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Medicine China

WHO Expert 'Had Concerns' About Lab Close To 1st COVID Cases (apnews.com) 166

Posted by BeauHD from the accidents-happen dept.
When a World Health Organization-led team traveled to China earlier this year to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, a top official said he was worried about safety standards at a laboratory close to the seafood market where the first human cases were detected, according to a documentary released Thursday by Danish television channel TV2. The Associated Press reports: The Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was handling coronaviruses "without potentially having the same level of expertise or safety or who knows," Peter Ben Embarek said during a conference call in January, according to footage shown by TV2. Ben Embarek is a WHO expert on disease transmission from animals to humans and one of the team's leaders. But months later, when WHO released its dense report on its mission to Wuhan, the U.N. health agency concluded that a leak of the virus from the lab was "extremely unlikely" to have caused COVID-19. The WHO report even lent credence to a fringe theory promoted by the Chinese government that the virus may have been spread via frozen seafood packaging.

In recent weeks, however, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has acknowledged it was "premature" to rule out a possible lab leak as the source of COVID-19, saying last month that he was asking China to be more transparent about the early days of the pandemic. "I was a lab technician myself. I'm an immunologist and I have worked in the lab and lab accidents happen," Tedros said. "It's common." In the Danish TV2 documentary, the WHO's Ben Embarek is pictured arriving in China, inspecting the stalls at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan and examining what he hypothesizes might have been living quarters for people who handled live animals there -- raising the possibility that the virus may have jumped from animals to people at the market. "It would mean that the contact between the human beings and whatever may have been in the market i.e. virus and maybe live animals would have been more intense," Ben Embarek said. "It goes without saying that the close contact would be doubled many times between humans and animals if you are among them around the clock."

The Danish documentary also featured Ben Embarek expressing his worries in January about the Wuhan branch of the Chinese CDC, concerns that have never been publicly disclosed by WHO. While numerous experts have questioned whether there might have been a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology -- where scientists were studying coronaviruses -- there has been less interest in another nearby facility. "What is more concerning to me is the other lab," Ben Embarek said. "The one that is next to the market," he explained, referring to the Wuhan branch of the Chinese CDC, located just 500 meters (547 yards) away from the Huanan market. In a June interview, Ben Embarek told TV2 that the possibility of a lab staffer being infected with the coronavirus while collecting bat samples was "likely."
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WHO Expert 'Had Concerns' About Lab Close To 1st COVID Cases More

WHO Expert 'Had Concerns' About Lab Close To 1st COVID Cases

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  • Lab escape can no longer be called conspiracy theory. Now lets only call escape of a virus engineered to be more virulent for research a conspiracy theory.

    Must protect muh gain of function research. WHO and Daszak and Friends should give it up already ... it's going to get banned because of precautionary principle, they should just resign themselves to it and stop making science look bad.

    • But this would still mean that lab escape scenario from the other lab on the other side of the city was wrong all along and people were right to doubt it. And also what is being described by Embarek isn't a research failure, but just a zoonosis incident like previously thought.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by burtosis ( 1124179 )

        And also what is being described by Embarek isn't a research failure, but just a zoonosis incident like previously thought.

        False. There is a massive difference in someone accidentally contracting it unawares when butchering an animal or similar and a researcher purposely seeking out coronavirus samples from bats and not taking proper precautionary measures and contracting it. Also going to point out that a conspiracy is the clandestine plan among two or more people to break the law which virtually none of these related theories fall under.

        • a researcher purposely seeking out coronavirus samples from bats and not taking proper precautionary measures and contracting it.

          That's the literal definition of zoonosis, no matter how you twist it.

        • Re:Time for the second layer of misdirection (Score:4, Informative)

          by Rei ( 128717 ) on Friday August 13, 2021 @07:44PM (#61690255) Homepage

          Indeed - they really go out into deep into the middle of nowhere, deep into remote unexplored caves, to try to find unique samples. I'd recommend reading about Shi Zhengli, China's "bat woman", about the length researchers would go to to find samples.

          Though I'm not sure where this notion that this is the only possibility is coming from; in the original story [tv2.dk], nowhere does Embarek state that he doesn't think it could have come from lab research. But the Slashdot study leaves out the worst part from the original, which is that the "extremely unlikely" wording was negotiated. Embarek did not believe this; he didn't think it was the most likely option, but he did not consider it extremely unlikely. But China didn't even want the words "extremely unlikely" in there - they wanted it flatly ruled out. Embarek negotiated to "extremely unlikely". And then in interviews after that, supported this "extremely unlikely" conclusion that he did not actually believe.

          • "leaves out the worst part from the original, which is that the "extremely unlikely" wording was negotiated."

            You might call it the worse part, but it's still par for the course, something everyone and not only the Chinese do to embellish their public image.

          • Why is someone who's not a Chinese citizen succumbing to pressure to say things he doesn't believe?

            Does fear of the Chinese regime strongly permeate to people outside China's jurisdiction, now?

      • Re: Time for the second layer of misdirection (Score:5, Insightful)

        by NagrothAgain ( 4130865 ) on Friday August 13, 2021 @07:05PM (#61690199)
        The point is that a lab escape was never a crazy, insane, nutjob, wacko idea. Even if unlikely, even if we determine it didn't happen, it was always a credible possibility which deserved serious consideration and investigation. It was derided and dismissed and shouted down for purely partisan political reasons.

        • Re: Time for the second layer of misdirection (Score:4, Insightful)

          by AATheorist ( 8044698 ) on Friday August 13, 2021 @07:44PM (#61690257)
          It is great to see more people come on board with this reality. When will the apologies from the twitters and facebook bans come through? Never. This never should have been politicized. It was a shit-tier bullshit response and every major media outlet, every social media company many slashdotters brigaded the mod/ban abilities they had to force any meaningful conversations into the realm of tinfoil hat land.
        • Without proof, it's still crazy, insane, nutjob, wacko bull

          • So many science deniers... (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Xenographic ( 557057 ) on Friday August 13, 2021 @08:26PM (#61690387) Journal

            You're supposed to exclude hypotheses after investigating them, not before.

            The reverse happened here and it happened for partisan political reasons, but it's getting harder to ignore the fact that we're missing a large section of this viruses evolutionary history.

            The simplest (but not the only) explanation is that it happened in humanized mice in a lab doing research to see how the virus would evolve in the future and that it escaped from that lab, so the history will be forever lost without samples from that mouse population which seem unlikely to be forthcoming. Every day we do not find the original animal reservoir where this virus came from is a point in favor of that hypothesis. You can get me to change my mind at any time by finding that animal reservoir. This can also be seen in how well the virus was adapted to humans--it took a long time for any mutations to arise that made it worse.

            In another few years, we'll have to consider anyone who doesn't admit the lab leak is the most likely hypothesis as a science denier, because it's just not credible that this and only this virus would arise zoonotically with no close relatives in any animal population.

            The wet market didn't even sell pangolins or bats, BTW, that was proven by other research that cataloged every single species sold in the market.

            • You're supposed to exclude hypotheses after investigating them, not before.

              What leads you to believe that it wasn't investigated? Rsilvergun posted a few helpful links for you.

              The simplest (but not the only) explanation is that it happened in humanized mice in a lab doing research to see how the virus would evolve in the future and that it escaped from that lab

              No fucking way. The simplest explanation is that it happened when dealing with bushmeat. Millions of people do that daily, and it only involves one animal and one human. Your addition of humanized mice, labs, researches and lab escapes makes it not only not "the simplest" but actually far from "simple".

              • > What leads you to believe that it wasn't investigated?

                Because it was a "debunked conspiracy theory" from the outset... before anyone had done anything to look into it. That's not what "debunked" means nor can a hypothesis like this be excluded immediately. Words like "unproven theory" would have been accurate, "debunked" isn't when the early narrative that it was from a wet market has only gotten more and more suspect over time.

                > The simplest explanation is that it happened when dealing with bushm

            • The wet market didn't even sell pangolins or bats, BTW, that was proven by other research that cataloged every single species sold in the market.

              Do you have a citation for that? I've been wondering what animals were there. All the pictures show it's a seafood market.

            • Every day we do not find the original animal reservoir where this virus came from is a point in favor of that hypothesis. You can get me to change my mind at any time by finding that animal reservoir. This can also be seen in how well the virus was adapted to humans--it took a long time for any mutations to arise that made it worse.

              Also worth mentioning that no one even seems to be looking for an animal reservoir at all.

            • Every day we do not find the original animal reservoir where this virus came from is a point in favor of that hypothesis. You can get me to change my mind at any time by finding that animal reservoir.

              I don't believe that you realize how huge China is. These things take time - years, sometimes over a decade. It *did* take over a decade for the last SARS outbreak. Your "every day we don't find it" reasoning is bullshit.

              This can also be seen in how well the virus was adapted to humans--it took a long time for any mutations to arise that made it worse.

              That makes no sense whatsoever. It's adapted to humans because...well, it was able to jump to them. The other strains didn't so they stayed where they were. Yours is literally a circular reasoning: The virus that has adapted to people is adapted to people.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by iNaya ( 1049686 )

            Considering that it may have escaped from a lab without evidence would be a reasonable thing to consider. Concluding it as a fact without evidence would be a bit premature.

            Lab escapes happen all the time in every type of country; so, NOT considering it as a possibility would be crazy, insane, wacko bovine faeces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

              Concluding it as a fact without evidence would be a bit premature.

              Premature is not the word for it, I think it's fair to say it's stupid to believe in something without evidence. Unfortunately there's a lot of stupid going around these days.

        • Re: Time for the second layer of misdirection (Score:5, Insightful)

          by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt.nerdflat@com> on Friday August 13, 2021 @08:26PM (#61690389) Journal

          Because of the nature of trying to prove a negative assertion, it is very likely that we will never determine for certain that it didn't happen unless we prove something else that is mutually exclusive to it.

          The so-called theory that the virus originated in a lab is a conjecture that people with particular agendas found appealing in 2020 and so pushed the concept as an allegedly viable hypothesis without a shred of any evidence that genuinely pointed to the occurrence. So-called evidence that has since surfaced to supposedly lend the theory that it originated from the lab more credibility does not actually do so unless you are performing the examination with blinders on, and only cherry-picking your evidence.

          • I never said anything about the virus originating in a lab.

          • Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore points out that

            Within the SARS-CoV-2 genome there is an insertion of 12 nucleotides that is entirely foreign to the beta-coronavirus class of virus that SARS-CoV-2 is in. There are many other viruses in this class, including the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 by sequence, and none of them have this sequence. The sequence is called the furin cleavage site.

            In order to infect a cell, the spike protein on the surface of viruses like SARS-CoV-2 needs to first be cut, or cleaved. The cut needn't be terribly exact, but it needs to be cut. Different viruses attract different kinds of cellular "scissors," so to speak, to make this cut; the furin cleavage site attracts the furin protein providing the most efficient way to make a cut. You don't need a furin cleavage site to cut the protein, but it makes the virus more efficiently infectious.

            So where did it come from in SARS-CoV-2? There are other viruses that have furin cleavage sites, other coronaviruses, though not the family of beta-coronaviruses.

            At one point this Nobel Prize winner said "When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus."

        • Iâ(TM)m going to double down on this and point out that it wasnâ(TM)t Trump or âoeright wing racistsâ who politicized it. Itâ(TM)s crazy the lengths people went to in order to demonize Trump.

      • That 'other side of the city' thing is extremely misleading. I don't know where the assumption came from that they had been doing their coronavirus work in the BSL-4 lab, but it's not true. It's not some secret that got uncovered either; Shi Zhengli herself did a Q&A with Science Magazine [sciencemag.org], where she clearly stated that their coronavirus work was conducted in their BSL2 and 3 facility. After the pandemic was already starting, *then* they started doing work on SARS-CoV-2 in their BSL4 lab. The building wi
        • I had people tell me that the lab escape hypothesis is reasonable because "the lab and the food market are on the same subway line". Clearly people believe that 1) the work took place in the BSL-4 lab, and 2) that the only people to travel on that subway line just happen to be foodie microbiologists.
          • Looking at the subway map both of labs would be using the same lines, so to the extent that's possible it doesn't matter either way, but doesn't even the CCP say they found cases prior to the market that had no relationship with it?

    • You were doing great until the phrase gain of function. I thought Fox had moved onto a new talking point by now. Are you sure it wasn’t caused by illegal immigrants?

      • Good boy, Daszak would be proud ... but I just don't see it working in the long run.

        It will be hard to shovel under the rug forever that good guy Obama banned gain of function research and that we will likely never know for certain where the virus came from. Lab escape of a partially man created virus is a likely hypothesis, which through the precautionary principle necessitates renewing Obama's ban. Also sending Daszak on the WHO mission was a fucking disgrace, calling into doubt the objectivity of the WHO

    • The lab leak has been debunked (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday August 13, 2021 @08:43PM (#61690427)
      you can find several links doing just that here [slashdot.org]. YouTuber potholer54 has also debunked it in detail here [youtube.com] and here [youtube.com] with an emphasis on sources.

      Just to address the "gain of function" nonsense, a scientist sent some emails to Dr Fauci where he said the virus looked like it might be engineered. He then did a peer reviewed study and found that it was not. This was early on in the pandemic, however if he'd just waited he could have skipped the study, because when we insert sequences into viruses for gain of function testing they don't last long in successive generations. Since they were inserted artificially they don't survive in the population. In short, it's not possible to manufacture a bioweapon with our current tech.

      If you'd like the rest of the talking points regarding a "lab leak" debunked click the links above and/or watch the videos. China would very much like that you did not though.

      See, China's to blame either way, but if you blame it on a lab leak or a bioweapon then you're not paying attention to the real culprit: wet markets and deforestation that put human beings and other animals in close contact with each other. Deforestation in particular has disrupted bat habitats.

      However Deforestation is also very, very profitable, as are the wet markets. And China very much needs those profits to maintain it's breakneck economic growth, without which their population might start asking questions about their complete lack of civil rights.

      So by all means, blame it on a lab leak. China's laughing at you all the way to the bank.

      • I have a hard time pin pointing why you say this bullshit :
        - you believe a very limited set of genetic manipulation tools are the only ones to induce changes in viruses, which creates genomes which are especially energy inefficient for reproduction. This isn't true, plain old chemical/heat/radiation induced mutation is common.
        - every virus is designed by God and any man made changes pull it away from optimal fitness.
        - changes induced by man have a magical property which by necessity makes them different fro

        • isn't there yet to make bio weapons. I know this because the peer reviewed studies and science communicators above (who link to peer reviewed studies) discuss this.

          It would be like trying to make a copy of the Mona Lisa with a 9 pin dot matrix printer from before 8-bit computers were a thing. Yeah, you could do it, but it wouldn't fool everyone.

          God didn't design anything here. As I've already pointed out elsewhere, the virus was the result of deforestation and the wet markets (probably mostly defore

          • The tech is there to make bio weapons, for the state of the art see the de novo recreation of horsepox.

            Supremely condensed the most important arguments from those scientists was that they couldn't find evidence for a chimera and that "SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone".

            The former is irrelevant to gain of function research with induced mutation and mutation selection. I'd add that if it was bioweapon research, it could almost certainly be made to look completely natural (agai

            • I meant to say that "if it was bioweapon research, even a chimera could almost certainly be made to look completely natural". Random induced mutations would look natural regardless.

      • Re:The lab leak has been debunked (Score:4, Insightful)

        by fafalone ( 633739 ) on Saturday August 14, 2021 @08:10AM (#61691435)
        Just out of curiosity, if it's been so thoroughly debunked, why are so many people saying it can't be ruled out and needs another look? The very experts you're relying on, Fauci says a natural origin is more likely, but isn't ruling the lab out. Same for many others, see this very story. You're also relying on the misstatement of the engineering artifacts; serial passage relies on natural evolution, it doesn't directly cut and paste in the genome, so would lack the markers and the instability of the techniques that were ruled out.
        You're also leaning heavily into the ridiculous 'intentional bioweapon' misdirect, that's not what serious people are talking about at all. Gain of function research is controversial but widely practiced and considered vital for understanding and preventing future pandemics; it's not exclusively bioweapons research.

        If you want to talk about misleading propaganda, attempting to use the genetic markers of splicing techniques to rule out *all* artificial manipulations, particularly serial passage, well that's prime example #1. A good number 2 would be jumping straight over the reasonable 'understanding the pandemic potential of coronaviruses' explanation for the fringe, far fetched 'intentionally designed and/or released bioweapon' thing trying to discredit people trying to talk about the more serious explanations.

        You're also talking to a progressive who doesn't watch Fox News so doesn't really care about whatever conspiracy about Fauci's emails they have, or whatever political games Republicans are trying to play, and starts from the presumption every time one opens their mouth they spew bullshit.
        • Because that's how scientists talk, and right wing politicians are using our scientists talk to deflect from right wing policy's fundamental inability to handle the global pandemic.

          The pandemic was inevitably going to shut down the non-essential sectors of the economy or it was going to kill several million American. When we shut down those sectors the government was going to have to step in to stop homelessness and mass starvation. However doing so would expose the fact that we have enough money for pe
        • this is the "Just asking questions" fallacy.

      • Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore points out,

        Within the SARS-CoV-2 genome there is an insertion of 12 nucleotides that is entirely foreign to the beta-coronavirus class of virus that SARS-CoV-2 is in. There are many other viruses in this class, including the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 by sequence, and none of them have this sequence. The sequence is called the furin cleavage site.

        In order to infect a cell, the spike protein on the surface of viruses like SARS-CoV-2 needs to first be cut, or cleaved. The cut needn't be terribly exact, but it needs to be cut. Different viruses attract different kinds of cellular "scissors," so to speak, to make this cut; the furin cleavage site attracts the furin protein providing the most efficient way to make a cut. You don't need a furin cleavage site to cut the protein, but it makes the virus more efficiently infectious.

        So where did it come from in SARS-CoV-2? There are other viruses that have furin cleavage sites, other coronaviruses, though not the family of beta-coronaviruses.

        At one point this Nobel Prize winner said "When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus."

  • If the media had not poo-pood this for Orange hate (Score:3, Insightful)

    by iamnotx0r ( 7683968 ) on Friday August 13, 2021 @06:36PM (#61690149)
    Despite anyones political beliefs, it might have been more prudent for the media at the time to think of all us people, and not their endless agenda. Over a year of info could have been looked into before *possibly* information being deleted or buried. At this point, the origins of covid will end up being like the Kennedy assassination. Will we ever know the truth?

    • Re:If the media had not poo-pood this for Orange h (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Krishnoid ( 984597 ) on Friday August 13, 2021 @06:52PM (#61690173) Journal
      Well, 18 months into it, it's still a global pandemic and nobody can get 99% of people in the US to get vaccinated or wear masks [local10.com], even at the state level [npr.org], to clamp down on the spread and put an end to this.

      With that "truth" staring us in the face daily, how much does the screenplay for our little origin story really matter? It's not like we're decisively fixing anything in "post-production" against any kind of Christmas release deadline.

      • Re: If the media had not poo-pood this for Orange (Score:5, Insightful)

        by GimpOnTheGo ( 6567570 ) on Friday August 13, 2021 @06:58PM (#61690189)

        Because while it's too late to stop this virus, it's not too late to stop the next one boiling out if a poorly run lab somewhere.

        For all we know the Chinese had a row of testubes containing nasty new viruses and so far they've only accidently dropped one.

        • Or Iran, or some other city in China (they have multiple developed cities there, you know), or the US, or some independent terrorist cell, or some carrier monkey. How about an actual plan and calendar for wherever the next one comes from? We now know month-by-month what pandemic response looks like in every country in the world, how about improving *that* where it's falling short?
        • since as I've discussed elsewhere [slashdot.org] it wasn't a lab leak.

          It might not be too late to do something about the deforestation and wet markets that actually caused this, but to do that we need to get people to stop making up stories about a lab leak and call China to task for their dangerous environmental policies that the Epidemiologists have been warning us about for 40 years.

          Seriously, keep fucking that chicken and what do you expect? We were lucky we made it this long.

        • Because while it's too late to stop this virus, it's not too late to stop the next one boiling out if a poorly run lab somewhere.

          Why bother, you can't get half the people to get a vaccine because they don't take this virus seriously. They care more about laws that protect them from being required to wear masks for the next virus, than the next virus.

          By all means go try and do that... but what else do you need to know about COVID-19 to be successful?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by ArchieBunker ( 132337 )

        Lol last week DeSantis was telling Biden to stop telling him what to do. This week he’s asking the feds for more ventilators. https://thehill.com/homenews/a... [thehill.com]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by arQon ( 447508 )

          And as usual, the Ds chose to be the Rs' bitch, which will cost thousands more lives at a minimum.

          This, right here, is the exact situation that they should have put DeSantis on the spot for. Make him publicly ask for the ventilators, and publicly explain why he wants them. Send a @#$%ing message, and get millions more Florida retards vaccinated as a result.

          You can argue that saving Floridians does the country more harm than good in the long run, but even so, I'm not comfortable with opting for the final sol

  • The WHO never investigated origins of COVID-19 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by takionya ( 7833802 ) on Friday August 13, 2021 @08:08PM (#61690341)
    The WHO never investigated the origins of COVID-19. They traveled to China and were presented with records by the Chinese that conveniently produced no evidence that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The WHO also stated that the delay in traveling to China was caused by the Chinese failing to provide visas. The very first statement out of the WHO was that the virus was not transmissible human-to-human. The CDC has stated that gain-of-function research was not carried-out at Wuhan.

    The only verifiable facts in the above is that the WHO did travel to China.

    • There's also Occam's Razor to contend with. Sure, it is possible the virus was manipulated from the lab. Someone in the lab (1) was modifying a version of SARS, and (2) they created something that was similar but also quite different for this virus, and (3) they released it nearby either as an accident or intentionally to a bushmeat market. It is also possible that (1) another research lab was modifying a version of SARS, and (2) they created something intentionally infectious but also quite different from

      • Re:The WHO never investigated origins of COVID-19 (Score:5, Interesting)

        by amorsen ( 7485 ) <benny+slashdot@amorsen.dk> on Saturday August 14, 2021 @06:01AM (#61691267)

        The simpler hypothesis is this:

        Virologists travel far to go into bat caves to gather virus samples. They accidentally spread a virus to the bats they keep in their lab. Not much care is taken around those bats, since they are not known to be infected with anything. Eventually a virus mutation makes the jump to either the lab workers directly or via other lab animals. The lab workers then infect the general population.

        The virus could stay undetected during this whole process. To me it makes more sense than the wet market theory, since the wet market did not sell bats or pangolins.

        • I'm not saying that's wrong, but how is that simpler? 1) virologist brings back virus from wild; 2) bats in lab get infected; 3) virus mutates to infect humans; 4) virologist gets infected; 5) virologist infects everyone else.

          Maybe that's what really happened, but it's certainly not the simplest scenario.

          Then again, I'm not the biggest fan of Occam's razor, especially in this sort of situation. If a random person in a rural area is patient zero and it spreads from there, then it's hard to argue with anyth

        • > They accidentally spread a virus to the bats they keep in their lab.
          > Not much care is taken around those bats, since they are not known to be infected with anything.

          I never worked with bats, but if the bats in your lab are sterile, I imagine you taking elaborate precautions for them to stay clean.
          You don't want an unknown factor interfering with your studies and I don't see why this should be different with bats than - say - mice.

          The virus does not look engineered and it took us more than 10 years

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The WHO does not investigate things. The WHO is an administrative organization that acts as a central point for distributing data and helps to manage international health issues.

      The WHO didn't state that the virus was not transmissible human-to-human, they said that the data they had been given by China at that stage did not suggest human-to-human transmission was possible. They did not investigate the Wuhan lab, they went to gather data from the Chinese investigations.

      The WHO has to maintain a neutral posi

    • they don't have the political clout to do it. The people who were going to investigate it were the US employees and contractors, our "boots on the ground". But, well, they were pulled out by the previous administration. As a result, it's going to take a long, long time to definitively prove the exact origins, as it'll have to be done with less direct means (and yes, it can be done, science bitches).

  • In a June interview, Ben Embarek told TV2 that the possibility of a lab staffer being infected with the coronavirus while collecting bat samples was "likely."

    Oh dear. I certainly hope that all the social media giants clamped down on any spread of such "misinformation" and "conspiracy theory".

  • What if Covid or a precursor was far more widely spread than is acknowledged? Maybe the reason it was discovered in Wuhan is that it has one of the very few laboratories in the world that specializes in Corona viruses?

  • It's a subsidiary of the Fashion Police.

  • It may be misinformation, and hey, we can't take the risk. Anything that may be misinformation needs to be deleted.

    It doesn't support the prevailing thinking, and it's very, very unpopular.

  • I'd wear a T-Shirt saying "Covid-19 was engineered!" if it would make all people wear a mask and get vaccinated.

    Unfortunately, it seems that the people passionate about spreading the lab hypothesis are the people most willing to spread the virus, too.

    To me, a vaccinated and mask wearing person, the question whether the lab hypothesis is right or not is the least pressing topic about SARS-CoV-2, *currently*. It is important to find the reservoir. But even if the reservoir is found, this will not disprove the

  • We now know that Trump derangement syndrome is extremely contagious, easily spread even by sound waves without a carrier even being present in the same room. Fortunately, the TDS pandemic is slowly dying down, but that very situation causes some sufferers to undergo frenetic activity trying to reinfect others, an unfortunate and novel aspect of the disease.

  • ObStewart: "Oh my god, there’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China, what do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab. That's just a little too weird, don't you think? And then they asked those scientists -- they're like 'how did this... so wait a minute, you work at the Wuhan respiratory coronavirus lab. How did this happen?' and they're like 'mmmm -- a pangolin kissed a turtle?' and you're like

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