Stranger things have happened. Many a virus has gotten going in such ways. I don’t know though. Seemed interesting. There is kind of a “not in China” focus to the presentation.
I mean, they could always also send researchers back to the caves/mines in Yunnan to sample bats there and see what homology they get. I’m quite sure it’d be similar. Though I assume that Chinese authorities are still blocking visitors/journalists from trips there…
You’re not really buying into this story, are you?
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How should I know? What, do you think you know exactly what happened?
No, I didn’t say that. I just mean I’ve tried to explain to you the flaws in that story, which I think are pretty big ones and you didn’t respond to.
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I can’t judge from what you wrote there. I just thought it was interesting, and await any potential new information. I have never found the “it happened in Wuhan so it had to have been the Wuhan lab” argument convincing, and you seemed to suggest that, so I responded to that.
Have you read the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article? Probably posted already somewhere above. It’s quite long, but I found it pretty convincing.
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Not sure about that one exactly, but I’ve read a lot of the stuff above and found it quite convincing, yes.
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I love RB, ha ha.
Occam’s Razor. Or Kiss.
The first cases were identified in Wuhan. Wuhan is in China.
You don’t need to be a professor of logic to understand when you are being led down the garden path.
The person who has the most to hide will endeavor that their secrets are kept hidden.
These arguments against the origin of Covid are looking for a conspiracy.
Social media is for entertainment. Posts on social media are entertainment. Try not to confuse entertainment for facts.
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report alleges the unusual uptick likely signals awareness of a new disease spreading in and around Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province.
Orders doubled from universities, jumped fivefold from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and surged tenfold from animal testing bureaus. Purchases from hospitals declined by more than 10%.
Monthly procurement data shows a spike in orders in May, especially from CDC buyers and the People’s Liberation Army.
“We believe the increased spending in May suggests this as the earliest start date for possible infection,” the report said.
Purchases rose sharply from July through October as well, in particular from the Wuhan University of Science and Technology. The institution spent 8.92 million yuan on PCR tests in 2019, about eight times its total for the previous year.
The university, along with local hospitals and public health authorities, plays a direct role in responding to outbreaks of new diseases, according to the report.
The involvement of these groups provides evidence that “the increase of purchasing was most likely linked to the emergence of COVID-19 in Hubei Province in 2019,” the report said. “We assess with high confidence that the pandemic began much earlier than China informed the [World Health Organization] about COVID-19.”
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…Or they could have been testing for H1N1 and that African swine fever virus which has been running amok in China.
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I’m just taking a break from reading it to say it is very long.
That is all.
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When the New Yorker does those longer pieces, they really go all out. 
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not much in the way of new information, for all that writing, but i guess for people that haven’t read this thread it might be interesting
Yeah, it covered a lot of ground that’s already been covered, but sometimes it’s nice to have a little review.
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I skimmed it, but they are definitely pushing a narrative. Hardly what I would call objective.
True, but it still provides a lot of interesting detail, and for those of us who have been following the story, the narrative is easy enough to filter out.
I’ll read more later, but they have done the filtering for us, for example, in the headline.
Did the virus spring from nature or from human error?
Those are not the only two possibilities, a deliberate release is also a posibility.
Then further down.
In response, President Biden called for an investigation into the pandemic’s origins. “I have now asked the intelligence community to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion,” he said.
Not exactly what happened, first Biden cancelled an investigation into the origins being conducted by the State Department, when wind of the story was going to break and they were worried it would look like they were trying to keep things secret, then Biden made that statement public to give the opposite impression of closing down investigations.
Again, people who suspect this was deliberately released would have pointed to this action (and others by the administration) to downplay the origin of the virus as possible complicity, that’s the narrative the New Yorker appears to be making sure no one thinks about.
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Yeah, it’s no secret that the New Yorker’s editorial policy is to carry water for the Democratic Party, although not all of the writers they publish are willing to play ball. This writer obviously is.
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