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The Proximal paper was used by Chinese disinformation bots to skelch any debate about a lab leak. I take that as a Streisand effect. Same when Fauci strongly an
by EA_itsinthegame 4y ago
The Proximal paper was used by Chinese disinformation bots to skelch any debate about a lab leak. I take that as a Streisand effect. Same when Fauci strongly and publically rebuked the Indian bioinformatics pre-print paper talking of the GP-120 HIV inserts. That is how I came to know about those inserts and their interesting history.
So strangely, the grossly unscientific propaganda effort that was the Proximal Origins paper may have had the reverse effects, at least, it had on me.
Anyone contributing to this virology conspiracy (why they were put in charge to lead the investigation and theory building, and not the way more qualified biosecurity experts?), including voluntarily, like Angie Rasmussen, has Chinese propaganda tainted blood on their hands.
- xadhominemx 4y agoWhat’s your scientific criticism of the paper?
- fortuna86 4y agoAlso, it's not either/or. COVID could have come from nature, captured and studied in a lab, then escaped.
- shadowgovt 4y agoIndeed. It could also have come from nature and while it was being studied in the lab, a similar strain made a jump to humans.
- xadhominemx 4y agoDid you click on the link and read the thread?
- fortuna86 4y agoYes but in that case, why would it emerge in Wuhan, hundreds of miles away from Southern China, where Coronaviruses actually exist in nature ?
- shadowgovt 4y agoVehicular transportation is quite fast these days.
- mikeyouse 4y agoI'm not sure where people developed this idea that coronaviruses don't exist near Wuhan. I've corrected it like a dozen times in this thread, but there are absolutely horseshoe bats in Hubei and there are absolutely coronaviruses in those bats -- including some close ancestors to SarsCov2. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711/figures/1 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711/figures/1 See the RF1 and RM1 in the bottom chart? Sars-like bat coronaviruses from Hubei Province!
- fortuna86 4y agoThanks for the correction. So some coronaviruses have been found in nature in Hubei, but surely in rural areas correct? Why would the center of a dense city like Wuhan be the epicenter for an outbreak (according to the official story a wet market that contained no bats walking distance from the Wuhan laboratory), and not an area where bats exist?
- tripletao 4y agoYou were mistaken to say just "coronaviruses" instead of "the greatest diversity of sarbecoviruses", but your comment was otherwise in line with the pre-pandemic consensus--no one expected spillover in Wuhan. Dr. Zhengli Shi, whose research is at the heart of this controversy, wrote in an interview: > We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province. https://web.archive.org/web/20201206204844/https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli%20Q%26A.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20201206204844/https://www.scien... That said, it's no surprise that SARS-CoV-2 first emerged in a city, since it spreads most effectively in dense crowds. Even if spillover occurred in a small village, it's unlikely that enough people would die for anyone to notice until the virus reached a dense city--the virus's IFR isn't that high, and people die of other respiratory diseases every day. There's just no specific reason to expect that city would be Wuhan. SARS-1 also emerged in a city far from the bat caves; but in that case, infected animals sold in markets there were identified, and the supply chain for those animals led back to likely bat spillover regions. For SARS-CoV-2, no such evidence has yet been found, despite much greater effort to search. That's not proof of unnatural origin, and there are other viruses for which the proximal host isn't known (e.g. Ebola); but that's different from both SARS-1 and MERS.
- warning26 4y agoConsidering this literally happened before at the Wuhan lab (among a group of sample collectors), this is, I think, the most likely scenario.
- fortuna86 4y agoI agree. What is the previous case you mentioned, do you have a citation ?
- warning26 4y agoAh, of course! I was thinking of this incident specifically, though it seems I remembered the details wrong; the miners who died seemingly did so before the WIV got involved: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/chinas-mojiang-mine-its-role-origins-covid-19-2021-06-09/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... > From 2012 to 2015, WIV researchers identified as many as 293 coronaviruses in and around the mine. (...) The institute in November 2020 disclosed the existence of eight other "SARS-type" coronavirus samples taken from the site.
- fortuna86 4y ago> Since the middle of last year, Li's postgraduate thesis has been circulated online as purported evidence that a coronavirus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 could have been infecting humans as early as 2012. > Some also believe the paper provides circumstantial evidence for broader allegations that WIV had captured, studied and conducted "gain of function" experiments on viruses found in the mine, including RaTG13. Wow, thank you I haven't seen this before. If true, that's smoking gun stuff.
- ikrenji 4y agonot for wuhan but lab workers got infected with coronaviruses in the past... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/
- EA_itsinthegame 4y ago
- epgui 4y agoThat's not how you do scientific criticism. Your comment is unsubstantiated opinion/accusation.
- mw888 4y agoIt’s an order of magnitude more information than you or the other commenter provided. Saying: “Wrong, I don’t like that.” is saying nothing at all. Be specific you fool.
- SiempreViernes 4y agoIf you know anything about how arguments work, and you actually read the parent to the comment you attack you would see that saying "that's not actually how you do it" is a perfectly fair response. What EA_itsinthegame posted was a series of disconnected statements that only form a cohesive whole by virtue of the layout rules in a html rendering engine. It's certainly not anything approaching a criticism of the tweet thread as it never even manges to quote from it.
- epgui 4y ago> that only form a cohesive whole by virtue of the layout rules in a html rendering engine That got me laughing out loud in the elevator hahahaha, love it.
- epgui 4y agoTo be more specific, you will note that you actually have no idea if I liked it or not, because I didn't say anything about that.