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Of the 674 other threads on C-D about Covid, the vast majority 70-80% are in the P&OC forum. I didn't want to go there. There are zero in Great Debates. Maybe that's intentional, but I hope it's not necessary to cede the ground 100%.
Pro Publica and Vanity Fair have a piece up on a new "interim" report by the minority staffers on the Senate Committee commissioned to investigate the origins of Covid. The report leans toward but is not conclusive on the theory of lab over market origin. It occurred to me that PP/VF might be called two left-leaning MSM outlets, but are giving credence to a theory embraced by the right, and ridiculed by some in the science community, never mind the left. That underlines the complexity of the issue. It's clearly not yet resolved, and I wonder how the full report will differ, if/when published. That the minority felt the need to publish does not send a great signal.
A few quotes.
Quote:
An interim report, released on Thursday by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP), concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”
Quote:
And then, in the fall of 2019, the dispatches took a darker turn. They referenced inhumane working conditions and “hidden safety dangers.” On Nov. 12 of that year, a dispatch by party branch members at the BSL-4 laboratory appeared to reference a biosecurity breach.
.......once you have opened the stored test tubes, it is just as if having opened Pandora’s Box. These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace. Although [we have] various preventive and protective measures, it is nevertheless necessary for lab personnel to operate very cautiously to avoid operational errors that give rise to dangers. Every time this has happened, the members of the Zhengdian Lab [BSL4] Party Branch have always run to the frontline, and they have taken real action to mobilize and motivate other research personnel.
Quote:
A bitter battle has ensued between a group of virologists who assert their research points to a market origin and an alternate group of academics and online sleuths who argue there’s been an attempted cover-up of a more likely lab origin. Four months ago, the World Health Organization’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens revised an earlier conclusion and said that both scenarios remain on the table, due to insufficient evidence, and require further investigation.
Quote:
For Reid, the import of Ji’s opening remarks practically leapt off the page. Ji told the assembled group that he had come bearing “important oral remarks and written instructions” from General Secretary Xi Jinping and China’s premier, Li Keqiang, to address a “complex and grave situation.”
Though the summary’s language is characteristically vague, Ji described:
many large-scale cases of domestic and foreign safety incidents in recent years, and from the perspective of shouldering responsibility, standardizing operations, emergency planning, and inspecting hidden dangers one-by-one, [he] laid out a deep analysis, with many layers and taken from many angles, which vividly revealed the complex and grave situation currently facing [bio]security work.
The WIV’s deputy director of safety and security spoke next, summarizing “several general problems that were found over the course of the last year during safety and security investigations, and [he] pointed to the severe consequences that could result from hidden safety dangers.
But what drew Reid’s full attention was the word Ji used to describe the important “written instructions” he was relaying from Beijing: “pishi.” When China’s senior leaders receive written reports on a worrying or important issue, they will write instructions in the margins, known as pishi, to be carried out swiftly by lower-level officials. As Reid interpreted it, the pishi that Ji arrived with that day appeared to have come directly from Xi, arguably China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. To Reid, it suggested that Xi himself had been briefed on an ongoing crisis at the WIV.
The most recent article, from which the quotes above are taken.
There have been three (at least) threads on Twitter today taking issue with a small section of the translation from Chinese to English by the Senate staffer, plus an omission by PP/VF and claims that these undermine the credibility of the piece. I'm certainly not competent to decide.
Will be interesting to see if/how this is addressed both by the publications and in the final report.
You should watch Bret Weinstein's thoughtful and intelligent take on the virus and the organized response to the virus.
Too long didn't watch? World leaders in Government, Healthcare and Policy functions 'done us dirty' deliberately. He doesn't speculate on the 'why' but does demonstrate that the last 2 plus years were an exercise in massive unethical and irrational overreach.
The American Society of Microbiology is not persuaded by the Senate Interim Report, but could change its mind if more evidence were forthcoming. I'm inclined to doubt more evidence will be forthcoming in the full report.
I'm not a scientist, don't know enough about gain of function to opine on it, but if genetic modification can be considered GoF, then it can hardly be all bad.
I've always wondered about the possibility of Covid being "mistakingly" released from the Wuhan lab.
The WHO group who "investigated" the lab was a joke. China did not provide any sort of transparency to the group and it was basically a policed controlled tour.
I wonder if it was a mistake / error, what happened to the people in charge and if anyone "disappeared". China obviously paid heavily in the spread of Covid and still is. Justice is swift and brutal in China. No judge or jury. Well maybe a pretense of one :P
I don't think this is a question of science so much as information: What do we know? What do we not know? What will we never know? Regardless we will not be getting quality information from China.
Here's a long piece by a scientist/journalist published Feb 2022, in the MIT tech review. There's lots of conflicting evidence, which is why this remains so far an unsolved mystery. That mystery could be solved by science alone, information alone, or a combination of the two.
Quote:
Meeting China’s bat woman
I met Shi Zhengli in person for the first time on a cold afternoon in December 2020. We had spoken earlier that year for an article published in Scientific American. The level of access she has given me is unparalleled. She rarely speaks with the press, and her interaction with journalists writing for the Western media has been largely confined to emails and texts. She told me she spoke to me because my strong science background allows me to grasp the nuances and complexity of her work, because I understand China, and because we can communicate in Chinese, our native tongue, in which I conducted the interviews.
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