We need to see the exchanges leading up to the cleavage site insertion proposal and any hint of these experiments being done. Best if we can see all grant proposals, funded or not, relating to SARSrCoV work.
Might be a little annoyed if the only outcome of tomorrow’s hearing is another shouting match with zero actions taken to investigate the #OriginOfCovid or make pandemic pathogen research safer and more transparent.
I personally think NIH funding to EcoHealth was used for GOFROC - the chimeric MERS-CoV work used a known human pathogen in the type of experiments that had been shown to have unpredictable GOF results - but I also personally favor getting things done over unproductive drama.
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The virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 has been cultured/isolated/purified countless times by independent research groups across numerous countries over the past 2 years.
There’s probably someone in the Boston area handling a SARS-CoV-2 isolate from a patient at this very moment as I tweet.
No one has patented the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
There is no virus that meets Koch’s postulates, which were invented before discovery of viruses. (Even some bacteria haven’t met Koch’s postulates.) Yet so many viruses have been isolated and are real.
"the NIH, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and Department of Defense (DoD) have paid EcoHealth more than $23.4 million in new and renewed assistance awards since April 2020"
$23M is not a lot to pay for intelligence, but this organization (its president and members) has been shutting down the lab origin hypothesis since day 1 and obstructing a credible investigation.
Maybe pay someone else for intelligence?
If this is all part of an intelligence collecting exercise, I gotta say I've been completely fooled.
Of all the viruses that could’ve started a pandemic in city with a lab experimenting on novel pandemic potential SARS-like viruses with novel cleavage sites, it was a novel SARS-like virus with a novel cleavage site.
Of all the cities this novel SARS-like virus with a novel cleavage site could’ve started a pandemic in, it was a city with a lab experimenting with novel pandemic potential SARS-like viruses with novel cleavage sites.
“Despite 15 years of coronavirus hunting and testing by the WIV, it was helpless to prevent a pandemic in its own backyard. If that's a coincidence, it's one of the great ironies of history.”
Every time SARS1 escaped from a lab it was a surprise. Only in one case could they trace the escape to a specific accident in the lab - a BSL4 highest biosafety level lab.
There was no foreknowledge of the escape by scientists or authorities.
The only reason why the SARS1 escape from a BSL4 even came to light was that the researcher’s dad threatened to kill himself if his son didn’t go to hospital for treatment.
The researcher had traveled to a different country for a meeting. People on the plane were not notified.
“It comes just days before Anthony Fauci, the head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies to Congress, where he is likely to be grilled on why he approved a $600,000 grant that was used for risky coronavirus research” ft.com/content/5e20cb…
I’m almost 100% sure all the wrong questions are going to be asked again, leading to zero new progress or insight into what research was conducted on novel SARS-like viruses.
Please no more holding up 3D models of the spike or pieces of paper showing alignments.
No more arguing about gain of function - these arguments are super unproductive because people aren’t using the same definitions.