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BREAKING NEWS: Covid-19 may not have originated in China but in the seafood industry in the US state of Maine, according to data circulated by a European scientist yesterday. The startling news came from a re-examination of a long-deleted social media post in Chinese, reports Science, an academic journal. It’s an extraordinary story. In September 2021, a post appeared on WeChat which said that people in Maine, in the middle of 2019, came down with a mysterious respiratory disease. Some attributed it to vaping, while others said it appeared to be a virus. By the end of the year, the virus arrived in China in frozen lobsters from Maine. They were sold at the Wuhan wet market—specifically at stall 6-29. As the lobsters thawed, live animals picked up the virus, and 17 humans developed anti-bodies to it. By 31 December, 2019, the Chinese government identified a mysterious respiratory disease at the market and closed it the next day. . 'CONSPIRACY THEORY' At the time, the 2021 post was dismissed as one of a dozen conspiracy theories attributed to China trying to “shift the blame”. The Maine lobster story spread on Twitter, but the accounts sharing it were closed down as “disinformation”. (It was later revealed that Twitter, before Elon Musk took over, worked regularly with US government agencies, who saw it as a political tool to control global narratives.) French virus scientist Florence Débarre dismissed the theory too, at the time. But when she revisited the WeChat post recently, she noted that it did not come across as a conspiracy theory. On the contrary, it contained a wealth of material that had never been released before, even by the Chinese government. This included detailed maps of the Wuhan market, identifying specific stalls which had infected live animals and the positions of stallholders carrying antibodies. “The maps contain information that was made public later, which indicates they come from an informed source,” Débarre told Science. In other words, a narrative deleted by pre-Musk Twitter as a conspiracy theory was in reality from a highly knowledgeable Chinese source, likely a scientist involved in the investigation at an early stage. The WeChat post, signed Kunlun Sword, says that Chinese scientists found 18 live animal samples which were positive from a stall numbered 6-29. This was the exact same stall that Débarre and other coronavirus experts had identified as the main source of the outbreak-- two years later in a 2023 study. Today’s development doesn’t conclusively “prove” anything—but it does indicate that a post telling a story quickly deleted from the western Internet, was a genuine source with a high level of access to original data. . STORY CANNOT BE DISMISSED It’s important to note that new story should not be dismissed as Chinese propaganda. Quite the opposite: The writer of the report in the Science journal takes a hostile attitude to the country, arguing that the story is “further evidence that China is withholding vital data on the contentious issue”. Some scientists remain skeptical about Débarre’s report, while others say it merits further study, the journal says. Still, at a more general level, the extreme politicization of the Covid-19 story means that all evidence that the virus circulated in the US and Europe in 2019 before being identified by doctors in China, is routinely omitted from reports. It should not be forgotten that the US government put the CIA in charge of Covid-19 origins research, not medical scientists. But as the Chinese make an increasingly large contribution to the world of research, the global science sector can at least hope for more balance in future.