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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zeynep tufekci Retweeted Josh Rosenberg
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 …
zeynep tufekci added,
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Replying to @zeynep
this is not an accurate summary of the proposal afaict
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How would you summarize it? And as a key question, what would have been the worthy benefit from it? I've yet to see a solid defense of why it would have been worth the risk?
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Doesn’t it seem likely that gain of function research would be done for either 1)biological advantage (warfare) or 2)money? It’s really a stretch to think this kind of work would be done to prepare us for the next pandemic.
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Replying to @GayleMaui @halvorz
I don't understand why anyone would do "warfare" with coronaviruses. Sadly, much better options. Much more mundane things like churn, overhead and publications seem likelier culprits to me—again, open to someone explaining why this risk/knowledge/benefit ratio can be justified.
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