Why David Relman and his colleagues told the world that we need to investigate both of COVID-19’s origin stories: “Listen, despite all this yakking, we actually don’t know a whole lot based on hard data. We have a lot of assumptions, but..very little data" stanfordmag.org/contents/germ-…
"[Some scientists] violated the principles of scientific investigation by saying, “Despite the fact that we don’t have much of an evidentiary basis for saying any of this, we’re going to tell you how we think this all went down.”"
"their assumption that because we haven’t heard of anything closer, there can’t be anything closer, is flawed. They continue to say that because we don’t see anything closer in a lab, it couldn’t have come from a lab."
"The problem is that you’re assuming that you know about everything that’s in the lab. I mean, all of us have unpublished data, so why would you assume that you know of everything that they could have had to work with?"
" scientists who claim that it couldn’t have come from a lab also fail to recognize the possibility of an accident during efforts to grow viruses directly from bat samples."
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In Y3 of EHA's grant report, the same figure is quoted: "Host-virus co-phylogeographic analysis of a diverse group of >1,300 bat CoVs showing that
these viruses have a larger host range, weaker host specificity and higher frequency of cross-genera transmission.." 2/4
However in Latinne et al. published in @Nature (2020), they only report 1,246 sequences: “Our final datasets include 630 sequences generated for this study and 616 sequences from GenBank or GISAID.” (1,229 sequences in the supplementary material) 3/4 nature.com/articles/s4146…
"All but one scientist who penned a letter in The Lancet dismissing the possibility that coronavirus could have come from a lab in Wuhan were linked to its Chinese researchers, their colleagues or funders"
"Conflicts of interest were not reported for any of the other 26 signers of the letter – not even those with obviously material undisclosed conflicts such as EcoHealth employees and Predict contractors."
"The standard remedy for fraudulent statements in scientific publications is retraction. It is unclear why retraction was not pursued.”
i) RNA extractions on 1,000 samples per year.
ii) RT-PCR assays on 1,000 samples per year.
ii) DNA sequencing on 3,200 samples per year.
Where is the data?
@Ayjchan@theintercept@MaraHvistendahl@fastlerner "We have developed primary cell lines and transformed cell lines from 9 bat species using kidney, spleen, heart, brain and intestine. We have used these for virus isolation, infection assays and receptor molecule gene cloning." cc @franciscodeasis
We had two valid covid origin hypotheses at the beginning and both should have been treated that way. Excluding one was for all intents and purposes an attack on science. It has since become clear that part of the offensive was a targeted campaign.
The media, for the most part, failed to fulfill an important task of journalism: to keep responsible institutions accountable and to keep the public up to date with the latest knowledge.
I expected the media to report the obvious inconsistencies earlier.
Scientists, by and large, failed to push for transparency, data accessibility and verifiability. If scientists have any belief in scientific principles, if it doesn't matter here, take those words out of our mouth.
The article is: Basically, let's ignore everything and revert to "...but Huanan market".
Clearly many scientists didn't get the memo: There is no epidemiological evidence to support the market origin theory. Earliest cases had no link to the market.
.@MichaelWorobey says.. “The fact that early [COVID-19] cases were linked to the market, and that the market was selling what were very likely intermediate hosts? .. All of that is probably trying to tell us something.”