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Nothing in this article is going to come as news to anyone who's been active in centrist and center-right-leaning media spaces for the last two years but the origin of it might.
What really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted
Long story short the UK Sunday Times, the Newspaper to which the New York Times' name is an hommage, and as I gather from other british media the de facto voice of the establishment in the UK has endorsed the Lab Leak theory and I'm kind of surprised that no one's seems to be talking about.
The article doesn't mention Fauci by name but his ties to EcoHealth Alliance have been well documented elsewhere, and the article does acknowledge the existence of US health officials desire to bypass US safety and reporting regulations. The article also notes that while release was likely accidental, the Chinese military and intelligence services had expressed interest in using it as a weapon and had begun working on developing an inoculation for the virus over a month before it first appeared in "the wild".
I personally don't have a whole lot to add to the article itself, but I do find myself wondering what now? I expect the US media to try and bury this. After all Fauci is their golden boy, the poster-child "trust the experts". At the same time, he his, along with the behavior of many within the media itself (looking at you Yglesias) the reason that experts are not to be trusted.
If a singular person (small group of people) is revealed to have been responsible for all the death, of all the suffering, of all the economic disruption and all the curtailment of simple human livelihood that resulted from Covid 19 and the associated panic, what crime can you charge them with? Assuming you could find a court even able to try it, what punishment can even approach being proportional?
I read that article and I'm not clear on what they're claiming is the new information. The Wuhan lab for studying coronaviruses was studying coronaviruses isn't news; of course they were working with SARS-CoV-1-like viruses and how to make vaccines for them, that's their job. Nor is the fact that China actively covered up any research into the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
The article makes no attempt to engage with the evidence for the market hypothesis (link is to a podcast discussing the papers, but there's also links to the papers): (1) the market is epicenter of the early cases and (2) there were two separate introductions to the market weeks apart of two separate lineages of SARS-CoV-2. It's certainly possible that SARS-CoV-2 was twice introduced to the market and nowhere else via two separate lab leaks that coincidentally happened near the specific stalls where the animals hypothesized to be most likely the source of a spillover were sold (maybe someone at the lab sold an infected animal to someone who then sold it at the market? Maybe the market is just the busiest place the accidentally infected people from the lab went, and they quickly realized they should isolate so the market spread swamped any other spread, and the position within the market was coincidence?), but that requires more evidence than "look over there: scary virus lab with military funding".
And, as I've mentioned before on this topic, China desperately wants the cause of the pandemic to be anything but a market spillover because the market hypothesis puts the blame squarely on China for stopping enforcement of the post-SARS measures they had in place to prevent exactly that from happening.
Doesn't this make the argument that the outbreak started with a spillover from animals at the market much less likely rather than more? That there was a distribution of covid within wild animals that split into two lineages before being transferred to humans? Fine enough. That both those lineages happened to transfer over to humans at the same place a few weeks apart, instead of literally anywhere else in the country? That seems spectacularly improbable. A far simpler hypothesis for why this could happen is that both lineages were circling in humans prior to the market and that the market being the epicentre is what caused the detection of the second at the market too. It also makes the lab leak hypothesis more likely, as a lab leak being repeated due to the same undetected problem with safety causing two distinct leaks is more probable than two outbreaks starting in close proximity by sheer random chance.
The reasoning for that supporting the market hypothesis is that it suggests the virus was spreading among animals within a farm that sold its animals to the market. It's exactly what you'd expect a zoonotic spillover event to look like. But it could also be explained by other theories, for instance the lab repeatedly selling infected animals to the market.
That's not supported by the data. In order for this to be true, either (1) the data has been manipulated to omit cases not linked to the market, (2) all of those humans were closely linked to the market, or (3) all of those humans were very careful (or coincidentally happened to) not spread the virus except at the market.
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