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toast0 • yesterday at 4:33 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

Is the US FBI a credible investigator for something like this?

a) I don't know that they have the right skills to track down patient zero of a disease.

b) They certainly don't have jurisdiction to do such an investigation in a foreign country, unless invited, and there's no way they were invited.

I strongly doubt we'll ever see a good answer on this, unless we get very lucky and some random research sample is looked at later that shows detection months earlier in a different location or if the Chinese did a good investigation and kept it quiet, but it leaks in a couple decades.

A timely and thorough investigation might have been able to determine an origin, but the US FBI certainly didn't do one.


Replies

junofan • yesterday at 5:04 AM

The US can just declare extraterritorial jurisdiction. We do it for bioweapons. Uncle Sam doesn’t need an invite.

IIRC one of the FBI guys who investigated anthrax was like “yeah, it’s pretty obvious looking at what that lab was up to.”

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