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A team of scientists say it is “beyond reasonable doubt” the Covid pandemic started with infected animals sold at a market, rather than a laboratory leak.
They were analysing hundreds of samples collected from Wuhan, China, in January 2020.
The results identify a shortlist of animals – including racoon dogs, civets and bamboo rats – as potential sources of the pandemic.
Despite even highlighting one market stall as a hotspot of both animals and coronavirus, the study cannot provide definitive proof.
The samples were collected by Chinese officials in the early stages of Covid and are one of the most scientifically valuable sources of information on the origins of the pandemic.
…
Their analysis was published last year and the raw data made available to other scientists. Now a team in the US and France says they have performed even more advanced genetic analyses to peer deeper into Covid’s early days.
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Off topic, but “Genetic Ghosts” would be a sweet band name. I’d go see them.
Danny Phantom caused Covid?
Wasn’t this known already? Weren’t there all kinds of discussions about shutting down wet markets because of this?
There’s a bunch of indications / conspiracy theories that it might have been a lab leak. Basically there’s not really a way to know unless the Chinese government starts being more forthcoming with information.
The main reason the conspiracy theory started is because the city where it started had a world renowned virus research facility in it.
Of course, the reason the facility is there in the first place is because Wuhan province is a place where a lot of viruses originate naturally (in bat colonies), so it makes sense you research the viruses close to their natural reservoir.
Wasn’t this disproven already? Covid has been detected in human waste matter samples from Autumn 2019 in Italy.
Overall, the results of this blind retesting of a selected set of samples indicate the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in some SMILE samples collected in the prepandemic period. The oldest samples found positive for IgM by both laboratories were collected on 10 October 2019 (Lombardy), 11 November 2019 (Lombardy) and 5 February 2020 (Lazio), the latter with neutralizing antibodies. Two additional samples collected on 17 December 2019 (Campania) and 28 January 2020 (Lombardy) tested as IgG positive by VisMederi and positive for IgG S1 and IgG S1+NP by Erasmus. Additional IgM positive cases could have been detected also by Erasmus by lowering the cut-off of the commercial IgM assay. The older among these putative additional IgM positive samples was collected on 3 September 2019 in the Veneto region, one of the first and mostly severely affected COVID-19 regions.
Yeah but the US media was too busy implying that China manufactured the virus in a bio lab.
Funnily enough China still suffered because it failed to lock down early enough because the government tried to ignore and detain doctors in an effort to control the narrative that everything would be fine.
The US suffered because they nuked their Pandemic emergency pla only like a few years before covid because Trump thought Spanish Fever wouldn’t reincarnate to finish the job on its 100th anniversary lol.
So it was easy to vaguely point at China instead of actually solving the problem.
I don’t know what US media you were consuming in 2020/21, but it was pretty much understood it came from something exotic in a wet market.
Most of us didn’t know what a wet market existed or what it was until COVID. There was some conspiracy shit that the right ate up, and some editorial and opinions on the idea, but the whole bioengineered super virus escaping a lab wasn’t taken that seriously
I know this is off topic, but - why didn’t anyone tell me there’s a species called a raccoon dog?!
Look up some of the Japanese lore about Tanuki (the Japanese name for the raccoon dog). It involves magic, giant scrotums, and all sorts of delightful stuff.
If you like anime, Studio Ghibli (famous for a lot of classics including Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and others) did a movie called Pom Poko, which is about tanuki. If you don’t care for subtitles, the English dub is pretty good, and the voice cast stars a lot of well known (for the time) American actors.
I will always upvote a Ghibli recommendation!
You might know of the tanuki, which is specifically the Japanese raccoon dog.
I didn’t know about that one either!
If you’ve ever played Super Mario Bros 3 (or other Mario games where this same suit is found) there’s a Tanooki suit, which is the one that lets you fly!
The raccoon tail lets you fly. The Tanooki suit lets you turn into a statue, but also happens to have a raccoon tail so it also lets you fly.
Ahh yes, the opposite of flying. Thanks for the correction!
You were told. You just didn’t listen.
Oy!
Eating animals causes pandemics from zoonotic diseases. More at 11.
Being near live animals is more dangerous.
You don’t even need to eat them; just being in close proximity to them and interacting with them is enough.
On the other hands, cows, chickens, and humans came together to create a smallpox vaccine, so there’s that at least.
And god forbid you should fuck them.
Yes, it’s just that eating animals has a distinct history of causing horrible pandemics in humans. See e.g. the 1918 H1N1 pandemic which killed tens of millions and was likely started by hogs or chickens farmed in rural Kansas, swine flu which killed hundreds of thousands and whose name speaks for itself, and COVID-19 which killed millions and is well-understood to have originated in a wet market.
Besides all the other reasons that it’s terrible, animal agriculture is a hotbed for transmitting zoonotic diseases to humans and combining existing human diseases with animal ones.
I suppose its mere coincidence that patient zero was a scientist that was experimenting with covid and its potential to transmit to humans. Pure coincidence.
Note, this evidence doesn’t rule out the preliminary scenario of a scientist from the bioLab visiting the wet market and infecting/contaminating some of the animal’s there.
In their Nazi lab on the dark side of the moon
Yes, that’s exactly what happened. Except it didn’t and science isn’t based on your feelings on an unsubstantiated anecdote and even IF it were real, real scientists with real brains are gonna figure this out. Not you.
