Sunday 3 January 2021

Politics trumps science (2)

 There was a natural reaction in China to the sort of fake news emanating from the Trump administration (the Sun has an example here). BBC News reports that a senior politician there has countered that SARS/CoV-2 arose spontaneously all over the world. 

It is true that retrospective analsyis has shown that the virus must have been active in France and Italy before it was identified in Wuhan, but otherwise the physical evidence is against the minister. Analysis of the bug's genome positively establishes that it originated in SE Asis in a bat species, and that it must have jumped (possibly via another mammal) to a human or humans in that area. What is in doubt is that this happened in Wuhan rather than an adjacent province or country with whom China trades. The travellers who carried the virus to Italy and France may have come from another area of China and were possibly symptomless. 

It is to be hoped that politicial considerations do not hobble the WHO's investigation of the source of the pandemic. If I were China's president I would change the message. I would point out that it was Chinese scientists who had warned for years that such a species jump was bound to happen, and that the West just did not listen. It was Chinese scientists who identified the virus in Wuhan when the few fatal cases in Europe were ascribed to pneumonia. China, admittedly after a fortnight's delay, released details of the genome to the world early in January last year allowing companies round the world to start work on vaccines. With a handful of notable exceptions, Western governments did nothing for two months. The noise from Trump now is clearly driven by the desire to cover up post-Obama complacency.



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