Thread by @faisalislam

Cummings today: “Last year I wrote about the possible threat of coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning”.. appears to be reference to this blog... actually about biolab accidents and giving a “Red Team” £1m to test security including honey traps .. dominiccummings.com/2019/03/04/the…

blog does reference coronavirus, in relation to an accident at a Chinese lab that led to 1 SARS death in 2004 ... not sure what message he is sending here. If he is saying that the blog was prescient, does he think the pandemic has something to do with a leak from a biolab?

Listening to him, he seemed to be saying that there was no way he would have backed herd immunity because he had warned of pandemic threat in particular from coronaviruses [ie with no vaccines and treatments] which would have been impressively prescient, but cant see it there...

I’m genuinely very interested in what exactly he was warning about - I’ve searched his blog for coronavirus - only 1 thing comes up - that biolab thing. SARS same, MERS, nothing. Please show me the warnings, I want to read them, will link to them here

https://twitter.com/lankland/status/1265013125939712000?s=21

Again - he literally told us to read his blog about his warnings on this topic - but the only warning on his blog I can find is re protecting biolabs from attack, not eg wet markets, or a virus with no vaccine or treatments - so what exactly is he asking us to infer here?

Weirder and weirder...

@jwiechers put blog through Internet archive machine and reference to coronavirus, quote on coronavirus was not in the version of blog saved on Way Back MAchine on Apr 9 2020 ... but is there this month...

https://twitter.com/jwiechers/status/1264953956758884354?s=20

And the account of the internet archive does check out - see the history here:

why would a reference to coronavirus be added in the last month?...

web.archive.org/web/*/https://…

change in April that appears to be shown on internet archive is quote from below article is expanded to include that reference to coronavirus I quoted at the top of the thread... so perhaps he thought he was warning about coronavirus by linking to this: thebulletin.org/2019/02/human-…

MORE: info on Way Bank machine internet archive corroborated by info on actual blog sitemap -hat tip @martbrow @exactlyaron and @jonwilliams80

edit that added “coronavirus” quote made “2020-04-14 T20:55:20”

So same day he returned to work, after Durham

dominiccummings.com/sitemap.xml

To be clear - I was genuinely interested in how prescient he had been on coronaviruses, and expected to be impressed.

Perhaps that writing is elsewhere... I’d be interested in reading it and happy to link to it, if anyone can show it me.

But...

NEW: No 10 source acknowledges blog was indeed updated, but says the original version from last year linked to an article [in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists] which did discuss coronaviruses [in the bits not quoted from originally but subsequently added].

The actual quote from yesterday’s press conference is actually stronger than the one from a transcript at top of thread:

“Only last year I wrote explicitly about the danger of coronaviruses”...

Blog: searching for PM’s top adviser’s coronavirus warnings made “only last year”, as mentioned in Rose Garden yday.

All very strange.

fundamental underlying issue in early response to this pandemic of being coronavirus not flu (as everyone modelled)...
bbc.co.uk/news/business-…