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.
But all that we got is some rather odd back-pedalling from the WIV, explaining that the samples never tested positive against all evidences and the theses unearthed by DRASTIC.
Great.
"Subtask 6.4 Test previously-collected human sera from Yunnan Province to assess SARSr-CoV QS spillover (WIV)."
@arambaut@BioSRP@bmj_latest@BallouxFrancois@Ayjchan In all, between the two EHA papers of 2017 and 2018 they only identified 15 positive cases in close to 1,800 people at risk (2.7% and 0.6%) and all these 15 were subclinical.
So clearly the logical thing was to go back to the sera of the miners, 3 of which had died.
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:
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”