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Unfortunately, one of the really frustrating things is that they obfuscated, lied and misdirected for so long that you have no idea what's true anymore. If they had this evidence in January of 2020, why are we learning it now? Fake data are a Chinese specialty (well documented in the literature), so it's not as if it's a stretch to think they could make a bunch of shit up and feed it to credulous Western scientists (thought it was really curious that there were no Chinese scientists on the author list here...seems like that's by design since only the Chinese have access to the original data). It would be hard to fake these data, but not impossible.

A few months back there was an article on here (hell, maybe I even posted it) about how Xi chose obfuscation, because whatever the origin, it looks bad for his policies. So maybe these guys finally cracked the case. But the fact that it's taken 2.5 years to get these data into the world only makes it look more suspicious.