Three long-time Slashdot readers all submitted this story — schwit1, sinij, and DevNull127.
DevNull127 writes: 4 U.S. businesses have concluded that the Covid-19 virus originated on the Wuhan market, the Wall Road Journal experiences. The U.S. Nationwide Intelligence Council reached the identical conclusion. Then there’s two extra businesses (together with America’s CIA) which are “undecided.”
However there’s one company that determined — with “low confidence” — that the virus had someway leaked from a lab. (And the FBI additionally determined with “reasonable confidence” on that very same principle.) “The brand new report highlights how totally different components of the intelligence neighborhood have arrived at disparate judgments concerning the pandemic’s origin,” writes the Wall Road Journal — including that sadly U.S. officers “declined” to offer any particulars on what led to the Vitality Division’s place.
The Wall Road Journal additionally notes:
Regardless of the businesses’ differing analyses, the replace reaffirmed an current consensus between them that Covid-19 wasn’t the results of a Chinese language biological-weapons program, the individuals who have learn the labeled report stated….
Some scientists argue that the virus in all probability emerged naturally and leapt from an animal to a human, the identical pathway for outbreaks of beforehand unknown pathogens. Intelligence analysts who’ve supported that view give weight to “the precedent of previous novel infectious illness outbreaks having zoonotic origins,” the flourishing commerce in a various set of animals which are vulnerable to such infections, and their conclusion that Chinese language officers did not have foreknowledge of the virus, the 2021 report stated.
Additionally responding to the Division of Vitality’s outlying place was a virologist on the Vaccine and Infectious Illness Group at Canada’s College of Saskatchewan, who posted a collection of observations on Twitter:
The obtainable proof exhibits overwhelmingly that the pandemic began at Huanan market through zoonosis. I do not know what this proof that Division of Vitality has is. All I do know that it’s “weak” and resulted in a conclusion of “low confidence”.
It reportedly comes from the DOE’s personal community of nationwide labs quite than by spying. However I do know that to be in line with the obtainable scientific proof, the DOE has to clarify how the virus emerged twice over 2 wks in people on the similar market the dimensions of a tennis court docket, over 8 km & throughout a river from the one lab in Wuhan engaged on SARSr-CoVs….
Claims of a progenitor at WIV are pure hypothesis & unsupported by proof…. Regardless of 3 years of a worldwide seek for this proof, it has not materialized, whereas proof supporting zoonosis related to Huanan has continued to stack up. In some unspecified time in the future, an absence of proof may simply be proof of absence.
