Can we stop blaming the bats for the creation of “covid”?

https://www.science.org/content/article/pandemic-start-anywhere-but-here-argue-papers-chinese-scientists-echoing-party-line#.Yv5P8FFAqPY.twitter

As most of us remember, the narrative in winter 2020 was that covid was started by a bat in a wet market in Wuhan, China.  Sadly, several of us actually believed this story in the early days.  By spring 2020, many of us realized that story was a fabricated lie of bat poop, but that did not stop the narrative from continuing. THE NOTION THAT it all began at the sprawling Huanan market in downtown Wuhan was not controversial at first. A 31 December 2019 report from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission announced a cluster of 27 unexplained pneumonia cases linked to the market, which was immediately closed. Three weeks later, after a novel coronavirus had been identified as the cause, government researchers concluded in the China CDC Weekly that “all current evidence points to wild animals sold illegally in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.” On 27 January, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that 33 “environmental samples” from the market had tested positive for the virus and all but two came from areas selling wildlife. Again, the results suggested “the virus stems from wild animals on sale at the market,” the article stated.

So, what better way to disprove the “bat theory” than to go on a mission testing bats for…you guessed it…..SARS!

A team of 21 researchers from China’s leading academic institutions had trapped more than 17,000 bats, from the subtropical south to the frigid northeast, and tested them for relatives of SARS-CoV-2.  Guess how many bats tested positive?  ZERO.

Originally, Beijing agreed with the bat in the wet market “theory”.  But they have now changed their stance. Today they agree to a myriad of ways the  SARS-CoV-2 outbreak could have occurred: it could have arrived in Wuhan from abroad, borne by contaminated frozen food or infected foreigners—perhaps at the Military World Games in Wuhan, in October 2019—or released accidentally by a U.S. military lab located more than 12,000 kilometers from Wuhan. Its goal is to avoid being blamed for the pandemic in any way, says Filippa Lentzos, a sociologist at King’s College London who studies biological threats and health security. “China just doesn’t want to look bad,” she says. “They need to maintain an image of control and competence. And that is what goes through everything they do.”

By now more than two dozen reports from Chinese scientists have suggested the virus came from elsewhere. Many, including Wu’s Lancet letter, explored the imported frozen food hypothesis. After China had all but stopped COVID-19 transmission by March 2020, researchers linked small outbreaks to imported salmon at a Beijing market, frozen cod offloaded at shipping docks in Qingdao, and imported pollock packaged by a company in Dalian. Other scientists tested more than 50 million swabs of frozen food packages from across China and found that nearly 1500 had genetic remnants of the virus. In the China CDC Weekly they asserted it “cannot be ruled out” that just such contamination triggered the initial Huanan market outbreak.

Yet researchers rarely detected infectious virus on the food—only viral RNA—and food regulators in the United States, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand have dismissed this route of transmission. There’s also nothing that connects imported frozen food at the Huanan market to the outbreak there.

Besides, if the virus arrived in Wuhan on frozen food, “it means the virus had to be already circulating somewhere else, and there’s no evidence of that,” Koopmans says. Studies from Spain, Italy, France, Brazil, and the United States have reported finding genetic pieces of the virus—or antibodies to it—in stored tissue from patients or wastewater samples that predate the Wuhan outbreak. Chinese scientific papers and media have made much of such findings, but skeptics say the viral traces may be contaminants and the antibodies could be responses to other pathogens that “cross-react” with SARS-CoV-2.

As for the frozen food route, Holmes says it’s not even worth discussing. “You might as well just say it came from cosmic dust.”

There have been numerous studies on blood and tissue done to compare pre and post SARS COV 2 samples, and indeed, SARS was found in samples outside of China prior to the initial report of the outbreak.  Over the last 2 years we have seen cases of people dying of what was now confirmed covid prior to Christmas 2019 in France.  Samples taken from tissues here in the United States found covid prior to November 2019.  The extensive illness spread in October 2019 after the Wuhan military games.

Can we finally put the bat soup theory to rest as misinformation and identify the true source of the outbreak was a bioweapon lab that created the virus?  In my opinion, yes.