6. Congress has a constitutional obligation to gather answers itself, can it overcome the bipartisan issue?
and force the NIH to reveal more information?
7. "People have information, but they are afraid to come forward," said the House investigator, adding that Republicans and Democrats must drop partisan concerns and unite to protect public health.
"China is the threat. We've got to stand together. This is our country."
1. What appears wasteful research to you in the present may be of great value to you or others in the future, if it is given the time to develop to its logical end.
Don’t judge the usefulness of your findings too quickly!
2. What appears wasteful or a dead end to you..
May be of immense value to somebody else!
Don’t judge the usefulness:
1. Of other people’s findings based only on your own assessment of them.
2. Of your own findings based only on your own current assessment of them either.
3. What appears wasteful and a dead end to you..
A. May be the raw stuff that new hypotheses and new research directions are born from.
B. Don’t judge the usefulness of your "investigations" until you have given them enough time to surprise you.
-Deliberate release of bioweapon
-Accidental release of bioweapon in development
-Lab accident during genetic engineering
-Lab accident during cell culture
-Lab accident during vaccine development
-Accidental infection that no one knew about
2⃣ WCDC
• Lab worker infected during field animal sampling
• Accident during experimental work
• Accident from exposure to infected waste
• Accident during move to new location
• WCDC gave bat samples to the WIV
3⃣ Virus engineering
•Engineered from RaTG13
•Engineered from pool of bat viruses (Laos)
•Engineered from secret database of bat viruses
•Engineered at UNC & shipped to the WIV
•Engineered hybrid of bat & pangolin viruses🐵
•Synthetic infectious clone engineered in vitro
They use a dataset skewed toward Yunnan & Laos (p. 16), leading to phylogeographic models that place SARS-CoV ancestors far from Wuhan & Guangdong (p. 12).
This sampling bias undermines the reliability of their geographic inferences.
23. Neglecting Alternative Hypotheses
No SARS-CoV-like viruses near emergence sites?
They completely overlook non-bat reservoirs, like civets or pangolins, which could explain local circulation (p. 15).
This omission weakens their claim of distant ancestor origins (p. 12).
24. Inconsistent Molecular Clock Rates
The paper misuses variable NRR-specific clock rates, which give inconsistent SARS-CoV ancestor dates (e.g., 1944–2014 for SARS-CoV-2, p. 9).
Without any validation of bat-specific rates, this approach has no rational grounding (p. 14).
"our inferences of the time of the ancestors of human SARS-CoVs and their closest bat sarbecoviruses are UNBIASED"
6. Captain Obvious Strikes Again (1)
"we show that the ancestors of SARS-CoV-1 & SARS-CoV-2 likely circulated in horseshoe bat populations 100s to 1000s km away from the sites of the emergence of these viruses in humans & as recently as one to six years prior to this emergence"
7. Captain Obvious Strikes Again (2)
"Our findings indicate that there would not have been sufficient time for the direct bat virus ancestor to reach the locations of emergence of the human SARS-CoVs via normal dispersal through bat populations alone"