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Jun 11
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D. Janković's avatar

Yes, you're right, it is odd.

Murphy didn't know what he was talking about. Other than it was a way to "get Fauci" I can't think why he thought the DEFUSE document worth sending - especially after finding it in a Top Secret drive shared with the CIA etc. Even if unclassified such documents are treated as commercial-in-confidence at very least. And he wasn't disciplined for it either. On the contrary he was promoted to LTCOL shortly afterwards. It was by an unusual coincidence he was at DARPA. He was awarded a one-year fellowship starting August 2020, the only Marine officer placed there - despite being a combat commander with no science/technology background.

"The word "masked" was italicized, but I don't know why. Did Murphy think that the civets were literally wearing face masks? So was he saying that if the aerosolized vaccine worked against masked civets, then it would also work against masked humans?"

lol at this!

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Jun 11
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D. Janković's avatar

I suspect some with extreme theories like Kingston are planted to tarnish those with more reasonable vaccine safety concerns and/or artificial origin theories as nutters.

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Jun 10Edited
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D. Janković's avatar

Woah…that’s a lot to get through. I will get back to you soon!

Adrian Gibbs's avatar

- Thanks for that very erudite analysis - but I still admire both you and Ebright for keping up with the facts and analysing them

D. Janković's avatar

TBC - I don’t hate Ebright, but I wish I could read his analysis somewhere that was more substantial than just one-liners on Twitter.

D. Janković's avatar

I have in past reached out to Ebright to ask him to consider my hypotheses. He responded that there was nothing worth considering other than the FCS - and only because that had been proposed in the DEFUSE document. After I objected, he blocked me.

An unscientific attitude imo. Motivated reasoning.

Alex Washburne's avatar

Ebright has lost all respect I used to have for him. He becomes fixated on scenarios and ideas that match his preconceived prejudices, and then becomes a boorish jerk, dismissing calm heads and sharper eyes from his orbit.

The answer to COVID origins is along the lines of what you’re reasoning here. For some reason, I have trouble believing you’re just some lowly bioinformatician - your analyses of alternatives and consideration of adversarial dynamics are far more robust than what they teach in academia.

As I may have mentioned, I’ve solved this issue to my satisfaction, with the exact intentions behind release lost in a fog of history or splatter of Zhou Yusen yet the intentions of R&D as clear as day, perhaps worried by the same MASP concerns of niche virologists of the day but not conducted to the knowledge of DEFUSE PIs (and thus their blanket rejections of a lab origin were shameful and ignorant, not conceited and willfully misleading).

D. Janković's avatar

Thanks for the encouragement Alex - hah- lowly bioinformatician!

I actually think Ebright's ideas around funding priorities merit discussion. It's a shame he doesn't do some analysis and write a thoughtful opinion piece instead of wantonly accusing colleagues of mass murder. How is this guy a scientist?