With scant evidence of complicity in the origin of Covid, US scientists are being hounded over lesser misdemeanors. Meanwhile the TERRORISTS responsible have avoided any blame.
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?"
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.
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.
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).
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?
I find it difficult to follow your interpretation of Baric’s account. If you are right, why doesn’t he simply state that they never intended to insert a furin cleavage site? He could easily have clarified this misunderstanding. Instead, he states:
“It’s not like it’s portrayed in the news where researchers were going to take furin cleavage sites and just shotgun them into every coronavirus they could find until they found something happened. It was a systematic process that was initially designed. And it wasn’t just the furin site.”
So, they didn’t want to shotgun the furin cleavage sites in a naïve trial-and-error way, but as part of a systematic process. In my opinion, this is not consistent with your interpretation.
My interpretation is that they would introduce furin cleavage sites, but only if they already found a virus with one in nature. This is analogous to the Yang et al 2015, experiment where they have a virus (MERS, and also HKU5) with an FCS, and a related bat cov (HKU4) without an FCS.
In this work they introduce an FCS into HKU4 with a single substitution - not an insert. This is systematically introducing an FCS "where clear mismatches occur" as according to the wording in DEFUSE. But ofc there were no sarbecovs known at the time that had an FCS, so it was a big IF.
Your analysis is all over the shop but most strikingly, you have no concept of the evolutionary cycle of the virus. That alone means you lack proper perspective, which is why nothing you insinuate makes any sense. Most things you suggest or imply are simply not even a possibility - yet you determine these falsehoods as facts, and from that premise you develop your illogical theories.
Your CCP bioweapon hypothesis is easily ruled out by applying the basic principles in biology. If that's not enough, some common sense on the face of it, tells you SARS-CoV-2 it not a biological weapon invented by the Chinese. Your track record suggests you don't accept feedback or take criticism onboard, which indicates an incapacity to learn. So what's left for you from here? You don't answer questions and you don't provide answers.
Your analysis relies heavily on the assumption that the virus that spread is identical to the one that was engineered. However, there were selection steps, whether in laboratory animals or in humans, before the virus was analyzed.
Generally passage doesn't result in a huge number of changes (depending of course how many times it is done). E.g. with MERS MA30, 35 passages in mice resulted in just 2 spike mutations (one of these was quite significant as in the FCS). So we could assume a handful of mutations but that wouldn't materially alter my analysis.
There's another way to generate and select mutations at a much faster rate - directed evolution - and that's what I propose was used to engineer SARS-CoV-2. But it isn't in DEFUSE, and afaik the first time Baric was involved in such an experiment was in 2022.
Most claims about DEFUSE being the "blueprint" for SARS-CoV-2 are simply about the FCS. Others that it's a chimera. Both are true, but such experiments go back decades, aren't unique to DEFUSE. Neither did those experiments establish that introducing an FCS had any major impact on infectiousness.
I'm not really clear what you're getting at. Describe the scenario in which I'm wrong in more detail.
DEFUSE planned to add an FCS. The project involved Shi. It is hard not to make the connection. While there are likely other anomalies suggestive of manipulation elsewhere, Daszak was aware of them, given that he stated in his email that he had around a hundred novel coronaviruses.
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!
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.
Woah…that’s a lot to get through. I will get back to you soon!
- Thanks for that very erudite analysis - but I still admire both you and Ebright for keping up with the facts and analysing them
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.
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.
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).
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?
I find it difficult to follow your interpretation of Baric’s account. If you are right, why doesn’t he simply state that they never intended to insert a furin cleavage site? He could easily have clarified this misunderstanding. Instead, he states:
“It’s not like it’s portrayed in the news where researchers were going to take furin cleavage sites and just shotgun them into every coronavirus they could find until they found something happened. It was a systematic process that was initially designed. And it wasn’t just the furin site.”
So, they didn’t want to shotgun the furin cleavage sites in a naïve trial-and-error way, but as part of a systematic process. In my opinion, this is not consistent with your interpretation.
My interpretation is that they would introduce furin cleavage sites, but only if they already found a virus with one in nature. This is analogous to the Yang et al 2015, experiment where they have a virus (MERS, and also HKU5) with an FCS, and a related bat cov (HKU4) without an FCS.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4524054/
In this work they introduce an FCS into HKU4 with a single substitution - not an insert. This is systematically introducing an FCS "where clear mismatches occur" as according to the wording in DEFUSE. But ofc there were no sarbecovs known at the time that had an FCS, so it was a big IF.
Your analysis is all over the shop but most strikingly, you have no concept of the evolutionary cycle of the virus. That alone means you lack proper perspective, which is why nothing you insinuate makes any sense. Most things you suggest or imply are simply not even a possibility - yet you determine these falsehoods as facts, and from that premise you develop your illogical theories.
Your CCP bioweapon hypothesis is easily ruled out by applying the basic principles in biology. If that's not enough, some common sense on the face of it, tells you SARS-CoV-2 it not a biological weapon invented by the Chinese. Your track record suggests you don't accept feedback or take criticism onboard, which indicates an incapacity to learn. So what's left for you from here? You don't answer questions and you don't provide answers.
If you have an intelligent criticism, you're welcome to make it. But I can't respond to this offensive claptrap.
I suspect you're just angry and confused because your pet theory has been debunked.
Your analysis relies heavily on the assumption that the virus that spread is identical to the one that was engineered. However, there were selection steps, whether in laboratory animals or in humans, before the virus was analyzed.
Generally passage doesn't result in a huge number of changes (depending of course how many times it is done). E.g. with MERS MA30, 35 passages in mice resulted in just 2 spike mutations (one of these was quite significant as in the FCS). So we could assume a handful of mutations but that wouldn't materially alter my analysis.
There's another way to generate and select mutations at a much faster rate - directed evolution - and that's what I propose was used to engineer SARS-CoV-2. But it isn't in DEFUSE, and afaik the first time Baric was involved in such an experiment was in 2022.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9239201/
I am talking about the FCS, which is your evidence that DEFUSE was not involved.
Most claims about DEFUSE being the "blueprint" for SARS-CoV-2 are simply about the FCS. Others that it's a chimera. Both are true, but such experiments go back decades, aren't unique to DEFUSE. Neither did those experiments establish that introducing an FCS had any major impact on infectiousness.
I'm not really clear what you're getting at. Describe the scenario in which I'm wrong in more detail.
DEFUSE planned to add an FCS. The project involved Shi. It is hard not to make the connection. While there are likely other anomalies suggestive of manipulation elsewhere, Daszak was aware of them, given that he stated in his email that he had around a hundred novel coronaviruses.
Of course - that's why many people have made that connection. But I'm pointing out that:
-introducing an FCS isn't a new idea, has been done several before with SARS, HKU4 etc with varying effects observed.
-the way it was introduced (by insertion) isn't consistent with DEFUSE or prior experiments.
-Baric has twice in sworn testimony rejected that he would have done it in this way and there's no evidence he did.
Daszak's claims refer to RdRp only, not full genomes let alone live isolates. It's what's in Latinne et al.
1) The mutations in the FCS can be the consequence of natural selection of the engineered virus.
2) There is no reason to trust Baric, one of the suspects.
3) Daszak made a post on Twitter about many viruses, not just RdRp.