The fully updated paperback edition of Viral: The Search for the #OriginOfCovid is now available.
It was a privilege to write Viral with . I hope it helps shed light on what I still consider the most important question facing the world today.
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Matt Ridley
@mattwridley
Biologist | Author of Red Queen, Genome, Rational Optimist, and Viral: The Search for the #OriginOfCovid: amzn.to/3xLkjqL
Matt Ridley’s Tweets
The Chinese spy balloon floating above the US is a brazen example of the countries massive espionage operations. abc7ny.com/chinese-spy-ba
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Haha, Maxmen? Please. No, Sarvecovs are well-sampled. We have hundreds of full genomes. None have an FCS even despite this locus being a mutational hotspot (see attached). So there is clear selection AGAINST an FCS in bats where these CoVs are GI, not respiratory viruses.
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SARS2 being the only known SARS-like virus to have an FCS (out of ~300 such viruses sampled) coupled with the DEFUSE proposal in which the WIV proposed to engineer novel FCSes in SARS-like CoVs makes for a compelling case SARS2 could have come from such an engineering effort.
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Today you can create a fully synthetic clone of a CoV in a matter of weeks. You could incorporate any genomic changes you wish, and if you use type IIs enzymes, their sites would disappear upon ligation and the genome would have no signs of manipulation.
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Here’s how Shi and Baric engineered an FCS into a MERS-like virus previously:
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Here the joint Shi and Baric 2015 paper about the critical role of an FCS in making a bat HKU4 virus into human MERS:
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/JV
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Interesting that even people like , with some expertise, need to be schooled on this topic.
I find there is huge ignorance, even among biologists, about the work (in Wuhan as well as elsewhere) of putting furin cleavage sites in viruses in recent years.
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Replying to @IanCopeland5
Umm, it could have been incorporated the same way virologists usually incorporate genetic changes into their reverse genetic systems — by modifying the genome in silico, then printing the modified cDNA fragment and ligating it with other fragments of the full cDNA IC.
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Great US is launching an investigation into #COVID19 origins in China. To be effective, this process must be bipartisan, fair, and evidence-based. The most important evidence is in China, but the investigation should gather info everywhere.
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Why I think the de-extinction of some extinct species one day is almost inevitable and mostly not a thing to be feared. Probably not in my lifetime.
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what a vile regime
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Iranian couple filmed dancing in Tehran were just given a 10-year prison sentence for “promoting corruption, prostitution and propaganda.” In the video that they posted to Instagram, Astiazh Haqiqi and her fiancé Amir Mohammad Ahmadi are dancing by Tehran's Azadi (Freedom) Tower. twitter.com/guardian/statu…
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You mean that they actually quoted our findings, textually, about the main DB going offline externally in Sep 2019 and remaining intermittently accessible internally till Feb 2020
All proven by the logs.
Well done!
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For the second time in a week, Flo put 2 and 2 together and obtained 5.
We have shown from the logs that matter (volume downloaded and page reads) that the main DB stopped being read externally (not internally) in Sep:
twitter.com/gdemaneuf/stat
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"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Gain-of-Function* Research: GROUNDHOG DAY EDITION”
f/t Vera Lynn
*ePPP
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This does seem to be an egregious error by . WIV was the main lab in China hunting SARS-like viruses, had by far the largest collection of sarbecoviruses in the world and had the nine closest relatives of SATS-CoV-2 at the time of the outbreak.
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Replying to @MJnanostretch
Complete non-sense from the author:
“Some scientists claimed that the virus was linked to the WIV based on little more than guilt-by-proximity—ignoring the fact that most major cities in China had similar labs studying coronaviruses because of the 2002 Sars outbreak”
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I've always taken the view that masks might help or might not help, and the answer will be found in careful experiments and studies. Looks like the answer is they don't.
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Massive new peer-reviewed study on mask efficacy, based on 78 randomized control trials with over 600,000 participants, concludes that masks made “little to no difference” in preventing infection with COVID or flu.
zerohedge.com/political/mass
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Scientists who have discussed COVID-19 in the media have become targets of harassment, intimidation, and threats from people who believe that the possibility of a lab leak is a conspiracy theory.
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Scientists who have discussed COVID-19 in the media have become targets of harassment, intimidation, and threats from people who believe that the pandemic is a hoax, that the virus was created intentionally to cause harm, or that vaccines are dangerous.
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There's no incentive to be right.
Most Twitter users want applause, and the way to get applause is to post fashionable falsehoods.
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Unrolled thread from threadreaderapp.com/thread/1620699
A long read but Gilles has done a public service by translating and publishing this. Puts the contrast between the Wuhan doctors (admirable) and their bureaucratic handlers (awful) in sharp relief.
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"We’re pretty much putting all our eggs in the offshore wind basket in terms of renewable energy targets and there is a chance we could be decommissioning a lot of these systems before their intended design life if they don’t behave the way we want."
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Dear Jordan Peterson, the video you link to was created by the museumofcommunistterror.com. Strangely the link you give goes to a different website, re History of Totalitarianism. Not sure how this error has happened but please see the videos of the Museum of Communist Terror.
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Worlds fail me. It’s “news” that people pay above cost of production for a good or service? I’m furious about the Mars bar I ate. It cost me 60p, I bet it only cost them 40p to make it! Exploitation! This is an actual headline. Below GCSE standard economics.
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What a fine continent America is. Pictures from both coasts this week…
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Glad to see this new initiative joining with and building on the pioneering work of Ryan Phelan's Revive and Restore. We have also begun to think about how to do de-extinction for the Great Auk, the last species of bird to go extinct in Europe.
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Excited to announce @itiscolossal Series B financing of $150M to advance our de-extinction causes and expand into avian genomics with the iconic dodo! Let's make extinction a thing of the past. fortune.com/2023/01/31/dod
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Ignoramus writing in Slate: "It doesn’t matter how COVID-19 began."
Narrator: That's like finding the bloody corpse of a person in your living room and saying it doesn't matter whether the person was murdered or had an accident because the carpet is ruined either way.
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"EcoHealth submitted its Year 5 progress report late and the report involved research that NIH believed resulted in a virus with enhanced growth...not until after NIH requested...July 2021 did EcoHealth submit the progress report on August 3, 2021, nearly 2 years late."-OIG HHS twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/st…
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The Road to SARS-Cov-2
1999 paper from the Dutch group of Peter Rottier from Utrecht University with a revealing title Retargeting of Coronavirus by Substitution of the Spike Glycoprotein Ectodomain: Crossing the Host Cell Species Barrier.
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Lab leak hypothesis denialist and propagandist Andrew Tan arguing, ridiculously, that transparency and basic of scientific ethical standards need not apply to those most closely implicated and highly suspect in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.
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Lab leak theorists Drs Alina Chan, Matt Ridley say sleuthing showed the WIV had SARS2-related viruses. It's relevant to note these weren't secret. Partial sequences in international databases in 2019 & other public information from Shi, allowed the sleuths their finding. 1/n
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read image description
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8. More HKU3 discrepancies: Daszak's renewal proposal mentions "diverse HKU3-related CoVs (179 sequences)!" Yet this info is missing from both Year 4 & 5 reports! Where are these 179 sequences? HKU3 clade is mentioned in Latinne et al. 2020. I couldn't find them in the datasets!
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Lois Goes North: Brilliant interview with Francis Egan CEO of Cuadrilla the shale gas company. Fracking has been demonised now we are forced to import fracked gas from across the globe instead of producing our own, blame the rich anti fracking protest orgs
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“A laboratory in Wuhan is on the cusp of being cleared to work with the world's most dangerous pathogens […] and has generated […] concerns. Some scientists outside China worry about pathogens escaping.”
February, 2017 in , with ao. .
nature.com/articles/natur
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The GX Mystery Resolved
A SARS-CoV-2-Related Virus from Malayan Pangolin Causes Lung Infection without Severe Disease in Human ACE2-Transgenic Mice
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jv
But they don't mention prior work with GX virus at WIV and elsewhere in 2018 and onwards...
Why not?
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This is actually a very mysterious finding, revealing work beginning in January 2020 in Southern China involving pangolin coronaviruses and hACE2 mice
Note Translation error:
"Andrographis coronavirus" is Pangolin Coronavirus
"Andrographis paniculata virus" is Pangolin Virus twitter.com/BillyBostickso…
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Cochrane review just out, reviewing 12 studies (incl. 10 RCTs) on the impact of community masks on the spread of viral respiratory illness.
How much more evidence will the mask fetishists need to realise that they simply don't work at a population level?
cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.10
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Dear - this article contains many factual inaccuracies.
e.g.
- It didn't take 15 years to identify the reservoir of SARS-CoV-1. It took 3 months.
- Lab accidents are not milder. 3.8% of lab-caused cases died.
- 6 of the 7 pre-'20 SARS outbreaks were from labs
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5/ Responses to ProPublica's editor's letter. No need to defend the article/response, the tone of discourse from these major participants is ridicule, overt threats and blatant misrepresentation. This is what the science of "How to destroy people and win followers" taught.
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1/ Former BBC journalist and director of WintonCentre provided pointed advice in 2020 which researchers and journalists have largely ignored.
Inform, don't persuade. Read the article. This short thread is my "maudlin" take.
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We’ve got a comment in Nature today on why science needs good ‘evidence communication’ and not the typical rules of rhetoric, designed to persuade rather than inform: nature.com/articles/d4158
@d_spiegel @Sander_vdLinden @MarteauTM
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"08-FEB-2020"
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1. According to the latest paper by Shi Zhengli journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jv, the pangolin coronavirus they used was isolated in 2019, and described post-pademic.
Here is the sequence deposition information:
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