On 01 Nov 2021, "Andrew Anglin - White Supremacist Pedo Boy"
<al@ssaohell.com> posted some news:slq02e$d2f$58@news.dns-netz.com:

> Biden hired a bunch of fucking queers

The new evidence is sure to provide a jolt to the debate over the
pandemic�s origins, even if it does not resolve the question of how it
began.

In recent weeks, the so-called lab leak theory, which posits that the
coronavirus emerged from a research lab in Wuhan, has gained traction
thanks to a new intelligence assessment from the U.S. Department of Energy
and hearings led by the new Republican House leadership.

But the genetic data from the market offers some of the most tangible
evidence yet of how the virus could have spilled into people from wild
animals outside a lab. It also suggests that Chinese scientists have given
an incomplete account of evidence that could fill in details about how the
virus was spreading at the Huanan market.

Jeremy Kamil, a virus expert at Louisiana State University Health Sciences
Center Shreveport who was not involved in the study, said the findings
showed that �the samples from the market that had early COVID lineages in
them were contaminated with DNA reads of wild animals.�

Kamil said that fell short of conclusive evidence that an infected animal
had set off the pandemic. But, he said, �it really puts the spotlight on
the illegal animal trade in an intimate way.�

Chinese scientists had released a study looking at the same market samples
in February 2022. That study had reported that samples were positive for
the coronavirus but suggested that the virus had come from infected people
who were shopping or working in the market, rather than from animals being
sold there.

At some point, those same researchers, including some affiliated with the
Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, posted the raw data
from swabs around the market to GISAID, an international repository of
genetic sequences of viruses. (Attempts to reach the Chinese scientists by
phone Thursday were not successful.)

On March 4, Florence D�barre, an evolutionary biologist at the French
National Center for Scientific Research, happened to be searching that
database for information related to the Huanan market when, she said in an
interview, she noticed more sequences than usual popping up. Confused at
first about whether they contained new data, D�barre put them aside, only
to log in again last week and discover that they held a trove of raw data.

Virus experts had been awaiting that raw sequence data from the market
since they learned of its existence in the Chinese report from February
2022. D�barre said she had alerted other scientists, including the leaders
of a team that had published a set of studies last year pointing to the
market as the origin.

An international team � which included Michael Worobey, an evolutionary
biologist at the University of Arizona; Kristian Andersen, a virus expert
at the Scripps Research Institute in California; and Edward Holmes, a
biologist at the University of Sydney � started mining the new genetic
data last week.

One sample in particular caught their attention. It had been taken from a
cart linked to a specific stall at the Huanan market that Holmes had
visited in 2014, scientists involved in the analysis said. That stall,
Holmes found, contained caged raccoon dogs on top of a separate cage
holding birds, exactly the sort of environment conducive to the
transmission of new viruses.

The swab taken from a cart there in early 2020, the research team found,
contained genetic material from the virus and a raccoon dog.

�We were able to figure out relatively quickly that at least in one of
these samples, there was a lot of raccoon dog nucleic acid, along with
virus nucleic acid,� said Stephen Goldstein, a virus expert at the
University of Utah who worked on the new analysis. (Nucleic acids are the
chemical building blocks that carry genetic information.)

After the international team stumbled upon the new data, they reached out
to the Chinese researchers who had uploaded the files with an offer to
collaborate, hewing to rules of the online repository, scientists involved
with the new analysis said. After that, the sequences disappeared from
GISAID.

It is not clear who removed them or why they were taken down.

D�barre said the research team was seeking more data, including some from
market samples that were never made public. �What�s important is there�s
still more data,� she said.

Scientists involved with the analysis said that some of the samples had
also contained genetic material from other animals and from humans. Angela
Rasmussen, a virus expert at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease
Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, who worked on
the analysis, said that the human genetic material was to be expected
given that people were shopping and working there and that human COVID
cases had been linked to the market.

Goldstein, too, cautioned that �we don�t have an infected animal, and we
can�t prove definitively there was an infected animal at that stall.�
Genetic material from the virus is stable enough, he said, that it is not
clear when exactly it was deposited at the market. He said that the team
was still analyzing the data and that it had not intended for its analysis
to become public before it had released a report.

�But,� he said, �given that the animals that were present in the market
were not sampled at the time, this is as good as we can hope to get.�

c.2023 The New York Times Company

<https://news.yahoo.com/data-links-pandemic-origins-raccoon-
113724388.html>