A forgotten social media post may hold key clues to Covid-19's origin

layer8

https://archive.ph/6KeRV

SirFatty

And I still think the lab leak is the most likely source.

customguy

To me it's kinda like 9/11 in that ultimately I don't really care about the cause, I saw what was done with it. That was very fucked up regardless of the origin being synthetic or not, in both cases.

CalRobert

"SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, had arrived in the country on frozen lobsters from Maine that were sold at the Wuhan market" ..... I know, strongly, that this is purely an anecdote. But this was kind of crazy to see. In Dec 2019 my family and I traveled from Europe to visit family in Maine. We returned around new year's and all got what was by _far_ the worst flu any of us had every had in our lives. And weirdest - it was consistent with covid symptoms. My youngest was 2 months old (we flew back with her to meet family) and she was quite ill - we still suspect long covid affects her. Now, entirely possible this is confirmation bias, and airports would have been full of travellers from all over, not just Maine, but still...

palmotea

> But a new analysis suggests the post may hold clues to the pandemic’s origin—and further evidence that China is withholding vital data on the contentious issue. > Evolutionary biologist Florence Débarre of CNRS, France’s national research agency, who firmly believes SARS-CoV-2 jumped into people from live animals at the market, calls the WeChat post “extremely elaborate disinformation.” But when she recently translated the post and compared the detailed maps of the market it contains with other, official ones, Débarre found surprises. The maps identify specific stalls as having live animals infected with SARS-CoV-2 and vendors with antibodies to the virus—data China has never shared. tl;dr: a post pushing a bogus conspiracy theory contained real (and undisclosed) information as background.

ilamont

Van Kerkhove says Débarre’s analysis is “interesting,” but cautions that the provenance of the data is unclear. “The way in which the information is identified is highly suspect,” she says. This has all the hallmarks of a CCP disinformation campaign to shift blame to foreign sources. This started almost as soon as the quarantines began, such as the baseless accusation that the US Army was responsible ( https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/coronavirus-chinese-offic... ). They then started erasing sampling data from the Wuhan outbreak and cracked down on anyone memorializing Dr. Li Wenliang while planting "evidence" that they knew conspiracy theorists would pick up and spread.