- Tue Aug 24, 2021 2:29 pm
#131803
People were censored, deplatformed, and called anti-China racists for putting forth the Wuhan lab leak theory a year ago.
Comes now this from The NY Times:
n the early days of the pandemic, scientists reported a reassuring trait in the new coronavirus: It appeared to be very stable. The virus was not mutating very rapidly, making it an easier target for treatments and vaccines.
At the time, the slow mutation rate struck one young scientist as odd. “That really made my ears perk up,” said Alina Chan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chan wondered whether the new virus was somehow “pre-adapted” to thrive in humans, before the outbreak even started.
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“By the time the SARS-CoV-2 virus was detected in Wuhan in late 2019, it looked like it had already picked up the mutations it needed to be very good at spreading among humans,” Chan said. “It was already good to go.”
The hypothesis, widely disputed by other scientists, was the foundation for an explosive paper posted online in May 2020, in which Chan and her colleagues questioned the prevailing consensus that the lethal virus had naturally spilled over to humans from bats through an intermediary host animal.
The question she helped put on the table has not gone away. In late May, President Joe Biden, dissatisfied by an equivocal report he had received on the subject, asked U.S. intelligence services to dig deeper into the origins question. The new report is due any day now.
Comes now this from The NY Times:
n the early days of the pandemic, scientists reported a reassuring trait in the new coronavirus: It appeared to be very stable. The virus was not mutating very rapidly, making it an easier target for treatments and vaccines.
At the time, the slow mutation rate struck one young scientist as odd. “That really made my ears perk up,” said Alina Chan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chan wondered whether the new virus was somehow “pre-adapted” to thrive in humans, before the outbreak even started.
Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times
“By the time the SARS-CoV-2 virus was detected in Wuhan in late 2019, it looked like it had already picked up the mutations it needed to be very good at spreading among humans,” Chan said. “It was already good to go.”
The hypothesis, widely disputed by other scientists, was the foundation for an explosive paper posted online in May 2020, in which Chan and her colleagues questioned the prevailing consensus that the lethal virus had naturally spilled over to humans from bats through an intermediary host animal.
The question she helped put on the table has not gone away. In late May, President Joe Biden, dissatisfied by an equivocal report he had received on the subject, asked U.S. intelligence services to dig deeper into the origins question. The new report is due any day now.
- By Clownkicker