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and sick people can freelly spread disease in population and become superspreaders because they simply deny or refuse the possibility they could be infected... Good job guys...
In silico simulation is tool in virology not proof that something does or does not exists.
Why China won't cooperate on finding the origins of COVID-19
Local officials in Wuhan initially tried to cover up the existence of a cryptic viral pneumonia that had an uncanny resemblance to the SARS virus that had emerged in Guangdong province 17 years earlier. When the outbreak became too large to conceal, Chinese officials shifted gears to denying its severity, most infamously in mid-January 2020 when they falsely claimed that there was no evidence of person-to-person transmission.
As of mid-November, the coronavirus pandemic that began in the central Chinese city of Wuhan has killed 6.6 million people globally and infected 635 million.
Though a combination of immunity from vaccines and infection seems to be ending the pandemic’s emergency phase, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, remains unpredictable. It has mutated in unexpected ways before.
One reason that scientists have struggled to stay ahead of the coronavirus is that China’s ruling Communist Party (CPC) has interfered with their investigations. Despite boasting about its ability to safeguard people’s lives, China has put politics above health concerns throughout the worst pandemic in a century.
At all levels of the party-state, officials have prioritized political considerations because the Chinese political system is too rigid for them to do otherwise. That has resulted in persistent Chinese obstruction of efforts to uncover how and why the pandemic erupted nearly three years ago.
Local officials in Wuhan initially tried to cover up the existence of a cryptic viral pneumonia that had an uncanny resemblance to the SARS virus that had emerged in Guangdong province 17 years earlier. When the outbreak became too large to conceal, Chinese officials shifted gears to denying its severity, most infamously in mid-January 2020 when they falsely claimed that there was no evidence of person-to-person transmission.
After China corralled the coronavirus by locking down Wuhan, it mounted a propaganda counteroffensive aimed at sowing confusion about the pathogen’s origins. To that end, it spread disinformation in both Chinese state media and on Western social media channels that suggested the virus originated at the U.S.’ Fort Detrick, which conducts defensive biowarfare research, or equally improbable, sewage in Europe.
Beijing reacted furiously to Australia’s call in April 2020 for an independent international inquiry into the virus’s origins by sanctioning Canberra. The Communist Party-owned nationalist tabloid The Global Times panned Australia as “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe” and warned Canberra was treading “a hazardous path that has no prospect for a U-turn during the COVID-19 pandemic, and likely for a long time afterward.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) investigation eventually undertaken under strict Chinese supervision — and whose report was co-written by Chinese officials — unsurprisingly failed to find China at fault or reach a conclusion about the virus’s origins.
Yet then Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s explanation of why a proper probe of the virus’s origins was necessary remains as relevant as ever. Citing the pandemic’s human and economic toll (which has since grown exponentially), he said that “it would seem entirely reasonable and sensible that the world would want to have an independent assessment of how this all occurred, so we can learn the lessons and prevent it from happening again.”
Due in part to China’s refusal to share raw data on early COVID-19 cases, insufficient scientific evidence exists to reach a definitive conclusion about SARS-CoV-2’s origins. Proponents of the zoonotic origin theory argue that most pandemics in history began when a pathogen crossed over from an animal to humans. That is true, but no animal coronavirus has been identified that is sufficiently similar to have been SARS-CoV-2’s direct progenitor.
Scientists who presented at 7th World One Health Congress in Singapore earlier this month say that SARS-CoV-2’s direct ancestor likely originated from several viruses and has since been recombining and mutating in bats. They believe that sampling bats for coronaviruses may identify viral fragments more closely related than those found to date in known pathogens, but probably will not reveal one direct ancestor.
Another more contentious idea on the origin of COVID-19 is that the virus escaped from a lab. Many in the scientific community frown on this theory because of its association with unsavory conspiracy theorists.
From a scientific standpoint, evidence to prove that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a lab accident is lacking. It simply is not there.
However, it is equally difficult to dismiss the lab accident hypothesis given that Wuhan is home to a virology institute known for conducting research on bat coronaviruses that alters their function to better understand their evolution. Some scientists oppose this “gain-of-function” research because they believe it is too risky. They say that if a modified virus not present in nature escaped a lab, it could wreak havoc.
What’s more, there are confirmed lab leaks of the first SARS from a Singapore lab in 2003 and Beijing facility in 2004. WHO investigations found that lax safety procedures likely caused the leaks in both countries. In May 2004 the WHO said that the China outbreak, which infected nine people and killed one, had been contained but that biosafety concerns remained.
The Chinese Communist Party is well aware of this history, but still adamantly denies the possibility that COVID-19 escaped from a lab. Zhao Lijian, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in June at a daily briefing, “The lab leak theory is totally a lie concocted by anti-China forces for political purposes, which has nothing to do with science.”
In October, after Vanity Fair and ProPublica published a new report about the lab leak theory, Zhao said, “U.S. politicians are rehashing the lab-leak theory to smear China in disregard of facts.”
China’s unflagging propaganda efforts to recast itself as pandemic hero rather than villain have borne fruit at home: Some Chinese people believe the virus originated elsewhere and that other countries caused the pandemic. They think that China should be lauded for its ability to contain the pathogen with lockdowns, mass testing, quarantines and digital surveillance.
A foreign business executive fluent in Mandarin who has lived in China since 2002 told me that though some educated Chinese take an agnostic view of the pandemic’s origins and “distance themselves from government propaganda,” others, such as his neighbors and taxi drivers, “consume all the party propaganda and blindly believe everything they hear.” He notes that while many conspiracy theories exist about the origin of the virus, in Chinese propaganda “the blame tends to be concentrated on the U.S., which is the narrative that most of these people absorb.”
Given the CPC’s draconian crackdown on civil society in recent years, it is highly unlikely that anyone in China will publicly challenge the party-state’s official narrative, even if some Chinese know better as the foreign business executive suggests.
Thus, two stories of the pandemic will exist: the CPC’s and the rest of the world’s. This will aggravate tensions between China and many other nations that have suffered enormous human and economic losses due to the pandemic, from the U.S. to the European Union states to India.
If Beijing cooperated with other countries to launch a proper investigation into the coronavirus’s origins, it could likely mitigate some of the reputational damage it has suffered as well as help the world better prepare for future pandemics.
But that seems unlikely. The CPC would rather deal with a hostile external environment in which no smoking gun can be produced that proves SARS-CoV-2 originated in China, whether zoonotically or from a lab accident, than allow a global audience to closely scrutinize its missteps.
Meanwhile, the factors that led to the pandemic have not fundamentally changed. The Chinese party-state remains obsessed with secrecy. It would be naive to think that local officials who encountered an outbreak of a new pathogen would act differently than their counterparts in Wuhan three years ago. Nor has the bushmeat trade disappeared from China, even if exotic animals are no longer openly sold at wet markets. Instead, it has gone underground, which is not a surprise given the industry was valued at $76 billion by the Chinese Academy of Engineers in 2016.
With that in mind, it will be imperative to carefully monitor the situation on the ground in China for any unusual disease outbreaks. This was the approach that Taiwan, which is excluded from the WHO due to China’s objections, took, with great success. Thanks to its large network of citizens in China, the Taiwanese government learned in late 2019 that something was seriously awry in Wuhan and began screening passengers arriving in Taiwan from there on Dec. 31, 2019. On Jan. 2, 2020, Taiwan set up a dedicated response team within its Center for Disease Control to monitor what was then known as “Wuhan pneumonia.”
Having been hit hard by the first SARS epidemic in 2003, which the CPC also tried to cover up, Taiwan did not trust the Chinese government’s word. That skepticism proved to be warranted — and holds valuable lessons for us all.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2022/11/18/commentary/world-commentary/china-covid-19-origin/