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@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
@mbalter
Apr 27 • 9 tweets • 5 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
1/ A new and much more detailed analysis of the genomic data from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan by virologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center essentially exonerates raccoon dogs as the source of the pandemic. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
2/ The study confirms and expands upon earlier analyses by @stevenemassey and others which find that the much-publicized "co-mingling" of raccoon dog DNA with SARS-CoV-2 is actually negligible compared to findings of the virus associated with other species, especially fish.
3/ Bloom explains his methodology and results in a Twitter thread which I have unrolled here: threadreaderapp.com/thread/1651428…
4/ In the thread Bloom asks the rhetorical question, "So how did we end up w media articles about raccoon dog co-mingled w SARS2?" The answer, in my view, is that gullible mainstream reporters were willingly manipulated by an "international team" of scientists...
5/ With a strong and vocal bias towards a zoonotic spillover hypothesis for #COVID19 origins for which there is no actual evidence. I explored that media bias in a recent article for Quill: quillmag.com/2023/04/04/cov…
6/ So now this is a real test for the mainstream #media. Will it cover this preprint (it has covered many preprints before that trend zoonosis) by a well respected virologist who has stayed above the Covid origins fray and never come down on either side of it?
7/ Or will it ignore this new study because it is inconvenient for the seafood market narrative the mainstream media has been pushing for more than three years? We shall see.
8/ @benjmueller @carlzimmer @sciencecohen @Laurie_Garrett
@MaraHvistendahl @KatherineJWu @natashaloder @fayeflam @JoelAchenbach @amymaxmen @lfspinney et al.
9/ One more thought on the #media coverage: As soon as the Liu et al paper in Nature was published, @jbloom_lab posted a Twitter thread pointing out that the data did not support any conclusions about raccoon dogs being intermediate hosts. Major media ignored that.

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More from @mbalter

@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Apr 26
1/ There's been a lot of online discussion of David Wallace-Wells's long interview with Anthony Fauci in the @nytimes earlier this week. Most of it has focused on Fauci's comments about gain-of-function research, and his apparent desire to fashion his own definition--
2/ One which, not surprisingly, would allow him to claim that he did not lie to Senator Rand Paul when he testified in Congress that NIH did not fund it at the Wuhan Inst Virology. As Rutgers molecular biologist @R_H_Ebright has pointed out repeatedly, gain-of-function...
3/ is not defined by what Fauci thinks it is, nor by the wishful thinking of scientists who want to continue doing it, nor by some confused member of the public who has their own idea of what it is. Gain-of-function research is defined by specific guidances laid out...
Read 14 tweets
@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Apr 23
@Rebecca21951651 @StevenSalzberg1 @ilongini @ilariacapua @nytimes @jbloom_lab @MaraHvistendahl This piece in @nytimes is a good start to actually covering Covid origins instead of what they have been doing all this time—failing to investigate. With all due respect to the excellent @MaraHvistendahl, most is not new, but it’s new to Times readers. More soon.
@Rebecca21951651 @StevenSalzberg1 @ilongini @ilariacapua @nytimes @jbloom_lab @MaraHvistendahl 2/ A major weakness, which I hope they will elaborate on later, no discussion of how the Chinese coverup affects the balance of the two leading hypotheses for Covid origins. There is no mention, eg, of China’s refusal to disclose research the Wuhan Inst Virology was doing.
@Rebecca21951651 @StevenSalzberg1 @ilongini @ilariacapua @nytimes @jbloom_lab @MaraHvistendahl 3/ An encouraging sign is that Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo, who has done much to puncture the facile conclusions of the Worobey/Pekar papers the Times hyped last year, is quoted in the story. But unfortunately, not about this important paper: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35752330/
Read 7 tweets
@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Apr 22
1/ Here’s a little thread about healthcare in the U.S.A. I am a senior who has been on Medicare for several years. The good news is that Medicare pays for most, although not all, of my care (and there can be unpleasant surprises, especially on dug coverage.)
2/ The bad news is that you are still in the private healthcare arena. I went through two local doctors who turned to be bozos in various ways (one was clearly engaged in Medicare fraud.) Then I found a third doctor who was really great, in the NY Presbyterian network.
3/ But after a couple of years in that highly profit-making system, he got fed up and decided to be a concierge doctor at $3000/year up front fee. No can do. Fortunately, I am a veteran of the Vietnam Era, so eligible for VA healthcare which I had never used except…
Read 9 tweets
@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Apr 21
One of the tricks in the journalist’s bag is to always have one or two ringers on speed dial, “expert” “sources” they can call if they need a quick quote when a deadline is looming. On the Covid origins story, @angie_rasmussen serves that purpose for a lot of reporters.
They don’t seem to mind that Rasmussen is deeply biased and a notorious toxic troll in the #COVID19 origins debate, because they know they can count on her for a barbed comment. But by using her as a source, reporters help spread her damage to public understanding of science.
Btw all journalists I know use ringers of this kind, and I did it myself when I had to cover the boring subject of French research politics for Science (which I did for more than a decade before I insisted we get someone else to do it.) It’s not quite so bad if…
Read 4 tweets
@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Mar 21
So it now turns out that the raccoon dog group (Florence Debarre and colleagues) apparently violated the terms of use of the database from which it got the partial data used in its analysis of samples from the Huanan seafood market, and thus engaged in unethical conduct…
When it also apparently tried to pre-empt (“scoop”) a paper submitted to @nature and probably in final review that it knew came to the opposite conclusion about Covid origins. Moreover, the statements by the Debarre team that it tried to collaborate with the Gao et al team…
From China are contradicted by GISAID’s inquiries, putting the honesty of the team seriously in question. Having controlled the narrative about Covid origins for more than three years now, this “international team” obviously knew that publication of the Gao et al paper…
Read 8 tweets
@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Mar 19
1/ Here’s an exercise in ethical thinking. CNN has a segment on the Russia-Ukraine war and features a guest who is introduced as an expert in geopolitics and warfare. The guest criticizes Ukraine and says that Russia has good reasons for its attacks on its neighbor…
2/ Later, we find out that the “expert” was actually an active duty Russian general, that CNN knew this, and that they elected not to tell us. Is there any question that CNN would be under severe fire for blatant violations of journalistic ethics? …
3/ Well, that’s EXACTLY what @TheAtlantic, @nytimes, @ScienceMagazine did when they published their stories on the new raccoon dog “data” and did not tell us—even though they knew—that ALL of the members of the “international team” reporting the data were well-known…
Read 9 tweets

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