Will all the major media that reported strong evidence of raccoon dog #OriginOfCovid now go on a blitz to inform the public that the data actually does not point to a raccoon dog intermediate host?
@jbloom_lab I can understand the first few times a journalist gets misled by scientists that lab #OriginOfCovid is not plausible + there is dispositive evidence for market spillover.
But if you keep getting misled by the same scientists for years, you might've become an accomplice or tool.
@jbloom_lab Every year without fail, the same scientists say they have new damning evidence of a wildlife market #OriginOfCovid
Why aren't respectable journalists catching on to this gimmick?
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Most interesting part of the @nytimes interview is when @dwallacewells asks Dr Anthony Fauci if it weighs on him at all that the pandemic possibly started in a lab doing the type of research he promoted for years. #OriginOfCovid
@nytimes@dwallacewells Dr Fauci responded that he sleeps fine and the suggestion that he needs to worry that NIH funded research that started the pandemic is troublesome to him.
At this part, I would've wanted to ask whether Dr Fauci was briefed on the defuse proposal by Ralph Baric in 2020 and what he thinks of the striking match between the proposed engineered viruses and the pandemic virus.
There are so many parties sitting on unique fragments of info relevant to #OriginOfCovid
There should have been a systematic investigation in 2020 to collect these fragments and piece them together to form a better picture of how the pandemic began. nytimes.com/2023/04/23/wor…
Part of the problem is censorship from the Chinese gov, which caused evidence & samples relating to early cases to be hidden or destroyed.
But another part of the problem is the journals & databases that didn't come forward with these manuscripts - whether retracted or rejected.
As a result, the window of time in which the virus is estimated to have first infected a human person is still as wide as September to November 2019.
E.g. the raccoon dog proponents say the first infection was only on Nov 18, 2019.
@SherylNYT the genetic evidence of close relatives to the pandemic virus found in nature does not discern between the market and the lab, because both were drawing viruses from the same areas in South China and SE Asia and bringing these up into Wuhan.
Based on the scientific literature, it's clear that the Wuhan scientists were collecting viruses in Laos before the pandemic, with and without their EcoHealth partners.
If we're going to spend an inordinate amount of time talking about raccoon dogs, I believe an equal amount of time and energy should be devoted to tracking down all info outside of China related to the 2018 Wuhan-US defuse proposal.
In this proposal that scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology & US collaborators sent to DARPA in early 2018, they said they were looking for rare furin cleavage sites to put in live SARS-like viruses in the lab. They were synthesizing entire genomes & producing viruses.
They said they would test these genetically modified "low-risk" SARS-like viruses, i.e., not SARS1-like viruses, to see how the cleavage site insertions affected the virus' ability to grow in human airway cells.
Comparing the Chinese CDC paper and Worobey/Proximal Origin et al. papers in Science that used the same data, the former makes few assertions while the latter went on @nytimes breaking news with claims of "dispositive" and "incontrovertible" evidence for a market #OriginOfCovid
@nytimes My question is, will there now be a comparable media frenzy reporting on the Chinese CDC's analysis that the available evidence doesn't tell us how the virus got into the market?
Of 1380 samples collected from the Huanan market by the Chinese CDC investigators, ~220 were from the raccoon dog stall and its associated warehouse space.
This data supports the CCDC's statement that "samples analyzed in the current study were somehow biased, and wildlife-related vendors and early case-related vendors were prioritized for sample collection"
Notably, the CCDC paper mentioned that "among the 60 SARS-CoV-2 PCR-positive samples for RNA-seq analysis, 39 samples tested negative by NGS (no SARS-CoV-2 reads at all) (65.0%)".
However, their data do not tell us which samples were false positives.