ajax18 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 07, 2023 10:52 pm
Res Ipsa wrote: ↑Tue Mar 07, 2023 10:39 pm
ETA: That doesn't sound right. I've generally thought of Cotton as an idiot rather than a mendacious sack of crap. Do you have a link by any chance?
You said at the time that because it was Cotton, you suspected he was just trying to stick it to China and you didn't believe his claims of China lying about the origins of the virus or covering up the fact that it came from a lab funded by Dr. Fauci to do gain of function research.
Link? I searched my posts for "cotton" "lab" "leak" and "wuhan" and couldn't find it. It is true, however, that I have a very low opinion of Cotton. My recollection is, at the time Cotton first made claims about China, he admitted they were not based on any evidence.
On the larger question, the two papers discussed in this Twitter thread by one of the authors provide very strong evidence that the origin was zoonotic transmission in the Market, not a lab leak.
https://Twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/sta ... 6580824070
ETA: Tom Cotton made his original statement in February 2020, very early in the pandemic, before right wingers were making accusations against Fauci and throwing around the term "gain of function," so you're conflating a whole bunch of different things that happened at different times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/busi ... china.html At the time, conspiracy theories were circulating that China had developed and intentionally released COVID-19 as a bioweapon. It was in this context, that Cotton said this to the media:
“We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there,” the senator said, “but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all.”
So, given the time, the context, and the statement, I would say today that, given his admission of no evidence, Cotton was simply grandstanding to attack China. He was also giving credibility to then circulating conspiracy theories based on what he admitted was no evidence.