I have never really understood why this is so important to the wingnuts. Oh well, I suppose I do. It was a way to gin up a narrative to smear Anthony Fauci. That is the claim that Covid-19 originated in a laboratory in Wuhan which had indirect funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, which Fauci heads. The non-insane version of this was that it was an accidental release, which would be worth knowing. The insane version was that Fauci was the mastermind of a plot to foist the virus on the world in order to bring about a One World Socialist Dictatorship. On the other hand, the pandemic is a hoax and it's not worse than the flu, but if you can't hold at least three contradictory ideas at once, you ain't a Republican.
Anyway, the retiring director of NIH, Francis Collins, exits with the following conclusion:
Statement on Misinformation about SARS-CoV-2 Origins
Analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false. The scientific evidence to date indicates that the virus is likely the result of viral evolution in nature, potentially jumping directly to humans or through an unidentified intermediary animal host.
I won't crowd the plate with all of the data, but here's a fairly easy to understand graphic that is dispositive:
The blue bars show the percent genetic overlap of the viruses studied in the Wuhan lab with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. The light orange bars show the viruses, occurring in nature, which are most similar to SARS-CoV-2. They were not studied in the Wuhan lab. QED. You will find the source document here.
From this analysis, it is evident that the viruses studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant are very far distant from SARS-CoV-2. Included for comparison is RaTG13, one of the closest bat coronavirus relatives to SARS-CoV-2 collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (ref) and BANAL-52, one of several bat coronaviruses recently identified from bats living in caves in Laos (ref). Although RaTG13 and BANAL-52 are 96-97% identical to SARS-CoV-2 at the nucleotide level (>900 nucleotide differences across the entire genome), the difference actually represents decades of evolutionary divergence from SARS-CoV-2. Experts in evolutionary biology and virology have made it clear that even the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2, which were not studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant, are evolutionarily too distant from SARS-CoV-2 to have been the progenitor of the COVID-19 pandemic (ref, ref). Field studies continue the search for more proximate progenitors.
Of course the corporate media won't get this, they're scientifically illiterate.
3 comments:
The origin of the virus is not as important as what happened next.
China knew there was a problem and they did not inform the rest of the world. They did not try to contain it. They knew their relative power to the rest of the world powers would likely have been diminished. Instead, they kept quite, knoingly allowing travel to all parts of the world.
"Hoovering" up all of the available PPE before the pandemic reached the rest of the world is pretty good evidence that they knew and did nothing.
China is a very bad actor and has not been held accountable for their misdeeds which cost millions of lives.
Even though you're officially banned, I'm publishing this because it is defensible, if a bit of an exaggeration. I have no respect for the Chinese government. However, it is pretty much irrelevant to the post per se.
The PRC government reacted the same way authoritarian governments react to damn near everything: denial, panic, ass-covering. Next?
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