I can’t find sources for this right now but apparently Dr Anthony Fauci played a key role in getting the ban lifted. He’s also the head of the NIAID ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci ) which (apparently) is the ultimate source for all funding on gain of function research.
So the lead guy we’ve been listening to (and still are) for scientific advice on this pandemic is entangled in a massive conflict of interest.
Edit: I assume this is getting down-voted either because is sounds like conspiracy theory or just everyone has already heard it and it's not news. Fauci has already admitted having been involved in funding Wuhan - https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/fauci-admits-nih-funding-of-wu... - that on it's own should not have been something he first admitted to in May 2021, while holding such a responsible position. Looking for more sources right now...
Edit 2: In this article from December 2011 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-wor... - you have Fauci making the case for creating viruses in a lab;
> "Given these uncertainties, important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory."
It doesn't explicitly mention gain of function but - while raising the concerns, it's arguing for research which would include gain of function. Meanwhile listening to this panel discussion which included Fauci from Nov 2017 - https://www.c-span.org/video/?437187-1/johns-hopkins-forum-e... ... again he's arguing for more aggressive types of research
[0]: https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-how-amateur-sleuths-broke...
This is laid out clearly in Wade's article below, and saying it's political is not based on data or science.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
Note the grant specifying the research here, with the chief author of the Lancet letter as recipient.
https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
Related threads:
The media's lab leak fiasco - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27307175 - May 2021 (696 comments)
Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before Covid-19 outbreak disclosed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259953 - May 2021 (343 comments)
How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27184998 - May 2021 (235 comments)
More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27160898 - May 2021 (341 comments)
The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 - May 2021 (537 comments)
Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26750452 - April 2021 (618 comments)
Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540458 - March 2021 (985 comments)
The Lab Leak Hypothesis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25640323 - Jan 2021 (229 comments)
Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25585833 - Dec 2020 (351 comments)
Wuhan lab did research on bat viruses, but no evidence of accidental release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23070031 - May 2020 (76 comments)
Experts disagree on whether Covid-19 could have leaked from a research lab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22695825 - March 2020 (6 comments)
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
If an outbreak were to happen in the United states just about everywhere would be near a CDC location: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&tbs=lf:1,lf...]
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-w...
This is the same Michael R. Gordon who in 2002 wrote the famous NYTimes article saying US Intelligence had credible information that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (Thousands of aluminium tubes) [2] and led to the Iraq War.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-i...
Calling the market “right next to the lab” is a bit of a stretch - it’s a three and a half hour walk.
The scientists getting sick early doesn’t actually seem to be confirmed - there’s still debate in the US intelligence community whether it’s true. And going to the hospital because you’re sick means something a bit different in China where primary care is rare.
And as for “against”... no mention of the virus not matching any backbones in use for genetic experimentation, or the suboptimal binding to humans, both of which would suggest against engineering.
Whether or not anything shady was happening, the conflict of interest is clear.
I looked up the person (Li-Meng Yan)[1], the paper[2], and the Fox News Interview[3] where Tucker Carlson "gleefully flogged" the bioweapon theory that this article references as being part of Steve Bannon's faction of right wing cranks.
In the paper Yan describes "an unrestricted bioweapon" like so -
Although it is not easy for the public to accept SARS-CoV-2 as a bioweapon due to its relatively low lethality, this virus indeed meets the criteria of a bioweapon as described by Dr. Ruifu Yang. Aside from his appointment in the AMMS, Dr. Yang is also a key member of China’s National and Military Bioterrorism Response Consultant Group and had participated in the investigation of the Iraqi bioweapon program as a member of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1998. In 2005, Dr. Yang specified the criteria for a pathogen to qualify as a bioweapon:
1. It is significantly virulent and can cause large scale casualty.
2. It is highly contagious and transmits easily, often through respiratory routesin the form of aerosols. The most dangerous scenario would be that it allows human-to-human transmission.
3. It is relatively resistant to environmental changes, can sustain transportation, and is capable of supporting targeted release.
-------
I don't know that's the exact definition I'd give for "bioweapon" but it seems plausible, from a somewhat authoritative source, and fits covid. In other parts of the paper Yan addresses what she calls the "cover-up" of the lab origins of covid-19 and she points to elements of the cover-up that predate the outbreak and concludes "the unleashing of the virus must be a planned execution rather than accident."
On the Tucker Carlson interview the host listens to Yan's points and invites an expert on. The expert seems to basically ignore Yan's more exotic claims (i.e. that it was an intentional attack) and summarizes the situation at 3:39 as "We don't know" and gives two possible explanations as "Zoonotic transfer" or "Accidental lab release" and leans towards the latter. That seems exactly right to me.
I don't follow the "cover-up" part of Yan's argument (though I will read more about it) so I can't comment on her conclusion that it was an intentional attack. That's certainly not what other people I've read seem to think. The "bioweapon" definition seems a bit like an exaggeration or a technicality, if only because "bioweapon" conjures the idea of much more severe and lethal and viruses.
My point is that the right wing cranks actually come out looking pretty good on this topic - as far as I can tell. They immediately questioned the natural origins and advanced credible arguments for lab leak which are gaining support and evidence. I think it's wrong for this article and others to start out, and dedicate space in the opening of their argument, to try and balance things by saying, essentially, "Yes, maybe the experts were wrong here, but so were the crazy right-wing people." The people who are really and clearly wrong here are the mainstream media outlets who blindly trusted the authorities that told them this couldn't be a lab leak. Tucker Carlson talked to Yan, who may not really be a virus-expert (her degree seems to be in Ophthalmology) and may be over-zealous in her anti-China stance (e.g. concluding it was an intentional attack on what might not be very good evidence) but Tucker Carlson and his show explicitly call out the two main theories as what I believe they still are - i.e. zoonotic transfer and lab leak.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Meng_Yan
The conflict of interest is: was this statement actually what he believed to be true at the time, or was it to draw attention away from the Wuhan lab, so there wouldn't be ugly questions about why his organisation provided funding to it?
To me it seems like the right thing for Fauci to have done at the time was draw attention to the potential conflict of interest but that admission only became public last month - https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/fauci-admits-nih-funding-of-wu...
https://in.news.yahoo.com/italy-launched-hug-chinese-campaig...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/31/8016865...
Months after this came out, the media was proclaiming that the virus was no worse than the flu.
I've been wondering certain things, especially why Marc Lipsitch (one of the most consistently trustworthy voices throughout the pandemic) signed that Science letter, knowing that it would add weight to the "it's a lab leak" propaganda, and stood by the assertion that lab leak is plausible[1].
I hope we do get the true answers to these questions, though think it's not especially likely.
I'll say a couple other things. For an audience of honestly intellectually curious people, the Trumpian right-wingers did enormous damage to their theory, even if it was correct, by being racist and scientifically willfully stupid. Similarly, the Chinese authorities, even if they were correct did enormous damage to their theory by being authoritarian and stifling real communication. But it is very easy to see why both sides acted as they did: these mythical honest intellectually curious people are a tiny fraction of the entire audience, and have relatively little power, so they were quite incentivized to act as they did. And, maybe a little too early to say for sure, but it probably worked.
[1]: https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1398455815959367683
So it is not a conflict of interest because of the sum of money? Someone doesn't need to gain anything to be in conflict, by definition: "a situation in which the concerns or aims of two different parties are incompatible."
Do you at least think he had a duty to disclose his involvement/investment in gain of function research? Specifically with the Wuhan lab at the center of this?
> As head of that agency, it's also his job to share his professional opinion with the public. For this, his reward is a public servant's salary. Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?
Did you know he's the most highly paid government official? His measly public servant salary only paid him $417K. [0]
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...
Media, governments, and scientists should take a stronger stand now, or they will not protect amateurs against the full wrath of more unsavory elements of hostile state actors.
In any case, beyond gain-of-function, the WIV and Wuhan CDC also had the biggest program in the world to sample novel SARS-like coronaviruses from nature, from remote bat caves that no other humans had any reason to enter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronaviru...
If SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus accidentally released by scientists, then Wuhan is the obvious place for it to emerge. That could have been directly from a lab, or a researcher could have become infected on a sampling trip, traveled home from the sampling sites (~900 miles away, to be clear; Wuhan was not an expected natural spillover region), and seeded the infection there. None of this is anywhere close to proven, but the previous dismissal of any unnatural origin as a "conspiracy theory" was an outrageous, unscientific smear.
For an epidemic to occur, you need not just a lab leak, but a population sufficiently naive to the pathogen. H1N1 was displaced by H2N2 in the late 1950's pandemic, which in turn was displaced by H3N2 in the late 1960s pandemic. Thus it hit the cohort of people aged 25-6 or less who'd never been exposed to H1N1.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/01/covid-19-varia...
> Within the scientific community, one thing leapt off the page. Wade quoted one of the world’s most famous microbiologists, Dr. David Baltimore, saying that he believed the furin cleavage site “was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.” Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate and pioneer in molecular biology, was about as far from Steve Bannon and the conspiracy theorists as it was possible to get. His judgment, that the furin cleavage site raised the prospect of gene manipulation, had to be taken seriously.
Furin cleavage sites have evolved and are present in multiple coronaviruses:
- HCoV-OC43 (infects humans)
- HCoV-HKU1 (infects humans)
- MHV-A59
- ChRCoV-HKU24
- BtCoV-ENT
- BtNeCoV-PML-PHE1
- BtCoV-HKU4
- BtCoV-HKU5
- MERS-CoV
- BtHpCoV-Zhejiang2013
- SARS-CoV-2
Phylogenetic analysis suggests that it has evolved independently at least 6 times that we know of.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
After that article was published a team in Thailand found furin cleavage sites in sarbecoviruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 called RacCS203 (91.5% similarity to SARS-CoV-2) and RmYN02 (93.3% similarity to SARS-CoV-2)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7873279/
Furin cleavage sites are common, nature understands how to utilize that trick very well, and continuously has re-discovered it.
Maybe he's covering his own ass? Maybe he's trying to protect gain of function research? He was, after all, the most vocal proponent that the risks with gain of function research were worth it. [0]
> The top scientist in the country, with several Ph.Ds, 50 years of experience in a both public leadership and an incredibly complicated branch of biology, is making roughly what a staff engineer at a FAANG company makes...and you are complaining? That's the bargain of the century. He's a sick fuck for actually sticking it out - he could have bailed and consulted on "return to the office" for all the big tech and entertainment companies. He is 80 years old, working insane hours, and probably would have made more money in 6 months than he has in his whole public career from a really nice beach. You will never convince me that THIS is the smoking gun that proves Dr. Fauci corrupt, finally, after 50 years in public service. It's too stupid.
Oh, ok. So before his only reward was his "public servant salary", but now that you know he's the most highly paid government official (including the President) his salary is now being compared to FAANGs and he's underpaid. What a sacrifice.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484390/
Edit: Fix typo.
Dare we inquire how long you have lived. :)
But seriously, I am not sure that the scientific community, nor all national governments, have reached a clear consensus on gain of function research. It is still a developing issue. Welcome to be corrected on that. Such research could potentially help to prevent pandemics as well as accidentally start them. The idea that scientists in the US might have been working with scientists in other countries, including China, on GoF research is not shocking to me. Here is a paper from 2016 on the ethics of GoF research:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4996883/
Perhaps the old saying about mistakingly attributing malice to incompetence applies here.
As for the cover-up, it is difficult to imagine that David Baltimore is wrong. I used a textbook he co-authored when I was in school; he is one of the pioneers of the biotech industry. It seems unlikely this was not created in a lab. Then again, it is probably easier to prove someone in a lab made a mistake than to prove soemthing exists in nature.
Oh please. The median CEO pay at a pharmaceutical company is nearly $5 million. It take all the way up to nearly $50 million per year, which someone with the incredible experience (not to mention government contacts) of Dr Fauci would be on the upper end of, and that's not too mention the tens of millions in signing bonus and retirement packages. [1]
1. https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/biotech-pharma-ceo-employ...
https://www.pnas.org/content/102/23/8073
So if the Chinese military had in fact been doing this, I'd guess it was just basic research, in the same way that lots of American basic research links back to DARPA. Of course they fund it because they believe there might be a military application, but I see no reason to think that application would be bioweapons (vs. the same kind of beneficial applications described in the open literature).
You are of course more likely correct about the alignment issue, I can't find my source now, and the above is probably much stronger evidence. For the alignment you'd have to be a virologist, probably one specializing in coronaviruses, to be able to really judge this. Of course a whole bunch of biologists have shifted their focus to coronaviruses in the last year and a half.
Several media organizations (washington post, buzzfeed) submitted FOIA requests for the emails, and as per federal law, they were released. No leak, normal federal government policy process, driven by mainstream-y media outlets AFAICT.
Twitter has not banned discussion of the theory. Here's a thread from May 27th (Nate Silver) discussing it in some detail:
https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1397869883585708034
Here's Ryan Delk from May 23rd saying it even more clearly:
https://twitter.com/delk/status/1396583148524212226
They did have policies related to the lab leak theory, but it seems like a mischaracterization to say that the banned discussion of it.
The only person I can find who has lost their account over related matters is a NY Times reporter who closed her own account after making some fairly dumb remarks about the theory.
I'm not sure that claim aligns with historical NIH funding for gain of function research: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9819304
I found an NIH article that says the likelier origin is that the 1950 virus was used to produce a weakened live virus vaccine candidate that lead to the reemergence and not an accidental leak. It also concludes by saying there has never been a likely lab leak epidemic ever observed.
> Of 23 samples that came from Wuhan, only three were type A, the rest were type B, a version two mutations from A. But in other parts of China, Forster says, initially A was the predominant strain. For instance, of nine genome samples in Guangdong, some 600 miles south of Wuhan, five were A types. [0]
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
The media is supposed to be a bit more skeptical of their sources than that. At this point I follow rules that look a lot like these:
https://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-IntelAnalysis.pdf
> This argument [that SARS-CoV-2 must be natural since it doesn't use a known backbone] fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29246
Note also that the WIV's public database of viral genomes went offline in Sept 2019, and hasn't come back.
As to the binding, Andersen looked at the binding of SARS-CoV-2's RBD to human ACE2 in silico, and found that it was suboptimal. But that proves only that the RBD wasn't designed in silico using his software workflow. Among unnatural origins, it's far more likely that the RBD either evolved naturally (as Relman proposed above) in a different virus, or evolved quasi-naturally in the lab during culture in human cells or in humanized mice. Andersen's argument doesn't address these more likely possibilities.
It was practice. Past tense. The WHO changed that practice in 2015 [1]. In fact they explicitly list Spanish Flu as an example of why that practice was flawed.
"Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations (e.g. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Rift Valley fever), people’s names (e.g. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease), species of animal or food (e.g. swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox), cultural, population, industry or occupational references (e.g. legionnaires), and terms that incite undue fear (e.g. unknown, fatal, epidemic)."
[1]: https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-pra...
Today the Los Angeles Times published an article headlined "The lab-leak origin claim for COVID-19 is in the news, but it's still fact-free."
What's missing from all this reexamination and soul-searching is a fundamental fact: There is no evidence — not a smidgen — for the claim that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory in China or anywhere else, or that the China lab ever had the virus in its inventory... No one disputes that a lab leak is possible. Viruses have escaped from laboratories in the past, on occasion leading to human infection. But "zoonotic" transfers — that is, from animals to humans — are a much more common and well-documented pathway. That's why the virological community believes that it's vastly more likely that COVID-19 spilled over from an animal host to humans...
"We cannot prove that SARS-CoV-2 [the COVID-19 virus] has a natural origin and we cannot prove that its emergence was not the result of a lab leak," the lead author of the Nature paper, Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, told me by email. "However, while both scenarios are possible, they are not equally likely," Andersen said. "Precedence, data, and other evidence strongly favor natural emergence as a highly likely scientific theory for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, while the lab leak remains a speculative incomplete hypothesis with no credible evidence." Co-author Robert F. Garry of Tulane Medical School told several colleagues during a recent webcast: "Our conclusion that it didn't leak from the lab is even stronger today than it was when we wrote the paper." As the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski sums up the contest between the lab-leak and zoonotic theories, "the likelihood of the two hypotheses is nowhere near close to equal."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/column-the-lab-lea...
And Wired also ran a piece last week with a similar skeptical headline. "The Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory Is a Tale of Weaponized Uncertainty." Its subheading? "Scientists almost never say they’re sure, and it could take years to pin down the pandemic's origins. Until then: People are trying to scare you."
https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-lab-leak-theory-weaponi...
Here's some good science sources:
- Comprehensive reddit post [0] from a virologist (table of contents, also linked as a 34 page pdf), referencing over 150 sources, with several sections going into the details of the genetic evidence, also interesting to read the comments.
- Here's an article [1] talking about different origin theories and the related genetic evidence, having a section I was interested in about the cleavage site and o-linked glycan, something apparently that has to develop in an animal with an immune system (this is something I haven't seen any lab-made proponents speak to yet).
- Lastly, here is an article [2], much more scientific than the Vanify Fair article, in favor of a lab connection (unfortunately, for me, this article doesn't mention the o-linked glycan, nor the genetic evidence that covid-19 may have originated hundreds of miles from Wuhan [3])
That's as far as I've gotten so far following the science. I'm hoping there will be more virologist commentary as more data comes out, perhaps something based on the full WHO report/data that I heard was released last week. I'd like to think that science will give us more definite answers eventually. It could take years.
I'm not so much interested in conjecture from politicians and journalists. I'm really taken back by all the inaccuracies, half-truth's, innuendo, and conspiracy theories floating around. Are we all led so easily by the headlines they feed us?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
[1] https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3
[2] https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
[3] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
Even that is something people uncovered online and we were talking about a year ago.
Quick edit: Here's a video from April 2020 that touches on this at 6:38 (and a whole lot more otherwise): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU
Or explicitly creating chimeric coronaviruses, which has been the state of the are for some time. Here's https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26552008/ one of the sources of smoke on this, a 2015 paper co-authored by the Bat Woman (2nd to last author), the key sentence from the abstract:
Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.
Have you read the fine article? It cites more than a few papers.
There were a lot of threads to pull, and some of us were following it. For example, this video was posted in April 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU
Take Fauci for example, is he a good scientist? Yes. But it’s also clear that he too subconsciously has pushed for the method of approaching pandemics that coincidentally he was good at, and now we are left with this mess. I doubt him or anyone in between is going to acknowledge it even if they realize it. I was downvoted here to oblivion for pointing this out weeks back but doesn’t matter. I threw away a decade of my life’s experience because I didn’t believe in this cult of an academic system, downvotes don’t hurt nearly as much.
1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
* A Wired article detailed how the whole basis for social distancing and masking was wrong, based on two unrelated facts that got mixed together 60 years ago: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
* Texas and Florida eliminated not just lockdowns but also all mask usage and the predicted spike in cases didn't happen.
* Fauci was caught lying to Congress about funding gain-of-function research.
* And probably the most direct trigger for this topic, Buzzfeed got and released Fauci's emails through a FoIA request just a couple days ago, which among other things revealed that he was warned about it possibly being a lab leak right at the beginning of the pandemic.
CCP owns Hong Kong, that was over in 1997, the only surprising thing about HK is that China waited this long to make it better known. Now... The country of Taiwan on the other hand, it’s going to be a bit more tense there for some time.
EDIT: Added links from Jan, most videos have been removed but the articles and screenshots are there. The one I specifically wanted was removed from YouTube and I can’t find it, showed a guy being checked by a PPE marshmallow then nearly immediately going into spasms in his car.
EDIT2: To whoever might have been upset at my thoughts on Taiwan; I updated it with some italics for you.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7923981/Coronavirus...
https://www.ibtimes.sg/china-virusnew-videos-wuhan-show-coro...
Here is snopes with an eye roll worthy fact check https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/people-collapsing-coronavi... “Unproven” ok, thanks for that guys.
https://www.wired.com/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-contin...
He is far from the top paid government official. That honor, by a long shot, in nearly every state in the country, goes to college athletic coaches[1].
The mutations on covid 19 are Really Different compared to the known and studied viruses. If it was a lab leak of an engineered chimera, you'd be able to see that A proteins came from virus X and B proteins came from virus Y and Z, but that hasn't been shown to be the case. From what I understand there are a bunch of smaller mutations across a lot of proteins resulting in something that doesn't really line up with known and studied genomes.
This paper actually goes through and compares the DNA of covid 19 against several other studied viruses: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-00459-7
Here’s an episode of Bret’s podcast from June 2020 covering this in depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug
Edit: a word
You can read more about how the intelligence community failed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Report_on_Pre-war_Intel...
For example, they thought that Iraq had restarted its nuclear weapons program, and there was nothing like that in the evidence you linked to.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/why-scientists-belie...
I'm not going to ban you because it doesn't seem like this happened before, but we ban accounts that do this kind of thing, so please don't do it again.
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
> Clues to the transition from bat virus RaTG13 to human virus SARS-CoV-2 may lie within the 4% of the genome sequences that diverge. Evolutionary biologists estimate it would have taken at least 50 years for the bat virus to have mutated itself into SARS-CoV-2, considering known, natural mutation rates of viral genomes.
It goes on to say, that it’s possible this virus is just different.
This paper states 20-50 years an an estimate. [1]
> Bats belong to the usual suspects for zoonosis, and indeed, a bat virus that shared 96% sequence identity with SARS-CoV-2 was isolated in Yunnan /China in 2013. However, a 4% sequence difference (>1000 bp) would indicate 20 to 50 years of separation from SARS-CoV-2, making this bat isolate an unlikely direct source for the nascent epidemic. Chinese researchers explored tissue and faecal samples from 227 bats representing 20 species living in China, collected between May and October 2019 and analysed them by metagenome sequencing. This investigation found that the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 in this sample set shared 93.3% sequence identity over the entire genome, less than the bat coronavirus isolated in 2013 from the same province, Yunnan (Zhou et al., 2020).
I’m not a virologist, just trying to keep up with this story. It seems like a consensus that 3.8% is a large chasm to cross in that time frame, but there could be things we don’t know or possibly viruses that are closer to SARS-CoV2 that we haven’t sequenced yet. I think the most important thing to note is that there hasn’t been enough evidence to rule out a gain-of-function lab leak hypothesis given what we know today about viruses and there wasn’t a year ago either.
[0] https://dnascience.plos.org/2021/04/15/3-possible-origins-of...
[1] https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/175...
Since very recently you also have a letter in the Science journal written in English, so it may help USA medias to consider the theory: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
Anyway, better late than never and this is a good story from vanity fair.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/people-collapsing-coronavi...
[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7923981/Coronavirus...
[3] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10808633/coronavirus-wuhan-zom...
[4] https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2020/01/31/les-videos-di...
A small number of SARS infections in 2003-2004 are also believed to have been due to laboratory accidents [2].
This article [3] gives an introduction to the subject from the perspective of a journalist who has reported on laboratory safety in the US.
This article [4] published in Nature in January 2012 by members of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity reviews the risk of a release of an engineered form of H5N1 influenza. It includes some alarming remarks such as:
'We found the potential risk of public harm to be of unusually high magnitude' and;
'A pandemic, or the deliberate release of a transmissible highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1 virus, would be an unimaginable catastrophe for which the world is currently inadequately prepared'
The authors take the possibility of release of a dangerous pathogen from a laboratory seriously, though the article is prospective rather than retrospective.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
[3] https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-covi...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/why-i-h...
> Fauci said the Trump administration will not only be challenged by ongoing global health threats such as influenza and HIV, but also a surprise disease outbreak.
https://www.healio.com/news/infectious-disease/20170111/fauc...
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/29/fact...
I would like to remind everybody that this happened in Milano just before the outbreak
In my opinion the most damning part of the article is the section about the human-adapted furin cleavage, I recommend reading that part. The working assumption is that we should find people with precursors to covid without that furin cleavage adaptation, and we don't. If China wants to prove it wasn't a lab leak, they'll need to find instances of the virus that predated that adaptation- as was the case with SARS.
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
We may learn from Taiwan*.
Quote: "Extensive public health infrastructure established in Taiwan pre-COVID-19 enabled a fast coordinated response, particularly in the domains of early screening, effective methods for isolation/quarantine, digital technologies for identifying potential cases and mass mask use."
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6...
More explanation of that here... https://youtu.be/jMr-fGmRGco?t=246
There's a lot of post-hoc engineering arguing for BSL-4 research into coronavirus when even if the lab leak theory proves true wasn't in evidence at the time.
[1] https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/info-2021/... (point 7)
Yes. Obviously you don't put an arsonist in charge of fighting fires, so if this information had come out early last year then he would have lost not only his role much sooner, but also his social status and career. If what's coming out now came out last year, Trump's replacement of him with Scott Atlas would have been more widely supported (maybe), and Biden may not have dared to put him back in his post.
That would have been a huge financial hit. Fauci does very well out of his position. "Very well" might even be an understatement. He is the highest paid federal employee [1], earning more in 2019 alone than the US President. Despite this fact, he has deflected questions about conflicts of interest by laughing it off and saying he has a "government salary", creating the impression he is paid far less than he really is.
Fauci charges between $50,000 and $100,000 per hour for motivational speeches [2].
Despite being theoretically in charge of a crisis situation in which nobody has time to ask how it started, Fauci has found time to write a book called, "Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward". He has also appeared on TV more than 300 times [3].
This is not a man who is too busy to investigate basic questions that may have direct relevance to developing treatments for the virus. And given that knowing where it came from would be of immense scientific value yet he has every incentive to cover it up, he is also not a man who should be running things.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...
[2] https://leadingmotivationalspeakers.com/speakers/anthony-fau...
[3] https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-has-chalked-up-300-media-...
This is just one example I could find quickly, but there are many more... https://twitter.com/JoePCunningham/status/139718591836522496...
You might hear about it, depending on where you get your news. You might also hear social media fact checkers dismissing it as conspiracy nuttery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Meng_Yan
https://nypost.com/2020/09/16/twitter-suspends-virologist-wh...
Oddly, it went offline 12 September 2019 shortly _before_ the pandemic was announced in December 2019.
Ref: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gilles-Demaneuf/publica...
Not really clear why it hasn't been released, it would be technically trivial and save a lot of speculation.
There is a bit of a pattern of DRASTIC researchers finding interesting tidbits in various science portals, followed by those portals going offline or being restricted.
Here's an interview with her... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhwrICQTcQg ... her opening statement (paraphrased) is "saving lives in the context of vaccines ... is about firstly maximising benefit and secondly about fairness and equity" ... make of that what you will.
Here's one case of someone stating the true goals of those who promote the lab leak hypothesis is to promote anti Asian sentiments...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547263
It's hard to believe how one can reach such a daft conclusion.
There are many others.
Perhaps it would've been easier for the scientists involved in gain of function research to remain unbiased, if they weren't fully aware that anything but total denial will make the world think they're responsible - as a profession and individuals - without as much as shred of evidence to support it.
> People have an idea that “trust the experts” can replace all the messy, gross, and often wrong processes we have developed to deal with the fact nobody can be trusted.
I observe the opposite. People seem to have the idea that experts are always in on it, or out to get something out of a crisis, and thus should be ignored. The alternative is, of course, to listen to whatever uninformed opinion piece confirms one's worldview the most. I think we'd all do better with trusting the experts more - they may be wrong, but they're also in the best position to discover and correct that. They may be also right. Most people - including journalists, pundits and bloggers - are not capable of telling whether experts are right or wrong. So trusting them seems like a better bet than trusting random opinions (unless yourself you have enough familiarity with the field, at which point your own interpretation may be valid too).
C.f. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
He was a Soviet scientist in charge of creating bio-weapons- the book starts with him planning world war 3.
In one of the anecdotes talks about a lab leak they had, caused by someone not replacing a filter and the the lab accidentally pumping out anthrax all day and killing a lot of people.
The government blamed it on local meat sellers at the market and executed them all. Blaming the local market seems to be part of the bio-weapon-denial playbook.
It's a great (but terrifying) book - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0031RS5DI/ref=dp-kindle-redirec...
Fauci has been covering this up since early on. Have you not followed the story of the released emails from the FOIA request? He knew this research was being conducted. He gave cover to those who attacked people like Sen Tom Cotton, who was trying to get this looked into from the beginning.
For this, his reward is a public servant's salary
Fauci is the highest paid employee in the Federal government.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-w... : Michael R. Gordon, WSJ on the "lab leak"
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-i... : Michael R. Gordon, NYT on "Iraq WMD"
The media are, in these cases, bad, but only because they've not adequately defended against the internal psyop by the US security agencies.
The two are not equal, the virus could be of natural origin but leaked from a lab, that scenario is still very much possible even in the context of the Lancet statement.
Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist, then is cited as saying there is no evidence in the statement, when actually there are around 12 relevant citations in there. I guess a dozen is just not enough data for a data scientist?
The actual context of that statement also gets quite a bit embezzled with an off-hand remark about "xenophobia and climate denialism": Since the first case in the US, there had been a concentrated and very nasty effort to politicize the virus.
It was US senators and US new pundits who at first floated the claim of it being a bio weapon [0], that's what triggered said Lancet statement in the very first place. It didn't just come out of nowhere for no reason, as some people like to claim, to imply the statement itself is already evidence for a cover-up.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation#Wuhan_...
It was never really "banned", there was a moratorium on such research after a string of safety lapses in US laboratories, moratorium's are always only of a temporary nature [0].
The often mentioned "GoF research" involving bats with US participation and funding, didn't even fall under that moratorium [1].
> you have Fauci making the case for creating viruses in a lab
Of course he would make that case, because that's a useful tool to have in research. No offense, but trying to make this out as something so binary and only bad, reminds me a lot about the more radical and clueless takes on GMO that see "All GMO as bad".
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/10/17/3570109...
The “engineered” component is about the Furin cleavage site on the sars-cov-2 spike protein.
The virus shares 92% genetic similarity to bat coronaviruses, except the spike protein, which is nearly identical to a pangolin coronavirus(which is otherwise only ~38% similar) with one key exception: The Furin cleavage site using “lab standard” sequences.
The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that are rarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair. For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.the best I could do was 3km, but I don't recognize anything from google pictures https://imgur.com/KxOT84W
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...
https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1391507272887455746
Basically, it's somewhat rare but not wildly so. FCoV has an RR pair, the first is coded as CGG, and the second as CGA, a difference of one base pair.
I can't scroll to find the original tweets but many Trump loyalists were very early on the Covid concerns– while the left was ridiculing any concern with articles like what I linked above. See https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/03/coronavirus-mik... and https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/why-some-early-maga-.... Tucker Carlson talked constantly about the Covid from very early on as well.
But such forms were already discovered back in 2015 as a result of the research that's now labeled as "GoF research", even tho it didn't actually fall under the GoF moratorium back then [0].
Imho the whole thing has a very "shooting the messenger" vibe to it; The evidence we had for this being a very real possibility of happening is now turned into the alleged cause of it actually happening.
Concerns about COVID were being cast as "racist" by the Left and the media (but I repeat myself) in the beginning: https://news.yahoo.com/pelosi-denies-she-downplayed-coronavi...
https://twitter.com/newsmax/status/1246131288664408064
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JZ0Ruh89f0
If you don't remember that, then you should question your information sources. I remember the accusations of racism online quite vividly as I voiced my concerns in early February that people should start taking precautions: buying quarantine supplies, PPE, etc.
Tucker Carlson had some early reports on COVID and was attacked for fear-mongering by his usual left-leaning political opponents.
> I haven't experienced any backlash against white people for any and all systemic racism built by other white people. I still do not see your point.
And I'm really glad you didn't. Not every Chinese experienced any backlash either. That's great for them too. But not everyone was so fortunate. Example from a BLM protest: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5ebji8
I'm also going to attack the sources... This was strongly pushed by the Trump administration which was looking for this result. And originally reported by in the WSJ by Michael R. Gordon who is also one of the original reporters about the Iraq Aluminum tubes/centrifuge story that turned out to be wildly false.
It took about 15 years to trace the origins of SARS [1] to a specific bat cave. We cannot be this confident this early on SARS-CoV-2.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
This is Fauci (serving under Trump) saying in January 2020 that he didn't think it was a threat, or am I missing something?
Are you saying that a then Trump official, now Biden official was speaking out of partisanship?
> I remember the accusations of racism online quite vividly as I voiced my concerns in early February that people should start taking precautions: buying quarantine supplies, PPE, etc.
I stocked up on ~3-4 weeks worth of supplies too, and replenished bi-weekly since early february, as well as many of my friends, neither of whom politicised it.
> Tucker Carlson had some early reports on COVID and was attacked for fear-mongering by his usual left-leaning political opponents.
Do you mean his fellow network hosts?
https://i.insider.com/5e5959a6fee23d09e47eae94?width=951&for...
https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/imag...
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-br...
The news articles that require the most analysis are the ones of which we are least critical (i.e. those which are prima facie the most factual), yet here you are with a lazy article about Rush Limbaugh. I mean come on, we know he was there to spread propaganda.
Now here's a CNN article, posted May 1, 2020. Let's lightly analyze it:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/politics/trump-intelligence-c...
My favorite part about this article is that, coming back to it today it's so easy to plausibly deny the associations they were making, but in the context of the time the conclusion from the article is that the lab leak theory is a conspiracy that the intelligence community is pushing back against.
>President Donald Trump contradicted a rare on-the-record statement from his own intelligence community by claiming Thursday that he has seen evidence that gives him a "high degree of confidence"
POP QUIZ!
1. Did Trump say he had a high degree of confidence that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the lab?
2. Why would CNN need to misrepresent something Trump said when he says enough BS the way it is?
Answer key: (1) No, watch the video (it was the interviewer who projected that statement onto Trump). (2) I don't know, but it doesn't seem like they have any good reason to do so.
The reporter drives the sentiment. The reporter is who the viewership listen to on how to feel about a particular statement. And what has the reporter done in this article? They have first suggested that Trump claims to have strong evidence the virus was leaked from the lab. Then they move on to suggest the intelligence community disagrees with this claim:
>In acknowledgment of that effort, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued an unprecedented public statement Thursday prior to Trump's comments making clear the intelligence community is currently exploring two possibilities but cannot yet assess if the outbreak "was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan" or began "through contact with infected animals."
Then they create an association with conspiracy theories:
>While the statement suggests the intelligence community has not yet developed a clear assessment as to how the outbreak started, it does say that officials have ruled out the possibility that the virus was "man-made or genetically modified," agreeing with a near consensus among scientists and refuting conspiracy theories.
The article says both theories are plausible! you might think, but the reporting brings us back to this central claim:
>But the lack of evidence to back up claims that the outbreak began in a Chinese lab has not stopped top administration officials, including Pompeo, and some Republican allies of the President from raising the possibility in public comments.
(emphasis on possibility is mine)
So when you say
>It wasn't against the possibility of a lab leak
I have to disagree. The mass media artfully manufactured the consensus that the possibility of the lab leak theory was unfounded. They did so while producing factual information that suggested we didn't have much evidence backing either theory, but used skillful narration to direct all attention to denying the possibility of the lab leak.
Damns my credibility a bit, doesn't it? Well, I should have more accurately mentioned that the FCS insertion (CT CCT CGG CGG G (PRRA)) Is rather unusual by betacoronavirus standards in that arginine is not typically coded as CGG (~5% of the time), and that RR coded for as CGG-CGG has not been seen in any betacoronavirus to date.
I have more in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27393013
But my quality quotient on this thread has been all over the place. Probably too invested in getting people to consider the possibility of the lab leak as most probable until we see an animal population to prove the natural hypothesis.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/apr/12/julianborger: CNN [and NPR] let army staff into newsroom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli...
The closest animal virus to SARS-CoV-2 was found in nature about 900 miles from Wuhan (RaTG13, in Mojiang), closer to Chongqing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, or HK.
There was an article from a popular outlet I've been particularly surprised about, since left-wing media otherwise mostly took the pandemic seriously here and around the world, and tried to stay science-based.
This article remained in my memory because they present themselves as fact checkers and are popular with many prominent people in my primary political and media spectrum.
They politicised covid early on and claimed it is just an anti-open-borders / anti-foreigners campaign: "The secret reasons why conservatives want you to be afraid of coronavirus": https://www.volksverpetzer.de/politik/rechte-panik-corona-vi...
This is from 27th January 2020, while many people here on HN likely have read the first concerning reports about this virus at the end of December 2019. I started being careful from mid January.
Until today this page self-righteously claims that "the available facts at that time" pointed towards nothing to be concerned about in the Western world, which is simple not true if you took your research seriously.
I mentioned that Men in Black scene. There were several other topics where I could find concerning evidence by carefully browsing otherwise questionable sources very early on – the lab leak theory (ProjectEvidence, Zerohedge), the aerosol transmission, that mask wearing is reasonable, the unclear and potentially harmful effects of the spike protein itself –, while I've been completely ignoring such websites before covid. ( Other things like people just dropping dead on Chinese streets did not turn out true ofc. )
[0] “In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...
IMO the most upsetting part about this is people like Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak being repeatedly caught in outright lies and coverup behavior. These people seemed to have the best of intentions at some point in their career but they are doing irreparable damage to their field and science in general with the public lies and coverups.
One example is Shi Zhengli publicly stating the the 6 miners that died after shoveling bat guano in a mine in Mojiang died from a fungal infection while the DRASTIC group was able to dig up two papers that specifically stated the miners died from a SARS-like virus. They also dug up evidence that Zhengli's lab visited the mine multiple times since 2012 to take samples after the miners died and retrieved as many as 9 unique Coronaviruses similar to SARS-Cov-2 from the mine.
There's this general situation where yes, there is that ecosystem 1 and downstream sources OP mentioned, and there is the ecosystem 2 (Fox and downstream sources).
However, former POTUS and ecosystem 1 cycled between themselves a fair bit, ecosystem 2 and former POTUS cycle, so by proxy eco1 and eco2 are cross-linking to each other in a sense, and so on.
I'm not telling you that there is no good way to parse info sources out there, but I am telling you the "MSM vs. other" delineation that OP is calling for awareness of doesn't really exist if you study the actual information flow... which this team did.
If you want my advice, read primary sources on events that matter to you. Studies, court documents, and so on. It's what that whole confusing ecosystem uses as well, and you can get the raw data without the analysis.
- the study: https://cyber.harvard.edu/publication/2020/Mail-in-Voter-Fra...
- discussion on the study: https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-yochai-benkler-m...
So if this COVID-19 origin hypothesis is true and it took only 8 to 19 years for a lab leak of a gain of function experiment to cause the worst pandemic in a century, we ought to be very interested in making sure this happens a lot less often. Ideally not at all, but I see no way to impose a world wide ban on this type of research.
According to Andersen, the CGG codon isn't quite as rare in coronaviruses. He also comments that the stability of the CGG codon in the Furin cleavage site has been remarkably high over the course of the pandemic, which is a hint that the CGG codon may be selected for and crucial for the virus.
Quoting him:
> Now, the codons. Here, Baltimore is talking about the two codons coding for the first two arginines (R) following the P - CGG. The CGG codon is rare in viruses because it's an example of an unmethylated "CpG" site that can be bound by TLR9, leading to immune cell activation.
> Despite being rare, however, CGG codons are found in all coronaviruses, albeit at low frequency. Specifically, of all arginine codons, CGG is used at these frequencies in these viruses:
> SARS: 5% SARS2: 3% SARSr: 2% ccCoVs: 4% HKU9: 7% FCoV: 2%
> Nothing unusual here.
> Furthermore, if we go back to the FCoV sequences and compare them to SARS-CoV-2 at the nucleotide level you'll see that FCoV also uses CGG to code for R immediately following the P. The next R is CGA (non-CpG) in FCoV, while it's CGG in SARS-CoV-2 - one nucleotide difference.
> We see CGG multiple times in different ways - here's an example comparing another "PR" stretch between SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, and SARS-CoV in the N gene. Note how SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 both use CGG, while SARS-CoV-2 uses CGC for the first R, while later R's are coded by CGT or AGA
> One final point about the CGG codons in the FCS - if they were somehow "unnatural", we'd see SARS-CoV-2 evolve away from "CGG" during the ongoing pandemic. We have more than a million genomes to analyze, so what do we find if we look at synonymous mutations at the "CGG_CGG" site?
> Remarkably stable. Specifically, CGG is 99.87% conserved in the first codon and 99.84% conserved in the second.
> This is very strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 'prefers' CGG in these positions.
https://img-prod.tgcom24.mediaset.it/images/2020/02/16/11472...
And yes, I checked Google Maps and they are very much obscuring this now (they weren't several months ago when I last checked).
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. There's far too much content here for us to read it all, or even see it all. People can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
What you're doing is called "gas lighting".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrJwjYPQvhQ
Avenatti was ALL over the place in left-leaning media, receiving endless accolades.
Also, in that CNN article video he is asked a question not asked in the above video. A very direct question and NOT leading:
> What gives you I high degree of confidence that this originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
> I can't tell you that. I'm not allowed to tell you that.
Seriously though, I was alive and not under a rock in 2020. I was paying attention to all of this while it was happening.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177
Thanks for your unsubstantiated comment though
No he was not.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/04/24/disinfectan...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ends-ban-on-posts-asse...
Whatever chilling effect it had, tall order at this stage of this general program of research or not, it's high time its advocates including yourself point to tangible progress of one sort or another, for we now can reasonably assess the risk side of the risk benefit trade off.
See this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398081 on why the advancements in vaccines don't even begin to cover the risks, or note as of now how long it looks it'll be before the Third World gets vaccinated against as much as is humanly possible, no sooner than sometime in 2022. Consider the possibility of a sufficiently good escape variant requiring another dose or two.
Consider how little the the whole world can afford the expense of a pandemic, and the Third World in particular, including viral surveillance of any sort, "molecular" (PRC based) tests or sequencing samples. And this time they're lucky, COVID-19 mortality risks are highly weighted with age, something that hits the young harder will hit them a lot harder.
Consider how many possible, probable, or proven lab escapes will it take before the world's governments clamp down on a lot more than gain of function research.
Yes, nature wants to kill us, although your itemized points also address that issue. It's just not very good at it, and almost all of that was before the germ theory of disease was accepted in the end of the 19th Century.
the Botao Xiao paper
>There are two subclusters of A which are distinguished by the synonymous mutation T29095C. In the T-allele subcluster, four Chinese individuals (from the southern coastal Chinese province of Guangdong)
>There are several curious features about this insert but the oddest is that of the two side-by-side CGG codons. Only 5 percent of SARS2’s arginine codons are CGG, and the double codon CGG-CGG has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus. https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
There's no need to politicize the discussion.
1) There's no evidence any recent president or cabinet member had a clue, or if they did have a clue it was off their radar anyway.
2) All this gain of function research was administered either in academic circles or at lower governmental circles where politicians are not involved. See for yourself. Fauci's own email from January 2020 referenced research already published in 2015. (That's during Obama's gain of function research ban, for those of you keeping score at home). Start at 5:00 into the referenced video.
EDIT: The paper was published after the ban was initiated. The research began before the ban, but apparently continued.
The whole video is well worth watching and walks trough Fauci's immediate responses as soon as it became apparent this is the real deal, and still 6 FULL WEEKS before the WHO declared a pandemic. A whole lot of CYA going on here. Fauci knew enough to reference this paper in the wee hours of the morning after a very busy day and before another hectic day he was headed for. Think he was familiar with the topic?
https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/origins-of-covid-19-...
But it was flagged nearly immeditally. I wonder why and by whom. Do moderators here check for state sponsored bots that try to hide such stuff?
The ban was actually lifted by the Obama administration, _11 days prior_ to Trump taking office.
Source: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2017/01/09/recomme...
JANUARY 9, 2017 AT 9:06 Recommended Policy Guidance for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight
"Adoption of these recommendations will satisfy the requirements for lifting the current moratorium on certain life sciences research that could enhance a pathogen’s virulence and/or transmissibility to produce a potential pandemic pathogen (an enhanced PPP)."
> https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/06/03/fac...
Any other crank sources you'd like to share?
I didn't argue that the email contained claims about the 'origin'.
Email Subject:
> "Coronavirus Bioweapon Production Method"
Dated March 11, 2020.
Screenshot of original email - https://i.imgur.com/HxUSoCv.png
https://www.pnas.org/content/102/33/11876
If you want to split hairs, you actually said:
> The Fauci emails in March 2020 that described the exact components of the virus ...
which is a complete lie. The email does NOT describe the components of the virus at all. You clearly are lacking in any sort of biochemical background as this is obvious. Do you actually fact check anything you are posting?
Many people have put together the charts with arrows indicating the dates when things changed, for example
https://rationalground.com/mask-charts/
That site is old now but there have been many since.
You can also find plenty of studies saying the same of course, but you can also find studies saying the opposite - academic research has failed on this topic. Fortunately the question in simple, so you don't need any research papers to see the truth: mask mandates do not work because if they worked, we could see it in the graphs, and we can't.
Wore mask at all times: 11% got infected Wore mask never: 23% got infected
Mask mandate doesn't mean people actually wore them. Maybe in shops they did cause it was illegal not to. If people kept having gatherings with friends & family then a mask mandate is meaningless.
And honestly, you should be ashamed to link to these type of websites. They don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny.
