You probably saw that Western virologists “sleuthed” that raccoon dog DNA was present in the wet market.

In fact this data was uploaded by Chinese scientists in preparation to publish in Nature. Their report says humans brought the virus into the market.

www.who.int/news/item/18-03-2023-sago-statement-on-newly-released-sars-cov-2-metagenomics-data-from-c...

An influential clique of Western virologists has aggressively pulled focus from these China CDC scientists — twice!

They say the wet market is the ONLY possible origin of the pandemic.

The Chinese scientists say it was a superspreader event.

Uh oh!

assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1370392/v1_covered.pdf?c=1645813311

In May 2020, China CDC Director George Gao said that the samples they took in the wet market in Wuhan indicated it was not the source of the pandemic after all, and that the virus had likely been circulating earlier.

nypost.com/2020/05/27/wuhan-wet-market-is-victim-of-coronavirus-outbreak-chinas-cdc/

But by March 2020, some Western virologists had staked their reputations on a wet market origin. "Prompted" by Fauci, they wrote a letter saying COVID was definitely natural.

Despite private doubts about the market.

usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/timeline-the-proximal-origin-of-sars-cov-2/

Fast forward to 2022.

On February 25, Gao released a preprint supporting his earlier claim that the wet market was a superspreader event.

According to their sampling, COVID was most strongly correlated with human genetic material.

assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1370392/v1_covered.pdf?c=1645813311

Two days later, on February 27, these Western virologists rushed out two preprints saying the wet market was “unambiguously” the source of the pandemic.

The news was push alerted by the New York Times and CNN.

“The lab leak theory is dead.”

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/26/science/covid-virus-wuhan-origins.html

The Chinese scientists’ preprint pointing to the market being a superspreader event was totally overshadowed.

Among the ironies: The Western virologists didn’t know that the more ancestral lineage of COVID was present in the market until they learned it from the Chinese preprint

But the Chinese scientists’ preprint couldn't publish until data about genetic material found in the market were made publicly available.

Western virologists say Beijing is hiding nothing about the Wuhan lab, but covering up a natural origin of COVID.

www.science.org/content/article/pandemic-start-anywhere-but-here-argue-papers-chinese-scientists-echo...

Last week, Western virologists seized on the newly public metagenomic data.

The Chinese virologists had been preparing for a year.

The Western virologists had been looking at the data for a few days.

Guess which analysis got picked up in the press?

Close observers already knew that raccoon dogs were sold at the Huanan Seafood Market (h/t @gdemaneuf)

So why approach the WHO and give quotes to the media before your Chinese colleagues even have the chance to publish their paper?

www.science.org/content/article/covid-19-origins-missing-sequences

Western virologists have now overshadowed the conclusion of the China CDC scientists who sampled the market in the first place — TWICE.

They are being chastised for not sharing data that they actually did manage to share despite political censorship.

www.nytimes.com/2023/03/17/health/covid-origins-who.html

In the coming weeks we’ll have to weigh how the Western virologists’ analysis of China CDC data compares to the Chinese virologists’ analysis of their own data.

But it won't matter much.

The Western virologists achieved their aim: protecting their pet theory.