Covid: China hits back as US revisits Wuhan lab-leak theory

[Ghost Hobbit]

BBC Reporting: Looks like China is getting desperate to shift attention away from truth.


China has denounced US efforts to further investigate whether Covid-19 came from a Chinese lab.
US President Joe Biden has said he expects to release the results of an intelligence report on the origins of the virus.
China's foreign ministry accused the US of "political manipulation and blame shifting".
It has rejected any link between Covid-19 and a virus research lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

• Why the lab-leak theory is being taken seriously

Covid-19 was first detected in Wuhan in late 2019. Since then, more than 168 million cases have been confirmed worldwide and about 3.5 million deaths reported.
Authorities linked early Covid cases to a seafood market in Wuhan, leading scientists to theorise that the virus had first passed to humans from animals.

• Wuhan: City of silence
• Wuhan marks its anniversary with triumph and denial
• Covid map: Where are cases the highest?

But recent US media reports have suggested growing evidence the virus could instead have emerged from a laboratory in China, perhaps through an accidental leak.
Why is this dispute happening now?
In a statement on Wednesday, President Biden said he had asked for a report on the origins of Covid-19 after taking office, "including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident". On receiving it this month, he asked for "additional follow-up".
Mr Biden said the majority of the intelligence community had "coalesced" around those two scenarios, but "do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other".
He said he had now asked agencies to "redouble their efforts to collect and analyse information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion".
On Thursday, Mr Biden told reporters he planned to release the report "unless there's something I'm unaware of".
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau then voiced his support for efforts made by the US and other countries to better understand the origins of the virus.

Wednesday's announcement angered Chinese officials.

media captionIn January 2021, the BBC's Robin Brant visited the Wuhan market where Covid-19 was first traced - a year after the first outbreak
Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said it showed the US "does not care about facts or truth, and has zero interest in a serious science-based study of origins".
"Their aim is to use the pandemic to pursue stigmatisation, political manipulation and blame shifting. They are being disrespectful to science, irresponsible to people's lives and counter-productive to the concerted efforts to fight the virus," he said.
The spokesman also said US intelligence agencies had a "dark history" of spreading misinformation.
A statement from the Chinese embassy in the US, which did not directly refer to Mr Biden's order, said "smear campaigns and blame shifting are making a comeback".

Readers now long used to articles dismissing the lab-leak theory as a dangerous, fringe conspiracy may be slightly bemused to find it suddenly front-page, presented as an entirely plausible possibility.

The truth is, there's always been plenty of circumstantial evidence to support both competing theories. A zoonotic origin, in which the virus passes naturally from bat to humans, is supported by the fact that coronaviruses have crossed the species barrier in exactly this way before.
There are also plenty of precedents for lab leaks in which researchers get accidentally infected by the virus they're working on. The Wuhan outbreak happens to be on the doorstep of the world's leading laboratory for the collection, study and experimentation on bat coronaviruses.
What's changed is not the evidence - of which there is none so far to prove either scenario - but the politics. The lab-leak theory, born into an environment poisoned by disinformation, was undermined not so much by China's denials, but by the fact it was being pumped by former US President Donald Trump.
Media organisations everywhere gave it the cold shoulder. My own attempts to look seriously at the lab-leak theory in May last year ran into long and fraught editorial discussions before it finally made it to publication.
The prevailing narrative has also loomed large over the science. Despite the dominant voices of some leading virologists insisting that only a zoonotic origin needed be investigated, a determined group of scientists has continued to argue that both scenarios should remain on the table.
It may be too late, of course. Wherever the debate goes now, China is extremely unlikely to allow another investigation on its soil.

What do we know about the lab theory?
Speculation about the Wuhan Institute of Virology - one of China's top virus research labs - began last year and was propagated by Mr Trump.
US state department cables came to light in April 2020 that showed embassy officials were worried about biosecurity there.
Earlier this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a report written jointly with Chinese scientists on the origins of Covid-19 which said the chances of it having started in a lab were "extremely unlikely".
It said the virus had probably jumped from bats to humans via another intermediary animal, but that more research was needed.
A WHO spokesperson on Thursday reiterated to the BBC that further studies were needed "in a range of areas, including on the early detection of cases and clusters, and the potential roles of animal markets, transmission via the food chain and the laboratory incident hypothesis".

IMAGE COPYRIGHTGETTY IMAGES
image captionThe Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was linked to early Covid cases
The laboratory theory has received increased public attention in the US amid recent reports attributed to intelligence sources that say three members of the Wuhan Institute of Virology were admitted to hospital in November 2019, several weeks before China acknowledged the first case of the new disease in the community.
Anthony Fauci, President Biden's chief medical adviser, has maintained he believes the virus was passed from animals to humans, though he conceded this month he was no longer confident Covid-19 had developed naturally.
Mr Biden's order for further investigations came the day after Xavier Becerra, US secretary for health and human services, urged the WHO to ensure a "transparent" investigation into the virus's origins.
"Phase 2 of the Covid origins study must be launched with terms of reference that are transparent, science-based and give international experts the independence to fully assess the source of the virus and the early days of the outbreak," he said.
While there is still no evidence to suggest it is man-made, Facebook on Thursday said that in light of the ongoing investigations and in consultation with public health experts it would "no longer remove the claim that Covid-19 is man-made from our apps".
"We're continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge," it said.
Related Topics

 

[Beast]

Enjoy your vacation with your fake news

 

[denel]

Of course, they are deflecting every bit of effort.

Bottom line, we need to get to the bottom of the origin of this virus - CCP/US both need to step aside and let international scientists do their work. This means free and fair analysis.

CCP has done enough damage from this worldwide; we have right to know so that the next pandemic can be prepared accordingly.

Enough of this b/s conspiracies from every state actor. Facts are it originated in China. End of story. Trying to deny this is folly.

 

[Beast]

Of course, they are deflecting every bit of effort.

Bottom line, we need to get to the bottom of the origin of this virus - CCP/US both need to step aside and let international scientists do their work. This means free and fair analysis.

CCP has done enough damage from this worldwide; we have right to know so that the next pandemic can be prepared accordingly.

Enough of this b/s conspiracies from every state actor. Facts are it originated in China. End of story. Trying to deny this is folly.

While it's the US who refused to allow fort detrick to be visited by WHO. Say who guilty?

 

[GumNaam]

Honestly dudes...the u.s. is fast starting to sound like a crabby ex mother in law that keeps harping about how mean her ex son in law was!

 

[Vanguard One]

The lab-leak theory has been strongly rejected by China


Nearly a year and a half since Covid-19 was detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the question of how the virus first emerged remains a mystery.

But in recent weeks the controversial claim that the pandemic might have leaked from a Chinese laboratory - once dismissed by many as a fringe conspiracy theory - has been gaining traction.
Now, US President Joe Biden has announced an urgent investigation that will look into the theory as a possible origin of the disease.
So what do we know about the competing theories - and why does the debate matter?

What is the lab-leak theory?

It's a suspicion that the coronavirus may have escaped, accidentally or otherwise, from a laboratory in the central Chinese city of Wuhan where the virus was first recorded.
Its supporters point to the presence of a major biological research facility in the city. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has been studying coronaviruses in bats for over a decade.

The laboratory is located just a few kilometres from the Huanan wet market where the first cluster of infections emerged in Wuhan.

Those who support the theory say it could have leaked from this facility and spread to the wet market.
Most argue it would have been an unaltered virus collected from the wild, rather than engineered.
The controversial theory first emerged early on in the pandemic, and was promoted by then-US President Donald Trump. Some even suggested it could have been engineered as a possible biological weapon.
While many in the media and politics dismissed these as conspiracy theories at the time, others called for more consideration of the possibility. Nevertheless, the idea resurfaced in recent weeks.

So why has it come up again?

Because reports swirling around the US media have raised fresh concerns over the lab-leak theory. And some scientists who were once sceptical of the idea have expressed fresh openness to it.

A classified US intelligence report - saying three researchers at the Wuhan laboratory were treated in hospital in November 2019, just before the virus began infecting humans in the city - began circulating in US media this week.

Lab-leak theories centre on the Wuhan Institute of Virology


But it was reported the Biden administration had shut down a US state department investigation, set up by President Trump, into the lab-leak theory.

"That possibility certainly exists, and I am totally in favour of a full investigation of whether that could have happened," Anthony Fauci, President Biden's chief medical adviser, told the US senate committee on 11 May.

President Biden now says he asked for a report on the origins of Covid-19 after taking office, "including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident".

President Biden asked intelligence agencies to report back to him within 90 days on the virus's origin


On Tuesday, Mr Trump sought to take credit for the renewed interest in an emailed statement to the New York Post. "To me it was obvious from the beginning but I was badly criticised, as usual," he said. "Now they are all saying: 'He was right.'"

What do scientists think?

The issue is still being hotly contested.

A World Health Organization (WHO) investigation was supposed to get to the bottom of it, but many experts believed it produced more questions than answers.

A team of WHO-appointed scientists flew to Wuhan earlier this year on a mission to investigate the source of the pandemic. After spending 12 days there, which included a visit to the laboratory, the team concluded the lab-leak theory was "extremely unlikely".


But many have since questioned their findings.
A prominent group of scientists criticised the WHO report for not taking the lab-leak theory seriously enough - it was dismissed in a few pages of a several-hundred-page report.
"We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data," the scientists wrote in Science Magazine.
And there is growing consensus among experts that the laboratory leak should be looked at more closely.
Even the WHO's own director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has called for a new investigation, saying: "All hypotheses remain open and require further study."
And Dr Fauci now says he's "not convinced" the virus originated naturally. That's a shift from a year ago, when he thought it most likely Covid had spread from animals to humans.
What does China make of this?

China has hit back at suggestions the virus may have escaped from a laboratory by calling it a smear, and it has suggested the coronavirus may have have entered the country in food shipments from another country.

The Chinese government points to new research published by one of its leading virologists into samples collected from bats in a remote abandoned mine.

• Wuhan- City of silence
• Wuhan scientist 'welcomes' visit over lab leak claim
• Wuhan marks its anniversary with triumph and denial

Prof Shi Zhengli - often referred to as "China's Batwoman" - a researcher at the Wuhan Institute, published a report last week revealing that her team had identified eight coronavirus strains found on bats in the mine in China in 2015. The paper says that coronaviruses from pangolins pose more of an immediate threat to human health than the ones her team found in the mine.

China's state media have accused the US government and Western media of spreading rumours.

"The public opinion in the US has become extremely paranoid when it comes to the origin of the pandemic," an editorial in the Communist Party-owned Global Times newspaper said.

Instead, the Chinese government has been pushing another theory: that the virus reached Wuhan on frozen meat from China or South-East Asia.

Is there another theory?

Yes, and it's called the "natural origin" theory.

This argues the virus spread naturally from animals, without the involvement of any scientists or laboratories.
Supporters of the natural origin hypothesis say Covid-19 emerged in bats and then jumped to humans, most likely through another animal, or "intermediary host."


That idea was backed by the WHO report, which said it was "likely to very likely" that Covid had made it to humans through an intermediate host.

This hypothesis was widely accepted at the start of the pandemic, but as time has worn on, scientists have not found a virus in either bats or another animal that matches the genetic make-up of Covid-19, casting doubt over the theory.

Why does this matter?

Given the massive human toll of the pandemic - which has now claimed the lives of 3.5 million people worldwide - most scientists think understanding how and where the virus originated is crucial to prevent it happening again.

The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was linked to early Covid cases


If the "zoonotic" theory is proved correct, it could affect activities such as farming and wildlife exploitation. In Denmark, fears about the spread of the virus through mink farming led to millions of mink being culled.

But there are also big implications for scientific research and international trade if theories related to a laboratory leak or frozen food chains are confirmed.

And confirmation of a leak may also affect how the world views China, which has already been accused of hiding crucial early information about the pandemic, and place further strain on US-China relations.

"From day one China has been engaged in a massive cover-up," Jamie Metzl, a fellow at the Washington-based Atlantic Council who has been pushing for the lab-leak theory to be looked into, told the BBC.

"As the evidence for the lab-leak hypothesis grows, we should be demanding the full investigation of all origin hypotheses that's required."

But others cautioned against pointing the finger at China too quickly.

"We do need to be a bit patient but we also need to be diplomatic. We can't do this without support from China. It needs to be a no-blame environment," Prof Dale Fisher, of Singapore's National University Hospital, told the BBC.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57268111

 

[zectech]

Whoever believes this lie is a Netanyahu troll:

President Biden is now calling for a report on the origins of COVID-19:
President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered U.S. intelligence officials to “redouble” their efforts to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, including any possibility the trail might lead to a Chinese laboratory.

After months of minimizing that possibility as a fringe theory, the Biden administration is joining worldwide pressure for China to be more open about the outbreak, aiming to head off GOP complaints the president has not been tough enough as well as to use the opportunity to press China on alleged obstruction.

The story blew up over the weekend after The Wall Street Journal reported that three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough to be hospitalized (which disproves the CN lab leak lie) in November 2019.

How did U.S. intelligence find this out? The report, according to the Journal, "was provided by an international partner."

So where is this talk coming from? Which country is the Journal's "international partner"?

My guess is that it's Israel, because when the lab-leak theory was first floated, in a Washington Times story in January 2020, it was sourced to Israeli intelligence:

​

The deadly animal-borne coronavirus spreading globally may have originated in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan linked to China’s covert biological weapons program, said an Israeli biological warfare analyst.​

​

​

​

 

[BHAN85]

A deliberately spread of a DNA engineered virus is the most feasible theory since the FIRST DAY.

Covid-19 is good for Chinese economy (destroy another economies, competitors, and decrease raw materials price, including oil).

So, why they wouldn't do it if they can do it and they win money doing it? Because Chinese gov care about Non-chinese people health?

 

[VkdIndian]

It is not too long when the entire truth would be out.

China has gained immensely from COVID as brought out in the previous few posts.

COVID is a Chinese made/propagated pandemic that has lead to death of millions across the world. It should be treated like an act of war and all countries should join hands to teach China that it can’t get away with a murder.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

A deliberately spread of a DNA engineered virus is the most feasible theory since the FIRST DAY.

Covid-19 is good for Chinese economy (destroy another economies, competitors, and decrease raw materials price, including oil).

So, why they wouldn't do it if they can do it and they win money doing it? Because Chinese gov care about Non-chinese people health?

Why would China release it in China?

Why would China publish the genome sequence instead of keep it classified or pretend not to know?

How would China know US and EU would **** up? In 2019 the US declared itself the most prepared to handle a pandemic ever in the entire world in all of history.

 

[BHAN85]

Why would China release it in China?

Why would China publish the genome sequence instead of keep it classified or pretend not to know?

How would China know US and EU would **** up? In 2019 the US declared itself the most prepared to handle a pandemic ever in the entire world in all of history.

Because they need a critical mass to spread over the whole world.

They wait until a few before Chinese New Year, when thousand of Chinese people come back to a lot of countries.

Why USA did 911 self attacks? Same reason than China spread Covid.
When a empire take off and feel strong, they start to do evil things, because no-one dare to accuse them.
China in 2020 is like USA in 2001. Killing three thousand of their own people to achieve economic gains.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

Because they need a critical mass to spread over the whole world.

They wait until a few before Chinese New Year, when thousand of Chinese people come back to a lot of countries.

Then why publish the genome or report to the WHO?

Could have just kept it secret or pretend "we are poor 3rd world China we have no medical technology". That would've delayed the vaccine by the 2-3 months it would've taken to identify the disease and sequence the genome. Moderna started working on the vaccine the day after the genome was published.

Or why publish a clinical guidebook?

 

[VkdIndian]

Then why publish the genome or report to the WHO?

Could have just kept it secret or pretend "we are poor 3rd world China we have no medical technology". That would've delayed the vaccine by the 2-3 months it would've taken to identify the disease and sequence the genome. Moderna started working on the vaccine the day after the genome was published.

Or why publish a clinical guidebook?

Yes. That’s right.

China seems to have a lot of explaining to do. Hopefully, that day is not too far.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

Yes. That’s right.

China seems to have a lot of explaining to do. Hopefully, that day is not too far.

We actually don't have to explain anything we don't want to. You can neither force us nor do anything about it.

 

[VkdIndian]

You can neither force us nor do anything about it.

I know that China did this because it thought that it has become too strong.

Don’t make this between one Country vs China.

It would turn into most of the World vs China.
So stop gloating over your presumed power and buckle up.