(Mar 2, 2023 06:26 PM)C C Wrote: FBI Director supports the lab leak hypothesis, but there is no new evidence, and scientists still favor the spillover hypothesis.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/covid-l...ses-again/
EXCERPT: . . . It is worth pointing out, however, that the lab leak theory has its origins in a lab-created bioweapon theory.
Bullshit.
Its origin was the result of knowledge that the disease first appeared within a mile of China's top Level-4 virology laboratory, where it was known by many virologists that gain-of-function research (funded in part by the United States) was taking place. The stated goal of this research was to genetically engineer animal coronaviruses to be infectious to humans. (See the grant application for that research in post #1 above.)
The purpose of this research was to better understand why some animal viruses jump over to humans, while most don't. The researchers wanted to better understand what genetic changes in the viruses facilitated the crossover, so as to be better able to assess naturally occurring animal viruses for their pandemic potential.
Quote:Very early on, and continuing at least through 2022, some scientists and others were hypothesizing that the virus was bioengineered as a weapon, which may then have either been deliberately or accidentally released.
I suppose that some people hypothesized about that. The WIV was known to be doing research for the Chinese military as well as for the Americans. But I don't think that the bioweapon hypothesis was taken very seriously, largely because a highly infectious virus like this wouldn't confine itself to just infecting an enemy, but would spread worldwide and would infect China too.
So the emphasis was always on an accidental release of coronaviruses that had been engineered to be infectious to humans, for the best of motives. We already knew that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing precisely that. (Again, see the grant proposal in post #1.)
Quote:This question can be primarily answered by examining the virus itself, looking for telltale signs of bioengineering. The book is basically closed on this question.
The "book is basically closed" only in the minds of those whose minds have already closed, to those whose purpose has always explicitly been to silence the lab-leak theory. The authors of the 'proximate origin' paper admit it themselves: "Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any kind of lab theory." And after the initial draft of the paper was rejected by Nature on February 20 because it gave too much credence to what the journal editor called 'conspiracy theories', along with the demand that consideration of the lab-leak hypothesis be removed before the paper would be publishable in that journal, one of the scientists wrote "We really, really wish that we could do that (that's how this got started) but unfortunately it's just not possible given the data."
But despite the scientific-integrity scruples, the paper was rewritten and resubmitted to include the conclusion that, in Steven Novella's words, "the book is basically closed on this question", that the lab-leak theory was simply "not plausible".
(CC might be interested to know that Nature is owned by the same German publisher that owns Scientific American and very likely has similar "woke" editorial policies to those the publisher has imposed on the latter publication. Just more ideological corruption of science.)
Quote:the evidence strongly supports a natural (not bioengineered) origin for the virus.
Except that doesn't appear to be true. Multiple leading viologists have testified that genetically engineering a virus genome leaves no telltale traces. You just have the result and the problem of explaining how it originated. After all, the observed 'gain-of-function' might have originated in a laboratory by cut-and-pasting genes (I think the evidence might arguably point to that) or by successive passage through animal hosts, with the most infectious variants selected each time to infect the next group of animals. Forced evolution in other words. Virologists do that too.
Quote:It seems that some of the bioengineered conspiracy theorists migrated over to the lab leak hypothesis, contaminating the debate with conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, earnest proponents of the lab leak hypothesis bristle at any suggestion that they are conspiracy theorists. Fair enough – but they have to understand the history and recognize that the lab leak side is rife with conspiracy theories.
That's just Steven Novella's excuse for ignoring the fundamental basis of the lab-leak theory. Though it is probably quite indicative of what his own motivation is. Battling the conspiracy theorists and their "woo"!!!
Quote:If we put all that aside and just take a look at the scientific question – what does the evidence say about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 – there are basically two ways to address the question. The first stems from virology, tracing the genetic sequence of the various strains of SARS-CoV-2 and trying to draw the lines back to its origin. We can also compare the genetic sequence to the most closely related viruses to try to piece together where the virus came from.
OK, but that sounds like a single line of research to me. Compare the various covid variants and try to determine what the original variant looked like, then compare that reconstruction to naturally occurring viruses to determine the likelihood that one of them crossed over.
Which might be difficult if the WIV virologists were using a naturally occurring animal virus as their 'backbone' and then engineering changes in it to make it more infectious to humans. (Which they state they were doing in their grant application.) In which case, similarity between covid-19 and a naturally occurring animal virus wouldn't be evidence against the lab-leak hypothesis at all.
Quote:When we do this the evidence currently favors the interpretation that SARS-CoV-2 is a spillover virus, a coronavirus that infects animals that crossed over to humans either through mutations or combining genetic material from human-infecting viruses in order to be pathogenic against humans.
Except that despite extensive searches all over China and elsewhere, covid-19 has never been observed in animals. So if it spilled over from animals, where are the animals that it spilled over from? Covid-19 has only been found in humans, after it first appeared in Wuhan less than a mile from the virology laboratory.
What's more, covid-19 possesses particular genetic features that make it more infectious to humans, that have never been observed in other members of the same coronavirus family of which covid-19 is a member. It's true that those features are observed in different sorts of viruses, but there's no evidence of naturally occurring transfer of those features into covid-19-like viruses.
Quote:The best animal candidates for hosts of the virus origin are minks, red foxes, and racoon dogs,all of which are sold in the Wuhan wet market.
I believe that the best (albeit imperfect) genetic match has been found in viruses isolated from Chinese pangolins. These are an Asian species of anteater which isn't sold in the Wuhan wetmarket and whose range in the wild is some 600 miles away.
Quote:Epidemiological evidence also traces the first infections back to the wet market.
That's just speculative. And it doesn't exclude the possibility that an infected WIV worker visited the nearby wetmarket and spread the disease to other humans there.
Quote:For this reason this is the most popular hypothesis among scientists.
Steven Novella's own motivation seems to be combatting what he insultingly called "conspiracy theories" up above. As is typically the case with self-styled "skeptics", he seems to have already believed that he knew what the truth was, and saw it as his mission to suppress any opinion that disagreed with his.
I think that just from their own email conversations about what they hoped to accomplish, the scientists who wrote the 'proximate origins' paper in less than two weeks (they obviously didn't do any laboratory research of their own) have revealed themselves as having all kinds of motives that go beyond pure science. Scientists are emotional and biased human beings, not idealized pure intellects. Like Steven, I see them as arguing for conclusions that they already favored for both political-ideological reasons (Trump had raised the lab leak theory so they felt they had to dismiss it) and for reasons of self-interest (they didn't want China offended and their own research collaborations in that country endangered, they didn't want more government restrictions placed on 'gain of function' research and they most emphatically didn't want the covid disaster blamed on virologists like them).
Quote:However, we have still not found the smoking gun original virus, so there is still a little room for questions...
That awfully big of you, Steven. Except that people are free to ask questions and to propose hypotheses whether you like it or not. Despite you having your blog, your being a Yale medical school neurologist, and despite you being a leading "skeptic", you still don't have the power to control other people's thinking. (Thank God!)