WHO abandons plans for second phase of COVID-origins investigation
I know most of the comments here are the politics of the situation, but I just want to point out the extreme irony of this sentence from the article:> Researchers are undertaking some work to pin down a timeline of the virus’s initial spread. This includes efforts to trap bats in regions bordering China in search of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2;There is significant concern that the mere act of having researchers wade around in bat caves looking for coronaviruses is a bad idea. As happens frequently, Zeynep Tufekci has some of the most reasonable, logical takes on the pandemic [1]:> Many of these research practices weren’t deviations from international norms. A bat field researcher in the United States told me she now always wears a respirator in bat caves but that wasn’t standard practice before.> It isn’t a wild idea to suggest that field research risks setting off an outbreak. Dr. Linfa Wang, a Chinese-Australian virologist based in Singapore who frequently works with Dr. Shi and pioneered the hypothesis that bats were behind the 2003 SARS epidemic, told Nature there is a small chance that this pandemic was seeded by a researcher inadvertently getting infected by an unknown virus while collecting bat samples in a cave.There is also a good Twitter thread on this subject [2].My vote is we stay the fuck out of trapping wild bats looking for viruses in the first place.1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.h...2. https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1557378231342350343