Ensuring a transparent, thorough investigation of Covid-19’s origin
state.gov
state.gov
I have reason to believe that if the outgoing administration claims to have reason to believe something but refuses to provide the evidence behind it, they are lying.
https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1350292056782954498
Here's a very serious, legitimate review of the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01205-5
Unfortunately, from my experience, most people are going to believe what they want to believe, based more on political affiliation more than anything else, and the empirical facts don't register too strongly.
The Trump administration is stoking the flames against the mainland China on their way out.
And words like "empirical facts" and "independent review" in context of China, do not add much credibility.
If virus has natural origin, we should be able to find population of infected bats. Until then it is just another unproven theory.
That said, there are facts, and they are relevant: the fact that COV RaTG13 has 96.2% similarity to SARS-COV-2. The incredible diversity of bat coronaviruses, and the fact that only fraction are studied and understood, despite serious study by the WIV.
Here's another good quote from another good thread: And investigating zoonotic origins can take decades, and you may NEVER find the "smoking bat" or whatever other intermediate species that may be involved. It's like looking for a needle in a planet-sized haystack. -- https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/13497545972759142...
The main point that I was trying to make, which I stand by, is that most people are going to base their beliefs about this question on essentially political considerations: do you trust the CCP or the US State Dept more? Unfortunately, both of those institutions have done terrible damage to objective scientific inquiry, and in my opinion neither one is really deserving of trust. Better to follow the science where it leads, but this is an often frustrating and time consuming process.
Maybe you’re right and most people today will base their beliefs on politics. I’d still hesitate to label anybody when the facts haven’t landed yet, if only to deescalate the present day’s partisanship.
But for start we could explain how south china wild bat got into wuhan meat market, 500 km from its origin.
I am not from US or China. From my view Wuhan lab was sponsored by US. My concern is how often will current crisis repeat, every 10 years? Nobody is answering this question.
And we do not need "lab origin" to pin blame on China. Wuhan meat market is open again, more bats sold...
And the most critical claim in the paper is not substantiated in any way:
> Gain-of-function research is also subject to intense scrutiny and governmental oversight, precisely because of the high risk involved in conducting it safely; thus, it is extremely unlikely that gain-of-function research on hard-to-obtain coronaviruses (such as bat SARS-like coronaviruses) could occur under the radar.
Or substantiation is hinted at but never delivered:
> This work produced some of the strongest corroborating evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally emergent pathogen, as serological surveys demonstrated that people living in close proximity to colonies of bats had antibodies to bat SARS-like coronaviruses. The NIH has since set impossible conditions for restoring the grant, ensuring that this research will never resume.
Maybe the next place to go is learning more about the initial results from the EcoHealth Alliance grant referenced in the above quote. Still, it's a pretty unsatisfying review.
[edit, fixed typo: containement -> containment]
One of the best articles I have seen on the lab-made hypothesis is here:
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
If you want to go down a more skeptical route, closer into conspiracy theories and Chinese politics, you can read some of the writings on this site:
https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/blog/scientific-evidence-and...
Please, when reading these, keep your scientist hat on and evaluate the claims with an open mind.
That being said, if anyone has links to rebuttals of some of the key ideas behind these articles, or further evidence of natural origin beyond the Andersen et al Nature paper, please link it, I'd very much like to change my mind.
"Gain-of-function research is also subject to intense scrutiny and governmental oversight, precisely because of the high risk involved in conducting it safely; thus, it is extremely unlikely that gain-of-function research on hard-to-obtain coronaviruses (such as bat SARS-like coronaviruses) could occur under the radar."
This research was not happening under the radar. WIV has been openly publishing gain of function research on bat Coronaviruses for years. It's quite possible that SARS-CoV-2 was a research project that they fully intended to publish, but was accidentally released during the research.
The above shows this is a political statement.
I happen to agree with this quote. It's also not, as the US administration likes to pretend, any sort of defense of their response to the pandemic. But at the same time, the presence of this quote makes it very clear that this is little more than a political, rather than a fact based statement intended to get to the truth.
It also aligns with what Pompeo is doing in nearly every other delicate situation in the US over the past few weeks. Setting stuff on fire making it as difficult as possible for the incoming administration to deal with.
China's initial dismissal and coverup of the spread of the virus, and their subsequent misinformation and lack of transparency, and finally, their attempts to stop an investigation into COVID origins are really seriously bad things.
To boot - they've made a political appointment to the head of the WHO and have been trying to obtain leverage within that organization of years.
It's actually reasonable that the US demands expulsion of China from the WHO on those grounds, until China plays be the rules. They can't claim 'it's an internal problem' as they always do here. Much like with currency and other things, if they want to be a part of these organizations they have to follow the rules.
I think “The COVID-19 pandemic was avoidable. Any responsible country would have invited world health investigators to Wuhan within days of an outbreak.” is counterfactual by definition.
Not to mention having digital photo of him for every announcement tweets reminds me of my country's bureaucrats that keep doing same for every PSA posters.
I'd wager several researchers in any research institution because sick in autumn 2019 and had symptoms consistent with common seasonal illness. And guess what new virus also has symptoms consistent with common seasonal illness...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
You may or may not have noticed, but there are some real problems we should be thinking about, including the very real probability that the B.1.1.7 variant is going to be much harder to suppress, and how to get our vaccination program on track. Instead we end up talking about these distractions that have much more speculation than evidence behind them.
Every single other virus ever has had a zoonotic origin. SARS-CoV-2 has a 96.3% homologue.
The default, as with literally every other of thousands of viruses, is that like all the others it is the product of zoonosis.
For most viruses too, the exact intermediate animal hosts aren't precisely known.
It's really akin to find a new species of bird and trying asking for evidence that it specifically came from evolution and not genetic engineering. Sure, it's possible that it didn't, but every single other species of bird came from it and it's fully expected to happen.
And by the way, the exact intermediate host for the original SARS was also never determined conclusively until fifteen years after the first outbreak.
But I believe that, while legitimate election security researchers have all basically said there is no reason to doubt the election or believe there was any sort of widespread fraud or abuse (and such statements conform to what was said in court, where lawyers can face consequences for stating falsehoods), legitimate computer security researchers outside the Trump Administration have pointed to Russia on the Solarwinds hack, so I give that claim more credence.
Yet for me the announcement seems lukewarm. The 3 points are rehash of theories that's been surfacing since March last year, it adds nothing new.
I assume the announcement is made because Pompeo's want to stay relevant and WHO team has just arrived in China.
The implication is that Covid was a biological weapon accidentally released? Wouldn’t this be a pretty idiotic biological weapon? An especially bad one for a heavily urbanized country to release? Not to mention the main outcome of this “weapon” would be hurt China’s top importers?
Unlike the US where a moratorium was put in place from 2014 to late 2017 after IIRC a National Academies report (the moratorium was lifted after setting up stricter controls, and no, it had nothing to do with the orange one).
Most likely, it was an accidental release.
Maybe over the long run, but maybe not the current State Department at this moment. IIRC, over the last month it's literally been trying to stir up shit however it can to make things difficult for the incoming Biden administration.
The current administration seems to think it makes sense to burn US national credibility for petty, self-interested not-even-wins.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/state-department-cables-corona...
Examples, please? Pompeo certainly taking a more hawkish and strident stance of late, but I’m yet to see anything that suggests they’re salting the earth rather than just trying to ram through some policy aims at the end of an administration
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/politics/state-dept-ta...
> WASHINGTON — The United States said on Saturday that it would relax its restrictions on interactions between American officials and their counterparts in Taiwan as the Trump administration seeks to lock in a tougher line against Beijing in its final days.
> ...The moves, some outside experts said, are meant to lay a trap for Mr. Biden, forcing him either to pay a domestic political cost if he unwinds them or to sour relations with Beijing if he does not.
Jan. 11:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/us/politics/cuba-terroris...
> WASHINGTON — The State Department designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism on Monday in a last-minute foreign policy stroke that will complicate the incoming Biden administration’s plans to restore friendlier relations with Havana.
> ...On the campaign trail, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. spoke of a return to Mr. Obama’s more open approach to Havana, pledging to “promptly reverse the failed Trump policies that have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.”
> While the Biden administration can remove Cuba from the terrorism list, doing so will require a review process that could take months.
Jan 12:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/us/politics/pompeo-iran-q...
> WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda’s new base of operations is in Iran, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Tuesday, using his last days in office to tie together two of what he called the world’s greatest terrorism threats but offering no underlying intelligence as evidence.
----
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/opinion/mike-pompeo-state...
> But Mr. Pompeo has not been idle. Over the past week, he unleashed a series of actions whose only real purpose appears to be to make life as difficult as possible for his successor at the State Department. He put Cuba back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, he plans to designate the Houthi rebels in Yemen as a foreign terrorist organization, he eased restrictions on contacts between American diplomats and Taiwan officials and he claimed that Iran is a “home base” for Al Qaeda.
> ...Some of the actions Mr. Pompeo took over the past week might be defensible, were they taken in the context of a coherent foreign policy. But coming days before a change in administration, their sole identifiable purpose is to maliciously plant obstacles — some commentators have called them time bombs or booby traps — before the incoming administration and President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for Mr. Pompeo’s successor at State, Antony Blinken, are in place.
I personally, I'd agree with the Taiwan thing in isolation, but this last minute decision is clearly intended to put Biden in a bind: reverse it, and he pisses off Americans who reasonably have favorable feelings towards Taiwan; keep it, and diplomacy with China gets a lot harder.
I'm speculating, but my guess is the Iran thing is meant to throw a wrench into any attempt to restart the Iran nuclear deal. Also, note the Iran thing was actually nonsense about Al Qaeda, not Iran's own conflict-stirring.
China, right now, is an adversary of the United States, and the current administration has been doing everything it could to pin the "China virus" on them.
The fact that they are now willing, immediately before a change in administration, to make the allegation in a slightly-more-official capacity means nothing to me. They beat that drum for the past six months with no evidence and no consistent story, and now they issue a statement full of supposition and loose circumstantial evidence. So what?
What advantage do you think the state dept has to put this out if it is not true? The new admin can walk it back in 1/2 a second if that’s the case.
If Pompeo is running for president in 2024, a war with Iran will benefit him in much the same way the war with Iraq (which was based on untrue claims) benefited Bush. It's in his interest (both in the sense of a personal interest and in the sense of consistent with his neoconservative / hawkish beliefs, which are much stronger than Trump's) to sour the relationship with Iran and also to prepare the American people for the idea that we should be going to war with them.
Was the war Dick Cheney started going years before Bush announced he was running? How would this be comparable at all to Bush/Iraq?
> After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cheney worried about the dangers of nuclear proliferation and effective control of nuclear weapons from the Soviet nuclear arsenal that had come under the control of newly independent republics-Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan-as well as in Russia itself. Cheney warned about the possibility that other nations, such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, would acquire nuclear components after the Soviet collapse.
and later in that biography:
> A draft Defense Planning Guidance issued early in 1992 envisioned several scenarios in which the United States might have to fight two large regional wars at one time–for example, against Iraq again, against North Korea, or in Europe against a resurgent, expansionist Russia.
Come Cheney's vice presidency, there was all of a sudden talk about an "axis of evil" - Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
Anyway, obviously Pompeo hasn't announced, but there is widespread speculation based on concrete actions by him - see e.g. https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2020-12-09/mi... - so I don't think it's unreasonable for me to say "If Pompeo is running."
And the most direct way it would be comparable to Bush/Iraq is that it would falsely allege that al-Qaeda is linked to the government of a Middle Eastern country and use it as an excuse for regime change in that country.
I want to believe that they have the evidence to back this up, and that we can trust what the administration says. But the United States has been trashing its own credibility on the international stage ever since 9/11 & weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The Trump administration did nothing to help this.
It's so easy to lose credibility and so hard to build it back. I wish we would stop blowing our credibility by making politically motivated statements without the evidence to back them up.
This is consistent with evidence of the virus in Italy in the same time period.
Due to the large number of Chinese working in Italy, there was a direct flight between Italy and Wuhan at the time.
The new Biden administration has no reason to cover this up further, due to the obvious danger that another pandemic results from a lab accident involving designer lethal virus.
To prove that it is "designer virus", additional, different kind of evidence is needed.
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/1/21243148/why-some-labs-work-on-...
This is true - but the implication, then, is that if they don't follow through with it, it is most likely to be because they don't feel the evidence is strong enough for it, as opposed to that they do believe it and are inexplicably covering it up.
Not even March, February https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronav...
Now, I don't read that site. I don't know what evidence the state dept has now. I don't know where the virus came from. —- BUT, I do know CBS/Media, Twitter and critics didn't know then nor now either. To be fair ZeroHedge was guessing too.
A few days later, he said he became deathly sick. Fever, coughing, and said he felt like he was going to die. His wife became very sick shortly after his illness began, and his 8 year old son as well. His symptoms did not completely clear up for him for a month. His wife was seeing one specialist after another for months with after-effects. His son got through it in 3 days.
All of this was before the first cases was officially reported by the CDC as diagnosed in Seattle on January 20th.
My friend's doctors did not know what they were dealing with at the time and did not test for COVID. After COVID became known, he looked into anti body tests. They were expensive ($700+ at that time) and he did not have one.
So this basically boils down to who to trust, your friend's uncle who works at Nintendo, or a highly regarded evolutionary biologist.
The mask issue was a debacle from a scientific communications point of view. In the early days, there was legitimate debate among scientists regarding the value of masks. But I think the main thing that went wrong was a paternalistic attitude, trying to address supply chain issues of N95 mask usage by medical and other frontline workers by convincing people that masks weren't effective. That, I think most agree, was a huge mistake.
Of course, your actual statement that highly regarded virologists tweeting that masks were "stupid" and "couldn't be effective" is false, and you probably know that.
Now would I bet on this? No, but it is entirely possible without resorting to anything that's not established scientific fact.