Here's their TL;dr premise: Viruses that are "pre-adapted" to human ACE2 receptors would by definition stop mutating.
You don't need a virology background to know how silly this is from an evolutionary standpoint.
E.g.
"If SARS-CoV-2 resulted from attempts to adapt a SARSr-CoV for study in animal models, it would likely have acquired mutations like N501Y for efficient replication in that model"
LOL. Why would it "likely" have acquired these? They don't say.
"Recurring mutations...including N501Y...E484K/Q... similarly enhance viral infectivity and ACE2 binding, refuting claims that the SARS-CoV-2...was optimized for binding to human ACE2 upon...emergence"
Literal nonsense unless your premise is that viruses stop mutating.
Denying lab leak outright, however, WAS an actual conspiracy.
The next day after you looped Andersen in this🧵to help dunk on Cotton's comments, he wrote to Fauci: "genome [was] inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory."
1/15🧵A major obstacle to fixing our #LowIQPandemic is "à la carte reality" (ALCR), which is information silo-ization hardened by scaled confirmation bias.
The democratization of information has obvious & great benefits. BUT it's enabled ALCR.
A quick example=Covid "knowledge."
2/ Covid has been such a clusterfuck that I hesitate to analyze how we ended up here in a quick 🧵.
But no matter the diagnosis, we can agree on the result: most ppl have preferred sources for Covid info/narratives.
Now—having preferred sources is NOT *ipso facto* a problem.
3/ But it IS a problem if 99+% of ALL info sources are *fatally* wrong.
Here's a Dunning-Kruger (DK) metaphor.
Those in the top %tile of Covid knowledge—on the "Plateau of Sustainability" like @R_H_Ebright—can see reality but have no way of enlightening (at scale) those below.
Our NIH—& DOD—allowed *and* funded this guy to work with the WIV, find the worst coronaviruses on earth, then genetically modify them to be MORE infective to human tissue.
And now he’s on the WHO committee investigating...himself.