Adrian J

Bioinformatics and data science

[Adrian J @humblesci]

Our paper "Forensic Analysis of Novel SARS2r-CoV Identified in Game Animal Datasets in China Shows Evolutionary Relationship to Pangolin GX CoV Clade and Apparent Genetic Experimentation" has been selected for the front page of Applied Microbiology

https://t.co/8sdrtwpsg9

[Adrian J @humblesci]

Um yeah...

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

Edward [Sherlock] Holmes: “[I]t is very striking that a bat-derived CoV with an FCS turns up in a city that was on a grant proposing to muck around with FCSs in bat-derived CoVs”

Matt Ridley:

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

It's remarkable how these scientists were making exactly the same arguments in private as we were making in public, while throwing childish insults at us for doing so.

[Yuri Deigin @ydeigin]

This is the essence of the zoonosis narrative of Covid origin: “We just need to re-convince ourselves it is coincidence.”

That’s their response to the DEFUSE proposal that we at DRASTIC leaked in 2021. So even though they agreed that “it really isn't beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff”, they were already committed to their natural origin narrative which they agreed to underwrite as per (overt or implied) direction from “Der Fauci”, as Kristian Andersen referred to him in an apparent allusion to Hitler (ie “Der Fürher”).

(Although I prefer my The GoFfather moniker)

[Jari Kuikanmäki @jarikuikanmaki]

Proximal Origin (2020), the Critical Review (2021), Worobey et al. (2022), Pekar et al. (2022), as well as Holmes’ “raccoon dog” Cell paper (2020) should all be retracted.

Then, Congress should issue subpoenas. The evidence for scientific misconduct is damning. #ProximalBoys

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

The incentive to fake a natural origin was huge. Slightly surprised the Chinese authorities never did it.

Exaggerating the significance of the pangolins at a critical moment was a clumsy first step in that direction.

Did George Gao prevent them doing something more market related?

[Alina Chan @Ayjchan]

"We still have no evidence for SC2 in that lab and they must have sequenced it first. But it is very striking that a bat-derived CoV with an FCS turns up in a city that was on a grant proposing to muck around with FCSs in bat-derived CoVs."

Even Peter Daszak, a collaborator and funder of the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab for more than a decade, didn't have access to their virus sequence or sample databases.

Even Ralph Baric, a collaborator on the Defuse proposal, told Congressional investigators that the Wuhan scientists wouldn't have shared their most interesting strains or sequences with him.

Why would rando virologists believe they are even close to knowing about the newest viruses discovered by Wuhan scientists?

[Ian Birrell @ianbirrell]

The latest messages released by @SenRandPaul also show how these prominent - and now discredited - scientists colluded to dodge FOIs and slagged off people daring to question them (I’m called a knob, fucker, bully and low IQ among other insults)

[JasperV @JasperFarlake]

There's a virus called RaTG13. It's the single closest known relative of the virus that causes COVID - 96% identical. It's the main reason people were told COVID could have evolved naturally: "look, here's its closest wild cousin, found in a bat cave."

Here's the problem. The lab that provided it - the Wuhan Institute of Virology - said it came from bat droppings collected in a mine in 2013. But when independent scientists actually checked the raw lab data behind that claim, the evidence pointed somewhere else entirely.

Here's how you check something like this. Bat droppings are full of bacteria - that's just what poop is. So if you scan the genetic material from a real dropping sample, most of what you find should be bacterial DNA. The WIV itself uploaded a real bat-dropping sample from the very same day: 91% of it was bacteria, exactly as expected.

RaTG13's sample? Only 10% bacteria. Instead, 87% of the genetic material matched bat body tissue directly - and most of that matched active genes, the kind of signal you get from a living cell, not from something that passed through an animal and sat outside. A peer-reviewed 2024 study narrowed it down further: this looks like it came from a bat that was alive in the lab, not a swab picked up in a cave.

[Massey 2021, arXiv:2111.09469 - Massey 2024, Microbiology Research, DOI 10.3390/microbiolres15030119]

We wanted to check this ourselves, not just take it on faith. So we independently re-ran the core comparison from scratch - mapping the raw reads of RaTG13 against a real same-day fecal swab control onto the bat reference genome, our own machine, our own pipeline. Our result: 94% of RaTG13's reads map to the bat genome, versus 47% for the real control. Same gap, independently reproduced.

If RaTG13 was in live culture at the WIV rather than a wild-caught trace, the entire "closest wild relative, 96%, ~40 years diverged" argument rests on a sample of uncertain, lab-linked origin. No confirmed wild RaTG13, no confirmed wild anchor for SARS-CoV-2's ancestry.

And it's not an isolated case. Applying the same method to unrelated WIV-linked datasets shows a pattern: a MERS-family virus in a cotton-plant dataset (2017), a fully synthetic lab-built version of a MERS-family virus hidden inside a rice dataset from Wuhan at the start of 2020, and a bat coronavirus contaminating the WIV's own mouse-genetics dataset (2017).

[Zhang, Jones, Deigin et al., arXiv:2104.01533; Jones, Zhang, Massey, Nemzer, Journal of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology 2024]

One more thing: the closest known relative of the ORIGINAL SARS virus from 2003 - a virus called WIV1 - has never had its raw data released at all, ever. No one can check it the way we just checked RaTG13. The only reason RaTG13 could be checked is that outside scientists pressured the WIV into releasing it in February 2020, right as COVID was breaking out.

[Ge et al., Nature 2013]

None of this proves any single specific story. It proves the main piece of "natural origin" evidence doesn't hold up when you actually check the underlying data - and that this isn't a one-off, it's a recurring pattern.

Credit to the people who did the real forensic work here: @stevenemassey #DRASTIC

[Nod @nizzaneela]

I was going to say something about how Florence Débarre, in a PubPeer comment, menaced those who endorsed my submission to the arXiv, but that comment seems to have been removed (along with a lot of other nonsensical comments on my work). Kudos, PubPeer.

[Tyler Stepke @TylerAStepke]

The PO authors thought the Global Virome Project was insanely dangerous and involved "100,000s of GoF experiments for viruses that could potentially infect humans."

They never shared their concerns because they fear "encouraging the lab escape crowd" more than the next outbreak.

[Adrian J @humblesci]

🤣

[Yuri Deigin @ydeigin]

LOL, Kristian Andersen wasn’t impressed with Vincent Racaniello’s expertise either:

[Alina Chan @Ayjchan]

There's no redemption arc in these messages, and I expect the journalists and scientists who have picked their tribe aren't going to have a sudden awakening.

Just know these virologists are conspiracy theorists. In what universe is Ralph Baric sending me out to do dirty work?

[Bryce Nickels @Bryce_Nickels]

Rand Paul's document release includes evidence Eddie Holmes wrote to Eric Lander in Oct 2020 an effort to silence Alina Chan.

(In June 2024, I emailed Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, and Eddie Holmes and asked them directly whether any of them had done this. None of them responded.)

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

So Kristian Andersen misled the world about the cause of an event that killed 20 million+ people,

probably the greatest single industrial accident in history,

and has spent six years misleading the world about it since.

Proximal Origin MUST be retracted.

@RetractionWatch

[Emily Kopp @emilyakopp]

New Slack messages between the authors of the infamous Proximal Origin paper suggest that Jeremy Farrar initiated the coverup of the Wuhan lab leak while in communication with a British intelligence "friend." Farrar is the WHO's chief scientist.

[Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright]

The claim--repeated literally thousands of times by journalists--that most scientists favor a natural origin of COVID and oppose a lab origin of COVID always was a lie. And almost always was a deliberate lie.

[Adrian J @humblesci]

100%

[Andrew Noymer 🇺🇦 @AndrewNoymer]

"Proximal origins" needs retraction not because it's wrong (tho, it is), but because it's fraudulent.

Many articles are wrong. Retraction isn't the remedy for wrongness.

Just-released Slack messages prove that conclusions in P.O. were not the good-faith beliefs of the authors.

[Dr. rer. nat. Valentin Bruttel @VBruttel]

@mentju4 Shocking. Garry explained in 2022 that they were not working on ebola. So they did, and did so at BSL2. They had 6 infected lab workers. IMO, they very very very likely caused that outbreak, got a NIH/Fauci grant and negligently killed >10,000 people.

[Jim Meigs @jamesbmeigs]

I've been covering lab leak controversy for over five years. Every new tranche of documents that's emerged over those years has made our public health leaders look worse:

They lied to the public, concealed their own roles in laying the groundwork for Wuhan's dangerous research, and conspired to discredit scientists like @Ayjchan who exposed evidence that the virus was likely manipulated by Wuhan researchers.

The latest batch of slack messages reveals that they all talked—and joked!—about this behind the scenes, even as they told the public the lab leak theory was "just a conspiracy theory," as Fauci repeatedly said.

This is a scandal for the ages. And we still have not gotten the full accounting we deserve.

[Adrian J @humblesci]

🔥

[Yuri Deigin @ydeigin]

Wow, I saw 72 mentions of my name in those Slack messages. And I’m not even mad. If anything, I’m kinda grateful because so often we don’t know what other people think or say about us behind our back, and your opponents are the most honest people when it comes to what they think of you.

Oh and privately their lab leak scenario probabilities were actually much higher than they would ever admit publicly. So our evaluation of the evidence was actually not that far apart…