Thread by @tgof137

Matt Ridley is calling for "peer review" of a blog post about Covid origins.

I'll volunteer to help!

https://x.com/mattwridley/status/1925100526640713873

I should clarify that I'm not sure I'm his peer -- Ridley has done many things I haven't.

He was a banker who helped crash the world economy in the great financial crisis.

I have never cost taxpayers millions.

He was a right wing politician in the UK house of lords, appointed to a position based on who his father was.

I'm not from a rich family, and don't think I'd enjoy being a politician at all.

Ridley is a climate change denier, who also happens to own coal mines.

I think climate change is a real problem, albeit a difficult one to solve.

And I have no coal mines to my name.

But we do have some things in common.

We both like to argue online about Covid origins.

We've both profited from the pandemic.

He sold a book promoting the lab leak theory.

I've made money debunking that theory.

So, maybe I am qualified to review this.

I'll give it a shot.

First off, Ridley says that he was quick to suspect a lab leak, back in spring of 2020.

I went back through his posts to find what he was actually saying at the time.

The earliest tweets I can find are actually not blaming the Wuhan institute of Virology, but rather, the Wuhan CDC.

https://x.com/mattwridley/status/1251809063714926592

He was blaming Dr Tian Jun-hua as the suspect, and there was no genetic engineering involved.

In this theory, a virus called RATG13 that the WIV collected is not relevant, because it's from too far away from Wuhan.

In Ridley's later theories, this logic flips to the exact opposite -- Covid has to be a lab leak because RATG13 is from far away.

On the one hand, it's okay to entertain more than one theory about how the pandemic started.

It's also okay to change your mind -- back in 2020, I thought the lab leak theory sounded plausible. I stopped believing that in 2022.

On the other hand, you should stop and think about what this means.

Ridley and others say that the location in Wuhan is a key coincidence.

They say that the Wuhan institute of virology is the most dangerous lab in China, the only lab that could create a coronavirus pandemic.

But at the beginning, Ridley was ready to blame a completely different lab.

That means there was always going to be a lab leak theory, no matter which city the pandemic started in.

If you can say that the Wuhan CDC is the likely source, and there was no genetic engineering involved, then you would have been able to find some lab to blame, regardless of which city in China the virus started in.

Ridley's position evolved over time. By the end of May, 2020, it looks like he's back to leaning towards a natural origin.

(but he did entertain some WIV lab leak claims in the same article, before saying the virus was probably natural)
archive.is/IaX0p

And by June, 2020, he was starting to promote other people's WIV lab leak theories:

https://x.com/mattwridley/status/1268452772996952070

That's around when I first head about the lab leak theory, since Yuri went on Bret Weinstein's show on June 8th.

Maybe we both got fooled by Yuri's arguments?

But maybe there's more to it than that -- some other right wing politicians in the UK had their emails hacked, and we can see they were trying to promote the lab leak theory via Bret Weinstein and Joe Rogan's shows:

https://x.com/mikeydoubled/status/1710047640245702948

There's been a long campaign to make the lab leak theory popular, going as far back as January 2020, when Steve Bannon and Miles Guo started pushing the idea.

https://x.com/tgof137/status/1903218474069160261

But let's set aside the politics for now and jump into the claims made in Ridley's new blog post.

This first claim is incorrect -- 3 labs had previously added a furin cleavage site to the SARS virus, in 2006, 2008, and 2009. 2 of those labs were in the US, one was in Japan.

"insert" was also the wrong word here. Every previous experiment which added a furin site to a coronavirus did so via mutation, not insertion.

Labs usually chose to mutate existing amino acids to become a furin site:

https://x.com/tgof137/status/1745577895450567011

That doesn't, of course, prove the WIV didn't do this.

Maybe they could have decided to insert the FCS this time, for some reason.

But that choice wouldn't match any previous coronavirus experiment.

What's even weirder is that the insertion is "out of frame" -- the RNA letters used do not line up with the amino acids encoded for. That's not a decision that a human designer would make.

But that is something that happens randomly, in nature.

It's also weird how the furin cleavage site is spelled here -- the optimal furin cleavage site is RRKR. Previous experiments used that sequence, or something similar.

The FCS here is PRRAR.

Both the P and the A are suboptimal. The P isn't even necessary, at all -- RRAR would work better without it. The P also puts a weird kink in the protein, something that a designer would probably avoid doing.

After covid transmitted among humans for a while, the P mutated into better choices, like H or R.

This all looks like the kind of random thing evolution would do, not like something a scientist would choose.

In fact, as Covid spread around the world, we started to see some cases with random insertions like this. Some were 12 nucleotides long. Others had double CGG codons. Many were out of frame.

It remains possible that Covid's furin cleavage site is some kind of lab creation, but most well informed scientists look at these genetic quirks and think the opposite is true -- an engineer would have designed this differently.

Ridley goes on to claim that it's weird that people agree that other diseases are natural, but disagree about Covid.

There are obscure lab leak theories for many of these diseases -- Raina MacIntyre said that MERS might be unnatural.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32288979/

One guy even made a theory for SARS was a bioweapon:
dogsbreakfast.substack.com/p/sars-evidenc…

But none of these theories are mainstream the way Covid is.

What's most interesting is that Ridley omitted HIV from his list of viruses.

HIV had multiple conspiracy theories, either that it was engineered or that it came from vaccine trials.

And Ridley himself promoted one of these theories!

For the most part, the public didn't care much about SARS or MERS, so there wasn't much demand for conspiracy theories.

The public was very interested in HIV and Covid, so conspiracy theories for how those diseases originated became widespread.

Next up, Ridley mentions a letter written by scientists, demanding a covid origins investigation.

The letter was primarily organized by Michael Worobey and Jesse Bloom.

Ridley doesn't mention that Worobey went on to do a detailed investigation of Covid origins which concluded that the virus originated naturally at Huanan market.

Bloom does continue to be agnostic about Covid origins, and has published papers skeptical of the market origin theory.

Ridley says that the virus began within the "last 4 months of 2019". This is incredibly vague, and I think purposefully so.

Ridley is familiar with better research on the starting date.

I know that, because he wrote about it as far back as 2020:
mattridley.co.uk/blog/where-did…

The time to most recent genetic ancestor calculation remains the same today as it did in 2020:

The pandemic started a little bit earlier than that, here's one model from Pekar et al 2021.

Late November is most likely, but there's a range around that.

This kind of research isn't hard to reproduce.

Anyone can put the genomes into BEAST and get the same TMRCA date.

I've tried building my own pandemic models, and they gave similar estimates to Pekar's work:

https://x.com/tgof137/status/1772417301561708753

This paragraph has a lot of real numbers, but is missing a huge amount of context.

Ridley is correct that none of the 457 animal samples at the market tested positive.

He neglects to mention which animals were tested, and when.

Chinese authorities cleared out the market on December 31st, killing most of the animals. They started testing frozen animals and stray cats, a few weeks later:

https://x.com/tgof137/status/1836601772447797437

We have a list of which animals were tested. The top 3 are rabbits, stray cats, and snakes:

https://x.com/tgof137/status/1836601774796603793

Suppose that the virus came to Huanan market on raccoon dogs.

How would you know?

Zero raccoon dogs were tested.

It simply doesn't matter how many snakes or rabbits they tested, if those animals can't catch Covid.

Ridley does have the correct number of environmental samples. He does not mention where those samples were located.

The positive samples are clustered in one corner of the market. The shop with the most positive samples happens to be a shop selling wild animals. The positive samples there came off a cage and some carts that were likely used to transport animals.

The water drain outside that shop also happened to be infected, something that was true almost nowhere else in the market.

https://x.com/tgof137/status/1836603496545817095

And photos of the shop just happen to show them caging raccoon dogs on top of the drains.

https://x.com/tgof137/status/1836605372620247500

Ridley also has this number correct, but neglects to inform the reader what those 80,000 animals were.

China did some large studies on livestock. This does confirm that, say, Covid wasn't infecting a lot of chickens in 2019.

But that's a meaningless fact since Covid can't infect chickens.

If you actually wanted to trace the source of SARS-CoV-2, you would test farms that were supplying the Huanan market.

China did test about 600 animals that way, but these were still mostly the wrong species (i.e. zero raccoon dogs or civets)

https://x.com/tgof137/status/1882839539716338080

It's quite possible that Covid did infect farms supplying Huanan market. But we have no way of knowing, because the relevant animals weren't tested.

This is incorrect, it's actually 2 out of 10 wildlife selling stalls.

But, more importantly, why would you expect Covid to be in every shop selling wildlife?

If one shop brings infected animals to the market, that shop should be positive, and then a lot of humans should spread the virus to other shops.

It's less clear that the virus would spread to other animals in other shops -- the animals are all in cages, while the humans are free to roam around.

We have a likely candidate shop for the start of the pandemic -- shop 6/29, which tested positive.

It would be great if China had tested relevant live animals from that shop, but they did not.

We're all left doing detective work, to try to solve the mystery with fewer clues.

Ridley notes that George Gao says that the virus didn't start at the market.

It's worth noting that George Gao said the opposite, back in January 2020:

https://x.com/tgof137/status/1836601765388837220

Over time, he started saying different things.

Gao never explained why he changed his mind.

The most likely answer is politics -- right wing politicians in the west started to say that the virus was a Chinese lab leak and that China had to pay reparations.

China responded by saying that the virus is an American lab leak, and that the virus did not start in China.

Average people in China believed these claims, and most of them now think that Covid started in America, the same way that most Americans think Covid is a lab leak.

https://x.com/tgof137/status/1903210848862212487

Ridley, himself a right wing politician, is now a part of this ongoing game.

Ridley contrasts Covid and SARS:

SARS and Covid actually arose in very similar circumstances.

https://x.com/tgof137/status/1914861799159292089

Ridley mentions that the market was the epicenter of the virus.

All the data we have continues to support this theory, and no good counterarguments against it have succeeded.

https://x.com/tgof137/status/1887650729277726899

Ridley is now contradicting even his own previous timeline.

A few paragraphs back he insisted that the virus started in the last 4 months of 2019, and now he's saying it started in July?

Like, did he really thought that this was all going to pass peer review?

Was he waiting for a reviewer to inform him that July is not one of the last 4 months of the year?

All competent research points to a most likely origin date in late November, but there is some range of uncertainty around that.

You can always find a few weird papers that point in a completely different direction, it you look around enough.

Here's a Chinese paper that says Covid started in February 2019:
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

You can publish that in China, because it helps support the favored narrative that Covid started somewhere outside of China.

But it's simply a bad analysis, not proof that Covid floated around the world for almost a year before being found in Wuhan.

Ridley's paper continues to go through a tedious series of DRASTIC's greatest hits. The Mojiang mineshaft. The DEFUSE grant. The missing database.

This database claim is wrong, it was still intermittently accessible until some time in 2020:

https://x.com/jhas5/status/1516551576776843270

But it also doesn't match the most likely Covid timeline -- Covid probably started in late November, not early September.

It doesn't even match other popular lab leak theories.

Elsewhere, there's a story that 3 people got sick at the WIV in November.

If those 3 were the first cases, then the pandemic didn't start in September.

And if the pandemic started in September, they're not the 1st cases.

(of course, that story doesn't hold up either)

https://x.com/tgof137/status/1903218464296407296

Ridley finally gets to this conclusion:

And yet, we already know this is wrong, because Ridley himself originally tried to blame another lab besides the WIV!

If his original theory had turned out to be true, then the virus had absolutely nothing to do with Shi Zhengli or Peter Daszak.

It wouldn't even have anything to do with Gain of Function research, because that wasn't a part of the theory!

In another world where the virus had spilled over in Guangdong province, Ridley might have written the same screed blaming GIABR instead of WIV.

That lab had some pangolin viruses sharing the same RBD as Covid, maybe that would be the theory.

And we know this is possible, because DRASTIC members have already made these theories!

I can easily think of other lab leak theories if this started in Beijing, Nanjing, or Shanghai.

Ridley also says that the lab leak theory could only happen after 2018:

But if this had happened any time after 2006, you could still point at an experiment which added a furin site to SARS, and say that virologists were interested in that kind of engineering.

If it had happened after 2015, you could point at other chimeric sarbecovirus experiments and say that was the relevant thing.

And people had no problems making HIV lab theories, decades earlier.

Though Ridley seems to have forgotten when he did that.

Ridley claims that he tried to submit his blog post as a paper, but it got rejected.

I'm not sure if this is true, or which journal this was -- lots of people have submitted worse preprints than this.

But it's also no mystery if this "paper" didn't pass peer review!

It's just a collection of random crap that people say on Twitter, not serious science. There are lies by omission and lies by commission.

None of this should be surprising.

This is the same playbook Ridley used when arguing against climate change.

In 2010, he praised bloggers for questioning climate change and said that climate researchers were corrupted by research grants.
spectator.co.uk/article/the-gl…

That sounds just like praising DRASTIC and accusing Covid researchers of being corrupted by funding.

Ridley framed climate change denial as a “free speech” issue:

That sounds just like framing lab leak as “important to talk about because it was censored”.

Or complaining that some random blog post can't pass peer review.

I've heard that lab leak was censored by Facebook in early 2020, though maybe that was mostly stuff like “Covid is a bioweapon”.

I talked about it some in 2020 and had no fear talking about it.

I certainly had no problem hearing about it -- it was on Joe Rogan, the biggest podcast in the world!

What I did not hear much about were rebuttals. Scientists tend to get much smaller audiences.

I guess I should say that I don't know for sure how Covid started, and no one knows all the details.

I suppose there's still some remote possibility that Covid came from a lab accident.

I'd like to see more evidence, and more transparency from China.

But right now we have a clear natural origin theory that's supported by most evidence, and most scientists.

On the other side we've got some weird mix of theories propped up by Matt Ridley, DRASTIC, and the Trump administration.

My money is on the scientists being correct.