Frankly, especially given the pattern of outright lying, cover-up and obfuscation on this matter, I don't understand how anyone can claim they *scientifically* know what's more likely. Existing (crappy, limited, censored) evidence is compatible with multiple scenarios.
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Mysteriously missing: early sequences, databases, accounting of early cases, work we now learn *had been proposed* but we were told was a crazy conspiracy, an "investigation" led by conflicted parties, that was lied to but still proposed frozen food imports as plausible origin.
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You might not have noticed it from media coverage, but some very senior folks in the field moved away from asserting no lab involvement. I thought their concern was the (again less reported) fact that WIV and WCDC had demonstrably lax lab/field practices. But now maybe also this?
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Three specific issues. What actually happened? (May take decades). How to globally improve safety in research in fields with catastrophic tail risk? (Urgent regardless of one's theory of what happened). How the heck did *our* understanding of all this turn out to be so poor? (
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The Intercept story on the same recently unearthed grant proposal. Looks to me like many junior and/or out-of-the loop folks have been left to twist in the wind by more senior and/or in-the-know folks tbh—explains the divergence in their assertions, too. https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/ …pic.twitter.com/lME2wfyA6c
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New Yorker article, while mentioning the recently-unearthed WIV/EcoHealth grant—proposing, among other things, inserting a furin cleavage site to bat coronaviruses—reveals that the grant "really shocked" the DARPA reviewers with how "irresponsible" it was. https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-mysterious-case-of-the-covid-19-lab-leak-theory …pic.twitter.com/yVPWx2xnZw
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Also keep seeing this: experts in the field "surprised" to learn that WIV was doing experiments with coronaviruses that could infect humans under BSL-2 conditions. Ralph Baric highlighted that as a concern back in MAY OF 2020—and the basic fact is documented in WIV's own papers.pic.twitter.com/EiKMrVQvvK
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EcoHealth/WIV proposed to "introduce furin cleavage sites into lab-created versions of SARS-related coronaviruses, recovered from bats in Yunnan. They planned to fully sequence and generate clones of three to five novel bat viruses each year." Clone=create virus that can infect.pic.twitter.com/7WS4YMsJxk
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This isn't like betting on horses. They wanted to take coronaviruses—like ones just found in Laos—very similar to SARS-CoV-2, but without a furin cleavage site, actively insert one, and make infectious copies—for three to six viruses per year! Like.. what?https://twitter.com/tweetjoshtweet/status/1447966629384556552 …
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Anyway, my views aren't secret: I think bat coronaviruses were knocking on the door, and we didn't learn from the 2003 SARS near-miss pandemic. I also think research tail risk needs to be taken seriously, not shot down as conspiracy. Wrote essay in June:https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1408401280473632775 …
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Meta-point is key players in Western countries *knew* of this grant proposal, kept it quiet while they participated in WHO investigations (ended up rating "frozen food imports" from *elsewhere* as more likely origins than anything lab related
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(Not sarcastic). If anyone knows a good write-up defending the risk/benefit/knowledge ratio of this proposed grant, please do point me to it because this particular one is baffling to me. That DARPA (thank you, reviewer 2!) would not fund it is good to know, but not the answer.
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More. In response to an Congressional inquiry, NIH says Daszak's EcoHealth was not complying with requirements from a 2018-2019 grant to "report immediately" on potentially dangerous experiments conducted in collaboration with Wuhan Institute of Virology.https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1450938549721710593 …
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We know from freedom-of-information requests (not by by traditional media for the most part) that EcoHealth's President Peter Daszak was instrumental in coordinating the high-profile "scientist response" to the question of origins, and was in both WHO team and Lancet task force.
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I hope all this is a lesson on the downfalls of credulity and group-think—even among smart people. People who *correctly* suggested that the required transparency, investigation and accountability were deeply lacking were branded as conspiracy theorists. That's how trust is lost.
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How German virologist Alexander Kekulé describes his reaction to the unearthing of the (unfunded!) grant application by EcoHealth/WIV. (Also note he later points out why/how the way forward is the same: better outbreak surveillance and lab oversight). https://www.n-tv.de/panorama/Kekule-sieht-neue-Hinweise-fuer-Laborunfall-article22875216.html …pic.twitter.com/1NOpLSAYS9
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More. EcoHealth had denied experiments with MERS but a missing NIH report Intercept JUST got says “We constructed the full-length infectious clone of MERS-CoV, and replaced the RBD of MERS-CoV with the RBDs of various strains of HKU4-related coronaviruses" https://theintercept.com/2021/10/21/virus-mers-wuhan-experiments/ …pic.twitter.com/SmjvceQplY
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So, EcoHealth submitted the fourth year report in 2018 and then, inexplicably, updated it in 2020 *only* to update the references? I've had big grants—who updates a report years later only for new references? Besides, can't even resubmit without agency approval? This is bizarre.pic.twitter.com/arVVDwL2dh
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Also, this from the unearthed grant: shouldn't these"180 unique SARSr-CoVs" from bats EcoHealth says they collected be shared with the scientific community already? (As far as I know, they have not been disclosed yet).https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1440337832472576014 …
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Here we go: maybe we could confirm that, indeed, there are no undisclosed sequences left. (I'll email and ask tomorrow). The numbers in the grant and here aren't an exact match: the organization itself clarifying all this would be good.https://twitter.com/Homozygoat_/status/1451380954249977858 …
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Dr. Ralph Baric, among leading coronavirus scientists, much to lose, honestly:"You can engineer a virus without leaving any trace."
@Voxdotcom, OCTOBER 2021, citing a single commentary from way back, March 2020, *twice* to assert what "we know for sure". Why people lose trust.pic.twitter.com/RNILY9RbiL
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I don't think we can assign likelihood to the options tbh—a bit like dividing by zero, given lack of evidence or cover-up—but some do say "I think this is more likely". Fine. But "we know for sure"? There is a Turkish saying for this: more of a royalist than even the king.
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For the record! (Etymology is almost certainly from French to Turkish, as there was a period of massive French influence on the language). Also, French has some of the best quips about monarchies!https://twitter.com/VParbelle/status/1452331597630517253 …
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After the Iraq War debacle, trust in media in the US dropped ~10-15% and never recovered. Good journalism isn't stenography. The way not to give fuel to misinformation and, yes, even absurd and terrible theories is to establish trust is through honest but *challenging* reporting.
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Worth reading. The first WHO investigation on COVID origins ended up rating *frozen food imports* from elsewhere as *more likely* than even a lab accident, let alone anything else. A repeat of the same embarrassing debacle isn't in the public interest.https://twitter.com/JamieMetzl/status/1452981444679249922 …
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Two issues: what sparked this pandemic? May be unknowable, given the cover-up, but we can still learn to try to address *all* the possibilities. Second is about *us*. How can "frozen food" end up in a WHO report as a realistic option like that, for ex? Where's the deep coverage?
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Lest anyone has any questions, I encourage people to look at the first WHO report to see their exact conclusions on what they considered "possible" (frozen food chain) and what they considered "extremely unlikely" (any lab incident), in explicit ranking. https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/origins-of-the-virus …pic.twitter.com/OSp8QP5phG
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Another letter on the new WHO origins group. The committee will have limits on access but a thorough accounting of open questions would be good. Having more people with the right expertise who demonstrate such independence and fewer who dismissed legitimate questions is helpful.https://twitter.com/garyruskin/status/1453118907246469130 …
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(I don’t think having an opinion on either likelihood is disqualifying. Trust is inspired by willingness to engage the open questions rather than brushing them away or pretending there is no issue. Surely there are a good number of such people with the requisite expertise).
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Yep. The people who *correctly* pointed out the obfuscations and the lack of transparency and accountability in the COVID origins investigation had long been dismissed as conspiracy theorists. Late conversions with shifting winds don't fix this dynamic.https://twitter.com/MaraHvistendahl/status/1454060376035893253 …
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