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Louis R Nemzer Profile picture
Louis R Nemzer
@BiophysicsFL
Professor at Nova Southeastern University. Antibiotic Resistance, Agent-Based Models, Seizure Prediction, Information Entropy of DNA
EricStoner Profile picture Loofymectin aka Jan Masleid Profile picture Beverly Rice Profile picture 3 subscribed
Feb 15 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Which is more parsimonious?

(A)"Some early cases missed" of an often asymptomatic respiratory virus during flu season - with a health care system extremely hesitant to acknowledge a novel contagious human disease

Or

(B) Speculate a completely unknown market as the source for A
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Image This raises some larger points. So much of the Natural Origin case is tied to proving a market spillover hypothesis, which in turn relies very strongly on a timeline of no or very few early cases... Which is very fragile to reports of earlier sick people retroactively removed.
Jan 24 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Proximal Origin was used to totally foreclose the possibility of an engineering.

The lead author in a press release: “By comparing the available genome sequence data for known coronavirus strains, we can firmly determine that SARS-CoV-2 originated through natural processes" Image But how do their arguments hold up in light of the DEFUSE grant?
Oct 10, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The fact that Dr. Holmes titled this slide with the definitive "Did SARS-CoV-2 Leak from a Lab? No!" with an exclamation point even, as opposed to something like "evidence we think supports a natural origin of SARS2" should be a huge red flag to every scientist. Look at the arguments-which have been rehashed multiple times in various publications and social media

It is either circumstantial (claimed clustering of early ascertained cases, "non-canonical" FCS) or based on "a lack of evidence" when non-transparency has been the norm
Aug 24, 2023 • 23 tweets • 9 min read
Some references for the article by @SharriMarkson
theaustralian.com.au/world/us-intel… Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) vs Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)
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Aug 22, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
The editorial board of the @washingtonpost giving props to @gdemaneuf, DRASTIC, @USRightToKnow , and US House GOP.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/…

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Image "At a time when trust and transparency were needed to save lives, Chinese authorities covered up the facts and lied — and they continue to do so today."
Jul 24, 2023 • 42 tweets • 13 min read
Apologists for the Proximal Authors like to focus on 'changing your mind is part of science'.

But the slack messages revealed things that are absolutely not part of regular science:

🧵 Coordinating responses to reporters with the express intent to hide uncertainty and mislead about the current state of the available evidence

Jul 23, 2023 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Yes, the authors of "Proximal Origin" were saying something different in public.

https://t.co/rp7qbw2MSbscripps.edu/news-and-event…
Image (1) "We can firmly determine" leaves no room for doubt

(2) "known coronavirus strains" turned out to be sequences from viruses supposedly collected before the pandemic, but the sequences were only provided afterwards, from Chinese scientists to coauthor Eddie Holmes. Image
Jul 17, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Dr. Robert Redfield (former CDC director and virologist) about Dr. Fauci (not a virologist)

"...definitely not transparent...aggressive attempt to stifle any discussion of the possibility...as a consequence of gain-of-function scientific experiments."

https://t.co/QOtFS3yu54foxnews.com/media/cdc-dire…



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Image If you need more evidence of Dr. Fauci trying to downplay the possibility of a lab origin in the early days, he went on Newt Gingrich's podcast on Feb 9, 2020, and made it seem like only animal sources were worth considering:

Jul 13, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Just bask in the awful, fallacious reasoning.

(1) I don't want to talk about lab manipulation, so take it out

(2) We don't have evidence that they had a precursor virus, so that means they didn't

(3) Colossal Strawman

(4) Discussing this hypothesis is bad for our interests Image *UPDATE*

Rambaut, Garry, and Andersen all agreed that Fouchier was talking nonsense!

Conflating absence of evidence with evidence against!

"Not only has it been done, it's specificly being done in Wuhan, in BSL-2"... can't dismiss a lab theory out of hand...very foolhardy"
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Jul 12, 2023 • 49 tweets • 19 min read
Garry says "you know" SEVENTEEN times in this one small section!

"I can't figure out how this gets accomplished in Nature":

🔴I was just playing Devil's advocate
🔴I was on my iPhone
🔴It was a Mardi Gras Ball
🔴There was an open bar
🔴I was just 'stress testing' our theory
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Image Garry has gone on to write multiple articles about how he's now convinced the FCS was not engineered.

Yet he never explains how it happened, or give even a single similar example of a clean insertion with no other nearby changes

Jul 11, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Serious question for the people who have been cheering on scientists like Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry as examples of "Science" standing up against "conspiracies," just as with climate change and vaccine refusal:

When will they be more of a liability than an asset?
Jun 29, 2023 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
IMO Looks pretty damning from these new emails that Peter Daszak actually did not know the WIV had really done the (very controversial) MERS chimera work they had proposed to the NIH... And then tried to blame the spokesman!

@JamesCTobias
@emilyakopp

https://t.co/9QGHNKRmvNscience.org/content/articl…



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Image Now why ever would Shi Zhengli hypothetically keep this vital information from her friend Peter?

Jun 21, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Check out our newest preprint!

HKU4 is a virus related to MERS, except it doesn't naturally have a Furin cleavage site.
Here, we show that some HKU4-related viruses supposedly discovered in pangolins was much likely to have been laboratory contaimination.
biorxiv.org/content/10.110… This may be important, since we know that previous experiments were done to *add* an FCS to HKU4, making it infectious like MERS.

Jun 15, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
In 2015, Baric and Shi tried adding
an FCS to (pesduotyped) HKU4
**Using MERS as the model**

"The S746R mutation was expected to restore the hPPC motif in HKU4 spike, whereas the N762A mutation likely disrupted the potential N-linked glycosylation site"

journals.asm.org/doi/epub/10.11… ImageImageImage The Furin Cleavage site of SARS2 and MERS are both unusual (non-canonical), in that they have something other than R or K in the third position:

R-X-(R/K)-R

And it's an A for SARS2, which was used by Baric in the past for attenuating functions
Jun 5, 2023 • 21 tweets • 8 min read
One of the aspects of David Baltimore's "smoking gun" is the conspicuous lack of quantification. How improbable is it?
There are a few different ways of looking at it

Apr 25, 2023 • 23 tweets • 8 min read
Really amazing interview.

I think some of the points Dr. Fauci raises in his defense are valid, except sometimes they completely contradict his previous arguments on the same subject!

I lot of 'I never said that' to things he previously admitting saying
nytimes.com/interactive/20… To look at the origin issue first,
the interviewer pushes back several times:

Both agree a natural origin is most likely but not conclusive.

[BTW the evidence Fauci uses is "Both A and B lineages come from the market"? Just a single glove of A was found!] ImageImageImageImage
Apr 24, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
(20:10) - Dr. Fauci giving an impassioned (ie. Loud) defense of gain-of-function research in Dec 2012.
Dr. Fauci: Gain of function is natural. Nature does it all the time with mutations. So we might as well make them in a lab and study them. ImageImageImage
Apr 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This is what I mean that Peter Daszak switched seamlessly back and forth between:

"I know it's not true because they are my friends and I trust them"
and
"I know it's not true because I'm an independent expert" ImageImage
Apr 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Sometimes I wonder if people deep down almost think that reality changes when scientists change their minds.

As opposed to scientists being wrong before, and are now trying to be less wrong because they actually want to match the underlying reality that existed all along. Ontological vs epistemological
As in: 'Yesterday, it was virtuous to believe X, because scientists said X was true. Today, it is virtuous to believe Y, because that's what scientists say is true now. So reality must have changed somehow, or else I have to admit I was not viruous'
Apr 23, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Very interesting.

2015 Video of @mlipsitch on the risks of GoF, with a response Derek Smith - a coauthor on the H5N1 Ferret paper.

First - effects of mutations are too complex and interconnected to learn much from GoF.

Also - the numbers don't work. The risk of a lab acquired infection happening and then sparking a pandemic are not acceptable. ImageImageImage
Apr 5, 2023 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
"Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 at the Huanan Seafood Market" has finally been published in Nature. It specifically argues against the market origin hypothesis, using more complete data than was provided for the Worobey et al. analysis.

nature.com/articles/s4158… Big Caveat:

Complete information should have been provided years ago. But for all the Western scientists who have (and undoubtedly will now) complain about a lack of transparency and hiding data, that should apply as well to the data underlying other works, like Pekar et al.