"currently available data" is highly biased (at best). If you conclude something from biased data, your conclusions will be biased.
A good scientist assesses quality and biases of data first. That is how Science work
If you do not study something enough, you do not make an absolute judgment, much less give extreme probabilities. There you exceeded your mandate and did something unprofessional.
"CNN published one piece of their works in June, which shows that the group ramped up efforts to expand its voices via these influencing media outlets." -->
[Thread] New unforced error. GIABR, the lab of the pangolins, has just uploaded sequences (MW600658:MW600715) that shows a trip to the Mojiang mineshaft or nearby on 22-Aug-2017, well after the last known trip of WIV in 2015.
Libiao Zhang explicitly credited as collector.
Some context: Very few CoVs published with collection date after 2016 by Chinese institutions
WIV used two main series of sample IDs (NNNN, e.g. 4991; and YYNNNN, e.g. 162387) plus some ad-hoc series.
We discovered yesterday that one of them was from GIABR.
[Thread] Who is the first known patient?
There is a lot of confusion, so let's review all possible patients according published onset dates [of symptoms] up to 15-Dec-19.
Notation
Patients are anonymized, so they are identified as <AgeSex> (e.g. 49F is a 49-year-old female). In case there are many patients with same age & sex, suffixes are used (e.g. 65M1, 65M2, ...).
U = Unknown.
Problem: people can have birthday during illness
XX Su (61F), XX Wang (62M) & XX X (UU) onset 14, 21 & c. 30-Nov-19.
Info unnoticingly leaked in Health Times and uncovered by DRASTIC and @ianbirrell
[Thread] Necessary corrections to the China-WHO report.
What they will probably fix and what they will not.
TLDR: circular swap of 3 IPCAMS genomes + tampered onset of Wuchang accountant; First patients and first cluster; Some falsehoods in articles washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pac…
As we said, the problems were with S01, S05 & S11. Absolutely chaotic, but with a little table it is all more clear. Part of the problem is inherited from Ren et al. (2020) who followed different orders in the text and in the genomes for the patients.
"It shows how an authoritarian government can successfully shape the narrative of a disease outbreak and how it can take years — and, perhaps, regime change — to get to the truth"
"“You can concoct a completely crazy story and make it plausible by the way you design it,” Dr. Meselson said, explaining why the Soviets had succeeded in dispelling suspicions about a lab leak"
“Those who don’t want to accept the truth will always find ways not to accept it.”
[Thread] Bat tissue collection and cell lines from the 3rd trip to Tongguan (TG) mine in Mojiang in Apr-2013
The 3rd trip is still my first guess for being the trip of live isolate WIV15 (and backbone). I guess it is more probable to isolate a virus from tissue itself... What do the experts say?
Jan 7, 2021, AVC Panel Discussion Origins of SARS-CoV-2 (from @KatherineEban's article)
“the incredible difficulty of isolating live virus from bat samples, which are usually fecal samples, and that this is extremely unreliable and usually not successful” downloads.vanityfair.com/lab-leak-theor…