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The deadline set by the Covid Origin Act of 2023 (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619/text) to release names, symptoms, hospital visits, and roles of WIV researchers who had Covid-like symptoms in fall 2019 has come and gone. A Google News search for "Covid Origin Act" results in a single article released over the weekend:
https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/covid-was-not-developed-as-a-bioweapon-dni-finds/
This source is not mainstream. It suggests that the legally mandated report has been released, but puts a spin on the results of the report (Covid not likely an intentional bioweapon) without revealing the full text. Most importantly, it doesn't name any of the names that the Act required. So I went to the website of the Office of the Director for National Intelligence. Crickets. Twitter? There has been a post, but it is about Juneteenth.
Edit: I suppose it is possible that the DNI has made their mandated report to Congress, and that no congresspeople have leaked it yet. In which case one would expect articles in a few hours to days?
As an aside, when I mentioned I was excited about this disclosure to a deeply Blue family member, they suggested I've shifted right. I wonder how the disclosure of Covid origins information became right-coded.
The Left committed early to the "bat soup" theory and declared anybody who doubts it racist, and instituted a censorship blockade of any opposition (or even critical discussion) to this. While they were forced to roll it back a little because dissent went high and wide enough in scientific circles that it wasn't possible any more to block, the initial commitment still weights heavily on the topic, and was not acknowledged as wrong even at "mistakes were made" level, and this colors every critique of this position as attacking the Party Line.
I was always surprised and a little confused that the "bat soup" theory was labelled the non-racist theory.
It sounds weird to me too, how "they are dirty people that eat weird disgusting shit and live in anti-sanitary conditions, and that's where the diseases come from" is non-racist, but "they conducted a high-risk high-technology cutting edge research in collaboration with US government and made a mistake" is racist. But then, very little that the wokes say makes sense to me, so that's just one more thing...
While I agree it's not the mainstream narrative, I have definitely seen pushback on the framing of Chinese "wet markets" being the source of pandemics being racist with the clarification that
"Wet market" is defined by Wikipedia as being the Singapore government invented term for what in the US we would call a farmer's market or public market. By using the Asian term for it that we don't use, it artificially sounds more distant and exotic. And ignores the actually important part: live animal markets without proper health and safety protocols, letting us pretend we don't need to ask whether our handling of live animals carries pandemic risk.
Related, there's no particular reason to think that there's anything special about China here other than China being really big so an outbreak at a completely random market across the world has a good chance of being in China. That said, the specific animals and local viruses in the local ecosystem may also have more pandemic potential in that region (coronaviruses seem to come from bats in Asia... but maybe that's just where we've been looking for them post-SARS)... although currently scientists are keeping an eye on H5N1 avian flu and live animal sales of chickens happen everywhere and sound a lot less exotic to a US audience.
Monitoring live animal sales everywhere (and which probably extends to keeping up with surveillance of pandemic-potiential viruses in wild animals), and making sure they're conducted safely is a massive, expensive project. Which means there's a massive demand for thought-stopping narratives for why we don't need to do it.
I don't think that in American society and American public discourse the question of "whether we need better regulation of live animal markets" even exists, let alone has any prominent placement. Thus, I do not think there's any discernable demand to skew any existing discourse (such as one about Covid origins) to one or other side of the question. I'm sure there are people for whom these questions are of supreme importance, but they do not have any way to influence the Covid discourse in any form.
Statistical arguments have never worked as "get out of literally Hitler free" card when it concerns racism accusations. If drawing attention to China or Chinese wet markets as source of infection were declared racist, then it'd be racist regardless of any statistical justification you could provide.
Not markets specifically. But I do certainly hear people talk about the disease potential of cramming animals too close together and overusing antibiotics. Which was in the news recently due to the avian flu outbreak spiking egg prices, which has the potential to lead to an avian flu pandemic. To be fair, part of why egg prices went up is because the US was aggressive about culling birds suspected to be infected.
I'm not proposing some active conspiracy, just the natural tendency (along the lines of fundamental attribution error) to think of problems as only able to happen to other people.
I think you're agreeing with me.
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It doesn't just sound distant and exotic, it sounds impossible to maintain hygiene in. "So this is our wet market, it's like a farmer's market except there are live animals and bits of dead animals everywhere, all crammed in together and all of it is wet, perpetually wet." No wonder a new disease appeared, I'm surprised the whole place didn't come to life in a lightning storm and terrorise Tokyo!
Although re Western handling of animals, that is regulated as shit. In Australia, even in rural areas, you can buy chickens and ducks without government intervention and that's about it. You can't buy them from a farmer's market though, live animal sales are not allowed in the same market as open produce stalls. It's a bit more lax in the US, especially in rural areas, but they still try to maintain livestock census and if say we had a spontaneous outbreak of BSE it wouldn't take them long (within the day) to track it to the source.
So it's not live animal tracking they want to distract from.
I think you're missing my point. According to that Wikipedia article, "wet market" doesn't mean anything different from "farmer's market"; it's just the term used for the concept in that region. So you get the message of "the stupid foreigners have this weird exotic type of market that's a bad idea" instead of "China has laxer health and safety regulations on their farmers markets; they should enforce regulations more like the ones in the US/Australia." (and, related, a reminder that those regulations in the US/etc. are doing something useful).
Yeah man, sorry I wasn't clear - that's what people think when they hear wet market, it's like a farmer's market but they think "it's like a farmer's market except revolting". And you say "not really, hygiene standards are laxer but they are at Western farmer's markets too" and they say "but there's exotic meat and live animals for sale" and you say "yeah but it's from local butchers and farmers selling their goods, like markets in the sixties and seventies before we got such stringent standards", but in their heads they still imagine people wandering around grabbing livers out of buckets and putting them in baskets next to fish heads they got from another bucket and bat brains from the bargain bin. Or they think there's a flower stall, and then a stall selling cannolis, and then a store selling lettuces, and then a fucking nightmare of blood and flesh, and then a guy selling avocados...
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I have been to farmer's markets in the US and in Europe, and at precisely none have I seen live or dead wild animals for sale. No one breeds bats (I think, maybe in China) so the market was selling wild animals - dead I presume, which is pretty weird.
The eating of weird wild animals is as traditional as Chinese medicine. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao invented both:
China banned bushmeat in 2020, so obviously, they agree with me, and you are the only one left defending the indefensible. Don't buy roadkill from a roadside stall.
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