Thread by @angie_rasmussen

REVEALED: reporters at @thetimes working alongside the internet’s most prominent SARS-CoV-2 origins conspiracists combined the world’s most idiotic lab leak theories to create this long read of nonsensical reheated horseshit. …

So let’s get into this tepid excuse for journalism

https://twitter.com/arbuthnott/status/1667582815750307840

I already knew this was going to be a doozy just by looking at the photo. This is what happens when you prompt an AI image generator with “suspicious-looking masked CCP official or military scientist with a coronavirus-themed PRC flag inspired by racist stereotypes”

And the actual non-AI photos & captions aren’t any more concerned with basic facts. No, the pandemic is not “widely believed to have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology” except in Twitter discussions that aren’t burdened by the need for evidence to support such claims.

This “investigation” is actually just rehashing documents from the US government, including this citation-free “fact sheet” that Mike Pompeo’s state department rushed out during his last week in office.

2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-act…

And this one summarized the investigative efforts by the entire US intelligence community.

It simply says the US IC was unable to reach a conclusion, but most ICs were either undecided or favored zoonosis. The summary was published in summer 2021.
dni.gov/files/ODNI/doc…

In October 2021, the summary was declassified. Here are key points the entire IC agreed on:

The virus was not created as a bioweapon, was not genetically engineered, and Chinese government officials were not aware of the virus before it emerged in 2019.

dni.gov/files/ODNI/doc…

The declassified report on which this piece is primarily based is no longer even current, considering the evidence that has emerged since—animals at Huanan market, early cases occurring near the market & not WIV, environmental samples localizing virus w/ susceptible animals…

This piece largely dismisses this evidence in favor of bold statements from unidentified investigators with extreme confidence in a lab origin. Yet they are anonymous, which conveniently avoids accountability for their claims, which are…different from the government reports.

However, the 3 allegedly sick WIV workers that made the investigator “rock-solid confident” provides a clue regarding their identity.

David Asher led the US State Dept efforts to investigate SARS-CoV-2 origins & presumably wrote Pompeo’s fact sheet.
2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-act…

These 3 workers have never been identified. This claim remains completely unverified. Even if it is true, there’s no reason to think people at WIV weren’t getting respiratory viruses in a bad flu season. Flu incidence in China hit a 10 year peak in 2019.
statista.com/statistics/861…

Dr. Asher has made a crusade out of proving a lab leak, regardless of whether that actually happened or not. As far as his absurd claims go, the sick WIV workers are pretty blasé. Take this hypothesis that zoonosis is the consequence of cross-species sex.
hudson.org/foreign-policy…

It is my professional opinion as a virologist doing origins research who considers zoonosis most likely that “maybe a bat fucked a pangolin” is not a plausible hypothesis for zoonotic origin. Anyone who says it is betrays their gross lack of qualification.

And Dr. Asher’s own former colleague Christopher Ford, an Assistant Secretary & Under Secretary of State, has described extensively how Asher’s assertions on origins were “insane” & how hard he fought to simply get them vetted by actual experts.
christopherashleyford.medium.com/the-lab-leak-i…

Dr. Ford’s account sounds like it would have been supremely frustrating trying to put the brakes on this crazy train enough to see if Asher’s theories could be confirmed by outside experts before Secretary Pompeo accused China of violating the BWC.

BTW, there were 3 “investigators” interviewed. Per Dr. Ford’s story, Tom DiNanno & Miles Yu are prime candidates for the other 2, given their no technical expertise, incorrectly calling different viruses “variants,” & inventing new Mojiang mine viruses out of thin air & vibes.

Anyway, whoever the sources (*cough* Asher & friends), it seems that both @Arbuthnott and @JCalvertST also failed to perform any basic fact-checking about the technical and scientific details in their piece.

For example, they describe Ralph Baric generating a chimeric virus by “recreating the genes from the microscopic spikes that protrude from its sides.”

Guys, the viral genome encodes the viral genes, not the spike protein. It’s right there in the name “genome”.

And Richard Ebright’s tiresome “dentist office” trope is not an accurate description of BSL-2 containment, either in terms of infrastructure, regulation, or practices.

K18-hACE2 transgenic mice just have one gene added to their genome—human ACE2 (the receptor for SARS-CoV-2). Human ACE2 alone doesn’t cause one animal to grow organs from another species. They do not develop human respiratory or vascular systems. They do not have human lungs.

And SARS & SARS2 can be 100% lethal with high viral loads in hACE2 transgenic mice. It does not reflect infectivity, transmissibility, or virulence in people, much less indicate that a “super-coronavirus” was made; neither SARS nor SARS2 have 100% mortality in humans.

But it wasn’t just all chimeric fun with furin cleavage sites…omg, they also did *serial passage.*

Serial passage is common, like when you are making a mouse-adapted virus to study pathogenesis in animals. As the name implies, it produces a virus adapted to MICE, not humans.

Because ACE2 is not the only host factor that a virus needs to interact with to establish a productive infection. And “humanized” mice with just human ACE2 will still yield viruses adapted to those other proteins, all of which will be the mouse versions. Hence, mouse-adapted.

Here comes breast oncologist & Bayesian nonsense entrepreneur Steven Quay to remind us once again he knows fuck-all about viruses. Many bat viruses directly infect & kill people: rabies, Nipah, Marburg, Ebola, the list goes on.

And of the Mojiang mine viruses they are talking about, the closest one (RaTG13) is still different by over 1100 mutations. Even adding a suboptimal, out-of-frame furin cleavage site followed by serial passage in hACE2 Tg mice could not make a Mojiang mine virus into SARS-CoV-2.

It’s also incorrect to say that SARS-CoV-2 was “remarkably well adapted to infect humans.” We know SARS-CoV-2 can infect lots of species. If it was so well-adapted, we wouldn’t see variants emerge, as they are evidence of the virus adapting to humans via real world serial passage

The whole article reads like a kitchen sink attempt to create a story out of nothing based on anonymous sources & a handful of avowed lab leak proponents with no subject matter expertise misrepresenting virology, & ignoring the actual evidence.

So let’s throw in some bioweapons!

One reason the bioweapon theory has been dumb going on 3 years now is that SARS-CoV-2 would make a shitty bioweapon. It’s highly infectious so doesn’t only affect the enemy, predominantly impacts older or medically vulnerable people so not soldiers, & has a low mortality rate.

An effective bioweapon by military standards would be one that preferentially & reliably kills or disables enemy soldiers without spreading to your own. By this account, these evil elite Chinese military scientists sound spectacularly incompetent at illegal bioweapon development.

But you can’t make a nefarious bioweapons plot omelette without defenestrating some eggs. According to the Times, maybe this guy allegedly making the SARS2 bioweapon vaccine got tossed off the roof of WIV! At least according to the unverified accounts of unnamed witnesses.

And the attempts at epidemiology in this piece are as incorrect & amateurish as the attempts at exposing the development of the world’s most poorly conceived bioweapon. Social media hotspots in late January don’t reflect where the pandemic began in late November/early December.

Michael Worobey previously analyzed the verified early cases to locate and date them. He found they lived in neighborhoods surrounding the Huanan market, not the WIV.

science.org/doi/full/10.11…

Led by Dr. Worobey, a group of us did a more detailed analysis. We found that even cases with no link to the market formed essentially a target on a map of Wuhan, with Huanan market at the center. That center is where these cases radiated outward from. It’s 10 miles from WIV.

https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1551937826580824070

We already knew there were live animals sold at the market, including several species that were either implicated in the SARS-CoV-1 epidemic (civets, badgers) and those known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 (raccoon dogs, mink, foxes).

nature.com/articles/s4159…

Environmental samples collected by the Chinese CDC confirmed that these animals were present at the Huanan market prior to its closure, clustered along with SARS-CoV-2 positive samples in the SW corner, exactly where we predicted in Worobey 2022.

nature.com/articles/s4158…

And our preliminary analysis confirmed the CCDC results and identified RNA as well as DNA, indicating the animals were there recently prior to sampling.

https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1638131211724902401

And furthermore, we also know from my colleagues’ work that there had to be at least 2 introductions of SARS-CoV-2 into humans to result in 2 distinct early lineages. This is inconsistent with lab origin hypotheses that can only account for 1 spillover.
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

All this evidence points in one direction: zoonotic spillover from live animals at Huanan market. But this is ignored by the Times authors in favor of unqualified hangers-on who have tossed up a pseudoscience salad of unqualified opinions, speculation, and intrigue.

But this is not only harmful in an abstract sense to science and to the citizens of the world who deserve to know how this catastrophic pandemic occurred. Even the self-proclaimed “civil” lab leak proponents are calling for prosecution based on the opinions of unnamed sources.

I’ve been getting “see you at Nuremberg” correspondence for long enough to know personally how damaging disinformation can be. Journalists who lack the integrity to ensure they are accurately reporting the facts can cause great damage and for what—clicks? Engagement? Page views?

The stakes here are high because we are all stakeholders—the pandemic profoundly affected us all. It has made the world a less stable & more inhospitable place. But just because a lab leak is a compelling story doesn’t make it true.

And if journalists aren’t pursuing the truth in their reporting, then they harm us all. We don’t need more thrilling conspiracy stories about the pandemic’s origin. We need the truth. @thetimes failed monumentally in that simple task with this piece.