They took all their data from the WHO 2021 study, the WHO study was heavily done with the CPP involvement:

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As I quoted earlier today, the report says the market was the epicenter of the outbreak, not the origin. They made that distinction clear at least twice.

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The marketplace was where the jump from animals to humans happened (twice!). But the fact that there are two lineages suggests it was kicking around an animal host long enough to evolve into two different strains before making the jump. Best explanation is that it originated in an animal reservoir on some farm outside China where it diverged and then animals taken to market kicked off the pandemic.

The lab origin theory gets weird because now we have two simultaneous leaks of different strains at the same time.

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It’s not trying to answer that question though. The source, as used by scientific people, is going to be some cave or farm or whatever with a population of animals where the mutation(s) happened

The fact that the outbreak comes from the market, with two lineages no less, strongly supports that this was not a lab leak. That theory is all but dead (and has been for quite some time)

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So what’s the theory for covid being so prevalent in the Huanan market that two distinct lineages made a zoonotic jump there at almost the exact same time, but for some reason nobody can find any further traces of it in any of the suspected intermediary animals, and they don’t actually have a direct link to the market for one of those lineages?

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There are lots of small family farms that bring animals to Wuhan, no guarantee that it’s still circulating there, and the Chinese government has a pretty big incentive to keep people from discovering if their livestock industry was responsible for all this. I don’t think the fact that we haven’t found it is odd at all.

And if we’re going to be fair, it’s also the case that no trace of either of these two strains has been found at the Wuhan lab or in any of its published papers.

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  1. Two lineages jumping at the same time is explicitly evidence against a lab leak and suggests multiple exposures and chances at mutations/cross overs. That is exactly what we would expect to see in a natural event.
  2. Animal reservoirs coupled with poor animal husbandry that leads to increased chances is the theory, and has been the source of numerous epidemics in the past, including SARS (twice before covid!)
  3. It’s extraordinarily difficult to track a completely novel pathogen down. It took a decade plus for SARS IIRC. It’s not commonly found down to that kind of detail generally (I think some modern flu outbreaks can be tracked down to certain poultry farms, but not 100% on that)
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I’d think China would be very eager to confirm the most widely suspected source rather than allow 2+ years of speculation that made them look far worse. “Yeah, it was Steve’s dodgy mink mill. Sorry about that. We executed Steve. Won’t happen again”

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