No. of Recommendations: 6
Dope:
On Tuesday, FBI director Christopher Wray publicly acknowledged that the Bureau considers an accidental biohazard leak from a laboratory in China to be the likeliest cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. The assessment had been made in August 2021, as part of an intelligence review ordered by President Biden. In an interview that aired on Fox News yesterday, Wray broke his silence on the matter, saying, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.” He added, “Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”Ok, Dope, what is the FBIs area of expertise? Does the area of FBI expertise encompass tracking airborne highly transmissible diseases?
NO.
Also, the right doesn't trust or like the FBI. So how does the FBI become the most trusted source for something outside of it's area of expertise for the right wing? <snip>
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, April 12, 2023"This twist to the origins search began in early March, when scientists at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) and their colleagues uploaded genetic data from swabs taken at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market to a scientific database.
An international team of researchers led by Crits-Christoph found the overlapping genetic material of animals and the virus at the same spots in the market, a connection the Chinese researchers soon confirmed with their own analysis in Nature.
The proximity is key, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization–International Vaccine Center in Saskatchewan and one of the collaborators on the international report.
“It's not a ‘smoking raccoon dog,’ but it is pretty indicative that in exactly the same part of the market that our other analyses suggested we would find the animals, now we found them in that exact spot—with the virus and without, importantly, much human [DNA present],” Rasmussen says. The findings confirm previous reports that live animals were sold at that market, and evolutionary biologist Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney—a co-author of the international team's report—had photographed live raccoon dogs there several years earlier. What the swab results don't do is confirm that the raccoon dogs or other animals were actually infected with the virus or that they were the animals that first spread it to people. The leading alternative scenario is that the virus leaked from one of several virology labs in Wuhan that conduct research on coronaviruses. And although there is no direct evidence for this or other theories, the new data cannot rule them out.
Raccoon dog...
...
Such lingering uncertainty isn't unusual: tracing the origin of a new viral disease can take decades. For instance, masked palm civets sold at an animal market in Guangdong, China, were identified as an intermediate host of the SARS virus that caused an epidemic in 2002–2003, but it took another 15 years to trace the source of the virus to bats; the origin of the Ebola virus, as well as those of many other viruses, has never been found. With SARS-CoV-2, the Chinese government's reticence to release all the data it has collected has hampered the origins search—for example, the CCDC team first released a preprint of the market data in 2022, two years after collecting them, and they didn't label the animal species present.
Many of the virus-positive samples were clustered in the market's southwestern corner, in the same place where stalls selling live animals were previously reported. Half a dozen virus-positive samples were also positive for raccoon dog DNA or RNA, often at higher amounts than human genetic material. One sample, known as Q61, contained a lot of raccoon dog material but very little human material. The report's authors also found genetic material from Amur hedgehogs, Malayan porcupines, masked palm civets, Siberian weasels, hoary bamboo rats, and other animals. Any of these species may have served as an intermediate host of the virus, which scientists believe likely originated in wild bats. Most of these other animals, however, have not been shown to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. Raccoon dogs have.
“This is not conclusive evidence that an animal was infected, but it's very consistent with that,” Crits-Christoph says. If the market were not the place where SARS-CoV-2 crossed from animals into people but instead the site of a superspreader event caused by people who were already infected,
“you'd have to ask, Why there?” Crits-Christoph says. “If humans brought it there, why did they bring it to the place in Wuhan with the most stalls selling wild animals?” <SNIP>
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-ne...So the
PEOPLE WITH EXPERTISE IN THE AREA say it's not conclusive, but one can conclude by the questions asked that the market source has a much higher probability at this point in time.
