China is lying about the origin of covid
But not in the way that you think.
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We’re 3 years into the Covid pandemic. We don’t know exactly how it started. China is refusing to share some key evidence.
You might think I’m talking about the lab leak theory, but I’m not.
The lab leak theory is all over the news right now, but there’s no new evidence, and there’s still not much evidence in favor of that theory.
The US Department of Energy recently announced they have a “low confidence” opinion that the virus leaked from the Wuhan CDC. The FBI announced, with more confidence, that the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a different lab than the Wuhan CDC. This isn’t a small difference — one of the two labs was doing gain of function research, the other was not. The two labs are across town from each other. The CDC is near where the virus started, the gain of function lab is not.
4 other US government agencies disagree and think covid has a natural origin. 2 are uncertain. Neither the FBI nor the DoE has shared any of the evidence that makes them think that covid is a lab leak. And the latest news was reported by the same journalist who reported that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
We can conclude that this latest news is probably about politics, not science.
The scientific consensus hasn’t changed. The publicly available evidence we have doesn’t point to a Wuhan lab. Most scientists think that Covid came from a market in Wuhan.
The earliest known cases were in this market. If you map all the case locations, they form a bulls-eye around the market. Positive samples for the virus cluster in one corner where wild animals were being sold. We think we even know which shop in the market was selling the infected animals. That shop had more positive samples than any other one in the market, one cage there even tested positive. That shop had a history of selling wild animals. One of the animals they sold was even shown to be able to catch and transmit covid.
You might have heard that China is using the market origin theory to hide a lab leak?
That’s not what they’re saying. China says the virus didn’t even start in China.
They say it could have come from a US laboratory. Or maybe it came into China on frozen seafood. Whatever happened, it came from somewhere else and it wasn’t China’s fault.
They’re also withholding some evidence from the market. There are a few things that could help everyone pin down exactly how this started.
China lied about the market selling wild animals.
Soon after the pandemic started, China stated that the market was the origin. In January 2020, the Chinese CDC wrote: “all current evidence points to wild animals sold illegally in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.”
The lab leak theory started in the US. In March 2020, China made the opposite theory, asking whether Covid came from a U.S. Army lab.
A year after the pandemic started, a WHO team got into China to investigate. The report wrote about the market that “No illegal trade in wildlife has been found” and “No verified reports of live mammals being sold around 2019 were found”.
But that wasn’t true.
There were pictures posted on Chinese social media:
Two Chinese researchers later documented all the animals that were being sold at the market in 2019.
What’s not known is whether those 2 researchers took any samples that could be tested for antibodies. Neither of the Chinese researchers has responded, when asked if they did. Perhaps they’re not free to answer that question.
The WHO report also wrote that it’s possible that the virus came in on frozen seafood. One of the report’s authors admits that politics drove the inclusion of that statement — none of the investigators thought that was likely.
Why don’t we know which animal was sick?
The main problem is that most of the animals were killed without testing.
We have this data from a few sources. A Chinese scientist, George Gao, published it in 2022. But we can confirm much of it from data leaked to the Epoch times in 2020.
We know that no animal samples were taken until 3 weeks after the market was closed and disinfected:
George Gao describes the animal samples that were taken:
The 457 animal samples included 188 individuals belonging to 18 species (with some stray animals sampled until March 30th). The sources of the samples include unsold goods kept in refrigerators and freezers in the stalls of HSM, and goods kept in warehouses and refrigerators related to the HSM. Samples from stray animals in the market were also collected, i.e. swab samples from 10 stray cats, 27 cat feces, one dog, one weasel, and 10 rats. All the 457 animal samples tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid, suggesting that the animal infections with SARS-CoV-2 might be rare in the market.
So, they didn’t test the live animals. They tested some frozen meat and some stray animals.
We also know that many species sold at the market were never tested. Here’s a list of the animals sold at the market that we know can catch covid:
And here’s a list of the animals that were tested:
Most of the animals we’re really curious about (like raccoon dogs) were never tested. And the only animal testing done was on frozen meat and stray animals, none of the live animals were tested.
The DNA data from the market was never shared
Even though the animals weren’t tested, we might be able to get more information from the surfaces that were swabbed for DNA.
When you take a sample and process it for RNA or DNA, you find various sequences from different sources. China processed the samples to find the virus, but they also found DNA from humans and animals.
The animal DNA data has never been disclosed.
George Gao’s paper shows they found other species:
But we don’t know which animals were found. If we had that data, we could look at the tests for each covid positive shop, and we might be able to tell which animals were sold there.
From an interview with virologist Angela Rasmussen:
The paper that was published by the China CDC, led by George Gao on February 25th, 2022, the day before our preprint came out, showed that there was lineage A at the market as well as Lineage B. That paper concluded that there was a stronger association between the viral sequences and these other sequencing reads in those samples from humans. But what it didn’t show was what other species had sequencing reads in there, and there were a lot of unmapped reads. And basically if we had the raw data for those sequences, we could find out what species those unmapped reads were mapping to. And so you can see that’s a raccoon dog or whatever.
The key is that that raw data also hasn’t been shared, which is why that paper probably hasn’t been published, because in order to publish in a reputable journal, you are required to deposit your raw data into a public database or repository. So there is some data that might give us some more insight about this.
But because there was a concerted effort, I think, to not look in the animals when it was clear that that this was associated with a market where live animals were sold, there was a real effort, I think, to prevent that data from ever being collected and to to prevent access to anything that would really implicate the live animal trade, because, again, that’s been recognized as a risk for the last 20 years, ever since SARS emerged. And it it’s a little embarrassing that that this happens despite the fact that there were you know, there was a lot of effort put into trying to prevent that from happening.
Edit (3/16/23): US scientists finally got access to this data. The swabs from market stall 29, the suspected origin of the pandemic, tested positive for raccoon dog DNA.
China could simply interview the people at the market
Another thing that could help is interviewing the people who worked at the market.
We think we know which shop had the infected animals:
And there were only so many shops selling wild animals. It wouldn’t be hard to interview everyone who worked at the market.
Someone could simply figure out what each shop was selling, and which farms supplied them.
Either, China never did this, or they never disclosed what they learned.
And they went on to deny that the market sold wild animals at all.
If you want to do your own sleuthing, I’d suggest starting with this map of the market.
Wildlife searches within China could be more aggressive
The case for the market origin would be clearer if we knew which animal had been sick.
Finding that animal, 3 years later, might be incredibly difficult.
We’ve been looking at bats in caves, the way we did with SARS. After 20 years of searching, the closest bat virus we’ve found is only 96% similar to SARS. We’ve already found a bat virus that’s 96.8% similar to Covid — that was found outside of China, in Laos.
Presumably, it should be possible to find a closer virus in China than in Laos.
A 2021 Chinese study tested 17,000 bats and couldn’t find a single one with a relative of Covid.
That’s highly suspicious, because searches across the border in Laos can find relatives of Covid. Also, an earlier study in China sampled only 342 bats and found 4 viruses similar to Covid.
Scientists could probably find viruses closer to covid within China, but it looks like the data might now be censored.
China could also be more open about the labs
They could also be more transparent about what research the labs were doing, just to try to set the record straight.
I don’t think this will actually turn up anything, because the best evidence we have points to infected animals at the market.
There’s also a difference between this and the market data. We know there is DNA evidence from the market that hasn’t been shared, because Gao’s paper mentions it. Some people think there is hidden evidence from the lab, but if there isn’t, I don’t know how you prove that.
For instance, the Wuhan lab already said that all of their employees tested negative for covid antibodies. Lab leak theorists don’t believe that.
They said they don’t have a precursor virus to covid and that they’ve disclosed the closest virus they do have (a virus called RATG-13). Lab leak theorists also don’t believe that.
We found a 2018 copy of their database in an unpublished paper. It didn’t show any hidden viruses.
China could, and should, be more open about the lab so that everyone knows whether or not there’s anything hidden.
But, if there wasn’t a secret program or a secret database at the lab, then it will be hard to convince people who think that there was.
And I think if they were more open about the missing market data, then we might be able to figure out which animal it was.
China instead tried blaming 6 other countries
What’s interesting about George Gao’s paper is that it doesn’t actually argue that the Wuhan market is the source of the pandemic.
It says that we don’t know where Covid started and points the finger at 6 other countries.
Gao cites 6 papers as evidence that Covid started before December, probably outside of China. The countries it points to are Brazil, France, Italy, Norway, Spain, and the United States.
The last one is the most amusing. Gao cites a paper called “SARS-CoV-2 exposure in wild white-tailed deer”, which looks at deer in 4 US states.
The authors took blood samples from deer, before and after the pandemic, and tested whether they neutralized a mock covid virus. Lots of deer tested positive for covid antibodies in 2021, and a few tested positive in 2020:
One sample tested positive in 2019. And it was exactly at the threshold of accuracy for the test. So, most likely a false positive.
According to Chinese scientists, this is evidence that the market origin hypothesis is wrong, and maybe Covid was already in the United States in 2019. It could have come to the US from somewhere else. Maybe Gao is even suggesting that deer infected humans, not the other way around?
Gao also mentions a paper from Spain, which tested wastewater samples both during and before the pandemic. One sample from March 2019 was positive on 2 out of 5 tests:
That’s almost certainly a false positive test. But, again, Gao thinks this is proof that covid was in Spain, 9 months before it was in Wuhan.
The other 4 papers are a little better, but also questionable. There’s a wastewater study from Brazil. There are antibody studies from Italy, France, and Norway. Each of these has a handful of covid tests showing up maybe a month earlier than we’d expect, but these are more the exception than the rule. The numbers in the Italian study look impossibly high, and other groups have written criticisms of the methods used. The Norwegian study shows tiny numbers of cases, within a normal rate of false positives.
This looks like an attempt to simply find every suspicious data point or false positive test from around the world, to avoid blame.
The Chinese government aren’t the only people lying
I don’t live in China. I don’t expect them to tell me the truth.
I live in the United States, and I don’t want my government to lie to me.
We’ve had multiple government investigations into the origins of Covid. So far, every investigation has given a different answer.
As I said earlier, the FBI and the DoE don’t even agree on which lab started the pandemic. One blames the gain of function lab, the other blames a different lab across town.
The House GOP report thinks that covid leaked from a lab in September. The senate GOP report isn’t sure what happened, but they think maybe there was a leak in October or November. An anonymous US intelligence source is certain that 3 lab employees got sick in November, but they never disclosed the details, just leaked the information to the Wall Street Journal. And the first 2 reports don’t seem aware of those 3 sick workers.
There will be more congressional hearings. Those will probably just be for show, and won’t include any new information.
If the US government has evidence about the origins of covid, I want them to tell me what it is, not leak it anonymously to the Wall Street Journal. I want them to do an honest investigation, not make up a story to get votes.
And, if they don’t know what happened, I want them to just tell me what they’re doing to make my life better.
What are they doing to research better covid treatments, or a vaccine that lasts longer? What are they doing to research long covid, to help the people still injured by this pandemic?
This won’t be the last virus we face.
We can, and should, secure all the labs in the world. But that won’t stop the next pandemic from happening in another 10 or 20 years, because most viruses come from nature.
What are they doing to prepare for the next one?
