why does the world need a proper investigation into that? Sometimes it seems to me that it’s just because we want someone to blame. Not because it would actually help anyone.
The CCP knowingly hid information about infections. This whole thing could have been contained in China with the right information at the right time. If it was a lab accident that could be avoided in the future too with better protocols.
I’m baffled that after millions have died some people just think we should let this go. Would you let it go if the us government accidentally killed millions of people in a nuke test or a chemical spill or any other accident of the same magnitude?
Plenty of CCP members have already been punished for their failure to contain the virus. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/11/china-fires-tw...
Maybe they weren't really the ones responsible. But if someone is powerful enough to avoid the CCP-internal punishment and have others take the blame, they're not going to let themselves be inconvenienced by foreign investigators.
The only thing an investigation at this point will do is waste time and money and divert experts from more useful tasks (like finding the next potentially catastrophic pathogen). I believe that demands for one should be considered purely performative. The only thing they achieve is to declare allegiance to one group and drum up discrimination against another.
This can and should be investigated and dealt with on it's own, irrelevant to if the source was a lab or natural causes.
My theory has always been that if you look at what was happening with China on a world stage at the time of the outbreak, HK protests, building military bases on atolls, Uyghur Camps, perhaps more. China was in a pretty bad place.
Then along comes this virus, and I'm sure they were like "oh crap, lets not bring any more attention to ourselves, maybe this will all just go away". Of course, it didn't. It was 100x worse than they probably imagined.
CCP screwed up massively. Was the screw up in a lab or not is secondary. They had the opportunity to stop it, but they didn't. That's the breakdown that needs to be discussed. I don't think that is a breakdown that is as politically charged or questionable.
It certainly looks that way. Given pandemics are a naturally occuring event, the origin of the event itself doesnt excuse the breakdowns in government, policy and to a certain extent personal human behaviour. It is not promisiong as there were precedents and plans in place, but we learnt nothing from inquiries into past pandemics.
Every person probably needs to have their own personal inquiry, no matter which side; 'its jsut the flu' to 'this is the end of humanity' and everywhere in between.
If this thing leaked from a lab, of course we would want to know! There can be lessons learned to prevent this in the future, and if the chinese government knew and covered it up, the world should definitely hold them accountable.
There are cases where someone close to animals might get it, a farmer typically, but it rarely becomes transmissible between humans — not unless it mutated first and for that it would need to be endemic among farmers. When we observe cases among relatives of the farmers who are not exposed, that’s when we panic. Swine flu and bird flu would fall in that case: there had been many cases among farmers, for decades, and they learned to dismiss them (making cases harder to track). When relatives got sick, epidemiology authorities were suddenly a lot more worried, to the puzzlement of farmers who had been sick prior.
More so, viruses are endemic in bats (who have notoriously poor immunity) but most of them can’t be transmitted to an animal with high immunity, like humans; not without going through mutation and selection through another animal with a more selective immunity, hence the idea of an intermediary host. The pangolin was suggested for a while, if you remember. There was a lot of talk about which animal, but what those stories didn’t really clarify is the “the” in “the pangolin”: whether virologists were expected:
1. widespread infection among pangolins living together; the meaning the species — but then we would have noticed entire groups being sick; or
2. if one single animal was infected by a bat, and someone was unlucky enough to be host to a human-compatible mutation (very unlikely) and then that human was host to another mutation that made it human-to-human-transmissible (also unlikely).
A lot of the early debate on Covid was surprised at how it seemed to have skipped that middle step, or how we couldn’t find it. If you are more familiar with physics, that’s a bit like saying you saw the tunnel effect at the human scale. Sure, we know it’s possible in theory, but… so unlikely, we would probably need to change the science to account for it anyway. Physicists would naturally side with whomever is trying to debunk the observation. That’s how science works: the burden of the proof is on who is making an unlikely claim given current model. The natural history explanation of Covid is possible, but extremely unlikely given “species barrier”.
Once again: I’m not a biologist, but a lot of the scenario that would make that possible would change our approach to epidemiology:
1. if the virus was undetected among humans close to bats for a while, and mutated to become transmissible, we’d need to think of monitoring asymptomatic humans;
2. if the virus was present and undetected in an intermediary species, that’s more likely but still very worrisome and would require significant changes to veterinary practices;
3. if there was a genetic manipulation towards gain of function, the political consequences would be a shit-show but it would preserve our understanding of how frequently and consistently viruses mutate.
In that particular case, the instinct of scientists was split, between people who see the gains-of-function research valuable and those who defend the model — which is why there isn’t a clear view of what “scientists” think. However, don’t let that disagreement confuse you: clarifying what happened will have scientific impact, be it ban a controversial approach, or change our understanding of inter-species viral transmission.
I’m not dismissing that it happen —I can’t imagine you’ve read anything like that in my comment— but the natural origin theory changes our understanding of how fast it can happen.
In this particular case there were reports that the virus was present in Spain and Italy before China. They seem to ignore that and keep screeching that CHina is to blame.
Edit: added source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...
The problem with this, if it were true, is that it will be very difficult to explain why there were not a lot of cases of misdiagnosed respiratory diseases in 2019 as we do know now that it is very contagious and what the symptoms are; they were not reported and definitely not on any scale.
We know it was in Wuhan well before January 2020 so that other sample from that month in Spain or other places would not be strange. A year earlier of course would be.