"Let’s look at the big picture: A novel SARS coronavirus emerges in Wuhan with a novel cleavage site in it. We now have evidence that, in early 2018, they had pitched inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab,” said Chan. “This definitely tips the scales for me. And I think it should do that for many other scientists too.”
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses."
And then what's more, they sat on the fact that they had requested funding for this research for the last 18 months, when the world has been desperately trying to find any relevant information on the virus' origins. The fact that they did not put this forward themselves in in and of itself suspect.
They didn't just "sit on it". EcoHealth and Peter Daszak deliberately and aggressively attacked anyone who pointed to lab-leak origins as conspiracy theorists and bigots. They did so in an article in The Lancet journal where they also stated they had no conflicts of interest.
Reading this statement, knowing what you know now, and it becomes very clear how sinister and calculated the misdirection was:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
And look at the end of the letter, at the sentence: "We declare no competing interests." That's a blatant lie, as we now know.
Those of us who have been seeing this for a long time were attacked, bullied, and tarred as bigots because of these irresponsible scientists desperately trying to cling to their grant funding. My comment history on HN has numerous comments, from months and months ago, where I was attacked, downvoted, and called an anti-Asian bigot for saying what is now obvious. Talking about this before the 2020 election resulted in immediate accusations of being a Trump sycophant/white nationalist, along with banning and deletions from social media. As a lifelong heterodox thinker, I always sort of shrugged my shoulders at being surrounded by people who predominantly just go with the herd on things. But this entire situation has now made me actively despise the "herd". After being a lifelong liberal Democrat who got demonized, bullied, and yes, beaten up for opposing the Iraq war in the conservative area I grew up in, I was shocked to realize that the other side isn't any different. Just a little more sophisticated. They don't physically assault you, but they'll try to get you fired, and equate you with a Nazi in a heartbeat.
As a result of this pandemic, my mother-in-law and aunt are dead, a friend took his own life when his charter fishing business went under, and my wife's mental health has been crushed. I myself was infected a month before I was eligible for the vaccine. Luckily it was a mild case, but I still don't have my sense of smell. Billions around the world had it worse than me, and it is unforgivable that the media, big tech, and the scientific community have colluded to obfuscate the true origins of this manmade disaster. The Soviets would have dreamed of having this kind of cover as Chernobyl spewed radiation into the atmosphere.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-should-we-make-of...
I have access to both LSD and psilocybin mushrooms and I'd be curious to see if I could alleviate my anosmia. At this point it's been 7 months and although I have some sense of smell restored there are massive parts of my spectrum that I have not recovered.
I recently accidentally drank spoiled orange juice because I couldn't tell at all that it was spoiled from the smell and even the taste.