What next?

Joe Biden finally wins the US election.  The future may be brightened, but is far from certain.  Trump is ousted, but Trump’s minions are not.  We don’t know what Trump will do in the next two months to make his disastrous 4-year-long actions and consequences worse and stick.  With GOP Senate control likely, how much Biden is able or wants to reverse Trump’s policies, let alone advance his own, is unknown.  A healthy opposition is important, but healthy is not the word fitting the Trump-enabling GOP right now.  The anti-science clouds have not dispersed, either.  While the Trump base proudly embraces and advances that climate, liberals are definitely not immune to the craziness either.  And they may now be its main driver from 2021 on.

NYT had another story about COVID-19 origin (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/world/who-china-coronavirus.html).  On the whole the event descriptions are mostly true, but the way the authors framed the story, the order they arranged the sentences, the handful of opinions inserted into it, and the scientific details and historic perspectives they omitted, left it no doubt another long-chewed gum on the same path since Jan 2020. 

NYT wanted to tell us, stealthily, that China blocked WHO from independently investigating COVID-19 origin.  It failed to mention that WHO has no such authority or isn’t even capable of doing any such thing.  Has WHO ever done it with any other disease, and what are the results?  NYT didn’t say, because it is blank.  WHO is no Interpol, and even Interpol doesn’t do it.  And what does “independently” even mean?  WHO running free in China?  Does China need to cooperate?  If so, how to define “independently”?  Who is to judge China cooperating or WHO working independently?  Everybody wants to know how COVID-19 arose, hugely important for science.  China has always maintained, with WHO, that it is a scientific question, not a political one.  My earlier blogs have dissected this over and over, first on Mar 28, 2020.  Yet all talks since Jan must inevitably turn to China bashing in the West: any WHO praising China’s controlling COVID-19 is a sign of surrendering and must be dismissed, while any WHO complaints, however minor, are indictive of China’s guilt.  There exist so many minefields that nothing will ever satisfy NYT or the West, whenever this question is posed.  Seen it before with the same media and circus on Iraq’s WMD.

From NYT actually, and countless Chinese media reports, there have been plenty of work in China and interactions with WHO since Jan.  NYT spent a lot of time on China’s CDC Director Gao, although how the story was told left an impression that Gao, hence China, is hiding sth, by first talking about the Wuhan market being the origin in Jan, then reserving course soon after.  Yet anybody following COVID-19 will know it is how we improve with more data becoming available over time, frankly a natural and standard process in every aspect of life. 

NYT’s single-minded focus on the Wuhan market is a sign that the West has learned little about China over the past 10 months.  My blogs have talked about this many times, since March 28, 2020.  They are barking at the wrong tree, because the Wuhan market is now almost certainly a place of superspreading event, not the origin of COVID-19.  NYT seemed to want to examine the whole market, but does it know how big the market is, and how many animals there were?  The NYT article mentioned that Gao talked about finding positives in the environment but not in the animals or animal samples they gathered.  This finding had been reported by Chinese media months and months ago.  Wuhan city shut down the market quickly, before CDC got involved, so Gao got what the city left him in late Dec and early Jan.  Anyway, when the market was shut down, should anybody expect to save all the animals and meat, mostly chickens, ducks, pork, beef, fish, seafood, etc, when there were no testing kits until almost 3 weeks later?  If there were exotic (mostly illegal) animals, their numbers were low, and the vendors would have been the first to bail.  And nobody has ever seen bats at the market.  I fully expect that China’s CDC has given WHO the data from the Wuhan market, because there is nothing to hide, and pointless to hide anything there.  And the early Wuhan cases were already been published in scientific journals in Feb! 

Contrast the Wuhan market to Beijing’s Xinfadi Wholesale Market, a place of another superspreading event in June.  Almost the exact same thing happened in Xinfadi, and environmental samples at specific locations were tested positive.  The likely cause at the moment is contamination and infection by frozen imported salmon packaging.  Nobody says Xinfadi is the origin of COVID-19.  Mounting evidence indicates people should move on from the Wuhan market.

If not the Wuhan market, where now?  Certainly not lab related or man-made, because DNA doesn’t lie.  What else?  We don’t know.  Just have to accept this fact, and let the professionals do the work, sans political bias.  Australia’s and the West’s endlessly and comically harping about investigating COVID-19 origin implies that China, WHO, or scientists are not working on it, which is false.  It also implies that China must be at fault; if not, or any day we don’t know the answer, there must be a China or WHO coverup.  In short, it is just a cheap shot to blame China.  Wuhan discovered COVID-19, but scientifically, who knows where the first patient, or the first bat for that matter, came from?  Do we know for sure how any other infectious diseases, e.g., AIDS, originated?  Answer: almost zero, if not actually zero.  From a strict point of view, this is practically impossible: once you find patient 0, any sensible person may ask: how about patient -1?  One can bet that China is as eager as, if not more than anybody else to find out, and work is ongoing, but any day the answer is not unavailable is not a day China is covering up: there are diseases decades, hundreds, and thousands of years old that humans still have no idea.  If history is any guide, where a disease was first reported is almost never the place it first appeared, and the disease has been with humans for a long time prior to discovery, e.g., AIDS. 

And studying the origin is irrelevant to containing the pandemic, the most pressing job now.  With HIV/AIDS still a menace, who cares about who the first patient was getting it from the first monkey?  Lastly, with so many infectious diseases throughout history and around the world, had any person or country got the blame then?