“I said there was no way he could be task force chair or on the commission if he didn’t share those.”
"The other 11 people on the task force refused to remove Daszak from their ranks, but agreed to make Keusch their chair instead."
So basically he first asked Daszak to step down from any work on the origins and keep working on the epidemiology side first.
That backfired for the other Task Force members, when the details of "Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in EID Hotspots of Southeast Asia” was released following FOIA by The Intercept.
Keusch and three other task force members were listed as co-investigators.
There is no excuse for not being transparent.
Keusch, who was made chair after Daszak had to step back a bit (not yet removed), objects.
But if - as he says - the grant was not an issue and should not have affected Daszak suitability, why did Daszak refuse to disclose it?
Seriously, Keusch should find some better excuses.
You had a good time calling the research-related hypothesis 'Debunked' at the KNAW-symposium in Dec 20.
Alongside meteorite (!), snakes and some other flotsam.
You had been working for a while with your the Chinese side of the WHO-Team (remote work started around Oct-Nov 20) and you were already pretty clear on your convictions.
You made the same claims in June 21, adding that there was no point going further:
You were also very dismissive of any criticism, and fully in line on this with a now very compromised Peter Daszak, who at the time was hiding DEFUSE:
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.
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.
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”