Cleverly disguised opinion article. The USG debunked nothing. The official stance of the US has been the pangolin-soup theory since 2020. The USG still has to contend with a large contingent of actual scientists who have evidence otherwise.
I guess I didn't expect any different from the LA times. Objectively speaking the US government has a vested interest in keeping China-US relations slightly less than lukewarm for the time being. They hardly can be considered an impartial arbiter of truth and after the latest ruling against Biden pressuring social media companies you can be certain "truth" is very flexible in the white house.
I treat this whole thing just like every other government message; could be this, could be that, could be a combination of both. If anyone takes any message from any government agency from any country as gospel truth they are delusional.
The bottom of page four of the report states the WIV institute's genetic engineering capabilities and that it has likely conducted some engineering of coronaviruses. Does that constitute proof of WIV engineering the COVID19 virus and the virus leaked from the lab?
Not an expert but from page three of the report:
"Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon."
“Wuhan lab workers were sick in November 2019, intelligence suggests”
Also, the WIV was more than 2 km from the market; the grandparent is probably thinking of a different, closer lab. The market was definitely the first big super-spreader event, but not necessarily the site of introduction into humans; the earliest cases show much less clear geographic distribution.
There's no conclusive evidence for any origin of SARS-CoV-2 yet. The ODNI report clearly leans against a research-related origin, but no one except the LA Times's "business columnist" is claiming that they "debunked" anything.
The bat virus they were doing gain-of-function research on at the Wuhan Lab came from miles away.
"Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan"
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
Who writes these headlines anyways...
A Pulitzer prize winning journalist. Lab leak is dead.
Is this satire? One biased source parroting another is not news or fact.
Also, does anyone in the real world give a shit about who wins a Pulitzer?
Personally I’m very concerned about the grey goo scenario. The three disasters I’m mentally prepared for today are a heart attack, hydrogen bomb flash and having everyone and everything around me rapidly dissolve into a giant block of carbon.
Gross. Have some dignity.
YMMV but to me the spike protein encoding on the original covid strains was just a little too close for comfort to fall into the random mutation category for my armchair opinion. I would have expected to see a non-human variant of the spike protein if it was a natural occurrence.
Either way, it is doubtful to me that we will ever know for sure.