Why Is the Origin of COVID-19 Causing Controversy?

[Tom.G]

A New York Times article about the current controversy over origin of the COVID-19 virus.

Titled:

The Government Must Say What It Knows About Covid’s Origins​

Wide ranging but somewhat superficial, it does have about 15 links to references embedded in it though.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/opinion/covid-lab-leak-origins.html

 

[artis]

Nice to see mainstream media sources finally trying to touch this otherwise still hot potato.

One thing is for sure. If indeed this was a lab accident then most likely the involved parties know about it and will do what it takes to suppress and withhold information simply because of fear of the immense backlash that will and should result if this indeed was so.
This wouldn't be the first time a pathogen has escaped a controlled environment anyway.

Either way China not allowing investigation into the WIV did not paint a forthcoming and transparent picture to begin with.

PS. That article has a paywall though.

 

[artis]

https://www.ft.com/content/cd633f52-c2d2-4ee4-b940-d1bef6a5d910

China investigated Covid lab leak claims, says top scientist​

A top Chinese scientist has said China investigated whether Covid-19 might have originated in a Wuhan laboratory — the first admission from a senior official that Beijing took the so-called lab leak theory seriously after years of heated denials.

“The government organised something,” he said in the BBC interview. “That lab was double-checked by the experts in the field,”

But sadly,

“Genomics cannot distinguish whether the virus transmitted to humans via traded wildlife in [Wuhan’s] Huanan Seafood Market or through a laboratory accident, where a laboratory worker was inadvertently infected from a sample they were processing,” said Professor James Wood, head of veterinary medicine at the University of Cambridge.“In reality, it may never be possible to know with confidence how the Covid-19 virus entered the human population,” Wood added.

Closing the World Health Assembly’s annual meeting in Geneva on Tuesday, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus appealed for an end to geopolitical arguments about pandemics. “Covid-19 has taught us that pathogens have no regard for the lines humans draw on maps,” he said.

Pathogens might not have a regard for human land borders and lines but they definitely have a regard for how certain individuals within certain countries and institutions approach safety while working with them.
Probably one of the reasons why Obama administration did a temporal ban on gain of function research funding in 2014, which was later lifted.

 

[russ_watters]

Locked pending moderation and unlikely to be reopened. While it is possible that the outbreak originated from the lab and that is worthy of knowing, there's too much politics and conspiracy theory involved for the subject to be a fit for PF.