Could covid-19 have originated in a copper mine?
Amanda Stutt | May 27, 2021 | 9:29 am
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Bats on the ceiling of a mine. Stock image.
An abandoned copper mine in the mountains of the district of Tongguan in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan and the bats that inhabit it are now a focal point for escalating calls for a more thorough probe into whether the covid-19 pandemic could have stemmed from a Chinese lab, the Wall Street Journal reported this week.
In 2012, six miners mysteriously fell sick with pneumonia-like symptoms after entering the mine to clear bat guano three of them died.
US Intelligence Agencies Not Sure Where, How COVID-19 Originated
U.S. intelligence agencies do not know the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19.
“The U.S. Intelligence Community does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus was transmitted initially but has coalesced around two likely scenarios: either it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals or it was a laboratory accident,” Amanda Schoch, assistant director of national intelligence for strategic communications, said in a statement on Thursday.
Two elements of the community lean toward the former scenario while one leans toward the latter. However, all three have low to moderate confidence. Additionally, the majority of elements within the community “do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other,” Schoch said.
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Facebook was slammed by critics for suppressing information after the social media giant announced it would lift a ban on posts claiming COVID-19 was man-made.
The social networking site made the move on Wednesday after President Joe Biden said his intelligence community was reviewing the origins of the virus.
Biden s move comes as the so-called Wuhan lab leak hypothesis, that the virus was created in the Wuhan Institute of Virology before somehow escaping, burst back into the mainstream.
Until yesterday, Facebook had branded content about the virus being man-made and escaping from a lab as misinformation or debunked claims that called for aggressive action from the platform s moderators.
Researchers investigating how, where and when the pandemic started have called for the U.S. to share any intelligence supporting the hypothesis that the Covid-19 virus might have spilled from a laboratory in Wuhan, warning that time was running out to examine blood samples and other important clues in China.