Lab leak

GoF asshole who supports a dangerous young investigator

#RetractProximalOrigins

[The Seeker @TheSeeker268]

Ok, this is news. David Morens got a full tactical SWAT-style takedown at his home, with guns, vests and the works.

Yes, it looks like performative overkill for one conspiracy count, two destruction/alteration/falsification counts, and two concealment counts, especially for an elderly retiree.

But let's not pretend this is not a mea culpa moment for someone who knowingly stifled a legitimate debate while millions died. Dissenting scientists were smeared, censored, and treated as pariahs in no small part because of actions by insiders like him. That's the real scandal here.

Accountability cuts both ways.

[Sigrid Bratlie @sigridbratlie]

We’ve reached a milestone in the covid origins case; the first indictment. David Morens is former advisor to Anthony Fauci at NIH/NIAID and close friend to Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance) who collaborated with and financed gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in Wuhan.

Morens has gone to extraordinary lengths to mislead authorities and the public, hide information and avoid FOIA, and lobby on behalf of Daszak/EHA to secure their funding. The indictment is not the result of partisan politics, but obvious criminal offenses and bipartisan unity; both the Democrats and the Republicans condemned Morens’ actions in his congressional hearing.

For Norwegian followers; if you want to know more, you can read my book Mysteriet i Wuhan (The Wuhan Mystery) where I have dedicated a chapter to Morens.

However, Morens is just one piece in the very complex puzzle that make up the scandalous handling of the Covid origins case. It will be interesting to see if more indictments will follow, and whether there will be real accountability for people who have betrayed our trust.

Finally; it is ironic that those who are now indicting Morens for violations of rules related to public transparency, are the same people, in the same administration, that are obstructing transparency and violating the law in the Epstein case 🤦‍♀️ The double standard is glaring! We deserve transparency and truth about both the origins of the Covid pandemic and the Epstein case.

[Entropy🌻Chase @EntropyChase]

Since the COVID origins debate picked up steam recently, I decided to write a shorter summary of the basic facts we have available. I noticed that not everyone has been caught up to date with these details. Hopefully this improves the discourse!

https://t.co/q5n2ZSSCWQ

[Alina Chan @Ayjchan]

Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists
✈️Relocated to Guangzhou
🧪Conducted more novel coronavirus experiments
🐁Infected human cells, organoids & mice with
🧬Enhanced chimeric 🦇 coronaviruses
🥼At BSL-2 (not a high containment lab)
🇺🇸US journal of virology published the work

[Gilles Demaneuf @gdemaneuf]

Very damaging email.
This is the reaction of Fauci to the ‘Tedros Prposal’ I wrote about.

The proposal was not enough for Fauci, he needed a quicker move. He got it through PO which Farrar forced onto Andersen himself.
@SenRandPaul

[Senator Rand Paul @SenRandPaul]

🚨BREAKING: Newly released emails show Fauci directed colleagues to “delete this after you read it”—dating back to Feb. 2020.

He denied it under oath. These documents are now public, and Fauci will finally testify before Chairman Rand Paul.

[Holtz @Biorealism]

"As we saw during the Covid pandemic, lab-created experiments can wreak havoc when they escape their confines." https://t.co/20ttlJM55X

[Alison Young @alisonannyoung]

“China’s continued obstruction sets a dangerous precedent; it weakens international cooperation and undermines trust in the scientific process when both are most needed. No country—whether China, the United States, or others—should be exempt from scrutiny in a global health crisis of this scale.”

[Emily Kopp @emilyakopp]

The COVID origins story has involved dogged work by @garyruskin, @BillyBostickson, @gdemaneuf, @KatherineEban, Open the Books and many many others. The fight for truth has always felt like an unlikely band of outsiders fighting the full force of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Nature and Science, and even top intelligence officials. I'll never stop marveling at the fact that this unlikely group changed history.

[Ticklicker @Ticklicker56]

@tgof137 merely SPECULATES that zoonotic spillover event(s) involving live wildlife sales at HSM resulted in Covid pandemic;
he also has NO ACTUAL EVIDENCE which accounts for HOW SARS2 (or kin w/ >90% nt similarity) got to Wuhan from nearest known location where bats harboring such viruses occur (ie, in Yunnan Prov; 1000mi to south).

[Michael Weissman @mbw61567742]

@ukhadds I appreciate your aerosol work but can't agree on that puff piece by coauthors of the badly wrong Pekar 2022 paper.
Getting down into the actual quantitative Bayes factors shows that the evidence favors a lab leak of DEFUSE-style research. https://t.co/jTzmy2fSkf

[Holtz @Biorealism]

@ArnoldBogis @angie_rasmussen Andrew Weber and Roger Brent have both commented that it's a helpful report. Ultimately, there is the problem Jesse Bloom argued last month that the earliest sequences aren't fully representative of the earliest cases. https://t.co/ibBnjGMq5G

[Rebecc@ ███████ @Rebecca21951651]

@ConversationEDU @Sydney_Uni Written by the Original Fraudsters -- here's what they REALLY think:

[Rebecc@ ███████ @Rebecca21951651]

@ConversationEDU @Sydney_Uni Written by the Original Fraudsters -- here's what they REALLY think:

[Holtz @Biorealism]

@ConversationEDU @Sydney_Uni Lab origin is favored by Energy Dept scientists at LLNL, FBI, CIA, Germany's BND and the French Academy of Medicine. As Chen et al (2024) set out, it's also far more likely on Grunow-Finke assessment. https://t.co/NCNCze9QMh

[Holtz @Biorealism]

Ok, but several analyses challenge the assumptions this piece relies on for Huanan Seafood Market origin. Particularly, in relation to multiple spillover theory (lineage A and B only 2 mutations apart with incomplete case ascertainment), ascertainment bias in case data and the environmental samples. Meanwhile, the NIH terminated WIV's subaward over refusal to share records of their SrCoV research that included Yunnan and Laos where the closest known relatives are. See for example:

1. Jesse Bloom on Jesse Bloom on "clear evidence of bias among the earliest available sequence, and explain why the root of the SARS-CoV-2 tree cannot be conclusively resolved with the current data".

Data are Insufficient to Confidently Root the SARS-CoV-2 Phylogenetic Tree (2025) | Molecular Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic https://t.co/uIalNSXkc4

2. Lv et. al. (2024) found new intermediate genomes so the multiple spillover theory is unlikely. Lv et al considered single point of emergence is more likely with lineage A coming first. The market cases were all lineage B so not the primary cases. Their findings are consistent with Caraballo-Ortiz (2022), Bloom (2021).

Jia-Xin Lv, Xiang Liu, Yuan-Yuan Pei, Zhi-Gang Song, Xiao Chen, Shu-Jian Hu, Jia-Lei She, Yi Liu, Yan-Mei Chen, Yong-Zhen Zhang, Evolutionary trajectory of diverse SARS-CoV-2 variants at the beginning of COVID-19 outbreak, Virus Evolution, Volume 10, Issue 1, 2024

https://t.co/xfV6bnO4Zv

3. Angus Mccowan who identified coding errors in Pekar et. al. leading to an erratum in Science in 2024 found another significant error. This actually reverses the Bayes factor to favor single spillover. https://t.co/YpSUEHe98H

4. Michael Weissman (2024) shows a model with ascertainment collider stratification bias fits early Covid case location data much better than the model that all cases ultimately stemmed from the market. George Gao, Chinese  CDC head at the time, acknowledged this to the BBC in 2023 - said they focused too much on and around the market and may have missed cases on the other side of the city). See also, Bahry (2023).

Michael B Weissman, Proximity ascertainment bias in early COVID case locations, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society, 2024;

https://t.co/0thsFsnI82

5. Sampling bias towards the wildlife-stalls stalls while the single lineage A sample was of low quality.

Liu, W.J., Liu, P., Lei, W. et al. Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 at the Huanan Seafood Market. Nature 631, 402–408 (2024).

6. Jesse Bloom (2023) showed a negative correlation with susceptible animals and SARS-COV-2 genetic material. His (2024) analysis of the 12 Jan 2020 samples showed genetic material from some animal CoVs was fairly abundant in samples collected during the wildlife-stall sampling of the Huanan Market on Jan-12-2020. However, SARS-CoV-2 is not one of these CoVs.

Jesse D Bloom, Importance of quantifying the number of viral reads in metagenomic sequencing of environmental samples from the Huanan Seafood Market, Virus Evolution, Volume 10, Issue 1, 2024,
 https://t.co/cW6CslqGjE

7. Patrick Berche, DG at Institut Pasteur in Lille 2014-2018, notes you would expect secondary outbreaks as occurred with SARS1 if it arose via the animal trade. It arose well adapted to human ACE2 cells with low genetic diversity indicating a lack of prior circulation in animals and a furin cleavage site not seen in other sarbecoviruses.

Gain-of-function and origin of Covid19, La Presse Médicale, Volume 52, Issue 1, March 2023

https://t.co/HvaiVM2Q90

8. Chen et al (2024) note the draft  DEFUSE restriction enzyme stitching plans are consistent with the speculation of Bruttel et al (2022). This type of research could have lead to SARS-CoV-2?

Chen, X., Kalyar, F., Chughtai, A. A., & MacIntyre, C. R. (2024). Use of a risk assessment tool to determine the origin of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Risk Analysis, 1–11. https://t.co/ln9pYKWcNh

[The Return @TumbleweedChase]

@MarionKoopmans Peter Daszak should be on trial for 10 millions counts of manslaughter.

[Yuri Deigin @ydeigin]

Wow, is that really @janeqiuchina saying that the lab leak hypothesis is not some crazy conspiracy theory but a legitimate scenario? A sign of things to come?

https://t.co/RRDx1flbWL

[Billy Bostickson 🏴👁&👁 🆓 @BillyBostickson]

it's never too late to admit you were wrong

Thank you @janeqiuchina for your bravery and common sense.

[Sigrid Bratlie @sigridbratlie]

Now that China and US governments seem to agree that Covid started before the Huanan market (although they blame each other for causing the outbreak), why not release intel that confirms the earlier timeline at least? E.g military intel. It will not definitively prove the origin, but it will at least put the wet market red herring to rest. That would be a huge relief for those of us in the scientific community having to put up with all the aggressiveness from conflicted scientists refusing to discuss anything but the market theory, and let us move forward towards finding real answers about the origin. @POTUS @CIADirector @FBIDirectorKash @DrJBhattacharya @DNIGabbard