In my own opinion of lab or nature, this interview was my personal ‘smoking gun’, no need to delve into FCS or cover-ups / conspiracy.
(1/n)
WIV, per this admission from Daszak in late 2019, was in possession of “over 100” SARs-like coronaviruses. He says “very similar to SARs” he adds some are “capable of infecting human cells, of infecting humanized mice […and] causing SARs-like illness”
Yet, only a handful of these have ever been published. How many is “some” … how many were being processed in human cells, or humanized mice? Is this number (let’s even say 3) larger than the expected number of natural spillover opportunities in Wuhan?
Given that Wuhan has not uncovered an intermediate host, nor are the bats native to Wuhan, natural spillover in Wuhan must be presumed to be from an infected human from wherever this reservoir existed to spillover.
Necessarily, we are comparing the odds that one patient zero arrived in Wuhan to seed the virus there, verses the odds that one of -at least some- SARs-like viruses (known to infect human cells) were in Wuhan, being worked at at the WIV in conditions that were not ideal.
In 2018 the US intelligence agency warned this very lab was not following adequate safety protocols. We know they had worked with other SARs-like viruses with minimal PPE before, at BSL2! (No protection against aerosol transmission at this level).
So, is it really much more likely in your minds, given what is readily known, that the lab is not worthy of investigation? How can anyone with a sense of decency claim they are certain natural spillover remains the far more likely scenario. The short answer is: they can’t.
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At the beginning of trying to engage with prominent virologists over the origin possibilities of SARS2 I was confused why they were making the easily spottable & fallacious “absence of evidence is evidence of absence” argument. (1/n)
(2/n) I was confused how they were convinced that consistency with natural evolution meant it precluded a laboratory leak. I was confused too they conclude this was “not a purposefully manipulated virus” when it was possible it could have been.
(3/n) I was confused why they would downplay and never engage with other scientists that called attention to peculiar strains of evidence like a furin cleavage insertion site using an unlikely CGG CGG back-to-back codon usage.
Dr. Rasmussen (@angie_rasmussen) could be the poster child of anthropocentrism. A dangerous bias of human infallibility, superiority, and with known negative consequences toward logical thinking.
This would also be a compelling piece if only:
-the database of all their viruses wasn’t deleted in Sept. 2019
-Daszak hadn’t tipped his hand that they were currently studying over 50 (not all disclosed) viruses in humanized mice capable of infecting humans in Nov. 2019