Viral Quotes

“To summarise, an outbreak of mysterious pneumonia in a copper mine, more than 1,800 kilometres by road from Wuhan, led to patient samples being sent to Wuhan for analysis. A 2013 medical thesis concluded, after incorporating results shared by the WIV, that these miners had likely been infected by a SARS-like coronavirus from bats in the mine. An expedition by Wuhan virologists to seek the viral cause brought back hundreds of samples from bats. Their repeated visits to the mine turned up a bat-borne coronavirus in 2013, which was recognised to be a novel SARS-like coronavirus. The WIV team partly sequenced this new virus in 2017 and then fully sequenced it in 2018. When its sequence was found to closely match the sequence of the virus causing Covid-19, the Wuhan scientists published it under a new name and failed to cite their own paper detailing its discovery or to reveal that they had been studying the virus over the past few years or to mention that it had come from a mine where there had been a fatal outbreak of pneumonia.”
― Alina Chan, Viral: The Search For the Origin Of COVID-19

“Tens of thousands of animals, both wild and domesticated, have reportedly been sampled across China. None has tested positive for the virus.”
― Alina Chan, Viral: The Search For the Origin Of COVID-19

“the virus causing the pandemic was evolving more slowly than one newly arrived in the human species from another animal normally would. This implied it was already well adapted to human beings from the moment it was first detected in Wuhan in December 2019.”
― Alina Chan, Viral: The Search For the Origin Of COVID-19

“The lack of international pressure, indeed the degree to which westerners and the WHO were willing to overlook a lack of transparency, will have given governments where accidents might happen in future – or even those contemplating making bioweapons – a clear steer on how easy it is to deflect awkward questions.”
― Alina Chan, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19