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“Racoon Dog” Theory of Covid Origin Resurfaces To Mockery and Skepticism

“Racoon Dog” Theory of Covid Origin Resurfaces To Mockery and Skepticism

The Atlantic publishes the latest trial balloon, and the rest of the media dutifully follow, as the story itself drowns in the Sea of Skepticism.

We recently passed the 3rd anniversary of “15-days to stop the spread” of the novel coronavirus.

During those three years, recent revelation on Twitter show that Big Pharma executives and government officials colluded to suppress information, studies, and analysis that countered the preferred narratives on the covid pandemic. Data on natural immunity, discussions challenging vaccine effectiveness, and information related to potential early treatment protocols were hidden and the authors shadow-banned or outright expelled from social media sites.

We recently reported on government agency revelations that the SARS-Cov-2 virus, which causes the illness covid, initially spread as a result of a lab leak. Despite the best efforts of former White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci and his minions to push the natural origin theory for this pathogen, 2/3rds of Americans believe the novel coronavirus came from a lab leak in China.

As the media template seems to be Democrat = natural origin, Republic = lab leak, the American press is trying to regain a hold on the narrative. So, Dr. Katherine Wu, a staff writer at the Atlantic, wrote: The Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic.

Wu indicates that new findings show that genetic samples from China appear to link the pandemic’s origin to raccoon dogs.

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.

“This really strengthens the case for a natural origin,” says Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University who wasn’t involved in the research. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist involved in the research, told me, “This is a really strong indication that animals at the market were infected. There’s really no other explanation that makes any sense.”

The findings won’t fully convince the entrenched voices on either side of the origins debate.

Few will be convinced, because the media and “experts” have lost all credibility on this subject.

For instance The New York Times dutifully picked up the torch, and reported this hot take.

…But the analysis did establish that raccoon dogs — fluffy animals that are related to foxes and are known to be able to transmit the coronavirus — deposited genetic signatures in the same place where genetic material from the virus was left, the three scientists said. That evidence, they said, was consistent with a scenario in which the virus had spilled into humans from a wild animal.

Many “news” outlets are now running with the report, including the New York Post. However, that paper added an intriguing tidbit.

The analysis of the genetic sequences has been led by Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in California; Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia; and Michael Worobey, a virologist at the University of Arizona.

Andersen was one of the authors on “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” a report that was coordinated by Fauci to disprove the lab leak and gain-of-function theories about the coronavirus.

At this point, I would like to step back and offer a few thoughts. While researching this piece, I came across some information presented by John Sexton at Hot Air:

Evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey is in a unique position because he was not a knee-jerk defender of natural spillover. In fact, he signed a letter in May of 2021 arguing the lab leak should be taken seriously. But a few months later he became convinced natural spillover was a far more likely explanation.

It’s clear-cut these wild, live animals, including raccoon dogs and red foxes, were in the market. We have photographic evidence from December 2019. A concerned customer evidently took these photos and videos of the market on Dec. 3 and posted them on Weibo [because it was illegal to sell certain live animals]. The photos were promptly scrubbed. But a CNN reporter had communicated directly with the person who took the photos. I was able to get in touch with this reporter, and they passed on those photos from the source.

As interesting as all this information is, there is a timeline developed by security agencies and put together by a Republican House committee that shows that many elements related to covid outbreak isn’t well explained by raccoon dogs in a wet market stall.

These include coal miners dying of a covid-like illness (when bats were being blamed), a series of pervasive biosafety-related projects (on the waste treatment and ventilation systems) being done in the summer of 2018 on a unit that was five years old at the time, and Shi Zheng-li (“Bat Lady” researcher leading the studies of bat viruses), Peter Daszak (head of the NIH grant-getting the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance), and a team of scientists were isolating novel coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology from 2015 forward.

Finally, even if the original virus did come from a raccoon dog, a sample of that virus could have escaped in a lab leak from the institute.

I agree that we will never know exactly where the novel coronavirus came from. However, a large part of that reason is that China covered up much evidence. Dr. Jamie Metzl, Ph.D., senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, had this to say at a recent congressional hearing.

Jamie Metzl testified how China’s government destroyed samples, hid records, imprisoned Chinese journalists, prevented Chinese scientists from saying or writing anything on pandemic origins without prior government approval, actively spread misinformation, and prevented an evidence-based investigation.

There was a lot of mocking a derision of the latest “raccoon dog” trial balloon.

There are so many more great tweets . . . as this hot take drowns in the Sea of Skepticism.

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Comments

Pandas are more likely.

Anything to keep the spotlight off the lab, EcoHealth, Draszic, Fauchi, NIH and gain of function research. It’s one little incestuous network where the people change seats sometimes approving and sometimes receiving grants. The only thing that remains the same is the bill goes to taxpayers and the profits to Pharma. That is the constant.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2.pdf

No bats. No pangolins. None. Zero.

It’s amazing how quickly scientists can abandon evolution when it’s politically expedient. If covid evolved in the wild, there would be wild populations with intermediate sequences.

The early proponents of the wet market conspiracy theory said bats had some of the genetic sequences unique to covid, and pangolins had the other piece. Put them side by side in crowded, unsanitary conditions, and they could find each other.

Then the Oxford inventory was published, and guess what. You’ve never heard of it. Totally suppressed.

    Petrushka in reply to Petrushka. | March 18, 2023 at 5:27 pm

    On the other hand, put them together in a laboratory where you can speed up replication and have the tools to transfer sequences from one species to another, and anything is possible.

So there’s a difference between a raccoon dog and a ‘coon hound. Folks down south will be relieved that their dawg isn’t a menace to civilization.

The first time I ever heard of a racoon dog was while reading “With Dersu Uzala the Hunter. ” The book goes by various names. It’s also a free Mospic film (english subtitles) on youtube and directed by Kurosawa Akira.

The film and book are excellent. The book was written in 1920(?) by a Vladimir Arsenyev a Tsarist officer surveying the region north of Vladivostok in 1909. The area is wild and the weather unpredictable. He meets a aborigine named Dersu. They became lifelong friends.

The Russian officer was a very decent man, Dersu is an animist and likewise a very decent person. Numerous ebook versions .mobi, epub and PDF are available for free at archive,org.

    Socratease in reply to Tiki. | March 18, 2023 at 7:00 pm

    In Japan they’re called ‘tanuki,’ but they’re a different species from the mainland racoon dog.

It’s already been demonstrated that the vile Dumb-o-crats are happy to gleefully act as useful idiot parrots and mouthpieces for the propaganda of the Chinese communist regime. These reprobates are unable to acknowledge the transparently malignant and belligerence designs and attitude of the Chinese communists.

Bruce Hayden | March 18, 2023 at 7:19 pm

It’s fairly straight forward. They can’t find any raccoon dogs that have a virus similar enough to that in Patient Zero, or at least the Wuhan.(first genetically decoded) variant. They won’t be able to do so, for the same reasons that they haven’t found a near enough bat progenitor. The virus has that furon cleavage site, and is uniquely optimized to attach to human ACE2 receptors. Not bat ACE2 receptors, or raccoon dog ACE2 receptors, but human ACE2 receptors. If there is a zoonotic source of the virus, then researchers should be able to inoculate that source with an early humanized variant of the virus, and it would thrive. So far, such early variants thrive in one, and only one, species: Humans.

The original variants might have been developed through pushed evolution (in a lab), but gene editing is more likely, since there should be some genetic residue from the pushed evolution, and there doesn’t appear to be, while there do appear to be evidentiary finger prints of gene editing.

I am not making this up. Dr Robert Redfield, CDC head under Trump, essentially pointed this out a week or so ago. Which is presumably why Fauci and the rest of the NIH, cut him out of the conversation. Yes – the politically advantageous zoonotic theory ignored input from the CDC under Trump.

    DaveGinOly in reply to Bruce Hayden. | March 20, 2023 at 12:46 am

    The furin cleavage site, the ACE2 receptors, and what I consider the nail in the “natural origin” coffin:
    https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v1

    From the paper:
    Lay Summary To construct synthetic variants of natural coronaviruses in the lab, researchers often use a method called in vitro genome assembly. This method utilizes special enzymes called restriction enzymes to generate DNA building blocks that then can be “stitched” together in the correct order of the viral genome. To make a virus in the lab, researchers usually engineer the viral genome to add and remove stitching sites, called restriction sites. The ways researchers modify these sites can serve as fingerprints of in vitro genome assembly.

    We found that SARS-CoV has the restriction site fingerprint that is typical for synthetic viruses. The synthetic fingerprint of SARS-CoV-2 is anomalous in wild coronaviruses, and common in lab-assembled viruses. The type of mutations (synonymous or silent mutations) that differentiate the restriction sites in SARS-CoV-2 are characteristic of engineering, and the concentration of these silent mutations in the restriction sites is extremely unlikely to have arisen by random evolution. Both the restriction site fingerprint and the pattern of mutations generating them are extremely unlikely in wild coronaviruses and nearly universal in synthetic viruses. Our findings strongly suggest a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV2.

LukeHandCool | March 18, 2023 at 7:44 pm

Don’t look at me. I’ve always boiled my raccoon dogs twice before consuming them.

BierceAmbrose | March 18, 2023 at 10:04 pm

Look, those little guys look cute, and nobody wants to judge here, but you go dipping your wick in random gene pools, no telling what you’ll catch in those waters.

JackinSilverSpring | March 18, 2023 at 11:25 pm

And where did the furrin cleavage in the virus come from?

I have seen three origin stories, natural, lab leak, and the South Park origin theory. The South Park theory is statistically more likely than the natural origin theory since the furin (yes, correct spelling) site issue was documented early in 2020. Sorry, you’ll have to watch that part, not appropriate for me to share here

When the idea of the racoon dog becomes discredited, perhaps they will turn to Bigfoot or the Loch Ness sea monster as the biological link.

E Howard Hunt | March 19, 2023 at 10:17 am

Perhaps Biden should direct the government to stock up on coonhounds as a precautionary measure.

Lucifer Morningstar | March 19, 2023 at 10:28 am

Interesting how the whole covid natural origin theory has been revived shortly after the Dept. of Energy concluded that it is likely the sars-cov-2 virus emerged/escaped from the Wuhan laboratory,

The question I have is how much did the Atlantic and other news media get paid by the CCP to publish these propaganda articles refuting a lab origin of the virus.

COVID may have leaked out of a Chinese lab, after all. So much for ‘misinformation.’

China Dismisses Latest Claim That Lab Leak Likely Caused Covid

I’m sorry, but anyone who expects me to believe that a novel coronavirus just coincidentally broke out in a city with a bio lab that just coincidentally happened to be conducting research into novel coronaviruses and just coincidentally had recently been identified as employing poor containment standards, but said lab had absolutely, positively nothing to do with the virus that happened to break out there needs to have their head examined.

Occam’s razor.