The Origins of the Pandemic - Under That Rug

 BY DEREK LOWE

It's a quiet late summer weekend - why don't we stir things up a bit, eh? I last wrote about the controversy over the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic here, after a preprint came out with a lot of hard evidence for the "Wuhan market" hypothesis (and conversely, no real evidence for the "lab leak" hypothesis). That paper was recently published here at Science as two papers, and no matter which side of that question a person takes, you'll have to deal with the data and the conclusions it reaches. My own opinion is that it makes a strong case for the market origin, and that alternative explanations are going to have to show why those lines of evidence don't say what they're appearing to say.

But it's also true that a big argument for the lab-leak hypothesis has been the behavior of the Chinese government itself. They have been obstructing investigations into that idea and vigorously contesting it in every way possible, which has naturally led to suspicion. Here's what I had to say about that back in February, specifically about the idea that the Chinese authorities had perhaps planted evidence to implicate the market rather than the labs:

The only other way that I can think of to easily explain these data would be systematic deception on the part of the Chinese authorities. That's not a paranoid statement - the Chinese government is systematically deceptive. After all, they bulldoze Uighur villages and ship the residents off to concentration camps that are visible from low Earth orbit, all the while denying that nothing is happening except perhaps some happy, smiling re-education here and there. No, the Chinese government is capable of treating its own people in the same fashion that the Wuhan merchants treat their raccoon dogs. But as the preprint notes, the authorities have attempted to be deceptive about the market hypothesis as well.

And that latter deception has only increased, as this article (again here at Science) demonstrates. There has been an increasing number of papers that appear to be trying to make it look as if the virus could not have originated in China in any form whatsoever. One adjective to describe that idea is "ridiculous", but full credit will be given for "unbelievable" and "Orwellian", too. For instance, how about the preprint describing a survey of viruses in 17,000 bats across China that found absolutely no strains related to SARS-CoV-2? Or the manuscripts that try to show how the virus could have come into China via imported frozen food? This exchange sums it up pretty well:

Science attempted to discuss these issues with George Gao, who until last month headed the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) and is a lead author on several key papers about the pandemic’s origins. “What can I say?” Gao texted back. “Best wishes.”

As the article shows, the Chinese government was originally open to the idea of a market origin, but that has tightened up greatly as 2020 went on. This party line already caused the March 2021 WHO report on the pandemic origins to say that there was no hard evidence that wild animals had been sold at the Wuhan market at all - which ironically gave the lab-leak theory more fuel. But that statement was an utter whitewash. There is plenty of photographic evidence of just that happening, as well as an entire study covering May of 2017 to November of 2019 (immediately prior to the pandemic) that was looking at tick-borne illnesses and extensively documented wild animal sales in the Wuhan markets. To claim otherwise, as the Chinese authorities do now, is idiotic.

As are the Chinese suggestions that the virus originated at a US lab in Maryland (a theory that the Foreign Ministry has aired several times). That joins the came-in-on-foreign-frozen-fish theory, the originated-in-humans-and-we-gave-it-to-the-animals theory, and the originated-in-animals-all-of-which-are-completely-outside-the-Chinese-borders theory. The only things these have in common is that they all shift the focus away from China and that contradict each other. The latest Science piece, which I very much encourage everyone to read in its entirety, finishes up this way:

There is no shame in admitting that the virus came from wild animals illegally sold at a market, (Chris Newman of Oxford) adds. “To leave it as an open question, it’s just going to breed intrigue about why the Chinese have not given us a clear explanation,” Newman says. “Why the smoke and mirrors? Whereas if they come up with something that we could all just accept, well, then it will be case closed. Can’t we persuade them that this is the right thing for everybody to do?”

I know the answer that that one. No, no one seems to be able to persuade the Chinese government of anything. The official line is that China has nothing to do with the outbreak in any way, that it's all the fault of foreigners and anti-Chinese forces, and that now the world must come together to find these culprits who are absolutely, positively, somewhere other than China. This reminds me of O. J. Simpson searching for his wife's murderer on the golf courses of Southern California. It is, to use a word that I was glad to see appear in Science in this context, bullshit.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/origins-pandemic---under-rug