Take the same compromised people, add a few more, find a biosafety expert that lauds the excellent biosafety of Chinese labs and decries ‘typical conspiracy theories’, sugar coat it with a few neutral names and you have a SAGO cake. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…
A cake with a near null dose of honest biosafety expertise (1 in 26), but a fat dose of EcoHealth devotees with a fully formed and reliable opinion as to the necessary zoonotic origins of COVID-19.
Here are Fisher and Koopmans (both in SAGO) having a good laugh at critics.
Watch the video - it's edifying.
Dr Yungui Yang (the Chinese member of SAGO) really likes Koopmans, especially the way she wrote to him that she agrees with the China's plans for Phase 2 and the way she discards Jesse Bloom's findings. news.cgtn.com/news/2021-09-0…
Koopmans has been involved in Gain of Function research of concern for decades.
A total of 27 publications by Prof Koopmans with Ron Fouchier (and others) (2004-2021) suggests that her career has long been enmeshed with GoF.
Supaporn (new on SAGO) is a subcontractor on NIH grant U01-AI151787 to EcoHealth Alliance.
Her team at Chulalongkorn University is to receive a subcontract of USD 1.07 million in 20-25.
Anyway she has been a safe hand for many years.
She used to work with DARPA before 2009 and then with EHA. vice.com/en/article/9kj…
She also did the bat guano epiphany paper of 2013 with Olival and Epstein from EcoHealth Alliance in 2013 - a few months after the Mojiang’s workers deaths, using old DARPA samples and DARPA PREDICT funding, and never mentioning Mojiang.
And she was back with Linfa Wang (who never disclosed DEFUSE) in a Nature paper about bat and pangolin BatCoVs similar to SARS-CoV-2 in Feb 2021, just when the WHO team was in Wuhan. nature.com/articles/s4146…
"Spies [!!] then falsely claimed that the Chinese government didn't give important data to the expert team, but the conspiracy was countered again by experts like Daszak and Thea Fischer."
While Summermatter goes ballistic and explains that Chinese labs could never cause an outbreak, or that even if a lab employee infection occured it would be all fine because they all know what to do and are very careful.
All we know is that 1. They tested IgG+ to some SARS like BatCoV and had symptoms very similar to COVID-19
2. RaTG13 (then BatCov4991) was sampled from that Mine in 2013
@arambaut@BioSRP@bmj_latest@BallouxFrancois@Ayjchan Now as you know, there would likely have been a mosaic of BatCoVs somehow similar to RaTG13 in that mine in 2012.
It’s not because we only know of RaTG13 that it’s all there was.
From there the Mojiang Passage Theory can make sense.
Both articles have left the scientific domain for the opinions one - if not the political opinions one - by asserting that the Laos BANAL BatCoV finds reinforce the zoonotic origin hypothesis. nature.com/articles/d4158…
Now let's cut through the noise and go back to the horse mouth, Marc Eloit the main author of that paper - from the Institut Pasteur.
On the key issue of the absence of the not-banal-at-all FCS in all the BANAL BatCoVs:
"It is possible that it was acquired in a lab" @Ayjchan
Science turns nasty in Covid-19 origins argument on Twitter | South China Morning Post archive.is/2021.10.14-234…
Jesse Bloom:
“I no longer think it’s a conspiracy theory that the furin cleavage site could have been engineered,”
He also added that he was “stunned” to see the DARPA proposal and questioned why the scientists involved didn’t come forward to disclose it earlier.
Holmes said that it was “staggeringly inept” for Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, and the scientists involved in the DARPA application to not have made it public “when everyone is looking for transparency”
By the way I had a good laugh at the 60 minutes story about Daszak in Tioman.
They make it sound like it is in the middle of nowhere, even saying that it is 'West of Borneo' when it is actually directly of the coast of peninsular Malaysia.
I went diving there in the 90s like so many tourists in Asia.
It's rather easy to go there: there is a little airport (short landing or you hit the hill!) and then you take a boat to your beach.