Covid-19 likely to be man made

The why is the conspiracy, that's what you need to expand upon, who is hiding information, why are they doing it, how many people know about it and why haven't they come forward with proof.

I can only speculate on the why. We know a fair bit of the conversations that were going on between Collins, Fauci and the group of virologists they discussed the outbreak with, as a lot has been released via FOIA, but a lot more has been redacted so an incomplete picture. What we do know is that the key virologists (Andersen, Farrar, Holmes) all had an initial impression that the virus was engineered. We also know that Collins and Fauci didn't really know much detail about this area of research and the funding that was going from NIH to EcoHealth to WIV. It looks to me like a bit of panic set in when this was realized, especially when the joint research from UNC and WIV was reviewed. There is a definite change in tone of communication once this is realized.

There is no question that Collins and Fauci wanted to knock lab leak conspiracy theories on the head, they said as much. Collins talked about the damage to science,especially Chinese scientists and the damage to intermnational relations. I would imagine what happened is after days of deliberations the virologists agreed that the virus could have come from a natural spillover or come from a lab leak, but were convinced that it was best to favor the former and discount the latter. We don't know exactly how they reached their Proxinal Origins conclusions as this is redacted.

Imagine what they were dealing with, a virus that was spreading out of control and reports out of China were it had a high fatality rate. A suggestion the virus was the result of research carried out in a lab in China, research that was funded by the USNIH. Imagine the furore if that was widely reported, at a time when there was intense fear among the population.

In short my opinion is i think Collins made a political decision and convinced Fauci and the scientists.

It does, but I suspect you have little or perhaps no understanding as to why. Also it isn't my argument, it's a hypothesis proposed by people who know the subject matter far better than you or I. It establishes the fact that the WIV in collaboration with UNC were building chimeric SARS-COV viruses where they inserted novel spikes into COV virus backbones, and then passaged them using humanized mice and found they caused more serious disease than the original virus. So it's an obvious place to look if you are serious about finding the origin of Covid, not an easy task as the Chinese government have zero interest in helping with the task and 100% interest in twarting it.

No idea where you are getting that from, but sorry have no interest in getting into another semantic back and forth as you seem to have zero interest in the actual topic.

Which is why people are on a thread discussing the origins of Covid on a Conspiracy Theory forum.

Interesting new development

"Newly released genetic data gathered from a live food market in Wuhan has linked Covid-19 with raccoon dogs, adding weight to the theory that infected animals sold at the site started the coronavirus pandemic, researchers involved in the work say.

Swabs collected from stalls at the Huanan seafood market in the two months after it was shut down on 1 January 2020 were previously found to contain both Covid and human DNA. When the findings were published last year, Chinese researchers stated that the samples contained no animal DNA.

That conclusion has now been overturned by an international team of scientists. Their analysis of gene sequences posted by the Chinese team to the scientific database Gisaid found that some of the Covid-positive samples were rich in DNA from raccoon dogs. Traces of DNA belonging to other mammals, including civets, were also present in Covid-positive samples.

The discovery does not prove that raccoon dogs or other animals infected with Covid triggered the pandemic, but scientists presenting the work to an expert group at the World Health Organization on Tuesday believe it makes that more likely.

“The data does point even further to a market origin,” Prof Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary biologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, told Science magazine. Andersen attended a meeting of the WHO’s scientific advisory group for the origins of novel pathogens and is working on the data.

The recently uploaded gene sequences were spotted by Florence Débarre, an evolutionary biologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. She alerted Andersen and Prof Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, who have both written papers providing evidence of a market origin for the pandemic."

It's new research which lends more weight to the wet market theory.

Careful now, apparently "interesting" is code for "some stuff I found on Twitter and didn't bother to look into"

No data as yet, not even a preprint, so would advise holding off until that's available.

Came across it in the Guardian, not in any twitter feed.

Just looked it up on Twitter a moment ago and now all these comments are making sense.

To understand

Source -> human -> lab leak -> live racoon dog -> humans

Is that what you are suggesting?

I am trying to understand why a raccoon dog could not have been infected by a human similar to mink farm infections in the early part of the pandemic.