Germany’s foreign intelligence service believed there was a 80-90% chance that coronavirus accidentally leaked from a Chinese lab, German media say. Two German newspapers say they have uncovered details of an assessment carried out by spy agency BND in 2020 but never published.

The intelligence service had indications that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been carrying out experiments where viruses are modified to become more transmissible to humans for research, they say.

China repeated its denial saying the cause “should be determined by scientists” - and pointed to a World Health Organization investigation which found the lab-leak theory was “extremely unlikely”.

The lab leak hypothesis has been hotly contested by scientists, including many who say there is no definitive evidence to back it up. But the once controversial theory has been gaining ground among some intelligence agencies - and the BND is the latest to entertain the theory. In January, the US CIA said the coronavirus was “more likely” to have leaked from a lab than to have come from animals.

  • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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    10 hours ago

    The lab was in China but it the experiments were run by the US. The NIH admitted they funded illegal gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Have you considered that this was perhaps a US bioweapon “accidentally” deployed against China? The US has a history of this: it used biological weapons in Korea in the 50s and lied about it for decades.

    And if that is the case (not saying it is; i’m still not 100% convinced of the lab leak theory) then it backfired spectacularly as China took the most serious measures of any country on earth to keep its people safe. No other country managed to maintain Zero Covid for as long as China did.

    Over 1.2 million people died in the US. One third of their entire population was infected, potentially suffering long term health damage. In China it was just over 5,200 deaths, not even one hundredth of the US numbers with a population more than four times that of the US.

    Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

    If that to you says “lax safety precautions” then we are not speaking the same language.

    The fact that you ridicule the lack of evidence and imply that this indicates China is covering something up is telling. If there was evidence you would say they are guilty. If there is no evidence then they are also guilty. That is called an unfalsifiable orthodoxy. There is nothing that can convince you otherwise because you have already decided what you want to believe and you don’t care what the evidence or lack thereof indicates.

    By that same logic i could claim that the lack of evidence just “proves” that the US are very good at covering their tracks and erasing evidence of a bioweapon attack. Do you see how that logic is bad because it can be used to justify virtually any conclusion?

    Why is it always the Chinese government that supposedly hides things? How about it’s actually the US government that has been hiding the truth all along?

    Be that as it may let’s put the speculation aside and stick to the facts:

    The fact is that China responded to the best of their abilities to a novel and highly contagious disease, which may or may not have been released from a US funded lab. It is objectively demonstrable (the stats prove it) that China had the world’s most successful Covid response. It is not China’s fault that the rest of the world is so incompetent or indifferent to the wellbeing of their citizens.