What should be the logical step right now to investigate the origins?
1. Invite scientists to come and sample in Yunnan and especially Mojiang, and release available sequences and sampling information, or
2. Block any access to the Mojiang mine, confiscate samples from the few Chinese scientists who somehow managed to get there, take all viral DBs offline and firmly tell the WHO to go sample elsewhere.
Well, you know the story.
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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.
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.