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Aug 8, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey

What about the weird coincidence that the 19-nucleotide sequence containing the furin cleavage site shows up in a patent filed by Moderna in 2016?

Quote: "A BLAST search for the 12-nucleotide insertion led us to a 100% reverse match in a proprietary sequence (SEQ ID11652, nt 2751-2733) found in the US patent 9,587,003 filed on Feb. 4, 2016 (9) (Figure 1). Examination of SEQ ID11652 revealed that the match extends beyond the 12-nucleotide insertion to a 19-nucleotide sequence" Source: https://doi.org/10.3389/fviro.2022.834808

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Aug 8, 2023·edited Aug 8, 2023Author

I never found the patent thing to be very compelling. Negative of 17 of Moderna's negative 19 nucleotides were already in a Dow patent from 2001 (ctcctcggcgggcacgt). So did Moderna steal the genes from Dow? They're just acgt's. If Moderna's acgt's can coincidentally match Dow's then they can coincidentally match a virus's, no amount of probability math actually renders the match necessarily meaningful.

On the virus end, nature supplies many of the patent-matching nucleotides that make up the stretch in question - they aren't part of the FCS insert, but belong to background cov's including BANAL52 and RatG13. These are the six at the end, cacgtag. It's a conserved region and Sars-1 for example is only one letter different, tacgtag. Vs. the Dow patent, Moderna just adds the ag, but that was already in the related cov genome.

As I show in this post (edit: sorry, the follow-up https://unglossed.substack.com/p/steelmanning-natural-origin), there is evidence that spike protein genes may have beyond-human-understanding genetic promoters for "_gg" repeat inserts around previously dropped FCSs, as a virulence toggle to accommodate different host niches. If so, any randomly created natural FCS insert might "hunt" for certain motifs that pre-existed in patents. You don't want to just think of nature as a random-number-generator, it has patterns built-in.

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Aug 1, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey

"Why “serious” scientists do not buy lab leak" - Hello. Was Prof. Luc Montagnier not serious enough?

- Let's put aside all distracting details, and just accept that the virus was manipulated/ engineered...

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Jul 30, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey

The problem is that David Cole doesn't seem to know the basic theory himself. Anybody who talks about the Wuhan wet market is repeating propaganda, whether they realize it or not. That includes indeed people who point out that the WIV is next to the wet market (or not as Cole claims).

In order to know the truth, you must know the three waves of propaganda.

1) Immediately in early 2020 China went into damage control mode, releasing RATG13 and the wet market samples "proving" that was the most likely starting point. We don't know if these samples were cherry picked or not, and they don't even indicate that strongly the wet market was the origin. Aldo China deleted the samples so we could never do independent analysis of their ancestry tree. But most importantly, we know now the outbreak started more than two months earlier. So who cares about the wet market. It may have been a hot spot of spread, but it is no more relevant than for instance that super spreader German bar in March 2020 that probably nobody remembers. The wet market in November 2019 was not the origin, so discussing it is irrelevant.

2) Team Fauci which suppressed, bribed and threated its way into dismissing the lab theory. Regardless of whether the lab theory is true, they spewed lots of propaganda to support the natural spillover theory because that is what they wanted. Most of what was claimed is irrelevant as it was just made up statements based on authority, not any actual evidence. It however still shapes today's debate as many people picked a trench at that time and haven't left it.

3) The vanity fair/DRASTIC limited hangout. After Biden won, they had an issue as they had been saying that suggesting that it was a lab leak was anti-science and racist. So they got a 'useful idiot' lady at Vanity fair to write a story about two persons nobody had heard of and who played no major role in the actual evidence for a lab leak, to be the poster persons of how nobody had figured it out and why we all missed it. Don't get me wrong the Drastic duo are good guys that did participate in many of the earlier discussions, but they were not the actual discoverers of the actual evidence. They were just used so now everybody could talk about it too without crediting the evil Republicans and 'other' conspiracist who already did already so early 2020.

So what is the evidence? Well, it is all circumstantial, but already know by April 2020 with only the Wilson papr from July 2020. In short: The outbreak started in the same city where the premiere corona virus lab sits, who we know did gain of function research in the years prior to 2019, who did collect and experimented with hundreds of bat viruses since 2012, many of them never published.

Also COVID-19 has a few odd sequences that are very unlikely to have occurred naturally, but just happen to be the similar to things discussed and practice in the gain of function world.

Further there is evidence of weird things happening in early September 2019, including claims that key people got sick, a key researcher going missing up to today, and most importantly WIV suddenly deleting their public virus database. One and a half year later we learn that that is just after the outbreak started, as the oldest samples are from early September 2019.

Does that mean it cannot be natural? No, it can still be. We just have not found any evidence pointing to a natural origin. We have not found virus A, virus B and the animal that would combine A and B into COVID-19. So, we have lots of circumstantial evidence pointing to lab and no evidence pointing to natural.

Unless in a few decades China may release now hidden secret records (if these exist), we may never know for sure.

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I am belatedly encountering the David Quammen NYT recap of the controversy, which certainly lacks the virtue of leanness but otherwise repeats the gist of Cole's post. Once again the Wuhan coincidence is assigned no value in interpreting the problem. A funny bit about Shi's learning of the virus:

"Shi was in Shanghai for a conference on the night of Dec. 30, 2019, as she explained it to me, when word reached her about a mysterious respiratory illness spreading dangerously among people back in Wuhan. Preliminary lab results suggested a coronavirus — not SARS virus, but something similar — might be the cause. She was asked to help identify the thing. She put her lab team to work on that immediately and took a train back to Wuhan the next day. Within hours, her lab had received a partial sequence from another lab. Her first instinct was to compare it with sequences of viruses they had worked on themselves, “and we found it’s different,” she told me. “So, the afternoon of Dec. 31, I already know it’s nothing related to what we have done in our laboratory.”"

Imagine the odds of a novel coronavirus emerging next door to the person you would call about a novel coronavirus...

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Jul 28, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey

I find that I am generally ambivalent towards Cole. He provides useful insight on some topics, but is useless (ignorant or just too biased) on some others. I think it is his belief in his absolute certainty that bugs me most. That, and his implicit antinatalist streak. All in all, Cole is the type that I take 'with a pinch of salt'.

Anyway, glad you commented on this.

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I'm eternally behind on dissident commentary, who's who, etc.! Just embarrassing myself with newbie takes constantly haha

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Jul 28, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey

The Taki article appears to lean too heavily on a kind of 'truthing', nonetheless it could still be right for the wrong reasons, a possibility that must be considered...

Looking at familiar sources, the excellent blog on this website has a series on the origin covering it in a fairly even handed way, with another article on the political implications:

https://merogenomics.ca/blog/en/116/SARS-CoV-2_coronavirus_origins_alternative_theories__do_they_hold_up_against_science_Part_1

https://merogenomics.ca/blog/en/117/SARS-CoV-2_coronavirus_origins_alternative_theories__do_they_hold_up_against_science_Part_2

https://merogenomics.ca/blog/en/118/Fake_viruses_SARS-CoV-2_origins_conspiracy_theories_Part_3

https://merogenomics.ca/blog/en/138/Lab-leak-theory-vs-natural-origin-of-SARS-CoV-2-why-past-conflicts-of-interest-might-be-driving-the-current-debate

Also writings by Matt Ridley & Alina Chan, plus Paul D Thacker are well worth a look.

Considering these, that the Taki article may well be right for the wrong reasons, doesn't mean it necessarily *is*.

So I have to admit, Occams razor is looking pretty handy here in favour of the leak from a lab of a man made chimeric virus - or even a natural virus.

That there seems to be a lack of willpower to find the intermediate species, plus the fact that Sars-Cov2 emerged well suited to human transmission gives this more support - but as of yet no smoking gun it seems.

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Jul 28, 2023·edited Jul 29, 2023Author

"Occams razor is looking pretty handy here in favour of the leak from a lab," also most of what is in the Chan oeuvre, are I believe excessively dismissive of natural origin. To echo my post, there really isn't anything about the virus that demands a non-natural origin, so only the Wuhan coincidence drives my leaning to engineered origin. If you take away Wuhan, yeah you can still fill a book with curious angles but they don't actually look that curious when you reference to regular viruses.

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OK if you put Occams razor back way with respect to WIV, you're still left with a virus that looks like a chimera of other viruse. The game changer for SARS-Cov2 is the furin cleavage site which ISTR appears in other viruses but so far not in coronaviruses. Also it first appears in a state that's highly contagious for humans, possibly because of FCS.

So either it got that way through passage through different animal species or as a result of deliberate manipulation. It seems to me that the former would be a freakish coincidence and the latter a very uncomfortable truth for establishment science.

I'd very much like to see all potential viral GoF experiments done in the most transparent way in internationally monitored labs. In science just because it can be done doesn't mean it should be done...

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I should probably do a post steelmanning natural origin.

RE FCS, the human betacovs have them, and SARS-CoV-2 is a betacov. If you align the amino acid sequences nothing looks weird except the Proline, and that has now been lost in most of the VOCs. However the 12n for the FCS still seem to be an insertion from ancestor based on RaTG13 and BANALs. Could nature have inserted by chance? There could be genetic promoters for the RdRp to reinsert a cg-enriched chain at that location - this is a theory I have based on the regular reinsertion of FCSs in avian flu HA genes. We also see that the SC2 FCS tends to drop out in cell passage where there's no fitness benefit to it, so there's definitely promotion for the rdrp to delete it. It could essentially be an evolutionary toggle that gives viruses flexibility to adapt to host.

If so, just because we don't find it in bat sarbecovs, doesn't mean it isn't in the toolkit, it could be built in to the nearby genes and how they behave with the rdrp but just doesn't get captured in our sequences because every insertion quickly is selected back out of existence. Unless it spills into a host that favors it.

Another thing to keep in mind is how would it look if SC2 has entered human circulation before, only to run through its potential immune evasion landscape and go extinct again, the same exact way flu does from the avian reservoir. Well, in the past, humans were not being kept alive in unhealthy and super-elderly states by medicine, and tuberculosis was rampant. So older pandemics of SC2 wouldn't have been noticed. Only now with so many vulnerable people and with antibiotics keeping camouflage conditions away is it even possible to notice SC2. It could be an ancient visitor already cross-suited for reentry into humans (again, exactly like avian H1/2/3).

Finally, the avian cov reservoir is huge and poorly explored. Let's say that FCS-having strains make up 1 part per million of circulating viruses. So we haven't sampled enough to find one, but that one is still there, and if it is more suited to human spread, then it will be selected for in the human pop. So it isn't a question of rarity, it will find us.

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After considering the spike's Furin cleavage site we still need to explain the HIV gp120 insert (it enhances cell membrane attachment.)

I did not think that WIV was the preeminent coronavirus research lab, but might have voted for UNC Chapel Hill (Ralph Baric) if given a ballot.

I am convinced that Ft. Detrick would not have appeared on my hypothetical ballot, but I have been very impressed with the protean pathological manifestations of both the original Wuhan virus (all via the spike) and the spike-producing mRNA and adenovirus injections.

I continue to have the sense that most of this was previously known, and indeed some of the published animal research aids this viewpoint.

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There are no HIV inserts. If upload-trawling Central Asians have to tag a handful of off-consensus vaccine-related sequences to find a match then we aren't talking about "Duh AIDs"

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Thank you. The original article I had saved has been "withdrawn" and does not seem to have been replaced. Pradhan,P et al, doi:org/10.1101/2020.01.30.92781

It seems that many of my favourite articles get "withdrawn". I had to be instructed on the phrase "cancel culture" as I am not a devotee of "Social Media."

Without specialist technical skills after 40 years on the clinical frontlines, I look at many of these anti-narrative or too revealing studies as "cancelled" rather than withdrawn. It should be mandatory for all of the reviewers', editors', and authors' correspondence to be published with any "withdrawn" manuscript.

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Jul 30, 2023·edited Jul 30, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey

Thanks for the all info on FCS, I had forgotten the details. It does appears elsewhere, but not in the exact same way hence the controversy. No 'smoking gun' for manipulation, but a 'close but no cigar' for guaranteed natural evolution OTOH due to lack of evidence.

I'm not sure original SC2 is likely to be the re-emergence of a previously extinct human coronavirus, as the existing common ones seem to smoulder in the population rather than flame out like flu variants, but who knows?

What's interesting from the Merogenomics blog is they covered a paper highlighted the case of the miners getting sick and some dying from a long 'mystery illness'. Maybe this resulted in SC2 or something close, it was sequenced and not published (understandably, due to it's bio warfare potential) but accidentally leaked some years later, it could certainly help to explain some of the anomolies.

If your super secret SC2 from the miners illness had accidentally leaked, how best would you cover for it? One way would be to release or re-release to the public domain details of a similar bat virus, sure it's the ancestor of SC2 but facilitates a narrative of natural evolution through animal passage like the original SARS.

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Jul 28, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey

The English language, sadly, fails again in its imprecision.

The word “the” is of course a definitive pronoun. Used in much of our parlance and written communication, it imparts the idea of fact to the following word.

For instance, “ the UFO” has within it a contradiction. Many of us doubt their existence yet we speak of “ the “ UFO. Instead i propose “the Putative U F O” or “suggested” UFO.

Likewise, “The Virus” lacks specificity and can carry an outright lie. Prove that such a proposed virus exists before blessing it with the word”the”. Please. The truth depends on it!

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At any moment I am not bleeding, I cannot "prove" that I contain blood. I don't usually find this to require the same linguistic caution tape of a UFO report. Viruses describe "invisible disease transmitting agent," people in the 19th century used it without any confusion despite having no physical model for what the agent was. Now we have a physical model and you want to banish understanding of observable health outcomes. No thanks.

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I'll probably have to stew on this post for some time. I think it does raise an interesting conundrum on what hypotheses have been formed, what evidence substantiates it, and what evidence is missing. For the most part, any evidence missing is likely not to be evidence we will ever see, especially at this point.

I guess this falls into the pitfalls of everyone "theorizing" when it's really hypothesizing. It's not really a lab leak theory more than it is a hypothesis. It's a natural origins hypothesis as well, but the conflation with theory sort of adds more alleged credibility to the idea.

It seems that the main argument is that we don't have clear, absolute evidence either way and any suggestion that infers absolute clarity on one explanation can't be correct. This also comes with the fact that we may never be able to find the truth, and I suppose that in a world full of people who want clarity this doesn't sit well with them.

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Doesn't sit well, and also they know they can use consensus as cover for assertions of certainty now. Well, too bad, the evidence still sucks...

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I'm curious what your thoughts are on all of these hypotheses relating to adverse reactions. It's one of those things I've been thinking of more frequently. This is a place where I just don't find the evidence compelling for many of them and yet they seem to be rather abundant and prominent.

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Jul 27, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey

The only problem is..... if this virus was a natural outbreak.... nobody on earth would have ever noticed it.

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How so? If you mean the rapid piling of attention and time-proven determination of the sequence in January, that’s a fair circumstantial argument

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Jul 28, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey

Exactly. They had the genome from the get go.

In the real world - cold viruses break all the time & we are none-the-wiser. They come & go without a trace.

Besides - engineered viruses spill from vaccine labs all the time. To think us mere mortals have the power to stop or eradicate a virus - is the ultimate god complex.

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Well, we seem to have done it with smallpox. The more important question from my perspective is what are the Chesterton's Fence externalities of virus elimination, and how brutal will the punishment be when we land in the elimination uncanny valley (reboot of nearly-eliminated childhood virus in a global populace with zero mucosal immunity because "eek Measles gives doctors work."

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Smallpox isn’t a virus.

Variola is the name of the virus

Pox were the human symptoms.

The ‘vaccine’ was effectively an engineered strain of Variola.

Decades ago when we had proper naming conventions it was

Variola RNA [Major] - Virus

Variola RNA [Minor] - Vaccine

But make no mistake - both were viruses and both strains are still in circulation on earth today.

When it comes to virus - we do nothing.

We wait — and treat the symptoms ‘if’ they ever present.

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As we saw with Marco Rubio's "groundbreaking" report on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, pretty much all of the extant evidence is, ultimately, circumstantial. There are reasons for suspecting--and even presuming--that the virus emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but very little of the extant evidence can even pretend to be of the "smoking gun" variety.

https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/rubio-reports-on-the-origins-of-covid

This was one of the problems with the earliest iterations of the lab leak hypotheses which emerged almost immediately after the virus spread beyond China. There were legitimate questions to ask, and no legitimate answers forthcoming, but initially all anyone had were suspicions.

https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/covid-19-as-a-bioweapon

Perhaps the biggest problem with most iterations of the lab leak hypothesis is the insistence by so many that it has to be a deliberately constructed bioweapon. The possibility that the crossover from bat to human (directly or via an intermediary host) simply took place in a lab with known safety problems gets rather rudely pushed aside.

However, the biggest problem with the zoonotic hypothesis is the litany of devious and deceitful steps--all documented--China took to weaponize the spread of the virus even if it hadn't deliberately developed the virus as a bioweapon.

https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/ccpvirus-yes-it-is-bioweaponhtml

In the end, we do not have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There is significant circumstantial evidence, however, and I do believe the preponderance of that evidence points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the place that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as an infectious respiratory pathogen capable of infecting humans.

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Jul 28, 2023·edited Jul 28, 2023Author

But there’s nothing in WIV’s published work that would have created SARS-CoV-2. This is an implacable problem. Any claim that the preponderance of evidence points to WIV is suggesting that WIV had foreknowledge that work on the precursor for SARS-CoV-2 needed to be *censored*, while they published other stuff, which means “something about the work they were doing on it was different than the work they published,” which means your evidence (the work they published) has to be thrown out because it wasn’t in the category of work that led to SARS-CoV-2. This problem might be easy to gloss over as just words, but it is still implacable. You are saying “WIV actually had a secret program more advanced than published and with differently sourced viruses,” but your “evidence” for the same idea is the publication of work that merely resembles the secret work. But any lab can have a secret virus program. Maybe a good way to hide your secret virus program is not to put “Virology” on the building sign.

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That's only true if we presume the virus was deliberately manufactured.

WIV has a track record of poor safety controls. We don't need an intentional bioweapons program to conclude that the most probable origin of the virus is the Wuhan Institute. All we need is careless handling of viral samples and animal subjects--both of which have been documented at WIV. In a lab with poor safety controls the same processes which would enable a virus to jump from an animal host to humans "in the wild" can still take place even without research intentions.

As I've said before, the "smoking gun" evidence would be the full records--research notes, safety documents, et cetera--of the lab. We probably will never get those at this point.

I should also add that if the virus was the result of a bioweapons program then information about it would be censored.

As it is many of the biolabs funded by the United States through the Nunn-Lugar threat reduction programs and subsequent biosecurity initiatives classify a considerable amount of their research data--and they presumably are NOT doing bioweapons research. It would not be at all remarkable to find Chinese research facilities doing similar things.

Lack of publication is not the obstacle you make it out to be.

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Jul 28, 2023·edited Jul 28, 2023Author

“All we need is careless handling of viral samples” Lab safety conditions do not determine anything about the likelihood of an undetected “passenger” virus being accidentally passaged. This is a hypothetical that deserves specific predictions and questions. How likely that passenger virus genes wouldn’t be in the raw sequencing data that is full of bat and cell culture genes? How often do passenger viruses appear in general and in good labs? What would the phylogenetic picture look like if “dirty lab passenger virus escape” were the origin — I’d argue we’d expect more heterogeneity, in fact that’s the whole point of my Omicron lab origin theory. The virus gets close to optimal and sibling lineages escape, more differentiated than the two SNPs that distinguish 19a and 19b.

Overall if you assert the virus could have emerged undetected in passage by accident you are suggesting something far less plausible than natural origin, because the magic ancestral virus is constantly being given easier opportunities to do the same tricks in wild animals. So I’m terms of explaining to the jury why natural origin could not have done it you want intention because you want it to be the case that the hypothetical fitness valley between wild and humanified is not crossable without nursing the virus along, otherwise you can’t explain why natural origin is implausible. At that point all you really have is “it appeared in Wuhan.”

As for secret extra program, I am not arguing that it is or isn’t implausible, just that it can’t use the non-circumstantial evidence we have, so it’s pure speculation.

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I remember hearing in '21 about the PLA erasing a lot of data at the WIV I think in November '19 some sort of big cleanup operation. Not sure that the truth of that was ever established but this would provide a mechanism for 'no sars2 records in wiv database' without deliberate foreknowledge of pandemic.

Personally, I don't believe in lab leak. For one CIA seemed to know about virus before the Chinese medical establishment, early outbreak in Iran per Unz also seems like a strong point.

The 'dropping dead in the streets' videos leave me with only two possibilities, deliberate made fake propaganda videos whether by Ccp or anti-ccp or the virus in early '20 China is not the virus in the rest of the world/China now. Interestingly the 'drop dead in the streets' has some similarity to the vaccine associated 'sudden deaths'.

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If they ate obvious fakes, and I didn't watch the. Much originally and haven't reviewed them recently, then that produces the problem that whoever made them presumably could have made a fake that would not be immediately obvious. But do we have a known real virus is marauding in the streets video to compare them against to make our determination of fakeness? They are obviously released with an agenda but their provenance remains one of the most important unanswered questions to unraveling the truth.

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There's a good deal more than "It appeared in Wuhan."

We know that the WIV has been researching sarbecoviruses for well over a decade.

We know that the WIV has collected samples of bat coronavirus from all over China and Southeast Asia.

We know that China knew of human-to-human transmission of the virus for at least six days in January 2020 while still professing to the WHO that there was "no evidence" of this.

In mid February, 2020, China issued a "wartime order" to put a stop to "lab leakage" of deadly pathogens.

At the same time, when China was still denying human-to-human transmission, Chinese firms were literally stripping all the medical supplies from other nations that they could, buying them by the ton and shipping them back to China.

In February 2020, Beijing but the WIV under the authority of the country's top bioweapons expert, Chen Wei.

https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/ccpvirus-yes-it-is-bioweaponhtml

These acts of deceit and subterfuge are not consistent with Chinese medical professionals dealing with a naturally occurring pathogen. They are consistent with Chinese medical professionals concealing "something"--and the most probable "something" is the involvement of one or more of the virology labs in Wuhan in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

It's not just that people here in the West believe SARS-CoV-2 originated in the WIV. The totality of specific actions Beijing took immediately after that initial outbreak strongly suggests that Beijing has always been convinced the virus came from the Wuhan lab.

Add to that the research performed by Dr. Li-Meng Yan--herself acknowledged to have significant expertise in both SARS-CoV-2 and infectious respiratory pathogens broadly--in which she asserts that SARS-CoV-2 definitively came from the WIV.

Add to that the research performed at the South China Institute of Technology--a leading research and educational institution in China--which concluded that SARS-CoV-2 most probably originated in the WIV.

Moreover, there is good evidence that several of the authors of the "proximal origin" paper arguing a zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2 initially believed the lab leak hypothesis to be the most probable.

As for the existence of "secret" research programs--that is already known. The Wuhan Institute even before being taken over by C, hen Wei worked closely with the PLA. It is all but certain that WIV has been involved to some degree in bioweapons research, or at the very least "biological threat reduction" research, which is very nearly the same thing.

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Jul 28, 2023·edited Jul 28, 2023Author

"These acts of deceit and subterfuge are not consistent with Chinese medical professionals dealing with a naturally occurring pathogen." massive and obvious intelligence insult detected. CYA isn't a euphemism that describes only acting guilty *when guilty*. Stop slapping me with this rancid fish.

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Jul 27, 2023·edited Jul 27, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey

Your final point "whether any collective memory of the past that we have is accurate" came up in conversation between my best friend and I not long ago. Oral tradition to the tablet, the scroll, the codex; pinnacle of mechanical reproduction in the printing press and photograph, the pure-information light bulb, magnetic tape and finally digitization. Without boring everyone with the details, the conclusion was that we're at a place where our current dominant information storage and retrieval mechanisms are at their most unreliable and hence least trustworthy. We produce more information in a week than has been produced in human history and 99.99% of it is completely useless to ourselves and anyone that comes after.

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I think a big part of the problem is a defect in human skepticism. Any case where something is unclear or uncertain, very quickly the default tentative interpretation gets treated as 100% the truth and so in a big, complex event you have a lot of early guesses based on limited info in the tapestry of the final gestalt.

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I have just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Talking to Strangers."

We default to believing that people tell the truth, and it is difficult to sort out the intentional lies. It is not presented as a "defect" but rather a necessary condition for societal survival.

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I kinda exaggerated there at the end most likely, but the point stands.

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No it is a good point. I think a lot if the problem is the illusion of accuracy and reproducibility. When you were told a story or read a hand copied manuscript you recognized that you were consuming an artistic product that was a reproduction of an earlier artistic product. More modern replacements give the illusion of a perfect and complete reproduction of the actual event.

Remember being naive enough to believe video was the truth? That's like believing porn girls are really into it.

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That David Cole piece is thoroughly unimpressive and subjective.

If one looks across the entirety of evidence, and the different lines of evidence, especially the genetic data, it is very difficult for a reasonable person to conclude anything other than it very likely came from a lab.

The real question, of course, is did it leak, or was it intentional release? Here we need to parse different types of evidence; most especially incentives, and capability. I think if we look at what Covid allowed globalists and authoritarians to do (problem, reaction, solution) and who benefited, it seems to me somewhere north of 90% likelihood it was intentional.

And from a risk mngt perspective, we should act as if it was intentional of course. A type 1 error is much preferable to a type 2 error in this situation...

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Belated RE the genetic evidence, I don't think it should be considered compelling without being part of the circumstantial picture (especially the "funny" Wuhan coincidence). The "HIV inserts" are mostly not even inserts (just deletions from LCA in SARS-1), except for the 12 out of frame nucleotides for the FCS, but this isn't unseen in putatively natural viruses - it's something that is less suspicious when you look deeper into natural virus work.

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I don’t think the post is trying to impress, it’s just an audit of the GOF Origin evidence that shows how repetitive and non-developmental everything after 2020 has been, concluding with a shrug.

Agree RE risk management - that’s also applicable I believe for the general attitude that US intelligence agencies should be trusted when they “report” which of the scenarios that don’t involve the US releasing the virus they are leaning toward. Assume a hostile witness.

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There's no doubt about the leak:

The REAL COVID timeline:

It’s a Bio-BOMB, yet less lethal than like the vx ... not what you were drilled

https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-real-covid-timeline

Bio-BOMB, not “vaccine”, not “gene-therapy”

This 5th gen war, includes a war on semantics.

https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/not-vaccine-not-gene-therapy-just

What do bioweapons have to do with the Department of Energy?

Anybody answering these questions PLEASE ? !!!

https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/what-do-bioweapons-have-to-do-with

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