Saturday, September 4, 2021

Coronavirus: Lab Leak Part 13 - Back to the Wuhan Wet Market hypothesis?

Is it looking like the Wuhan Wet Market hypothesis is back in play? Bloomberg (Aug 16) looks into this:

According to the report, which was published in June in the online journal Scientific Reports, minks, civets, raccoon dogs, and other mammals known to harbor coronaviruses were sold in plain sight for years in shops across the city, including the now infamous Huanan wet market, to which many of the earliest Covid cases were traced. The data in the report was collected over 30 months by Xiao Xiao, a virologist whose roles straddled epidemiology and animal research at the government-funded Key Laboratory of Southwest China Wildlife Resources Conservation and at Hubei University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

. . . Not only did the study contain conclusive evidence that live animals were being sold for human consumption at the epicenter of the outbreak, but [Chris Newman, a British ecologist who is one of the paper's co-authors] says he assumes Xiao collected blood-sucking ticks from the wild animals he studiously cataloged. The blood meals of frozen tick samples could be examined for traces of the coronavirus, which would be extremely helpful in identifying infected species prior to December 2019. Xiao didn’t respond to emails requesting comment.

Wait a second, virologist Xiao Xiao has frozen tick samples? I would hope that the entire virologist community is demanding to know if he did indeed keep samples and then are demanding that they be released for study. In fact, why doesn't Chris Newman know the answer to this question if he co-authored the paper? Why didn't he ask? Why is he having to speculate?

. . . As other nations began blaming the Chinese Communist Party for the pandemic, the government grew defensive. It may have been embarrassed that its citizens were still eating wild animals bought in wet markets—a well-known path for zoonotic disease transmission that China tried unsuccessfully to outlaw almost 20 years ago.

Let's say that the Wuhan Wet Market hypothesis ends up being fact, the problem is that the Chinese Communist Party hid facts on the selling of wild animals at these wet markets. They either aren't being truthful about the lab leak or they're not being truth about the wet market. There is a total lack of honestly here. Bloomberg tries to theorize that they were "embarrassed." Okay, but let's fast forward to March 2021 where the article mentions that two Wuhan residents who had shopped at the market for 20 plus years claimed that they didn't notice live animals being sold at the market. Maybe they were embarrassed back in early 2020, but by early 2021 this is just a elaborate cover-up. 


No comments:

Post a Comment