A Senate minority report has just been published and reported in ProPublica. ProPublica is a non-profit, non-partisan online news source and winner to date of six Pulitzer Prizes.
It’s a long read, but kind of like a detective story. Sit down and enjoy this whodunit!
Then make up your own mind if you think the origin of Covid were more likely from an unknown animal in the Wuhan wet market, or from an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Me, I remain on the fence, though I lean to LL. If there were some solid actual evidence on the ZO side, like an actual animal with the actual disease, found around the Wuhan wet markets, then I’d change my mind. Till then, the balance of probabilities is with the LL hypothesis. In my view.
[ADDED: A curious thing happened to some scientists who began LL then flipped to ZO. Like Kristian Andersen. Who initially said, to paraphrase: “the virus looks like it could not have arisen in the wild, so presumably it was engineered”. Then, a while later (not very long at all in Andersen’s case) said “well, I can now see how it might have arisen in the wild”. But then — and this is the curious bit — go further and say, “…and it couldn’t have been engineered”. This is a weird extra step. I’m no virologist, but many virologists most assuredly do believe that CoV-2 could have been engineered. Indeed that the evidence, admittedly circumstantial, is that it was.]
China has played a horrible part in all this. It’s kept secret. Punished any whistle blowers. Failed to cooperate with international investigations. In short, it’s made things worse for the rest of the world. While it goes its own merry way on the Zero Covid policy path, which is infuriating even its own population, docile as it usually is.
Shame on China. And shame on the WHO for not putting more pressure on China, especially early on, when the knowledge would have been even more useful: eg, an earlier vaccine could have been developed.
We need to know the origins of Covid so we can know what best to do to avoid the next pandemic. If it’s ZO, then the wet markets need to be closed down. Across Asia. Or something. Something done with them. If it’s LL, then any gain-of-function research needs to be banned forthwith. As it had been by the US, but not by China.
The article:
COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab. ProPublica.
Wayback Internet Archive version
PS: there’s mention in the article of “Party Speak”. This is the same as I’ve called elsewhere “Commie Speak”. The turgid, turdy, tat that Chinese apparatchiks are obliged to use. It was everywhere when I first went to China in 1976, and I even learnt how to write it, in Chinese. Then it waned over the decades, as Deng Xiaoping’s sanity took over. It’s back in major vogue since Xi Jinping, and his mania for keeping CCP party control, at whatever cost. Even linguistic sanity.
