What disturbed me was the immediate attempt by the Chinese officials to sell the idea that the virus originated in the Wuhan wet market. They even produced PSA videos and news articles showing people eating bat heads to make their case to the world.
More complete patient tracking later showed that the virus was detected in patients that had not been to the market first and then appeared at patients from the market. When the government in charge of managing a situation starts putting out propaganda before getting the facts it makes concerned people suspicious and destroys any credibility they might have had.
Maybe its just a coincidence that the only P4 bio laboratory built in China is less than a mile from the site of the first infections but its understandable that people would speculate on this. I don’t think this is the end of the controversy.
RE: They even produced PSA videos and news articles showing people eating bat heads to make their case to the world.
The only problem with this is the propaganda is FALSE.
SEE HERE FROM THE NEW YORK POST:
https://nypost.com/2020/02/22/dont-buy-chinas-story-the-coronavirus-may-have-leaked-from-a-lab/
EXCERPT:
They first blamed a seafood market not far from the Institute of Virology, even though the first documented cases of Covid-19 (the illness caused by SARS-CoV-2) involved people who had never set foot there. Then they pointed to snakes, bats and even a cute little scaly anteater called a pangolin as the source of the virus.
I don’t buy any of this. It turns out that snakes don’t carry coronaviruses and that bats aren’t sold at a seafood market. Neither are pangolins, for that matter, an endangered species valued for their scales as much as for their meat.
The evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The virus may have been carried out of the lab by an infected worker or crossed over into humans when they unknowingly dined on a lab animal. Whatever the vector, Beijing authorities are now clearly scrambling to correct the serious problems with the way their labs handle deadly pathogens.
China has unleashed a plague on its own people. It’s too early to say how many in China and other countries will ultimately die for the failures of their country’s state-run microbiology labs, but the human cost will be high.
Says something about our corrupt media that the Washington Post called the lab origin a “discredited conspiracy theory” without asking any real questions or doing any journalism.
If the Chinese allow WHO into that lab and reveal the studies that have done on there, then that’s some level of third party confirmation. However, Chinese government promises? Sorry. Not buying that.
If it was a bioweapon that escaped, then we need all of that information to combat the spread. This a very easy weapon to spread with, say, a volunteer group of jihadis willing to cross our southern border or just fly into the country before it has become active.
Reptiles passing the "flu" to human mammals.
Right