China has consistently exhibited shady behavior when dealing with this virus. The Nature paper showing that the virus came from pangolin has been found to be fabricated.<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x</a>
<a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1320344055230963712" rel="nofollow">https://mobile.twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/132034405523096371...</a>
As a non-virologist, it's nearly impossible to determine who is wearing the tin foil hats. I've read five or six different but equally outlandish origin theories and convoluted Beautiful Mind / Minority Report threads about Covid in the last 30 minutes and everyone seems to be circlejerking about their own wild theories.<p>How can I, someone entirely outside the domain, begin to filter what is credible and what is nonsense?
If the findings in this paper are true (which, for the moment, I think we need to doubt), then this is an incredible bombshell of a finding. It suggests, at least to my reading, that this virus was spreading in communities for several months before being noticed. The fact that the IgM was found to be so much lower than IgG suggests an additional month or more before the September 2019 sample. It also suggests that the virus may not have originated in China.<p>Both of these are at least vaguely plausible - if it was the in the early phases of exponential growth, and, unlikely as this is, didn't make its way into high-risk groups during that time, then obviously it just had the appearance of a typical seasonal coronavirus. If people over 65 didn't exist, we'd probably have never even identified this virus.<p>The sample wasn't random - it "was enrolled from September 2019 to March 2020 through the SMILE trial (Screening and Multiple Intervention on Lung Epidemics; ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03654105), a prospec-tive lung cancer screening study using low-dose computed tomography and blood biomarkers, with the approval of our institutional review board and ethics committee."<p>I don't know what effect that might have in skewing the results; I look forward to expert analysis on this point.<p>On the second piece - the matter of origin - the evidence of Chinese origin is strong, but not airtight by any means. It's not altogether impossible for it to have emerged in Europe and been unnoticed.<p>Still, I have to believe that something is very wrong with this study, and that its findings are an error, until we these results reproduced or further analyzed. As much as I'd love for it to be true.<p>The thing that I can't reconcile is that seroprevalence this high wasn't found in any surveys until much, much later - I believe late April 2020. And there is no place that achieved seroprevalence without high-risk groups being affected (and substantial deaths as a result). It seems likely that any situation in which these numbers are real has to at least have appeared as a very, very bad flu season, and that wasn't the case in late 2019 in Europe.<p>So what the heck is happening here?<p>And why isn't this huge, bombshell news around the world? Far less meaningful studies have received much more bombastic coverage.
Putting aside a potential common benefit coming from doing so, I'm having trouble morally justifying testing someone's blood for other purposes than it was explicitly given for.