Published Thursday, April 21st, 2022 in Independent Science News: Delete, Deny, and Destroy: Chinese and Western Strategies To Erase COVID’s Origin Are Being Exposed By Independent Research by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD.
Synopsis: On Feb 25th this year, George Gao, head of China’s CDC, published a scientific preprint co-authored with 38 other Chinese virologists (Gao et al., 2022). Using previously unpublished evidence, this preprint concluded that the Huanan market in Wuhan played no role at all in the appearance of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019. These authors then implied that the origin of SARS-CoV-2 was not even in China. Within hours, two other preprints appeared. The authors of these included many prominent Western virologists but none from China (Worobey et al., 2022 and Pekar et al., 2022). The two ‘Western’ preprints assessed the Huanan market evidence (though without including the new Gao et al. data) and concluded the exact opposite–that the COVID-19 pandemic began in late 2019 with multiple zoonotic spillovers at the market in Wuhan. This latter interpretation was widely covered by the Western media as discrediting the lab leak possibility.
Neither of these viewpoints is an objective scientific analysis of the relevant data, however. Rather, they reflect an emerging scientific struggle. It is between Western-affiliated scientists on one side and their Chinese counterparts on the other. Each side is trying to twist the COVID-19 origin story to fit their local political needs, which are really those of their respective government funders and other backers. What the combatant camps did not anticipate, however, was the appearance of an innovative and much superior methodology for the genetic dissection of COVID-19 origins, along with researchers willing to use it. Consequently, the data manipulations and stratagems of both sides–the Gao establishment in China and the Western virologists ginning up a market zoonosis–are being revealed for what they are.
Read full article at: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/delete-deny-and-destroy-chinese-and-western-strategies-to-erase-covids-origin-are-being-exposed-by-independent-research/
