This is kind of relevant in so much as it demonstrates that "Science" seems to lose its memory every now and then.
In "The Vitamin D solution: A 3-step strategy to cure our most common health problems" it point out that by the early 1900s scientists discovered the efficacy of sunlight exposure (UV and thus Vitamin D production) solved a lot of post-Industrial revolution medical issues.
This knowledge seems to have been expunged now even though the problems are largely the same.
Brian, you have a tendency to go where others don't go, which has benefitted you. However, sometimes the rabbit hole, just goes nowhere and you don't need to see how deep it goes.
The defuse project is a red herring. I know some other websites make a big deal out of it, but the reality is both Wuhan labs (people forget there are two, not one) are doing routine experimentation with viruses. Many labs around the world are, but none is as specialized as Wuhan's in corona viruses. And most of that research was done without much safety. The term gain of function is a broad term, and implies it is super special and secret, and requires special gear and labs. But many deadly SARS-1 virus handling was done under level 3 for instance. Reality is, most of the work they did, despite being potentially dangerous, is done at level 3, which literally is just a white coat, some goggles and the same mask we had to wear to go to the supermarket.
Key is Wuhan did hundreds of enhancements like experiments over the years. Hundreds! The defuse project just indicates one of the many ideas that were floating around in that world. It isn't that that specific project was The One, or would have been even very special. In fact Daszak doesn't seems to me as a brilliant mind, but more a grant manager who tries and sell others people ideas.
Also the Laos angle is a strawman. The suggestion being 'it is closer genome wise, so the other one cannot be the ancestor'. The reality is that the closeness math is just a quantitively measure, where the Laos one edges out in a photo finish, but qualitatively the two things that separate Wuhan's RATG13 from COVID-19, just happen to be the two things that make it infections for humans. RATG13 is basically COVID-19 except without the ACE-2 receptor and cleavage protein.
Laos and RATG13 are accepted as basically siblings that probably separated just a few decades ago. Geographically the locations where they were found are situated next to each other after all. Either two could technically be the ancestor, but RATG13 was what Wuhan used. We know they were working with it since at least 2016! After all that was the year they first published about it. In 2018 - confirmed by them - they had fully sequenced it, and we learned in April 2020 they had even isolated it from its bad poop. The latter you typically only do if you want to do 'something' with it. The suggestion they did only SARS-1 work is hence incorrect. Key is RATG13 could be the ancestor and Wuhan was working with that. That makes Laos irrelevant. There are likely more siblings if we look further.
It really isn't far fetched to suggest that perhaps they did 'something' with RATG13 other than mapping its genome. And since we know they did do gain of function and many related experiments on a routine basis under non-secure circumstances, this should be the base theory.
Wuhan claims they absolutely pinkie swear did not use RATG13 for any experiments, but of course we cannot know for sure they are not lying about this too. So we end up with two stories:
1) Wuhan did indeed do some more experiments with RATG13 in the years between 2016 and 2019, other than that one publication in 2016, resulting in an 'oopsie'. This story is completely in line with all we know.
2) The Americans found the Laos virus, but did not publish it. Then they brought it home and did some nice work on it. Then they decided to release it secretly in Wuhan, because that would discredit the Chinese. And of course the fact it would inevitably spread back to America, considering thousands of people fly each month from the US to Wuhan alone each month, that was just a price to pay. Oh, and let's not forget, they did all this without notifying the actual political people in charge, and despite a switch in administration not a single sole leaked as much as a single thing about it.
No, I don't need to know how deep this rabbit hole is. I'll pass on the red stuff this time :-)
And Brian, one more since you like analogies, In the TV series Shark Tank entrepreneurs pitch ideas to possible investors to get money. My favourite investor frequently explains entrepreneurs that not dropping bad ideas is one of the most common mistakes he sees being made, as it waste time and effort of the entrepreneur. As he says: sometimes you just have to take it behind the barn and shoot it. This is one of those Brian. Your brain is to valuable to be wasting time on this.
Thank you for a though-provoking essay. I feel compelled to cite what I consider two flaws in your arguments, however.
I’m familiar with Unz’s bio-warfare conjecture. It is possible of course, but one argument against it is it requires a more complex explanation (e.g. violates Occam’s Razor principle) than accidental lab release would. Admittedly, if you are going to perpetrate a bio-terror attack, what better scapegoat than the WIV, though? Of course I cannot speak for all of us “conspiracy theorists,” but I think by mid-2020 it was obvious to anyone who had studied the various reports that the virus was not of natural origin. What then was its exact source? We probably will never know for sure.
The first flaw I found was anything doing with the Wuhan wet market:
The latest Wet market story is probably just more disinformation. Here are some simple facts: We know that humans in Wuhan were infected in Late 2019 (allowing the possibility that the virus had been circulating for months earlier). We also know (in the past three years) that SARS-CoV-2 is somewhat transmissible to other mammals. There have been plenty of reports of dogs and cats, catching it, animals in zoos, and reportedly, a large portion of wild deer in USA have antibodies to the virus. In Europe there were culls at mink farms and other animals that either were infected or were feared to be virus reservoirs. None of the preceding facts are even in dispute so far as I know. All this is to say: there's nothing in the least remarkable that a raccoon dog or any other mammal might catch the virus. Note one elegance of this argument: It only requires the virus be somewhat contagious inter-species, which it in fact is. There is no need to worry about a natural or artificial origin at this stage. It’s not even relevant.
You also write: “Why did researchers from India report the HIV “inserts” in SARS-CoV-2 so quickly?…This is because normal "science" doesn't work this fast. Pradhan, et al. is more consistent with intelligence operation masquerading as authentic research (i.e., to drum up fear and conspiracy theories regarding the virus).”
Again, there’s a very simple explanation that doesn’t require spooks. And yes, science sometimes does work that quickly. I’m just a layman and even by mid-2020 I was aware that for many years researchers had been playing with viruses to include inserting HIV sequences into them. There are plenty of academic papers to choose from. If that’s true, there should be nothing odd about a researcher claiming to find alien sequences in a novel virus. Obviously that supports an artificial origin.
None of the above is to deny that the spooks planted disinformation, or that they have even stopped doing so now.
I invite you to look at this Substack article, as it explains some of the tools a researcher presumably would use to determine a virus’s ancestry.
The lab work was meant to be done in North Carolina by Baric. According to J Sachs who spoke to a DEFUSE reviewer, the work was done before the proposal went in.
After some further checking, I did find...(1) China released the genome by Jan 12...(2) First case outside of China (Thailand) on Jan (13)...(3) By Jan 19, it was in 4 countries...(4) By Jan 31 there were almost 9,800 infections worldwide and 213 people had already died...(5) The WHO officially declared it a pandemic on March 11. That said, if a group had initially started out to create and release a virus for nefarious ends, how would they have done it differently to bring about their diabolical plans any better? But as I have seen countless times in the world of computer security, "it is almost never a hack;" but instead a stumble...usually programmers. For this to have been an intentional release, a LOT of people would have to have not stumbled by now. People are notoriously fallible. Although you've made a convincing case, I remain skeptical because most bad foul-ups occur as a result of an unlikely series of stumbles falling into an unlikely (bad luck) order. Thinking now of the fact that nearly all air disasters arise from a series of stumbles, with an occasional mechanical issue sprinkled in for good measure.
I watched the comments section on their pre-print before it was pulled and it reminded me of how Dr. Henrik Svensmark was treated at a scientific conference when he presented his sun spot cycles tied to global temperatures paper. Vicious. And to the best of my reading, the HIV insertions proved real...although odd that not much seems to have come of that finding. As a result, I missed your clear red flag finding of "major epidemic..." in the very first line no less. So, I emailed and asked them (didn't mention you). You'll never know if you don't try :)
So the options are zoonotic, leaked, spread, and there is no virus?
I might divide spread into intentional by agency, rogue or not, and intentional by individual, as in a kind of Malaysian flight 370. But I don't know how hard it would be to start a pandemic, maybe Daszak or Baric can chime in here.
"Why did researchers from India report the HIV “inserts” in SARS-CoV-2 so quickly?" Can you explain how a lab emphasizing research in systems and network biology engineering would be incapable of finding those HIV like inserts so quickly?
I've heard from multiple credible sources that Covid-19's spike protein is practically IDENTICAL to that of the AIDs virus - which could only occur if it was artificially grafted on!
I guess it's just a further coincidence that the WIV was set up to study Covid and AIDs?
Means, motive, opportunity: means (it's a respiratory virus, so pretty simple) and opportunity (military games) I can see, but (discrete) motive stumps me.
Do you feel it's part of WEF et al's attempt to control tf out of everyone for whatever reason?
"...the framing of the controversy as only including these two alternatives thus ensures that both sides must miss the truth."
You mean like a false dichotomy? It feels like I've been running into a lot of those lately. They appear to be useful as an effective means of deception.
Great post. I love the twist at the end. The fact that I see it as a twist - that the best case against lab leak is intentional release and not animal origin - shows that the binary being presented (lab leak vs animal origin) had sunk in. Although I have leaned towards intentional release for awhile now.
I like "credential-havers" and will steal phrase.
This is kind of relevant in so much as it demonstrates that "Science" seems to lose its memory every now and then.
In "The Vitamin D solution: A 3-step strategy to cure our most common health problems" it point out that by the early 1900s scientists discovered the efficacy of sunlight exposure (UV and thus Vitamin D production) solved a lot of post-Industrial revolution medical issues.
This knowledge seems to have been expunged now even though the problems are largely the same.
Brian, you have a tendency to go where others don't go, which has benefitted you. However, sometimes the rabbit hole, just goes nowhere and you don't need to see how deep it goes.
The defuse project is a red herring. I know some other websites make a big deal out of it, but the reality is both Wuhan labs (people forget there are two, not one) are doing routine experimentation with viruses. Many labs around the world are, but none is as specialized as Wuhan's in corona viruses. And most of that research was done without much safety. The term gain of function is a broad term, and implies it is super special and secret, and requires special gear and labs. But many deadly SARS-1 virus handling was done under level 3 for instance. Reality is, most of the work they did, despite being potentially dangerous, is done at level 3, which literally is just a white coat, some goggles and the same mask we had to wear to go to the supermarket.
Key is Wuhan did hundreds of enhancements like experiments over the years. Hundreds! The defuse project just indicates one of the many ideas that were floating around in that world. It isn't that that specific project was The One, or would have been even very special. In fact Daszak doesn't seems to me as a brilliant mind, but more a grant manager who tries and sell others people ideas.
Also the Laos angle is a strawman. The suggestion being 'it is closer genome wise, so the other one cannot be the ancestor'. The reality is that the closeness math is just a quantitively measure, where the Laos one edges out in a photo finish, but qualitatively the two things that separate Wuhan's RATG13 from COVID-19, just happen to be the two things that make it infections for humans. RATG13 is basically COVID-19 except without the ACE-2 receptor and cleavage protein.
Laos and RATG13 are accepted as basically siblings that probably separated just a few decades ago. Geographically the locations where they were found are situated next to each other after all. Either two could technically be the ancestor, but RATG13 was what Wuhan used. We know they were working with it since at least 2016! After all that was the year they first published about it. In 2018 - confirmed by them - they had fully sequenced it, and we learned in April 2020 they had even isolated it from its bad poop. The latter you typically only do if you want to do 'something' with it. The suggestion they did only SARS-1 work is hence incorrect. Key is RATG13 could be the ancestor and Wuhan was working with that. That makes Laos irrelevant. There are likely more siblings if we look further.
It really isn't far fetched to suggest that perhaps they did 'something' with RATG13 other than mapping its genome. And since we know they did do gain of function and many related experiments on a routine basis under non-secure circumstances, this should be the base theory.
Wuhan claims they absolutely pinkie swear did not use RATG13 for any experiments, but of course we cannot know for sure they are not lying about this too. So we end up with two stories:
1) Wuhan did indeed do some more experiments with RATG13 in the years between 2016 and 2019, other than that one publication in 2016, resulting in an 'oopsie'. This story is completely in line with all we know.
2) The Americans found the Laos virus, but did not publish it. Then they brought it home and did some nice work on it. Then they decided to release it secretly in Wuhan, because that would discredit the Chinese. And of course the fact it would inevitably spread back to America, considering thousands of people fly each month from the US to Wuhan alone each month, that was just a price to pay. Oh, and let's not forget, they did all this without notifying the actual political people in charge, and despite a switch in administration not a single sole leaked as much as a single thing about it.
No, I don't need to know how deep this rabbit hole is. I'll pass on the red stuff this time :-)
And Brian, one more since you like analogies, In the TV series Shark Tank entrepreneurs pitch ideas to possible investors to get money. My favourite investor frequently explains entrepreneurs that not dropping bad ideas is one of the most common mistakes he sees being made, as it waste time and effort of the entrepreneur. As he says: sometimes you just have to take it behind the barn and shoot it. This is one of those Brian. Your brain is to valuable to be wasting time on this.
I think we can both agreed that you’re not coming up to speed on anything I’ve mentioned. But you did ask and I took the time to respond.
Thank you for a though-provoking essay. I feel compelled to cite what I consider two flaws in your arguments, however.
I’m familiar with Unz’s bio-warfare conjecture. It is possible of course, but one argument against it is it requires a more complex explanation (e.g. violates Occam’s Razor principle) than accidental lab release would. Admittedly, if you are going to perpetrate a bio-terror attack, what better scapegoat than the WIV, though? Of course I cannot speak for all of us “conspiracy theorists,” but I think by mid-2020 it was obvious to anyone who had studied the various reports that the virus was not of natural origin. What then was its exact source? We probably will never know for sure.
The first flaw I found was anything doing with the Wuhan wet market:
The latest Wet market story is probably just more disinformation. Here are some simple facts: We know that humans in Wuhan were infected in Late 2019 (allowing the possibility that the virus had been circulating for months earlier). We also know (in the past three years) that SARS-CoV-2 is somewhat transmissible to other mammals. There have been plenty of reports of dogs and cats, catching it, animals in zoos, and reportedly, a large portion of wild deer in USA have antibodies to the virus. In Europe there were culls at mink farms and other animals that either were infected or were feared to be virus reservoirs. None of the preceding facts are even in dispute so far as I know. All this is to say: there's nothing in the least remarkable that a raccoon dog or any other mammal might catch the virus. Note one elegance of this argument: It only requires the virus be somewhat contagious inter-species, which it in fact is. There is no need to worry about a natural or artificial origin at this stage. It’s not even relevant.
You also write: “Why did researchers from India report the HIV “inserts” in SARS-CoV-2 so quickly?…This is because normal "science" doesn't work this fast. Pradhan, et al. is more consistent with intelligence operation masquerading as authentic research (i.e., to drum up fear and conspiracy theories regarding the virus).”
Again, there’s a very simple explanation that doesn’t require spooks. And yes, science sometimes does work that quickly. I’m just a layman and even by mid-2020 I was aware that for many years researchers had been playing with viruses to include inserting HIV sequences into them. There are plenty of academic papers to choose from. If that’s true, there should be nothing odd about a researcher claiming to find alien sequences in a novel virus. Obviously that supports an artificial origin.
None of the above is to deny that the spooks planted disinformation, or that they have even stopped doing so now.
I invite you to look at this Substack article, as it explains some of the tools a researcher presumably would use to determine a virus’s ancestry.
https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/how-to-blast-your-way-to-the-truth
You’re missing an important data point.
The lab work was meant to be done in North Carolina by Baric. According to J Sachs who spoke to a DEFUSE reviewer, the work was done before the proposal went in.
After some further checking, I did find...(1) China released the genome by Jan 12...(2) First case outside of China (Thailand) on Jan (13)...(3) By Jan 19, it was in 4 countries...(4) By Jan 31 there were almost 9,800 infections worldwide and 213 people had already died...(5) The WHO officially declared it a pandemic on March 11. That said, if a group had initially started out to create and release a virus for nefarious ends, how would they have done it differently to bring about their diabolical plans any better? But as I have seen countless times in the world of computer security, "it is almost never a hack;" but instead a stumble...usually programmers. For this to have been an intentional release, a LOT of people would have to have not stumbled by now. People are notoriously fallible. Although you've made a convincing case, I remain skeptical because most bad foul-ups occur as a result of an unlikely series of stumbles falling into an unlikely (bad luck) order. Thinking now of the fact that nearly all air disasters arise from a series of stumbles, with an occasional mechanical issue sprinkled in for good measure.
I watched the comments section on their pre-print before it was pulled and it reminded me of how Dr. Henrik Svensmark was treated at a scientific conference when he presented his sun spot cycles tied to global temperatures paper. Vicious. And to the best of my reading, the HIV insertions proved real...although odd that not much seems to have come of that finding. As a result, I missed your clear red flag finding of "major epidemic..." in the very first line no less. So, I emailed and asked them (didn't mention you). You'll never know if you don't try :)
So the options are zoonotic, leaked, spread, and there is no virus?
I might divide spread into intentional by agency, rogue or not, and intentional by individual, as in a kind of Malaysian flight 370. But I don't know how hard it would be to start a pandemic, maybe Daszak or Baric can chime in here.
"Why did researchers from India report the HIV “inserts” in SARS-CoV-2 so quickly?" Can you explain how a lab emphasizing research in systems and network biology engineering would be incapable of finding those HIV like inserts so quickly?
I smell disinfo!
I've heard from multiple credible sources that Covid-19's spike protein is practically IDENTICAL to that of the AIDs virus - which could only occur if it was artificially grafted on!
I guess it's just a further coincidence that the WIV was set up to study Covid and AIDs?
Of course it was released. The whole picture doesn’t fit together without an intentional release.
Yes, yes, yes but WHAT did they seed at multiple locations and times??
Means, motive, opportunity: means (it's a respiratory virus, so pretty simple) and opportunity (military games) I can see, but (discrete) motive stumps me.
Do you feel it's part of WEF et al's attempt to control tf out of everyone for whatever reason?
"...the framing of the controversy as only including these two alternatives thus ensures that both sides must miss the truth."
You mean like a false dichotomy? It feels like I've been running into a lot of those lately. They appear to be useful as an effective means of deception.
Great post. I love the twist at the end. The fact that I see it as a twist - that the best case against lab leak is intentional release and not animal origin - shows that the binary being presented (lab leak vs animal origin) had sunk in. Although I have leaned towards intentional release for awhile now.
I love nuance mongerer! 😄 So annoying!