WHO report: covid likely not from Wuhan

[PicsInRed]

Covid not from Wuhan, not there before December 2019 and may even have been imported into Wuhan/China in frozen food.

Definitely, 100% not from a lab but may have mutated bit by bit and crossed different animals and borders whilst doing so in order to reach the current covid we know and love.

So there ya go.

www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55996728

@goldfinchfan

China needs to be made to stop it's human rights abuses.

It is getting away with so much because peopel want cheap tat.

We don't want to keep living in fear.........China doesn/t give a stuff about the planet of the quality of LIfe.

It was clear that the WHO were going to decide that Covid was not caused by China.
The virology Lab and bats blood is a coincidence

You are so right......unfortunately. I feel so bloody helpless - anyone else?

@Lweji But because Covid can present as asymptomatic, a lab worker could have picked it up (like with hantavirus in Yunaan) and spread it, and no one would know. It's unlikely we'll find patient zero and when WHO admits that they're not sure now it did originate in a wet market. Covid is so tricky because most people don't show or feel symptoms.

It is a pity people have lost faith in them.

It comes from when they were accused of overblowing H1N1 in 2009, which apparently came to nothing and governments spent too much on vaccines and preparedness.
www.reuters.com/article/us-who-idUSTRE63B2TL20100412

This time they were cautious. Now they are blamed too. The fuckers can't win.

I tend to remember this stuff. Most people seem to forget it. The important thing is to have someone to blame. Preferably someone else.

@lweji
Well, the average person would hardly blame themselves, would they?

Blame is reserved for those in authority. That's the price of authority. Credit is the reward.

@Calledyoulastnightfromglasgow

lweji did you miss Taiwan (not allowed to be part of WHO) screaming for weeks about this virus and begging the WHO to take action?’

Nobody missed it because it didn't happen.

Also WHO does not have the authority to recognise Taiwan as an independent country.

They did a joint briefing with Chinese health authorities because it was a joint investigation. Those were the terms under which WHO was permitted access

I know, LangCleg, and that's what I meant about there being no way they'd have allowed anyone to investigate who they couldn't keep a watch over

On the subject of how we'd assure independence, I realise we probably can't as long as organisations are vulnerable to pressure via funding - and since funding's obviously essential it's a bit of a circular problem

There was a lab technician in Birmingham, she caught small pox at the university. it was in the 70s and if I remember correctly it was the last death recorded of small pox

It was indeed Birmingham, ancientgran, and there's an interesting article about it here: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-45101091
As you'll see, in a roundabout way that outbreak actually killed two people, in that Professor Henry Bedson - the guy who headed the facility - killed himself over it

[quote BibbityBobbety]@Lweji But because Covid can present as asymptomatic, a lab worker could have picked it up (like with hantavirus in Yunaan) and spread it, and no one would know. It's unlikely we'll find patient zero and when WHO admits that they're not sure now it did originate in a wet market. Covid is so tricky because most people don't show or feel symptoms.[/quote]
I know, that is why I don't use a language that conveys certainties.

But what the WHO said now is that it doesn't seem to have originated in Wuhan's wet market where it was detected first.

Infected lab workers, though, are more likely to get high viral loads, and thus more likely to show symptoms. But it could have been covered up, or simply lost along a string of unremarkable contacts. Sure.

My point is that admitting they had it in culture and released it to the population isn't particularly worse than admitting that their farming and market practices are a hotbed for dangerous viruses.

The conspiracy theory that it was released to control the population seems unlikely because they have managed to get rid of it almost entirely, and they don't really need excuses.

[quote 7Days]@lweji
Well, the average person would hardly blame themselves, would they?

Blame is reserved for those in authority. That's the price of authority. Credit is the reward.[/quote]
The thing is that WHO's authority is very limited.

But, say, most Boris supporters would rather blame China or the WHO than their precious leader. Same for many other countries.

China needs to be made to stop it's human rights abuses

Good luck with that; they're not listening, and if they did they almost certainly wouldn't care

Incredibly, someone posted recently about the "wonderful work they're doing investing in Africa" ... as if they're doing it out of altruism
As I wrote at the time, if they think there was a problem with the Brits running things, just try having the Chinese regime involved

I think people want to believe it's the lab because they want to blame someone, and want a theory of how it could have happened.

Because the idea that Mother Nature can just do this, in ways that we cannot necessarily bottom out fully, is just too unsettling

As id the possibility that there is an unknown animal reservoir of the same or similar out there somewhere, which could spill over again at some random time in the future.

SARS 2003, MERS 2012, SARS-2 2019

This is what corona viruses do.

@vaxmeup

I still believe it was accidentally leaked from the lab, spread by an infected researcher(s). China have had over a year to get rid of any incriminating evidence, so of course the WHO wouldn't find anything in the lab at this point!

Me too

myfriendsgivebadadvice
So the midnight farmers were hugging pangolins after all! Well theres a lesson learned. Dont hug pangolins after nightfall or a plague will befall us all 😭

admitting to having it in culture is no worse than having bad animal practices
Just paraphrased you there Lweji so I could answer this part.

Maybe not in the Western World. But it may well play a lot worse in less developed countries where China are making their mark.
Bad animal husbandry exists everywhere, high tech labs are only in rich countries.
They may not be speaking to us when making that declaration. They will want to minimise anti Chinese sentiment in parts of sub Saharan Africa where bad animal husbandry is widespread, so perhaps more excusable.

Again, not to say it's not true. But maybe it's not us who they want to hear it.

Lweji
I think you are over politicising this. Or rather politicising things the wrong way. Its not at all Boris vs WHO. Theres an element of culture war in all this which is so bloody counter productive

Not meaning to keep firing stuff at you specifically! Just, you keep saying stuff

Thank you Lweji for your patient little campaign against these damaging conspiracy theories. People, please remember the scientific communities’ heartfelt appeals to think before you click. The man made virus/lab escape story makes excellent pop culture narrative, but it encourages us to be lazy and not bother to learn about how terribly, frighteningly likely the spontaneous emergence of a zoonotic species is when we combine intensive farming, overcrowding, poor cheap animal husbandry, and inadequate hygiene. The WHO has been warning for years about the inevitability of a pandemic - and as for not listening or believing in them, they work with emergent information, which will change as rapidly as the situation does, and they cannot work at all if a government bans them. If we start to take weird comfort from the idea that a baddy had to have made this virus, we miss genuine opportunities to take boring, sensible steps to prevent the next virus from taking advantage of ideal conditions accelerating the normal, natural leap between species.

@scaevola

I think people want to believe it's the lab because they want to blame someone, and want a theory of how it could have happened.

Because the idea that Mother Nature can just do this, in ways that we cannot necessarily bottom out fully, is just too unsettling

As id the possibility that there is an unknown animal reservoir of the same or similar out there somewhere, which could spill over again at some random time in the future.

SARS 2003, MERS 2012, SARS-2 2019

This is what corona viruses do.

I find the zoonotic virus more believable than the lab version tbh

I will always believe it came from that lab. What are the chances of a pandemic starting close to a virus institute confused and all those scientists were killed to keep something quiet.

You will always believe something despite there not only be no evidence to support it, there is actually evidence that disproves it? There are a million correlations that seem unlikely but happen all the time. That doesn’t prove a causation.

WHO also being the organisation that told us there was no evidence of human to human transmission?

At the point when there was no evidence. Science isn’t a fixed set of facts, it is evolving knowledge based on gathered information. If you’d asked WHO in September 2019 they would have said Covid 19 doesn’t exist. Because it didn’t.

@Puzzledandpissedoff
Of course China investing in African economies is not altruism. I’m not sure what’s wrong about it though. The West has been doing so for centuries, initially down the barrel of a gun. The UK and France in particular are still spending vast sums annually on FDI.

@EvilPea

We are / were never going to get the truth on this one. China lied every step of the way. I do think it was animal Based. But I don’t think we will ever know the truth of it

This.

LemonSwan

They're living in poverty, unwell and struggling to survive. Your comments are in poor taste.

I once read a post on MN about errors made at work. One poster in the UK admitted to accidentally releasing anteaters I believe, infected with leprosy from a lab where they were working. Apparently triggered a high level military operation to recover them.

As for Covid, we'll likely never know. Maybe we're all boiling frogs. Que sera, sera.

Perhaps worth reminding people of the timelines of what WHO did

www.who.int/news/item/27-04-2020-who-timeline---covid-19

First visit to Wuhan was on 20 January - something that often is overlooked in rush to condemn

Cam77 Simply this: in today's world, African countries unable to repay western loans can reasonable expect support for them to be written off

Campaigners wouldd probably call on China do the same, but whether it'll happen is less certain, as in the regime's response

China lied every step of the way.
Pretty meaningless. Did they conceal certain information? Yes. However:

“It was Chinese scientists who first described the human threat of this new disease on 24 January. It was Chinese scientists who first documented person-to-person transmission. It was Chinese scientists who first sequenced the genome of the virus. It was Chinese scientists who called attention to the importance of scaling up access to personal protective equipment, testing and quarantine. It was Chinese scientists who warned of the threat of a pandemic.”

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/03/covid-19-cold-war-china-western-governments-international-peace

China alerted the world to the threat of the virus which it identified in Wuhan in January, while simultaneously condoning off an entire UK sized province.

The fact that in Britain (for example) the PM was shaking hands with patients in March, people were still going to Tesco without masks on in July, and we never managed to develop a workable track and trace etc is not China’s fault.

@CassandraCalled

If the lab leaking the virus is so unbelievable can you explain this research paper please - of how the Hantavirus outbreak in 2003 originated from lab rats?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20380897/

Or this research report in 2007 on how foot and mouth likely leaked from a Surrey lab

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2007/08/report-lab-leak-likely-caused-uk-foot-and-mouth-outbreak

Both these reports are published by the scientific communities so clearly this is not implausible? These too are zoonotic viruses so why is it a conspiracy theory that a zoonotic virus could have somehow been transmitted through a lab worker and into the wider world - when it has happened before?

Why is it more likely that there's some serious repercussions from animal husbandry rather than a security failure no country in their right mind would admit to now, given the global impact?

Also WHO are now investigating the hypothesis that frozen food could be to blame, is that a conspiracy theory too? And why is a quality control failure in frozen food supply chain more likely than poor lab protocol? And given WHO investigated the wet market in Wuhan and couldn't establish a link, that means the wet market theory is not true either, as yet. Correct?

www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55996728

So essentially all we know is it's from animals. But have absolutely no idea in what form or capacity it transmitted to humans. So not sure why a lab leak is least likely compared to everything else that's been suggested...