The latest NYT article provides almost a textbook example of how negative thinking can fuel conspiracy theories. The author says he provides five pieces of evidence suggesting that Covid escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. In fact, none of the pieces of evidence are convincing, and some are false. Here I will focus on the first mentioned evidence, the opinions we have to take from the fact that Covid happened in Wuhan.
The article shows a graph of “hundreds of major cities” within a 1500 mile radius of the bat caves where Covid is thought to have originated:
Then we are led to believe that it would be a coincidence if Covid would have appeared naturally in one city in this region that recently had a large virology lab. But is this claim true?
In 1994, I got married in Beijing. We spent our honeymoon in Wuhan and Chongqing. Is it an “incredible accident” that my honeymoon was spent in the city where Covid started? As we shall see, the answer is no.
A relevant example occurred in 2014, when virologist Eddie Holmes visited an animal market in Wuhan when Covid began to spread to humans. He took a picture of a cage with a raccoon dog, and thought that this was the kind of place there future epidemic it may appear:
Even more surprising – it turns out that one of the co-authors of this study, Eddie Holmes, had been taken to the Huanan market a few years before the epidemic and showed raccoon dogs in one of the shops. He was told, “This is the kind of place that has the ingredients for the transmission of various types of dangerous bacteria.”
So you click on pictures of raccoon dogs. In another photo, raccoon dogs are in a cage piled on top of a cage with some birds in it.
And at the end of our sleep task, we looked at the GPS coordinates on his camera, and we found that he took a picture in the same place, where five samples were found to have SARS-CoV-2.
I don’t know about you, but that seems like a bigger risk than this virus from Wuhan.
The NYT article is wrong; Wuhan is not just one of hundreds of big cities, it is Chinese megacity. Southern China has four megacities (Wuhan, Chongqing, Chengdu, and Guangzhou/Shenzhen), or five if you consider Guangzhou and Shenzhen as separate metro areas. All of them are hundreds of kilometers away from the so-called “bat caves”. The epidemic is more likely to have originated in these areas than in hundreds of other cities in China. These cities have many wealthy buyers, and large animal markets that attract exotic species from all over China. And crowded people and many tourists from elsewhere. Areas that are magnets for people and commerce.
But let’s say I’m wrong, and that there’s nothing special about these four Chinese megacities. If so, proponents of lab leaks face another problem. Unlike Covid (also known as SARS-2), there is absolutely no dispute about how SARS-1 crossed into humans back in 2002. It first appeared near a wildlife market in the city of Guangzhou. So people who reject my claim that southern China’s megacities are special have simply traded one incredible risk for another. Now they have to explain why Covid appeared in the big city of Guangzhou, and not one of the hundreds of other cities in southern China.
Here are the facts:
SARS-1 is known to have originated in an animal market that was approximately 900 miles from bat caves. There were medium animal beings.
SARS-2 was first detected in people working and shopping at an animal market about 1000 miles from the bat caves. The famous virology lab was in a completely different area of the big metro area.
Please use Occam’s razor.
Most Americans have a very limited knowledge of the Chinese world, so they are easily swayed by the type of argument presented in the NYT. So consider the American analogy. Imagine an epidemic among people working and shopping near a pet market in Flushing, NYC’s Chinatown. Epidemics are known to have started in such markets. Then someone on the internet states that the epidemic began in “New York City”, which also houses the most important virology lab at Columbia University. Maybe there was a leak in the lab, and the infected scientist just passed town to shop at the animal market in Flushing, thereby infecting other people.
Does that sound like a “conspiracy theory”?
Throughout history, many global epidemics have started in southern China. Even by Chinese standards, the southern Chinese are famous for eating a variety of exotic animals. Southern China has dense populations, often living close to animal life.
Of course, the NYT article contains other “evidence”, all equally weak. Those are some disputed points here again here again here.
Source link