By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
The question of Covid’s origin has generated a vast literature and a polemic[1] even vaster, neither of which I can pretend to have mastered[2],[3]. Nevertheless, with the change in administrations, the Origin Question has exploded into the news again, and I think I can at least make a small contribution, limited in scope and questioning the conventional wisdom, summarized in the title. On January 24, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA )director John Ratcliffe] gave an interview to Brietbart (bless their hearts) that included the following passage:
[RADCLIFFE:] One of the things that I’ve talked about a lot is addressing the threat from China on a number of fronts, and that goes back to why a million Americans died and why the Central Intelligence Agency has been sitting on the sidelines for five years in not making an assessment about the origins of COVID. That’s a day-one thing for me. I’ve been on record as you know in saying I think our intelligence, our science, and our common sense all really dictates that the origins of COVID was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the CIA has not made that assessment or at least not made that assessment publicly. So I’m going to focus on that and look at the intelligence and make sure that the public is aware that the agency is going to get off the sidelines.”
On the following day, the CIA released “a new analysis that began under the Biden administration.” From the New York Times, “C.I.A. Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid’s Origins“:
[T]he agency issued a new assessment[4] this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.
There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shift, officials said. Rather it is based on the same evidence it has been chewing over for months.
Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time.
The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence,” which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete.
That is, there is no casus belli. More:
Senior intelligence officials in the Biden administration defend their process and methodology. They have said that no intelligence was suppressed and insist that politics did not play into their analysis.
These officials say that there are powerful logical arguments for both the lab leak and the natural causes theories, but that there simply is no decisive piece of intelligence on either side of the issue.
To boost the natural origins theory, intelligence officers would like to find the animal that passed it to a human or find a bat carrying what was the likely ancestor of the coronavirus that causes Covid.
Similarly, to seal the lab leak, the intelligence community would like to find evidence that one of the labs in Wuhan was working on a progenitor virus that directly led to the epidemic.
Neither piece of evidence has been found.
At this point, I had expected to transition into quoting directly from the new assessment. Unfortunately, in their coverage of the story, neither The Times, nor AP, Axios, Breitbart, CNBC, CNN, Daily Caller, Financial Times, FOX, NBC, Politico, nor the Wall Street Journal include a link to the new assessment, or even quote directly from it. Nor do they at any point link to a complete copy of the CIA’s (emailed) statement on the matter. Nor is there anything relevant in the press release or reports sections of the CIA, Intelligence.gov, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. So while all the stories defer to Ratcliffe’s claim that the new assessment has been “released,” it is not entirely clear to whom, if anyone, the release has been made. Perhaps matters will clarify on Monday.
What I expected to find, in the new assessment, was no mention of early Covid cases in Italy (which Yves has been highlighting in the comments section), with the focus entirely on Wuhan. That was the case in the previous 2021 and 2023 assessments. In this post, I hope to at least persuade you that the potential cases of Covid in Italy, pre-Wuhan, aggregated, merit at least a dismissive footnote in the CIA’s assessments. After all, if SARS-CoV-2 was out in the world prior to, or contemporaneously with, its initial small scale November 2019 appearance in Wuhan, or the first major in December 2019, that might well call its origin at the Wuhan Institute of Virology into question. The absence of such a footnote is therefore curious, and in the context of an assessment of such political and strategic import, downright odd. I will simply post the studies I have found from 2020 through 2022. There are rather a lot of them for a completely unfounded hypothesis; in fact, I would so far as to say that for the Italian medical establishment, the consensus view was that the existence of early Italian cases was worth pursuing. Finally, 2022, I will present a meta-study that aggregates many more early cases, including its conclusions.
Now to the studies.
The Studies
I’ve organized studies claiming early Covid in Italy chronologically by publication date. The method used to detect Covid appears in square brackets before the study title. (I haven’t included some studies whose test methods were inferior to Nested-PCR.)
2020
[Nested-PCR, RT-PCR] “SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating in northern Italy since December 2019: Evidence from environmental monitoring” Science of the Total Environment (August 15, 2020):
The first autochthonous Italian case of COVID-19 was documented on February 21, 2020. We investigated the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Italy earlier than that date, by analysing 40 composite influent wastewater samples collected – in the framework of other wastewater-based epidemiology projects – between October 2019 and February 2020 from five wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in three cities and regions in northern Italy (Milan/Lombardy, Turin/Piedmont and Bologna/Emilia Romagna). Twenty-four additional samples collected in the same WWTPs between September 2018 and June 2019 (i.e. long before the onset of the epidemic) were included as ‘blank’ samples… A total of 15 positive samples were confirmed by [nested RT-PCR and real-rime RT-PCR]. The earliest dates back to 18 December 2019 in Milan and Turin and 29 January 2020 in Bologna…. Our results demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 was already circulating in northern Italy at the end of 2019. Moreover, it was circulating in different geographic regions simultaneously, which changes our previous understanding of the geographical circulation of the virus in Italy.
[In-house ELISA, virus neutralisation assay] “Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the prepandemic period in Italy” Tumori (November 11, 2020).
We investigated the presence of SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain (RBD)–specific antibodies in blood samples of 959 asymptomatic individuals enrolled in a prospective lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020 to track the date of onset, frequency, and temporal and geographic variations across the Italian regions. SARS-CoV-2 RBD-specific antibodies were detected in 111 of 959 (11.6%) individuals, starting from September 2019
And:
[T]he onset of the epidemic [is] likely to have preceded the identification of the first case, probably in the last part of 2019. Since November–December 2019, many general practitioners began reporting the appearance of severe respiratory symptoms in elderly and frail people with atypical bilateral bronchitis, which was attributed, in the absence of news about the new virus, to aggressive forms of seasonal influenza. One investigation on SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence in healthy blood donors has been performed in one of the two initial lockdown areas in northern Italy. In a group of 300 stored plasma samples, 5 samples collected between the 12th and 17th of February exhibited evidence of anti-SARS-CoV-2 NAbs. Moreover, a phylogenetic analysis of the SARS-CoV-2 genomes isolated from 3 Lombardy patients involved in the first COVID-19 outbreak suggests that the common origin of the strains dates back several weeks before the first cases of COVID-19 pneumonia reported in China. Based on these findings, a prior unnoticed circulation of the virus among the Italian population could be hypothesized.
(This article was covered in Reuters (and News Medical Life Sciences, and the Week. Concerns were raised about it in Retraction Watch, apparently because it was fast-tracked, but nothing came of them.)
2021
[Nested-PCR, Sanger sequencing] “Evidence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in an Oropharyngeal Swab Specimen, Milan, Italy, Early December 2019” Emerging Infectious Diseases (February 2021):
We describe the earliest evidence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in a patient in Italy, ≈3 months before Italy’s first reported COVID-19 case. These findings, in agreement with other evidence of early COVID-19 spread in Europe, advance the beginning of the outbreak to late autumn 2019. However, earlier strains also might have been occasionally imported to Italy and other countries in Europe during this period, manifesting with sporadic cases or small self-limiting clusters…. This finding is of epidemiologic importance because it expands our knowledge on timing and mapping of the SARS-CoV-2 transmission pathways. Long-term, unrecognized spread of SARS-CoV-2 in northern Italy would help explain, at least in part, the devastating impact and rapid course of the first wave of COVID-19 in Lombardy.
[Immunohistochemistry, insitu hybridisation] “COVID‐19‐related dermatosis in November 2019: could this case be Italy’s patient zero?” British Journal of Dermatology (May 1, 2021).
In November 2019, a 25‐year‐old woman presented with urticarial plaque‐like dermatosis on the arms (Figure 1a)…. In July 2020, we realized that the histopathological features of the biopsy matched the minichilblain pattern described in our previously published paper on COVID‐19‐related dermatoses (Figure 1b, c).2 Hence, we decided to study this biopsy again…. An Italian paper demonstrated SARS‐CoV‐2 gene sequences with PCR analysis in northern Italy in wastewater samples in December 2019.6 A more recent paper reported the presence of SARS‐CoV‐2 receptor‐binding domain‐specific antibodies in blood samples of 111 asymptomatic Italian individuals enrolled in a prospective lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020.7 Along the same lines, Amendola et al. reported the presence of SARS‐CoV‐2 RNA in an oropharyngeal swab specimen of a child from Milan with dermatosis suspected to be measles in early December 2019. All these facts lead us to believe that our patient could represent the earliest case in the literature of detection of the virus on tissue samples. Can we then call this case the dermatological Italian patient zero?
[ELISA, microneutralisation assay] “Timeline of SARS-CoV-2 Spread in Italy: Results from an Independent Serological Retesting” [Viruses] (December 30, 2021):
Given the importance of this evidence, an independent evaluation was recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) to test a subset of samples selected on the level of positivity in ELISA assays (positive, low positive, negative) detected in our previous study of prepandemic samples collected in Italy. SARS-CoV-2 antibodies were blindly retested by two independent centers in 29 blood samples collected in the prepandemic period in Italy, 29 samples collected one year before and 11 COVID-19 control samples. The methodologies used included IgG-RBD/IgM-RBD ELISA assays, a qualitative micro-neutralization CPE-based assay, a multiplex IgG protein array, an ELISA IgM kit (Wantai), and a plaque-reduction neutralization test. The results suggest the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in some samples collected in the prepandemic period, with the oldest samples found to be positive for IgM by both laboratories collected on 10 October 2019 (Lombardy), 11 November 2019 (Lombardy) and 5 February 2020 (Lazio).
(This is a follow-up to the Tumori study.)
2022
[ELISA, RT-PCR] “Evidence of SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies and RNA on Autopsy Cases in the Pre-Pandemic Period in Milan (Italy)” Frontiers in Microbiology (June 14, 2022):
To date, no studies aimed at searching for evidence of the circulation of SARS-CoV-2 in the pre-pandemic period have been conducted on autopsy cases. We wanted, therefore, to address this specific topic by analyzing blood samples collected from cadavers subjected to autopsy at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Milan….. [O]ur data indicated that the first SARS-CoV-2 positive case dated December 2019, while the detection of positivity only to IgM test by rapid LFIA in October 2019, being within the lower limit of the specificity rate of the test, possibly represents nonspecific signal or cross-reaction with antibodies against other coronaviruses.
[Nested-PCR, Sanger sequencing, commercial ELISA, neutralisation assay] “Molecular evidence for SARS-CoV-2 in samples collected from patients with morbilliform eruptions since late 2019 in Lombardy, northern Italy” Environmental Research (December 2022):
As a reference laboratory for measles and rubella surveillance in Lombardy, we evaluated the association between SARS-CoV-2 infection and measles-like syndromes, providing preliminary evidence for undetected early circulation of SARS-CoV-2. Overall, 435 samples from 156 cases were investigated…. The earliest sample with evidence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA was from September 12, 2019d.
And from News-Medical Life Sciences, “Italian study finds SARS-CoV-2 in clinical samples collected before December 2019“:
“Despite the lack of a definitive timeline on when SARS-CoV-2 initially emerged, previous evolutionary studies indicate that the virus likely circulated in China for several months before the first outbreak was recorded in Wuhan, China. Soon after, an increasing number of cases were reported in several European and North American countries by mid-January 2020…. The SARS-CoV-2 strain that circulated in Lombardy, as well as much of Europe soon after its initial detection in Italy, differed from the Wuhan-Hu-1 strain, which was the reference genome originally identified in China. In fact, some of the different mutations present within this strain included A23403G (Spike D614G), C14408T (RdRp P323L), and C3037T (synonymous). This strain, which has since been named B.1 in Pangolin and 20A in NextStrain, is often referred to as the DG1111 haplotype and comprises an αβ mutational signature.
Several studies suggest that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in many nations prior to its official detection.
Finally, let me quote from this review of the literature in the British Medical Journal, “Waiting for the truth: is reluctance in accepting an early origin hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 delaying our understanding of viral emergence?” (December 2022). From the Summary:
A growing body of studies provides evidence for the global circulation of SARS-CoV-2 prior to December 2019, contradicting the currently hypothesised timeline of the original viral emergence in Hubei province of China around November 2019; however, any suggestion of an earlier SARS-CoV-2 circulation is met with scepticism.
• Several studies performed independently by different groups retrospectively demonstrated the presence of antibodies and viral RNA in clinical samples and showed SARS-CoV-2 community circulation by detecting viral RNA in wastewater at times inconsistent with November 2019 emergence.
• Despite some limitations, combining the knowledge acquired from these studies is sufficient to warrant further larger-scale investigations to determine the veracity of this hypothesis.
• If proven true, an earlier than currently believed worldwide spread of SARS-CoV-2 will provide essential clues for understanding the genesis of this pandemic and offer invaluable lessons from our successes and failures with crucial implications for future pandemic preparedness and global health.
(I did my own digging for sources, but they overlap with Table 1.) Sadly, no larger-scale studies were ever made — in fact, the studies stop entirely, rather as if a switch was thrown — but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have been worth making:
Despite the increasing documentation available in support of its early circulation, current scientific literature discussing the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is almost exclusively focused on the November/December 2019 hypothesis, completely ignoring this growing body of contradictory evidence. In fact, the possibility of early circulation is only seldom mentioned or discussed in such papers. Furthermore, as this alternative hypothesis clearly contradicts the timeline that is today held as the most likely, when these studies are cited, it is done dismissively, minimising the results obtained by numerous independent research groups. This attitude, pervasive among high-ranking journals, clearly demonstrates scepticism and has the consequence of avoiding a more critical interpretation of scientific data and of discouraging a constructive scientific debate that should consider all available facts when advancing a hypothesis and re-evaluate assumptions in light of new evidence. Additionally, this bias often results in rejection of manuscripts in support of an early SARSCoV-2 circulation, reinforcing the ‘echo chamber’ effect. Science is a quest for ultimate truth, which shall not be discouraged by such mindset.
Sounds like droplet dogma all over again. And concluding:
Despite the technical limitations of available early origin studies, even a remote possibility that positive tests indicate an early SARS-CoV-2 circulation should be considered sufficient to warrant the scaling up of research to more samples from more regions and through a wider timespan. Time is running out: valuable samples that may contain the key to the understanding of SARS-CoV-2 origin might already have been destroyed as their regulatory storage time requirements lapse. Many more will meet the same fate in the coming months and years. What is there to lose in accepting this hypothesis as tenable and exploring it urgently before the chances of finding the answers to explain how this pandemic emerged are gone forever?
What was there to lose? Plenty, as with all paradigm shifts.
Conclusion
Jon Stewart framed the origin question hilariously in 2021:
“There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? Maybe ask the chocolate factory” https://t.co/dRihMZZV2O
— MAD & CRAB 🦀🇭🇷🇵🇸 (@bigmadcrab) January 26, 2025
Turn it around. What do you think happened when there’s an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey Pennsylvania, and also — before? — in Italy’s Chocolate City, Turin?. Investigate further, I would say.
Further investigation, however, seems unlikely. Both sides of the controversy are now dug in to an origin story centered on Wuhan, whether at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Science, it would seem, has no further role to play.
NOTES
[1] For example, this exchange on X following the quasi-release of the CIA’s new assessment isn’t only overheated:
— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) January 25, 2025
I translated the Taz interview with Drosten cited by Metzl:
taz: In any case, they believed in a natural origin.
Drosten: I still think that’s likely, and almost all scientists who are working on the topic also assume that. But assuming doesn’t mean knowing.
taz: If you now say that this virus may have come from the laboratory after all, that will cause an uproar.
Drosten: I wouldn’t postulate that directly. But it’s not the same if we don’t have proof of a natural origin in 2020 as if we still don’t have that proof in 2025.
(Further down, Drosten gives a really good explanation of how the furin cleavage site works). I guess I can see what Ebright and Metzl are saying in Drosten’s actual words if I squint really, really hard…
[2] Personally, I take the strong form though not generally sympathized-with view that tweets like this:
If the FCS was inserted by a zoonotic mechanism, why is it flanked by BsaXI? pic.twitter.com/VkLoAvbbTm
— Tony VanDongen (@tony_vandongen) January 24, 2025
are logically equivalent to saying: “Look at this watch; gears so round and intermeshed can only have been created by God (the Watchmaker analogy, beloved of Creationists). When searching for causes, at least in the US, I think we give far too much weight to malevolent human actors, and far too little to impersonal systems, evolution, sheer accident, etc.
[3] Hilariously, China’s discourse is a mirror image of our own; see Bioethical Inquiry, “In the Shadow of Biological Warfare: Conspiracy Theories on the Origins of COVID-19 and Enhancing Global Governance of Biosafety as a Matter of Urgency“:
Immediately after the epidemic (initially called “Wuhan pneumonia”) became public knowledge in late January, an unsettling theory started to circulate in China. Posts with certain variations—but containing exactly the same information and similar wording—spread like wildfire, particularly on Chinese social media WeChat. They tied the origins of the virus to the first China-hosted international military multi-sport event which involved the participation of nearly ten thousand athletes from over one hundred countries.
The original message is a masterpiece of conspiracy theory rhetoric. It is worthwhile citing it in full (in English translation):
Compatriots: In this time of the Wuhan pneumonia epidemic, please do not forget the Seventh World Military Games in Wuhan three months ago. Of course, some international athletes came from Africa, where infectious diseases frequently break out. Some athletes came from the United States, which has long attempted to carry out biological warfare against China. When [the authorities] investigated the source of the virus responsible for the 2003 SARS epidemic, many clues pointed to the United States and its biological warfare conspiracy against China.
So, doesn’t this coronavirus pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan have something to do with the USA? This outbreak coincides with respect to the timeline, coincides with respect to the place, and coincides with respect to the gathering of people. And it also coincides in a major way with the China–US trade war, which is still raging fiercely. Shouldn’t we put all these coincidences together to analyse, synthesize, theorize, and verify so as to reach a clear conclusion? While carrying out its trade war with China, the U.S. government took advantage of the Seventh World Military Games, where many American athletes had numerous personal interactions with Chinese, hiding the novel coronavirus in their equipment with the aim of infecting the people of Wuhan. As the virus has an incubation period of two or three months, outbreaks on a massive scale would occur around the Spring Festival Holiday when vast numbers of people return home for the Chinese New Year.
See also “GOP report says October 2019 Wuhan military games were ‘one of the earliest super spreader events,” Washington Examiner.
[4] There are other early claims (France, England; Singapore; Barcelona, Spain; the Congo; the United States). I’m focusing only on Italy because the aggregate number is so large.
Reading the book Gomorrah that in Italy there is a large amount of Chinese imports and migrants? The author writes about it in his book and The NY Times excerpt below. A horrific and sad tale in the Times short bit. Obviously long before the covid outbreak but shows globalism in full stride. The whole book is an important read.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/books/1st-chapter-gom.html
I thought that there was an early Iran case? Am I wrong?
There was also the so called “vaping disease” breakout early in 2019 with symptoms that pretty much mimicked COVID including the ground glass imaging in lung X-rays.
Great post Lambert. It’s appreciated.
Never took a stand on the origins of Covid simply because the evidence was so fouled up by political expediency, conspiracy theories, geopolitics and all the rest of the circus. It was claim versus counter claim with obvious evidence like the outbreak in Italy in 2019 being firmly ignored. But with the CIA making noises about blaming the Chinese for it, does that mean that Trump will try to leverage this talking point with the Chinese and try to make them international pariahs so he can get a good deal from them? Is this the CIA trying to simply get into Trump’s good books here? It was only back in 2021 that Trump said ‘China should pay USD 10 trillion to America, and the world, for the death and destruction they have caused!’ You can bet that he has not forgotten in the same way that he wants Greenland handed over to him. It would still be rattling around the back of his brain. But as I said in a comment at the time, he had better be careful making this claim lest China demand $20 trillion compensation for America being the source of the Great Flu pandemic – plus 106 years interest-
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/china-dismisses-donald-trumps-10-trillion-compensation-for-covid-spread-2458517
Ya gotta love the right wing on Covid. It’s a deadly Chinese virus wreaking death and destruction that they owe us trillions for causing, and it’s just a cold, masks don’t work, end the lockdowns!
There is a large Chinese presence in Northeast Italy, around Turin, in the clothing trade. And, so, a lot of airplane travel between Turin and various major Chinese cities.
Yes, but the point is that Wuhan has been treated as the origin of case 0 and thus fingerpointing at the lab, when the cases in Italy point to earlier spread and do not specifically implicate Wuhan.
Turin is in the Northwest.
Great post. Anything coming from a Washington DC three-letter agency suffers from “striving toward the führer” and too much exposure to Hollywood fantasy — and should be dismissed out of hand.
I had something with all the classic symptoms of Covid-19 in December 2019, not tested but confirmed by my antibody reaction to my first Moderna jab many months later. The public health authorities in Silicon Valley testified that tissue samples confirmed that Covid-19 had been ”in the wild” there since at least October of 2019.
The political obfuscation has made evidence-based analysis impossible, so I’m going with Jon Stewart: the origin has to have been Fauci-led, U.S.-funded, research at the Wuhan lab and the “leak” was probably intentional to dirty-up the Chinese geopolitically.
That’s my working hypothesis until falsified, thanks.
Thank you Lambert.
Italy sent 139 athletes (and the associated staffing) to those military games in Wuhan. Make of that what you will.
One is reminded of the large number of Chinese cheap labor workers in Italy.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-chinese-workers-who-assemble-designer-bags-in-tuscany
The best Covid origin theory I’ve seen is by Jim Haslan in his book, COVID-19: “Mystery Solved: It leaked from a Wuhan lab but it’s not Chinese junk” as well as explained on his substack Reverse Engineering the Origins of SARS-CoV-2 in which he proposes that Ralph Baric took Corona virus sequences from a variety of strains that had been collected and synthesized a chimeric SARs Cov 2 like sequence in 2018. Patenting the spike sequence. They hoped to use this sequence as a vaccine to stop transmission at the origin, bats themselves. Rather than tediously capture and inject bats, it was decided to aerosolize it and have bats spread it amongst themselves, which was done in Vincent Munster’s Rocky Mtn lab. They had trouble getting it to spread via aerosol in Egyptian fruit bats, along with mink, deer, mice in his lab so they had Linfa Wang (UNC) who had access to the BL4 lab (not Shi Zhengli’s BL2 lab) in Wuhan test it on horseshoe bats, which is where it escaped in early Sept 2019. This would explain why the CIA hasn’t released its findings and it fits the timeline.
Springfield Retirement Community.
Current efforts seem aimed at applying liability to China via Narrative Management.
The widespread covid outbreak in Northern Italy indeed needs deeper study. If the outbreak occurred in Wuhan with the accepted timeline, then mathematically the R factor would have had to have been much higher than we later learned it was.
Similarly there are detailed and publicly available statistics on the widespread outbreak on the cruise ship docked and quarantined in Yokohama. This outbreak was supposedly caused by a solo Chinese passenger who had come from Hong. Kong. The speed of the spread on the boat again mathematically implied a much higher R value than we now know to be the case.
Both of these events lead to assuming the disease was more contagious than it was. This caused grave policy over reactions.
Both can be explained by an earlier undetected outbreak. In the case of the boat, it is much more likely mathematically that it was already spreading among the crew, who were very sick, well before the Hong-Kong passenger boarded, and they gave it to him.
> The widespread covid outbreak in Northern Italy indeed needs deeper study. If the outbreak occurred in Wuhan with the accepted timeline, then mathematically the R factor would have had to have been much higher than we later learned it was.
Thanks for making this point so crisply.
Many thanks, Lambert Strether. There have sometimes been discussions here in the comments about science and the politicization of science. What this posting is about is the scientific method. If cases were observed and measured in Italy before the full-blown outbreak in Wuhan, then we must look at these earlier data, eh?
I am here to defend the Chocolate City! And the Undisclosed Region, Bagnacaudalandia. There was a stereotype in Italy that Lombardy was the “untore,” the region that spread Covid to others.
In fact, the zone around Brescia and Bergamo was particularly hard hit.
This paragraph and the underlying article caught my eye. If you go into the underlying article, you’ll see that Covid was presenting as a rash and the tests that the Italians were doing were to ascertain if it was measles.
I am reminded from William McNeill’s great book, Plagues and Peoples, that several of the plagues in the classical era in the Mediterranean basin may have been measles. Or, going by the underlying article, something else?
One of the reasons that Italy isn’t being incorporated into the Anglosphere discussion is that the Mediterranean world is a black hole for Anglos. Americans are still speculating on the likes of “Was Cleopatra really black (in the U.S. sense)?” Dealing with Italian realities is haaard work, as W. Bush used to say.
The other is the natural (unnatural?) tendency to pin diseases on the other. Remember the French Pox?
The question is where and how Covid arose in Italy. Did it jump species? Northern Italy is known for intense cultivation of rice, dairy cattle, pigs, and silk, among many other crops. Did Covid come in from the wild? Wild boars (of which there are many)?
The question of importation is interesting: From where? Not necessarily China.
I recall quite well the first death in Italy in February 2020, because I was trying to arrange to move to the Chocolate City. The first death was an elderly man in the small town of Vò in the Veneto. At the time, no one knew how he picked up Covid. There are some Chinese living in Vò, a small group of people, but tests of the townsfolk were inconclusive.
Wrapping up: This is how we have to maintain our scientific reasoning / skepticism. Easy solutions like “it was the Dragon Lady of Wuhan who let loose the plague” are clownish and dangerous.
I’m agnostic on where Covid arose. However, that Covid necessarily arose in Wuhan is, to my mind, not proven — and by a timeline all parties had access to, if they followed the literature.
So they are “intelligence agencies” the ones responsible to determine the origin of pandemics…
First time watching Tim Burton´s “Charlie & Chocolate Factory” adaptation. It´s so odd. Now seeing Lambert mixing Turin chocolate into this virus issue (death, blood and rockn roll so to speak – I am a big chocolate fan) might appear a bit gross at first but with Dahl it fits. Wonder what latter would have done out of this Covid business as a writer…
Apparently, all variants trace their lineage back to the earliest strain found in humans, almost immaculate conception. If the virus originated in wild animals, it would likely have mutated several times before spilling over to humans. At least a couple of those mutations would have spilled over into humans and we would have evidence of an earlier strain even if we couldn’t find it in an animal. For me, wild animals are a highly unlikely source.
Factory farmed animals would be more likely to produce a virus that spilled into humans before mutating. But the genomic distance between the original virus and other known viruses in farm animals is large and seemingly easily bridged if farm animals were to blame. But we’ve not seen evidence of that bridge.
Live vaccine development involving gain-of-function still seems most likely, especially with all the efforts to cover up these research activities. The EcoHealth proposals showed how researchers were planning to insert furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses. The Feb 2020 Slack chats among Proximal Origin authors were convincing. They were in the best position to know and most immediately assumed lab activities were to blame. Then published Proximal Origins, essentially a cover-up, despite their private doubts.
*Sigh*
It took 15 years to establish the animal origins of SARS.
And your assertion is incorrect. See Sick animals suggest COVID pandemic started in Wuhan market Nature. From December 2024.
And Genetic tracing of market wildlife and viruses at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic Cell. From September 2024.
Intelligence agencies are sometimes asked to advise on questions such as this one, because by definition they typically have access to information that other bodies don’t. Here, I imagine the reasoning was that, if the origin was in a Chinese laboratory, then at some point the government must have been become aware of it, and this would leave an evidential trace. If this was true, and if the US had access to evidence (anything from human sources to email to internal CCP communications) then it might be possible to say something important about the origin of the virus, depending on the strength of the evidence. Some indirect evidence may also give pointers: sudden and unexpected meetings of CCP bodies involved with health, rumours of investigations into bio-security, speculation in closed email lists, for example.
But it sounds as if there was no convincing evidence at all: “low confidence” in this context just means “we’re not sure,” and that the lab-leak hypothesis is now considered to be marginally more probable (or less improbable) than the hypothesis of natural origin. It’s unlikely that there was any substantive intelligence to sway the discussion, and, given the time that has elapsed, I don’t think there will be now. We can assume that whatever internal and secret CCP investigations there were into the outbreak were concluded long ago, and that if they had pointed to a laboratory leak, and if there were direct or indirect indications available, they would have been known by now. In the circumstances, intelligence agencies, although used to weighing and judging evidence from a very wide range of sources, have no special insights that other investigators have not.
It will be interesting to see if the new assessment upgrades the status of what were previously considered sketchy reports of a possible shutdown of the Wuhan lab based on commercially available cellphone data:
From NBC News Report says cellphone data suggests October shutdown at Wuhan lab, but experts are skeptical:
Please read Auerlien’s comment. The CIA does not know anything specific and its assessment was low confidence.
But your remark demonstrates that the spin is working.