Remember, kids: If a worldwide pandemic begins just a few miles from a low-security, dangerous, pathogen-enhancing infectious disease laboratory run by a bunch of ruthless adherents to a genocidal ideology, well, you're an evil racist for thinking there's any connection there.
Meanwhile, here's something called a "raccoon dog" that is apparently actually behind the pandemic:
Yup, you knew The Atlantic was gonna jump all over this ChiCom bait.
For three years now, the debate over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has ping-ponged between two big ideas: that SARS-CoV-2 spilled into human populations directly from a wild-animal source, and that the pathogen leaked from a lab. ...
Now, an international team of virologists, genomicists, and evolutionary biologists may have finally found crucial data to help fill that knowledge gap. A new analysis of genetic sequences collected from the market shows that raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying and possibly shedding the virus at the end of 2019. It's some of the strongest support yet, experts told me, that the pandemic began when SARS-CoV-2 hopped from animals into humans, rather than in an accident among scientists experimenting with viruses.
Folks, try not to laugh too hard when you learn how this hard-hitting new data found its way into the global scientific community:
A few weeks ago, the data appeared on an open-access genomic database called GISAID, after being quietly posted by researchers affiliated with the country's Center for Disease Control and Prevention. By almost pure happenstance, scientists in Europe, North America, and Australia spotted the sequences, downloaded them, and began an analysis.
By "pure happenstance," huh??
So just to be clear, scientists want you to ignore the unbelievably compelling circumstances at play here:
...and instead they want you to believe that a tanuki was responsible.
