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 have yet to read your reply to my reply, and am on the way out the door - but your bringing up of the difference in closeness as being "just math" prompted me to do a manual sequence align. I hadn't considered comparing the sequences before since I was previously just thinking of RatG13 as a potentially fake sequence. Here are the alignments, you can see that WIV would have had to do a lot of work to "gain of BANAL" the RatG13 spike receptor binding domain in order to come up with SARS-CoV-2 from it (especially around 23,000 / 450, which is where you get a sea of red bold):
I admit that is convincing. But as I mentioned in my other reply, that would still only prove RATG13 is not the direct ancestor. But none of the BANAL viruses itself is also suited as direct ancestor. So we still have not found our ancestor then.
The problem is also that Anderson and his team made themselves completely untrustworthy by faking the natural origin story, and clearly spewing smoke.
And the Chinese lied about everything they could possibly lie about too, so we just have to assume they have lied, if they happen to have RATG13's sibling. In fact if you think about it, in a way it makes more sense. If they would have used RATG13, why would they have made it public? I always believed they panicked and just hoped that the natural wetmarket would stick if they showed a natural COVUD-19 ancestor, but perhaps it was a more nefarious strawman.
Then again, perhaps it is in the Boy Cried Wolf story, that final time it truly was a wolf.
Just kidding, of course: the cleavage, HIV sequences and reversed transcribed 'Moderna' sequence alone make it almost certainly lab based of course. But I must admit, the mystery is likely a bit deeper than RATG13 to COVID-19. But I still think the Laos-US angle is too farfetched.
But I'll keep supporting your writer's room of course!
I got swamped this weekend, and don't remember the order of comments very well at this point. I just wanted to note an important "double standard, but for a good reason" element at play in RaTG13 vs. BANAL. This is halfway a note to self.
RaTG13 was in the lab. Supposedly just as a bunch of RNA on a swab. But if it was an isolate or (theoretical) "infectious clone" / DNA<>virus platform, then it is semi-fixed to the sequence. There is no "swarm." If you shoot a bunch of mutations at that sequence with a shotgun, they should be (somewhat) "random." If those mutations led from RaTG13 to SARS-CoV-2, only ~2% x 1/3 of them should be reversions to background, let alone introduce a BANAL nucleotide. So the huge number of "reversions" and/or acquisition of BANAL consensus means SARS-CoV-2 didn't come from RaTG13 as uploaded by WIV, so this sequence is not evidence WIV was working on the progenitor.
Whereas the Temmam, et al. BANAL sequences are just individuals in a whole world of virus. So there is nothing remarkable about reversions "appearing" in SC2 - this could just mean that the sample they found was "degenerate" of the BANAL swarms, especially if SC2 was descendent from an isolate years before 2019. So here the mutation shotgun is randomly deforming BANAL, not randomly adding form to SC2. In the same vein, "BANAL-related" doesn't really describe a fixed limit of relatedness since we don't know how rich / diverse the fauna is. I do think my language in the "defending" post was too concrete, though.
Unfortunately, my writers' room feels that unless I maintain my obsession with "GOF bad" being the real red herring, major plot themes will evaporate and ratings will plummet.
"April 2020 they had even isolated it from its bad poop" Ref to Massey, SE https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2111/2111.09469.pdf ? If so, thanks for the reminder - I forgot that this one contradicts the claim that there was never any isolation and will craft a correction later today.
Still, the BANAL / RaTG contro seems unresolved. Did WIV *also* implant BANAL's BsaI/BsmBI restriction sites into RatG without even having any BANAL genomes in their library? If BANAL were, instead of the backbone, an RS-map donor for the RaTG backbone, that still sounds like a third party trying to frame WIV.
"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." Administrative volatility in democracies is precisely what localizes power and reduces oversight to the deep state. Pre-WWI France, for example:
"But the relative independence of the ministry did not necessarily confer power and autonomy upon the minister. French foreign ministers tended to be weak, *weaker indeed than their own ministerial staff.* One reason for this was the relatively rapid turnover of ministers, a consequence of the perennially high levels of political turbulence in pre-war France. Between 1 January 1913 and the outbreak of war, for example, there were no fewer than six different foreign ministers. Ministerial office was a more transitory and less important stage in the life cycle of French politicians than in Britain, Germany or Austria-Hungary. [...]
Things changed after [longer-serving, more influential minister Théophile] Delcassé’s departure at the height of the first Moroccan crisis. His successors were less forceful and authoritative figures. Maurice Rouvier and Léon Bourgeois occupied the minister’s post for only ten and seven months respectively; Stéphen Pichon had a longer spell, from October 1906 to March 1911, but he abhorred regular hard work and was often absent from his desk in the Quai d’Orsay. The result was a steady rise in the influence of the Centrale.57 By 1911, two factional groupings had coalesced within the world of French foreign affairs. On the one side were the old ambassadors and their allies within the administration, who tended to favour détente with Germany and a pragmatic, open-ended approach to France’s foreign relations. On the other were the ‘Young Turks’, as Jules Cambon called them, of the Centrale. The ambassadors wielded the authority of age and the experience acquired over long years in the field. The men of the Centrale, on the other hand, possessed formidable institutional and structural advantages. They could issue press releases, they controlled the transmission of official documents, and above all, they had access to the cabinet noir within the ministerial office – a small but important department responsible for opening letters and intercepting and deciphering diplomatic traffic." Clark, The Sleepwalkers
Putting in new bosses every week, as democracies are wont to do, gives the "peons" the reigns.
I don't understand the reference to BsaI/BsmBI. As I understand, both RATG and BANAL-52 have mutations versus COVID-19 between the BsaI/BsmBI sites. BANAL-52 is technically a bit closer, as it differs in less mutations, but nothing spectacular. 9 vs 7 sites if I remember correct. But in both cases all mutations were silent mutations.
Or are you referring to the three unique sites from BANAL-247 and BANAL-113? That is a good point, but in reverse these two are further away than RATG13 in terms of genetic delta.
The way I always looked at it, is that what was changed from either BANAL-52 or RATG13 towards COVID-19 is far greater than what separates them from each other.
Of course, it is possible RATG13 is not COVID-19 pre-manipulation host. Perhaps it is one of the many other WIV collected and never published. After all BANAL and RATG13 are siblings and have many other sisters. That is what BANAL proved in fact; that there is a huge family. And that is obviously not just in Laos, but the entire region there from Laos to south China.
But if I miss something, please educate me. I'm willing to change my mind.
RatG13 lacks the BsmI/BsmBI sites near the 1886, 9853, 23827 marks on the map Anderson tweeted back in November (note I don't know where the exact sites are because figuring out complementary sequences trips me up). So these sites are in the BANAL family, and in SARS-CoV-2. not RaTG13. As with the RBD genes in my alignment what would have to happen is WIV imported all these genes from BANAL onto RaTG13. Yes, they could have just had a BANAL and being at work at that, but so could any lab anywhere in the world. RaTG13 isn't evidence they had or were working on BANAL so it isn't evidence they worked on something that became SARS-CoV-2.
But the problem is these sites are not present in any single BANAL specimen. So it doesn't make the Laos connection any stronger.
After all, this would just suggest the COVID-19 ancestor is something that is a recombination of various viruses that are related to BANAL. For instance a set of viruses in the same Chinese caves where RATG13 was found by WIV.
(Plus that many of the mutations may just have occurred as a consequence of the RATG13 to COVID-19 work. The mutations are so small after all, and we don't know what drove them in the first plave. Although I admit that is outside my expertise.)
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.
Thank you for the excellent reply. Yes, WIV is fewer parts - but that’s why it’s easy to verify, however imperfectly, that the claim of guilt doesn’t seem like plausible. Sure, files were deleted or whatever, hubbubs were hubbubbed. Doesn’t strike me as something that *only* happens in China when novel viruses appear.
I suppose my Pradhan et al. Argument requires more nuance. What also strikes me as a problem is that just because lots of HIV vaccine dev might result in this signature, doesn’t mean it should be expected in a virus that escapes a lab, unless that lab was working on a self-transmitting vax, and this doesn’t point to WIV and isn’t well-described by “gain of function” - you can’t apply that to overt, intentional virus dev without saying “intentional”
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.
That’s fine - there should still be alignment between “virus of interest” because low frequency high potential spikes were supposed to get grafted onto whatever the researchers considered the corresponding high frequency “backbone”- otherwise you would have emails like “Baric, where did you get *this* backbone, it’s not in our existing “SARS-1-like” roster. And if China is really worried about proving anything we would have seen those emails — literal smoking guns on UNC. So it’s unlikely SC2 was shipped from UNC to WIV for further tinkering followed by oopsie.
Edit: put another way, WIV had their remit, and they were making extremely slow progress on it, centered on some SARS-1 like constructs such as “WIV-1.” They were in a productive quagmire on these constructs. If a fully-formed zombie screenplay arrives on your desk in the morning, the least likely writer in the world to have produced it is the one you know was still bogged down in act I of an alien movie for the last three years. Even more true for an organization - any other lab could more easily have made SARS-CoV-2 from scratch than Daszak or Baric could have gotten WIV to shift gears
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.
Appreciate the follow-up. Busy but my rushed reply is the text is probably going to be older than the upload date. Could the intro have been the last thing written, with the work on BLASTing initiated when there were fewer cases? Maybe..
Wow! They replied. Here it is........."A simple search on the internet would reveal that by March 2020, WHO had already designated SARS Cov2 as a pandemic.
Before that there were newspaper reports of rapid spread of this disease.
On 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the current outbreak of the novel coronavirus 2019‐nCoV, which was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan on 31 December 2019, a “public health emergency of international concern”—an alarm it reserves for events that pose a risk to multiple countries and which requires a coordinated international response. (Please see this paper by - Wu D, Wu T, Liu Q, Yang Z. The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak: What we know. Int J Infect Dis. 2020 May;94:44-48. doi: 10.1016/j.ijid.2020.03.004. Epub 2020 Mar 12. PMID: 32171952; PMCID: PMC7102543).
By the time we reported, we had this WHO information just came in. Moreover, Cases of mild to severe illness, and death from the infection have been reported from Wuhan. The number of cases within and outside China were increasing steeply. By the time our report came the outbreak had spread rapidly to distant nations including France, Australia and USA among others.
A provocative reply. "[W]e had this WHO information just came in" does suggest that "major epidemic" was a last-minute addition. OTOH, it's not exactly inconsistent with a scheduled upload either, haha.
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.
Yes, I keep forgetting to acknowledge that possibility. Given the left-field source material (ie NW Laos bat viruses), the weird easter eggs all over the original sequence (ie reverse Moderna patent sequence in the FCS) could be some creative hacker type intelligence behind the whole thing. But then was the Military Games, Kadlec's appointment and conducting of "Crimson Contagion" in the months before then, all just accidental gifts on the part of US gov? Unclear what is plausible there
If this was all planned, then we are in for some serious trouble indeed. I lean more towards human nature, human fallibilities, and unseen momentum/eddies. That said, I'm not negating intentional, and even nefarious, aims here. I'm just not comfortable enough to commit to the big one :). Not sure if "a fully planned release" is what you are proposing or not. If you are, what do you speculate their motives to have been? The virus was clearly uncontainable and, for the most part (Peru being the odd exception), doesn't appear genetically targetive. So, I'm not sure who benefits here unless there's a get out of jail free card (i.e. behind the curtain pre-release, sterilizing vaccine).
"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?
How about, why were they describing SARS-CoV-2 as a "major epidemic" in January 31? Were they fortune tellers? Are there genetic analysis pre-prints for the monkeypox "major epidemic" back when it was still a trickle of cases?
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?
Nonsense. Go to PubMed and search on "HIV SARS". I get over 4000 results. Granted I have not read the abstracts. But HIV has been studied for 40+ years. To include inserting its gene sequences into other viruses and to see what would happen.
This is my time reading one of your articles. But you seem to be arguing that such research was not being done at WIV.
While I admit I don't know for a fact that HIV was being studied there, we do have quite the paper trail that they were doing GoF research, so why not throw HIV into the mix? We also know they were doing some research under contract via EcoHealth.
It's quite possible that, out of the myriad research papers out there, there are one or more that show that WIV worked with HIV, although perhaps not specifically with the SARS type viruses.
Unless I've totally misread you, you don't seem to have any problem thinking that SARS-CoV-2 is of artificial origin. Why, then, would it be surprising that it had features such as HIV inserts?
Yes, the DOD's DEFUSE research (to combine the HIV & SARS viruses) was farmed out to China - owing to legal restrictions on gain-of-function research in America.
DEFUSE is not DOD, it's Daszak writing a welfare application for Ecohealth. The only sentence that has any resemblance to reality is at the bottom of page 3, "We are requesting $14,209,245 total funds for this project across 3.5 project years"
There's no "put HIV epitopes onto spike" anywhere. It's just a lot of spaghetti-at-the-wall descriptions of assays to justify a price tag for milking the government.
Where was SARS-CoV-2 designed - any lab, anywhere. You don't need WIV. It's an extra part to distract you and you are lapping it up
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?
Motive is hard to guess because one suggests extreme stupidity (magically self-contained attack on Chinese economy) and one extreme sagacity (global lockdown with "GOF bad" as the patsy).
Not only one motive, but multiple motives. Yes, it is an experiment for transhumanism, but also for depopulation, individual control and nanotechnologies.
Not to mention an unparalled opportunity for some unscrupolous people to make a shitload of money and practice dictatorial powers. A live fire simulation, if you like, for possibly bigger operations in the future. If millions of people were sickened and killed, what of it?
Some percentage of vials loaded with graphene has been introduced into the population as identified by at least eight different laboratories around the world using sophisticated electron spectroscopy which has revealed self assembling nano particles in live video observations in the presence of WI-FI EMFs & RFs. Citations can be found through varied platforms, including via Dr Ana Maria Mihalcea’s substack
Other laboratories have detected the lipid nano particles which cloak the PEGs that cause genetic editing, including reverse transcription into DNA alterations. Once the DNA has been permanently altered to express the intended outcome, you can say the the person has become a “genetically modified organism” (GMO). Both of these technologies are now being introduced into the human population through voluntary self experimentation. Detection menthols are being introduced through the self assembling graphene oxide nanoparticles. You can also find a great deal on the patents for these technologies via Karen Kingston’s substack
"...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.
The term didn't feel appropriate since it's not clear if the dichotomy is being forced, or if it's self-policing on both the "serious" and the "counter-serious" (eg DRASTIC) sides to not go out of lane
I see -- I hadn't thought about it in quite those terms. I am still learning to parse this stuff. And I am starting to wonder about many things I have long believed, those things that I may never have properly reexamined. This is all so strange.
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 have yet to read your reply to my reply, and am on the way out the door - but your bringing up of the difference in closeness as being "just math" prompted me to do a manual sequence align. I hadn't considered comparing the sequences before since I was previously just thinking of RatG13 as a potentially fake sequence. Here are the alignments, you can see that WIV would have had to do a lot of work to "gain of BANAL" the RatG13 spike receptor binding domain in order to come up with SARS-CoV-2 from it (especially around 23,000 / 450, which is where you get a sea of red bold):
https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/0e5h8kSD_iLK_N0IPWL9XWsTw#sequence_map_sarscov2_aligns_share
I admit that is convincing. But as I mentioned in my other reply, that would still only prove RATG13 is not the direct ancestor. But none of the BANAL viruses itself is also suited as direct ancestor. So we still have not found our ancestor then.
The problem is also that Anderson and his team made themselves completely untrustworthy by faking the natural origin story, and clearly spewing smoke.
And the Chinese lied about everything they could possibly lie about too, so we just have to assume they have lied, if they happen to have RATG13's sibling. In fact if you think about it, in a way it makes more sense. If they would have used RATG13, why would they have made it public? I always believed they panicked and just hoped that the natural wetmarket would stick if they showed a natural COVUD-19 ancestor, but perhaps it was a more nefarious strawman.
Then again, perhaps it is in the Boy Cried Wolf story, that final time it truly was a wolf.
Just kidding, of course: the cleavage, HIV sequences and reversed transcribed 'Moderna' sequence alone make it almost certainly lab based of course. But I must admit, the mystery is likely a bit deeper than RATG13 to COVID-19. But I still think the Laos-US angle is too farfetched.
But I'll keep supporting your writer's room of course!
I got swamped this weekend, and don't remember the order of comments very well at this point. I just wanted to note an important "double standard, but for a good reason" element at play in RaTG13 vs. BANAL. This is halfway a note to self.
RaTG13 was in the lab. Supposedly just as a bunch of RNA on a swab. But if it was an isolate or (theoretical) "infectious clone" / DNA<>virus platform, then it is semi-fixed to the sequence. There is no "swarm." If you shoot a bunch of mutations at that sequence with a shotgun, they should be (somewhat) "random." If those mutations led from RaTG13 to SARS-CoV-2, only ~2% x 1/3 of them should be reversions to background, let alone introduce a BANAL nucleotide. So the huge number of "reversions" and/or acquisition of BANAL consensus means SARS-CoV-2 didn't come from RaTG13 as uploaded by WIV, so this sequence is not evidence WIV was working on the progenitor.
Whereas the Temmam, et al. BANAL sequences are just individuals in a whole world of virus. So there is nothing remarkable about reversions "appearing" in SC2 - this could just mean that the sample they found was "degenerate" of the BANAL swarms, especially if SC2 was descendent from an isolate years before 2019. So here the mutation shotgun is randomly deforming BANAL, not randomly adding form to SC2. In the same vein, "BANAL-related" doesn't really describe a fixed limit of relatedness since we don't know how rich / diverse the fauna is. I do think my language in the "defending" post was too concrete, though.
Unfortunately, my writers' room feels that unless I maintain my obsession with "GOF bad" being the real red herring, major plot themes will evaporate and ratings will plummet.
"April 2020 they had even isolated it from its bad poop" Ref to Massey, SE https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2111/2111.09469.pdf ? If so, thanks for the reminder - I forgot that this one contradicts the claim that there was never any isolation and will craft a correction later today.
Still, the BANAL / RaTG contro seems unresolved. Did WIV *also* implant BANAL's BsaI/BsmBI restriction sites into RatG without even having any BANAL genomes in their library? If BANAL were, instead of the backbone, an RS-map donor for the RaTG backbone, that still sounds like a third party trying to frame WIV.
"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." Administrative volatility in democracies is precisely what localizes power and reduces oversight to the deep state. Pre-WWI France, for example:
"But the relative independence of the ministry did not necessarily confer power and autonomy upon the minister. French foreign ministers tended to be weak, *weaker indeed than their own ministerial staff.* One reason for this was the relatively rapid turnover of ministers, a consequence of the perennially high levels of political turbulence in pre-war France. Between 1 January 1913 and the outbreak of war, for example, there were no fewer than six different foreign ministers. Ministerial office was a more transitory and less important stage in the life cycle of French politicians than in Britain, Germany or Austria-Hungary. [...]
Things changed after [longer-serving, more influential minister Théophile] Delcassé’s departure at the height of the first Moroccan crisis. His successors were less forceful and authoritative figures. Maurice Rouvier and Léon Bourgeois occupied the minister’s post for only ten and seven months respectively; Stéphen Pichon had a longer spell, from October 1906 to March 1911, but he abhorred regular hard work and was often absent from his desk in the Quai d’Orsay. The result was a steady rise in the influence of the Centrale.57 By 1911, two factional groupings had coalesced within the world of French foreign affairs. On the one side were the old ambassadors and their allies within the administration, who tended to favour détente with Germany and a pragmatic, open-ended approach to France’s foreign relations. On the other were the ‘Young Turks’, as Jules Cambon called them, of the Centrale. The ambassadors wielded the authority of age and the experience acquired over long years in the field. The men of the Centrale, on the other hand, possessed formidable institutional and structural advantages. They could issue press releases, they controlled the transmission of official documents, and above all, they had access to the cabinet noir within the ministerial office – a small but important department responsible for opening letters and intercepting and deciphering diplomatic traffic." Clark, The Sleepwalkers
Putting in new bosses every week, as democracies are wont to do, gives the "peons" the reigns.
I don't understand the reference to BsaI/BsmBI. As I understand, both RATG and BANAL-52 have mutations versus COVID-19 between the BsaI/BsmBI sites. BANAL-52 is technically a bit closer, as it differs in less mutations, but nothing spectacular. 9 vs 7 sites if I remember correct. But in both cases all mutations were silent mutations.
Or are you referring to the three unique sites from BANAL-247 and BANAL-113? That is a good point, but in reverse these two are further away than RATG13 in terms of genetic delta.
The way I always looked at it, is that what was changed from either BANAL-52 or RATG13 towards COVID-19 is far greater than what separates them from each other.
Of course, it is possible RATG13 is not COVID-19 pre-manipulation host. Perhaps it is one of the many other WIV collected and never published. After all BANAL and RATG13 are siblings and have many other sisters. That is what BANAL proved in fact; that there is a huge family. And that is obviously not just in Laos, but the entire region there from Laos to south China.
But if I miss something, please educate me. I'm willing to change my mind.
RatG13 lacks the BsmI/BsmBI sites near the 1886, 9853, 23827 marks on the map Anderson tweeted back in November (note I don't know where the exact sites are because figuring out complementary sequences trips me up). So these sites are in the BANAL family, and in SARS-CoV-2. not RaTG13. As with the RBD genes in my alignment what would have to happen is WIV imported all these genes from BANAL onto RaTG13. Yes, they could have just had a BANAL and being at work at that, but so could any lab anywhere in the world. RaTG13 isn't evidence they had or were working on BANAL so it isn't evidence they worked on something that became SARS-CoV-2.
But the problem is these sites are not present in any single BANAL specimen. So it doesn't make the Laos connection any stronger.
After all, this would just suggest the COVID-19 ancestor is something that is a recombination of various viruses that are related to BANAL. For instance a set of viruses in the same Chinese caves where RATG13 was found by WIV.
(Plus that many of the mutations may just have occurred as a consequence of the RATG13 to COVID-19 work. The mutations are so small after all, and we don't know what drove them in the first plave. Although I admit that is outside my expertise.)
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
Thank you for the excellent reply. Yes, WIV is fewer parts - but that’s why it’s easy to verify, however imperfectly, that the claim of guilt doesn’t seem like plausible. Sure, files were deleted or whatever, hubbubs were hubbubbed. Doesn’t strike me as something that *only* happens in China when novel viruses appear.
I suppose my Pradhan et al. Argument requires more nuance. What also strikes me as a problem is that just because lots of HIV vaccine dev might result in this signature, doesn’t mean it should be expected in a virus that escapes a lab, unless that lab was working on a self-transmitting vax, and this doesn’t point to WIV and isn’t well-described by “gain of function” - you can’t apply that to overt, intentional virus dev without saying “intentional”
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.
That’s fine - there should still be alignment between “virus of interest” because low frequency high potential spikes were supposed to get grafted onto whatever the researchers considered the corresponding high frequency “backbone”- otherwise you would have emails like “Baric, where did you get *this* backbone, it’s not in our existing “SARS-1-like” roster. And if China is really worried about proving anything we would have seen those emails — literal smoking guns on UNC. So it’s unlikely SC2 was shipped from UNC to WIV for further tinkering followed by oopsie.
Edit: put another way, WIV had their remit, and they were making extremely slow progress on it, centered on some SARS-1 like constructs such as “WIV-1.” They were in a productive quagmire on these constructs. If a fully-formed zombie screenplay arrives on your desk in the morning, the least likely writer in the world to have produced it is the one you know was still bogged down in act I of an alien movie for the last three years. Even more true for an organization - any other lab could more easily have made SARS-CoV-2 from scratch than Daszak or Baric could have gotten WIV to shift gears
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.
Appreciate the follow-up. Busy but my rushed reply is the text is probably going to be older than the upload date. Could the intro have been the last thing written, with the work on BLASTing initiated when there were fewer cases? Maybe..
Wow! They replied. Here it is........."A simple search on the internet would reveal that by March 2020, WHO had already designated SARS Cov2 as a pandemic.
Before that there were newspaper reports of rapid spread of this disease.
On 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the current outbreak of the novel coronavirus 2019‐nCoV, which was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan on 31 December 2019, a “public health emergency of international concern”—an alarm it reserves for events that pose a risk to multiple countries and which requires a coordinated international response. (Please see this paper by - Wu D, Wu T, Liu Q, Yang Z. The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak: What we know. Int J Infect Dis. 2020 May;94:44-48. doi: 10.1016/j.ijid.2020.03.004. Epub 2020 Mar 12. PMID: 32171952; PMCID: PMC7102543).
By the time we reported, we had this WHO information just came in. Moreover, Cases of mild to severe illness, and death from the infection have been reported from Wuhan. The number of cases within and outside China were increasing steeply. By the time our report came the outbreak had spread rapidly to distant nations including France, Australia and USA among others.
I hope this satisfies your query.
Best wishes,
B. Kundu"
A provocative reply. "[W]e had this WHO information just came in" does suggest that "major epidemic" was a last-minute addition. OTOH, it's not exactly inconsistent with a scheduled upload either, haha.
True
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.
Yes, I keep forgetting to acknowledge that possibility. Given the left-field source material (ie NW Laos bat viruses), the weird easter eggs all over the original sequence (ie reverse Moderna patent sequence in the FCS) could be some creative hacker type intelligence behind the whole thing. But then was the Military Games, Kadlec's appointment and conducting of "Crimson Contagion" in the months before then, all just accidental gifts on the part of US gov? Unclear what is plausible there
If this was all planned, then we are in for some serious trouble indeed. I lean more towards human nature, human fallibilities, and unseen momentum/eddies. That said, I'm not negating intentional, and even nefarious, aims here. I'm just not comfortable enough to commit to the big one :). Not sure if "a fully planned release" is what you are proposing or not. If you are, what do you speculate their motives to have been? The virus was clearly uncontainable and, for the most part (Peru being the odd exception), doesn't appear genetically targetive. So, I'm not sure who benefits here unless there's a get out of jail free card (i.e. behind the curtain pre-release, sterilizing vaccine).
"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?
How about, why were they describing SARS-CoV-2 as a "major epidemic" in January 31? Were they fortune tellers? Are there genetic analysis pre-prints for the monkeypox "major epidemic" back when it was still a trickle of cases?
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?
Backwards. HIV resemblance points away from WIV and towards USA, that's the whole point, you're lost
Nonsense. Go to PubMed and search on "HIV SARS". I get over 4000 results. Granted I have not read the abstracts. But HIV has been studied for 40+ years. To include inserting its gene sequences into other viruses and to see what would happen.
This is my time reading one of your articles. But you seem to be arguing that such research was not being done at WIV.
While I admit I don't know for a fact that HIV was being studied there, we do have quite the paper trail that they were doing GoF research, so why not throw HIV into the mix? We also know they were doing some research under contract via EcoHealth.
It's quite possible that, out of the myriad research papers out there, there are one or more that show that WIV worked with HIV, although perhaps not specifically with the SARS type viruses.
PubMed: search 2019 and earlier, "HIV Wuhan" yieleds > 500 hits.
Unless I've totally misread you, you don't seem to have any problem thinking that SARS-CoV-2 is of artificial origin. Why, then, would it be surprising that it had features such as HIV inserts?
Yes, the DOD's DEFUSE research (to combine the HIV & SARS viruses) was farmed out to China - owing to legal restrictions on gain-of-function research in America.
So, where WAS it produced? Idiot.
DEFUSE is not DOD, it's Daszak writing a welfare application for Ecohealth. The only sentence that has any resemblance to reality is at the bottom of page 3, "We are requesting $14,209,245 total funds for this project across 3.5 project years"
Just look at it for yourself, stop passing off other people's word as your own opinion and then being upset I am unimpressed at the result of your non-effort https://assets.ctfassets.net/syq3snmxclc9/4NFC6M83ewzKLf6DvAygb4/0cf477f75646e718afb332b7ac6c3cd1/defuse-proposal_watermark_Redacted.pdf
There's no "put HIV epitopes onto spike" anywhere. It's just a lot of spaghetti-at-the-wall descriptions of assays to justify a price tag for milking the government.
Where was SARS-CoV-2 designed - any lab, anywhere. You don't need WIV. It's an extra part to distract you and you are lapping it up
Shut your front-bum.
https://banned.video/watch?id=61e85d6d67828c03950c7e7e
https://www.jiosaavn.com/shows/EcoHealth-VP:-Fauci%E2%80%99s-Buddy-Peter-Daszak-Works-for-CIA/YVnm-cVh,c0_
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??
Sequences argue a transmissible coronavirus.So either sequences are fake, or it was a transmissible coronavirus.
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?
Motive is hard to guess because one suggests extreme stupidity (magically self-contained attack on Chinese economy) and one extreme sagacity (global lockdown with "GOF bad" as the patsy).
It was world-wide, so the conspiracy is massive. Or do you envision a way of doing it with a small cadre of dedicated travellers?
And so far no (conspiracy) leaks. Kinda freaky to think they finally cracked the "human" element of leaks - both technological and social.
Not only one motive, but multiple motives. Yes, it is an experiment for transhumanism, but also for depopulation, individual control and nanotechnologies.
Not to mention an unparalled opportunity for some unscrupolous people to make a shitload of money and practice dictatorial powers. A live fire simulation, if you like, for possibly bigger operations in the future. If millions of people were sickened and killed, what of it?
Absolutely!
How is it an experiment for transhumanism?
How is it an experiment for nanotechnologies?
Some percentage of vials loaded with graphene has been introduced into the population as identified by at least eight different laboratories around the world using sophisticated electron spectroscopy which has revealed self assembling nano particles in live video observations in the presence of WI-FI EMFs & RFs. Citations can be found through varied platforms, including via Dr Ana Maria Mihalcea’s substack
https://open.substack.com/pub/anamihalceamdphd/p/nanotechnology-used-by-military-for?r=pg5ml&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
or via Brighteon or via La Quinta Columna.
Other laboratories have detected the lipid nano particles which cloak the PEGs that cause genetic editing, including reverse transcription into DNA alterations. Once the DNA has been permanently altered to express the intended outcome, you can say the the person has become a “genetically modified organism” (GMO). Both of these technologies are now being introduced into the human population through voluntary self experimentation. Detection menthols are being introduced through the self assembling graphene oxide nanoparticles. You can also find a great deal on the patents for these technologies via Karen Kingston’s substack
https://open.substack.com/pub/karenkingston/p/dear-congress-ignoring-pfizers-bioweapon?r=pg5ml&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Using life force?
Is that like midichlorians?
Huh?
Your first link says there was no mRNA in the vaccines, the second link says an mRNA bioweapon was released.
It's confused af.
I see no evidence "self assembling" <anything>s are happening, using "bio photonic life force" to power themselves.
"artificial intelligence synthetic biology based on Hydrogel and metals"
"Light Medicine - A New Paradigm - The Science of Light, Spirit and Longevity"
It sounds like science fiction.
Midichlorians are the cells in your body that provide The Force, you know, from Star Wars. Science fiction.
"...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.
The term didn't feel appropriate since it's not clear if the dichotomy is being forced, or if it's self-policing on both the "serious" and the "counter-serious" (eg DRASTIC) sides to not go out of lane
I see -- I hadn't thought about it in quite those terms. I am still learning to parse this stuff. And I am starting to wonder about many things I have long believed, those things that I may never have properly reexamined. This is all so strange.
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!
Thanks!