Oh wait they were right?
There was no problem with the conspiracy nonsense, there were people who denied the possibility and maybe ask yourself about your part in that.
This feels like a strong claim given the source:
> Medical personnel at hospitals and clinics across the city were informed to only report suspect cases if they were linked to the market. These details have been publicly confirmed (see above)
Source: https://archive.ph/iMQVD
Their sources are:
> Liu Yue ( pseudonym at the request of the interviewee ), director of the emergency department of a tertiary hospital in Wuhan, told reporters that after the New Year's Day holiday, the hospital held a meeting, and the director of the department attended the meeting. The hospital leaders verbally conveyed to them a "reporting standard" for "unknown viral pneumonia"."
> Li Xia ( pseudonym ) , director of the emergency department of another tertiary hospital , also confirmed to reporters that on January 3, the hospital held a similar meeting.
> "The leadership of the hospital requires that this reporting standard can only be communicated through face-to-face, telephone, or WeChat voice." Li Xia said.
This is a strong claim. Is it true? Is there any evidence for this other than two pseudonymous reports?
See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8393104/ https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-con... (pages 125 and 161)
"In the first days of the epidemic in Wuhan, cases were identified on the basis of clinical features, including fever and acute respiratory symptoms, radiology and epidemiological features. An association with the Huanan market was identified among some of the earliest recognized cases and, for a short period until mid-January 2020, exposure to the Huanan market was included in the case definition. It rapidly became clear, however, that there were cases without a link to the Huanan market, and this element of the definition was dropped a few days after being introduced (Annex E3)."
Further, the criticism of rewording "these analyses provide dispositive evidence" to "these results provide incontrovertible evidence" is bizarre. The term "dispositive" in this context is equivalent to "the last and final word" which in a scientific context was rightfully removed, though it was replaced by a strong assertion.
With these two matters, I did not think the author has sufficient credibility for me to further investigate their claims.
On the unlinked cases - if you read my medium post, it explains that even the cases with no connections to the market had been identified with ascertainment bias. Local investigators had searched hospitals and the neighborhood near the market for cases even if they had no link to the market.
On your 2nd point, I've clarified that it was not a rewording but a removal of both claims of dispositive and incontrovertible evidence from the preprint. This means that peer review flagged both of these strong assertions in the manuscript and the authors had to remove both of them.
Removal of a claim of "dispositive" evidence isn't weakening the case; there could be further incontrovertible evidence that would make the present evidence no longer dispositive.
MSH3 Homology and Potential Recombination Link to SARS-CoV-2 Furin Cleavage Site https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fviro.2022.8348...
The study is a bit technical but a not-as-techincal summary can be found here https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/lab-leak-theory-new-arti...
To summarize, a gene sequence from the Furin Cleavage Site found in SARS-CoV-2 shows up in a Moderna patent from 2016.
Don't take my word for it though, research it for yourself.
It hasn't been confirmed, not at all, proponents of the theory claim a trillion to one chance of a coincidence (19 bases => 4^19, a naive interpretation), but a lot of scientists disagree. I you said, research it for yourself. And by my own research, the hypothesis is unlikely, so I take it as a "no" until the "further investigations" are done.
Yet: "the observation that the preponderance of early cases were linked to the Huanan market does not establish that the pandemic originated there."
What was the purpose of the study?
