Even if the webminar starts with the usual factual and logical fallacy ('zoonosis happens all the time, hence a research-related accident is much less likely'), it does improve much towards the end, especially thanks to @YanzhongHuang who inject a healthy dose of realism.
I still find it irritating though that @ggronvall brought up the political slant so much.
Sometimes it is better to just discuss the science and leave the politics to politicians.
On the science part she unfortunately made the usual mistake of citing the supposed absence of SARS-CoV-2 in a lab as a strong argument against a research-related accident.
@ggronvall may I remind you that the most parsimonious origins scenario is an infected field sampler.
In that case the first time the virus would arrive in Wuhan could well be in the body of that infected field sampler.
No reason for it to be in any Wuhan lab before. An that would perfectly also perfectly explain the lack of detection at the source...
Unless one can go back to these Yunnan caves to check what is there - which - guess what - nobody can, because they are being blocked from doing so.
Anyway, @YanzhongHuang was clear: trust won't get you far in countries like China or the USSR.
Verify - don't just believe.
Additionally that 'no virus in the lab' argument is incredibly naive because it supposes that there is some kind of virus police which makes sure that every sample is immediately processed and that all detected viruses are fully disclosed.
Which could not be further from reality
@DavidRelman explained as much (and more) in this very good Stanford webminar.
Anyway, as to @ggronvall position, it would be proper to mention that she is also works for Hopkins Center for Health Security - which has been extremely busy working (with the US government backing) on improving biosafety practices in China.
That is very responsible work, especially given the research that the NIH was at the same time supporting in China.
But I just wonder if there is not a bit of a conflict of interest here.
How good would all that work look if indeed it was a research-related accident? @Ayjchan
Since Jan 21, the Hopkins Center for Health Security has worked with Tianjin University, the Interacademy Partnership, with support from the US Department of State and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to develop the Tianjin Biosecurity Guidelines.
That very first picture of SARS-CoV-2 was taken on the 7th Jan 2020 by Song Jingdong (宋敬东), associate researcher at the Beijing Institute of Virology and a student of Hong Tao.
But bad habits die hard, and as we just learnt a senior scientist got infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the Beijing Institute of Virology in Jan or Feb 2020.
Another SARS lab accident in the same lab. Nothing changes.
They worked so hard to create a nice little story of immaculate infection via imported frozen food - good reason to fill rather disappointed that it did not catch up.
“A recent study from the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. revealed that the coronavirus was already spreading in the U.S. in early December 2019 - a humiliating slap in the face for politicians who claimed they have enormous evidence the virus came from a lab in Wuhan”
That certainly deserves top marks for creative writing.
They nearly got there though.
They managed to get the perfect debilitating ToRs, hoodwinked a few well groomed useful idiots by claiming a moral high ground, and got the near perfect result from the China-WHO Potemkin tour.
This paper can be found below.
It actually says preciously little that is new - only puts a new twists on well known facts while ignoring the logical issues that the suggestions in the paper raise.
Let's start by what is clear and well accepted: the market was just an amplificator event, on line #2 of Wuhan tube.
An haplotype network shows that the samples isolated at the Huanan Seafood Market do not cluster the ancestral lineages - no jump to human there. #DRASTIC
So the databases were taken offline in 2019 after the outbreak of the pandemic, which was not even communicated to the WHO until the 3rd Jan 20, and for which there was actually about nothing known internationally until the 31st Dec 19.
These hackers clearly had a time machine.
As we now know, it is even worse because the databases were actually taken offline in Sep 2019.
2nd contradiction: as DRASTIC has always said, only the viruses that were the object of a scientific publication were released publicly in the DB. Everything else was not.