Relman: "I would call it..superficial, skewed and incomplete..I'm struck by the fact that there are very few primary data..on which we can judge the kinds of assessments that are made, in some cases quite, quite enthusiastically"
Relman: "We can't simply dismiss one idea as very unlikely and hold another as very likely, when, in both cases, we have no direct evidence.
Secretary of State Blinken: "We have got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing..helped to write it."
Yu: "The international organization has lost its credibility by believing one..narrative."
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"Determining the origin of..SARS-CoV-2..should have nothing to do with politics. It is a forensic question, one that requires thorough investigation of all possible theories"
"But a fatally flawed investigation by the World Health Organization and Chinese officials and experts only muddies the waters, and it places the WHO further at odds with the U.S. government and the Biden administration."
"The Chinese government received the report in advance and had tightly controlled the investigators’ visit to Wuhan, where the outbreak originated and where labs hold the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses."
"Let’s say, for instance that a Florida panther rampaged through the South Bronx, injuring many people. It would be immediately reasonable to wonder: How could that possibly happen? Florida panthers don’t live anywhere near the Bronx and aren’t normally so ferocious."
"WIV is around 10 miles from the site of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, whereas the natural coronavirus variants that most closely resemble SARS-CoV-2 come from a region in South West China more than 900 miles away."
"David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University, says a lab leak was never the subject of a 'fair and dispassionate discussion of the facts as we know them.'"
"Relman agrees that in the absence of conclusive evidence, the message on origins should be 'we don’t know.'..[H]e found himself increasingly disheartened by those who..had seized on a spillover scenario, despite 'an amazing absence of data.'"
"[L]ab-release dangers are growing as well. The risk increases in proportion with the number of labs handling bioweapons and potential pandemic pathogens (more than 1,500 globally in 2010)..many of them, like the Wuhan lab, located in urban areas close to international airports."
Taiwan: 0.4 per million (10 deaths)
China: 3 per million (4,636 deaths)
Singapore: 5 per million (30 deaths)
Hong Kong: 27 per million (203 deaths)
South Korea: 33 per million (1,678 deaths)
Japan: 60 per million (7,584 deaths)
US: 1,700 per million (549,145 deaths; +2K daily)
New Zealand: 5 per million (26 deaths)
Australia: 35 per million (909 deaths)
..
UK: 1,800 per million (125,690 deaths)
Nations that successfully suppressed outbreak include both small and large, both island and non-island, and both autocratic and democratic.
Sole relevant parameter for success or failure is whether government took prompt resolute action (success) or whether it did not (failure).
How did so many rich, but sociopath-led, countries get it so wrong? How did others get it so right? nymag.com/intelligencer/…
"[T]he UK was consumed with Brexit..The US had Trump..As the pandemic progressed, both [sociopath-led] countries flipped from denial to capitulation, choosing to treat almost any caseload plateau as an opportunity to relax, no matter how high..ongoing spread it represented."
"For decades, the richest nations of the world had told themselves a [lie] in which wealth and medical superiority offered, if not total immunity from disease, then certainly a guarantee against pandemics, regarded as a premodern residue of the underdeveloped world."