Not much news this week, because of the holiday, so I’ll just share a couple of longer articles:
Since the lab-leak theory is still being pushed by people with the worst agendas, here’s an excellent interactive article on its (lack of) plausability. (I owe some kind jackal a hat tip for sharing an unpaywalled version.)
From the Toronto Star, “Raccoon dog? Bamboo rat? Lab leak? Four years after first COVID case in China, science is providing new clues to the virus’s origins”:
In the early morning hours, a ghostly group of figures in white fanned out across the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, China.
Clad in hazmat suits, the researchers from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention had been dispatched to the sprawling downtown market to hunt for the cause of a strange new virus that was infecting the city’s residents…
In their sweeps beginning on Jan. 1, 2020, the researchers targeted a wide swath of locations — doors, floors, wildlife stalls, public toilets, trash cans, sewage drains and even dead and stray animals. They collected nearly 1,000 environmental samples and more than 400 animal samples during several visits over the next three months.
But it would be another three years — three years during which the COVID-19 pandemic swept the planet and became the largest public health emergency in a century, infecting more than 750 million people, killing an estimated 15 million, and upending the lives of countless more — before the genetic data culled from those market samples would be made public.
It was a delay that prevented scientists early in the pandemic from gaining insight into how the virus may have first infected humans, information that could have aided officials in their efforts to clamp down on the early spread. The delay allowed conspiracy theories to fester and was a decision that Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead for the COVID-19 response at the World Health Organization, calls “inexcusable.”
It wasn’t until March 2023 that a French researcher stumbled on the Chinese data and blew the search for the origins of COVID wide open…
COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: December 27, 2023Post + Comments (83)