Thread by @akoz33

I really can’t tell the journalist who write this is deliberately lying or he is just ignorant (and the same is true about most of the others). Compare these words:
asia.nikkei.com/Business/Scien…

“A 2015 paper in Nature Medicine co-authored by Shi and Ralph Baric, a leading expert on coronaviruses at the University of North Carolina in the U.S., foreshadowed the COVID-19 pandemic. It described a SARS-like virus in bats that had the potential to jump directly to humans

and resisted treatments used against SARS.” and what Shi, Bari and the other authors say in the abstract of their own paper:

Just to be absolutely clear, let me repeat:”Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.”
We generated a chimeric virus. They are not describing a

a bat virus, they are describing a chimera which they produced in a lab in North Carolina and then took to Wuhan after an outcry (the Obama administration imposed a moratorium on this kind of research, in 2017 Fauci ended it and a 3 million dollar grant was awarded to Wuhan

to continue this work. Now if anyone still has any doubt, here are two pages from a Nature (news section) describing the outcry this engineered virus caused. Look at the title. And not also the note they added once the covid epidemic started asserting that “scientists don’t

believe” it was this virus or it’s descendent but sone other very similar virus that caused the current pandemic. But not the slightest proof has benn offered. Here are these two pages

So now, the claim that is being made is this: that a bat virus somehow acquired the ability to infect humans in Wuhan, where there are no bats of this kind at all (and none have ever been sold at the local wet market - all the photos showing bats on sale come from Southern China)

and then infected human beings and that by amazing sheer coincidence this happened next door to a virology lab, where work had been going on for a number of years on bat derived chimera viruses that were artificially given the ability to infect humans. Well, I would say that

while such a phantastic coincidence is not impossible, the probability of it happening is somewhat smaller than the probability that the earth will be destroyed before the end of this year by a giant meteorite astronomers have failed to spot.
Both the Nature article and the

subsequent discussion in Nature news (posted above) are there, they can’t delete them, the evidence is unambiguous. But what they can do and are doing is to assume that most people don’t read and can’t understand such stuff and journalist are too ignorant or too corrupt or both

to follow it up. And the, of course, they add “no respectable virologist believes it was a chimera that caused the pandemic” except Luc Montagnier and he is mad. And then of course there is also Jean-Claude Perez, who wrote this

But Perez is a mathematical biologist, and there are very few of them, and since hardly anybody can understand any of his stuff, he can be safely ignored.
So who else is there? Well, there is of course Pyotr Chumakov, the famous Russian virologist and oncologist, who used to be

head of a research lab in Cleveland and now has returned to Moscow. His younger brother, Konstantin happens to be the Deputy Head of FDA, in charge of vaccines etc.
So what do the two brothers say this? Well, I already translated once an interview with Pyotr Chumakov, in which

he said that twist they were doing in Wuhan was “insane”, and the role of the “American consultants” wac very dubious and unclear and the whole thing had an awful feel about it. But then in another interview on Russian television his brother, Konstantin was also asked about this.

It was the last question, what does he think about the claims that the virus was artificially engineered? And not at all surprisingly Konstantin Chumakov says that he had seen no evidence to support this but than quickly adds “I am not an expert on this but I asked someone who is

and that is what he says”. And who could this expert be? Dr Fauci perhaps, who years ago wrote an article in the Washington Post defending the “gain of function” research and who authorised the ending of the moratorium imposed by the Obama administration.
And now we come to the

last pint: what do these people: Montagnier, Perez, Chumakov and several others have in common? Well, one obvious thing - they are not going to be applying for any US grants. Montagnier is on very bad terms with the entire virology establishment and has a permanent professorship

in Shanghai. Perez, a distinguished former IBM research fellow (it’s much harder to become one than to get a full professorship at a major university) is retired. Pyotr Chumakov was dissatisfied with insufficient funding of his pioneering research on cancer treatment with viruses

(he has not been able to get funding for any medicine although one based on his ideas has been made in China and two more, developed by other labs are entering trials) and accepted an offer from Russia. Konstantin Chumakov is, of course, one of the most important virologists in

the US but he “is not an expert on chimera viruses”.
The saddest thing about this story is that it actually quite accurately reflects the situation in American & world science.
(In another interview Pyotr Chumakov mentioned “corruption that did not exist in the past”. )