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:
Yow even said that there was no point asking for hard data from the WIV or any other lab, because really you didn't think it would change anything (just like that!).
Great investigative skills!
Do you think that this is the right open scientific attitude to be working on SAGO?
Or are the negativity, dismissive attitude, lack of concern and a fully formed opinion (without asking for data) a requirement for the job?
I note that you have been involved in Gain of Function research of concern for decades.
A total of 27 publications with Ron Fouchier (and others) (2004-2021):
Not much different from Vincent Racaniello, the host of the TWiV show with you, Peter Daszak and Thea Fisher (also on SAGO).
He is a smart scientist I am sure, but also one who in 2016 was stating in a paper that the GoF moratorium should be rescinded because the benefit outweighed the risk.
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”