The World Health Organization has said it continues to ask China to share data and cooperate with investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, but the UN health agency has issued another report, citing lack of transparency. You are blaming the country, namely the United States.
A WHO official on Friday said the United States had not shared any reports or data from federal agencies assessing how the COVID-19 pandemic began. It was included, and determined that there was “low confidence” that the pandemic was likely caused by a laboratory accident.
At a press conference on Friday, WHO’s COVID-19 technical director Maria van Kerkhove said: “At the moment, we do not have access to the data underlying these reports or how they were generated. “Again, the institutions that have information about this reiterate that it remains important that that information is shared so that the scientific debate, and this debate, can move forward. Without it we cannot advance our understanding.”
The DOE’s “low confidence” conclusion has renewed a bitter partisan debate in the United States over the origins of the pandemic. WHO and China.
This week, Republican Senators Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee) and Ron Johnson (Wisconsin) used an unpublished DOE report as a justification for imposing new transparency rules on the WHO. “Recent news about the Labourek theory only underscores the extent of the Chinese Communist Party’s influence on the World Health Organization.” Blackburn wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.
Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kansas), meanwhile, told The Washington Post that he supports the “Laborique” hypothesis. As a biochemistry major, I don’t think this virus could have originated naturally. It’s too perfect.”
unsolved science
U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously agree that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a bioweapon, and most agree that the virus was likely not genetically engineered. It concludes and contradicts Marshall’s proposal. Virologists and genetics experts also largely agree that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered.
The DOE’s “low confidence” rating also doesn’t give the investigation the “momentum” that some lawmakers seem to suggest. The Confidence Criteria for U.S. Intelligence Service Assessments in the National Intelligence Estimate for 2007 (NIE 2007) Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities describes a “low confidence” assessment as follows:
In general, the reliability and/or validity of the information is questionable, or the information is too fragmentary or insufficiently corroborated to allow firm analytical inferences to be made, or there are serious concerns or problems with the source. means that there is
Even if such an assessment were more important, the DOE’s commitment to the laboratory leak hypothesis remains a minority view within the US intelligence community. Of the nine intelligence community entities that reviewed SARS-CoV-2 origin data, only two of them, the DOE and the FBI, leaned toward laboratory leaks. Five of his agencies (four agencies and the National Intelligence Council) support the hypothesis of natural ‘spillover’ events from wildlife, while the other two of his agencies weigh in on either hypothesis. states that there is not enough data for
Meanwhile, virologists and infectious disease experts continue to point out that the limited data available so far support the spillover hypothesis, but conclusively this is not the case. Two parallel studies, published last summer in the journal Science, found that two strains of SARS-CoV-2 infected humans on two separate occasions at the start of the pandemic in Wuhan, causing most cases. are concentrated in the Wuhan market area. High concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 positive environmental samples and wildlife. Many of them may be infected with SARS-CoV-2.
However, unaware of what data the DOE and FBI used to show unreliable trends towards laboratory-based origins, researchers and WHO officials were skeptical that assessments had so far been collected. I’m not sure how it fits with the published scientific information.
