In other news, Arizona has now joined the list of states that have certified Joe Biden's victory. The state also certified Mark Kelly's victory and he will be sworn in as a U.S. senator on Wednesday, rather than in January, because it was a special election.
Meanwhile, the French government says they're moving ahead with a digital services tax on the likes of Facebook and Google, among countless others. Trump threatened to impose tariffs over this many times in the last two years, but it's too late for him to do that now.
Finally, Chinese scientists published by state-controlled media are claiming the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, actually originated in India in the summer of 2019, not in the food markets of Wuhan, China.
The researchers propose that India's young population, extreme weather and drought created the necessary conditions for the virus to jump to humans.
The researchers write: "Our result shows that Wuhan is not the place where human-to-human SARS-CoV-2 transmission first happened."
It adds: "Both the least mutated strain's geographic information and the strain diversity suggest that the Indian subcontinent might be the place where the earliest human-to-human SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurred, which was three or four months prior to the Wuhan outbreak."
It is worth nothing that the findings are still a preprint and are yet to be peer reviewed- so should not be seen as established conclusions.
Is this a state-sanctioned attempt to redirect blame toward India?
Maybe. It could be. India is China's closest rival and they came dangerously close to an armed conflict earlier this year, but at the same time would it really be surprising if climate change led to the pandemic? Scientists have predicted that pandemics will happen more frequently in a warming world. Scientists involved in the preliminary report out of China propose that animals and humans were driven to the same sources of water by extreme drought and that's where it jumped to humans.
The World Health Organization's investigation of the origins of COVID are a very long way from concluding. Possibly years away. We may also never know for sure.