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February 15, 2021 03:41 am

WHO Team Member to New York Times: What We Learned in China

Peter Daszak is part of the World Health Organization's 14-member team investigating the origins of the coronavirus. This weekend on Twitter he described "explaining key findings of our exhausting month-long work in China" to journalists — only to see team members "selectively misquoted to fit a narrative that was prescribed before the work began." Daszak was responding to a New York Times article which painted China as uncooperative for failing to hand over some raw data. But ironically, the next day the Times published a longer interview they'd done with Daszak, which acknowledges that Daszak "said that the visit had provided some new clues..." The Times had even specifically asked him if China's attitude made their work difficult, to which Daszak explicity answered: no."You've got a task to do. You've volunteered. You know what it's going to be like. You get caught up in the historical importance. I don't know if we were the first foreigners to walk around the Huanan seafood market, which is blocked off even to Chinese citizens. The only people that have been in there have been the Chinese disease investigators. We met with the doctors that treated the first known Covid patients." The Times also asked if they'd learned anything they didn't know before. Daszak's response:From Day 1, the data we were seeing were new that had never been seen outside China. Who were the vendors in the Huanan seafood market? Where did they get their supply chains? And what were the contacts of the first cases? How real were the first cases? What other clusters were there? When you asked for more, the Chinese scientists would go off, and a couple of days later, they've done the analysis, and we've got new information. It was extremely useful. The team also learned how extensively China's disease-control center had investigated the Wuhan market:They'd actually done over 900 swabs in the end, a huge amount of work. They had been through the sewage system. They'd been into the air ventilation shaft to look for bats. They'd caught animals around the market. They'd caught cats, stray cats, rats, they even caught one weasel. They'd sampled snakes. People had live snakes at the market, live turtles, live frogs. Rabbits were there, rabbit carcasses... Animals were coming into that market that could have carried the coronavirus. They could have been infected by bats somewhere else in China and brought it in. So that's clue No. 1... Some of these are coming from places where we know the nearest relatives of the virus are found. So there's the real red flag... There were other markets. And we do know that some of the patients had links to other markets. We need to do some further work, and then the Chinese colleagues need to do some further work... What is the next step? For the animals chain, it's straightforward. The suppliers are known. They know the farm name; they know the owner of the farm. You've got to go down to the farm and interview the farmer and the family. You've got to test them. You've got to test the community. You've got to go and look and see if there are any animals left at any farms nearby and see if they've got evidence of infection, and see if there is any cross-border movement. The Times' interview begins by specifically acknowledging Daszak's statement about new information obtained on the visit, "which all of the scientists, Chinese and international, agreed most likely pointed to an animal origin within China or Southeast Asia. "The scientists have largely discounted claims that the virus originated in a lab, saying that possibility was so unlikely that it was not worth further investigation."

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