Discussing the Lab Leak claim with Jon Perry

I tried to keep this as short as possible. Of course. I failed as usual. If Jon (or anyone else) wants to respond, I don’t expect him to address every single point I made at once.

Prologue

So, recently there was a conversation between Jon Perry , Dr. Daniel (@dsterncardinale), Jackson Wheat (@JacksonWheat1), and me on Jackson’s channel.

And @dsterncardinale made a follow-up video on this:

I think most members aware of Jon Perry and his youtube channels ‘Stated Clearly’ and ‘Stated Casually’. His style of science communication with stellar animations is top tier. This opinion of mine hasn’t changed, which is why it pains me to see that things have come to this. We discussed the idea that SARS-CoV-2 (will abbreviate as SARS2) originated from a lab leak. A subject which has been talked about on - this - forum - before - several - times. Back in the early days of COVID in February 2020, Jon made a general video on the origins of viruses, which was also played during our live stream. The possibility of a lab leak was mentioned, but it wasn’t a strong defense of it. More time was spent discussing zoonosis. But I noticed things started to change in 2021 when he published a video on Gain-Of-Function in March; and a video fully dedicated on the question ‘Did COVID-19 come from a lab?’ in April; and then his first interview with Alina Chan in December and promoting her book ‘Viral’.

That last one in particular was rather stunned me. Before that interview, I was already aware of Alina her book ‘Viral’ mainly from following Joseph Moran’s blogs. Alina is one of the most prominent supporters for the lab leak origin of SARS2. She first co-authoring a preprint in May 2020 (still not published) arguing that SARS2 was preadapted to infect humans and that this could point to a lab origin. This study is flawed, which I have covered this on the forum before. The preprint did not have an impact on the scientific community, but she rose to fame on social media and pop journals, and later writing that ‘Viral’ book with Matt Ridley who has argued that AIDS originated from Polio vaccination campaigns. This alone does not automatically invalidate any points he makes (I will discuss that later), I just did not expect Jon to promote such unreliable sources.

Today Jon Perry promotes the lab leak hypothesis being ‘fully plausible’ as stated in one of his replies to Jackson back in May on Twitter, which eventually prompted the live conversation (emphasis mine).

JON: There’s no direct evidence it leaked from lab but the lab is 10 miles from the alleged epicenter, they were doing passage experiments in humanized mice, they were bringing thousands of viruses into the city, & Dazsak has a well documented history of lying. That’s not nothing.

JACKSON: I could agree with all of these things, but none of these are evidence of a lab-leak though.

JON: Let’s do a video on this together. It’s probably time. Here’s my argument: A lab leak is fully plausible and we need to stop pretending it’s not. I could do something next month.

Although he would later alter this statement (see section ‘Fully plausible’ or ‘Very implausible?’). And before the live stream, Jon and I also interacted on Twitter,which I will bring up later (see section ’ Scientists suppressing debate? [Part I]'). There were lot’s of point made but did not have the chance to fully respond to them, especially since my internet connection frequently cut-off.

Defining ‘Conspiracy Theory’

Just to get this out of the way first, this was one of the more heated points of contention. Jon really doesn’t like when we use the term ‘conspiracy theory’. However, to me at this moment, there is no way to not consider the lab leak as one. But I need to establish some definitions, and we need to differentiate between ‘conspiracy’ and ‘conspiracy theory’ which we sadly did not do during the live stream.

Definition - Conspiracy (or coverup): A secret plan conducted by a group (the conspirators) for some nefarious self-serving purpose which often inflicts harm onto others; with an attempt to keep the agenda hidden from everyone outside the circle of conspirators. Conspiracies DO happen, nobody would disagree. Famous examples include the Watergate scandal and and the recent Trump’s fake electors plot. Some (not Jon) may whine and throw a tantrum about me mentioning this latter. I don’t care.

Definition - Conspiracy Theory: Claims or narratives which postulate that something happened due to - or was covered-up by - a conspiracy, which persists in spite of a lack of evidence for it and/or when it faces evidence against it. The conspiracy theory handbook provides seven traits that typifies conspiratorial thinking. Examples include QAnon (pizzagate) and the Moon landing hoax.

So, to be fair to Jon, one reason why he might be resistant against calling the lab leak a ‘conspiracy theory’ is that while he would agree that it entails a ‘conspiracy’ (first definition) but he does not agree that it is a ‘conspiracy theory’ (second definition). Probably because he either believes that there is not sufficient evidence against it, or there is sufficient evidence for it, or both, such that it remains - as he claimed - “fully plausible”.

But I would still disagree. The evidence for zoonotic origin (and against a lab-leak) is very strong. This case was already strong when the the proximal origins paper came out in March 2020, which is unsurprisingly despised by many lab-leak proponents; and the lead author deleted their twitter account after facing severe harassment. The evidence has only grown since. Some papers I can recommend include Worobey et al., 2022 (which Jon showed on stream), Pekar et al., 2022, Crits-Christoph et al., 2023, Liu et al., 2024, Pekar et al., 2025. Also good review papers by Holmes et al., 2021, Alwine et al., 2023, and Holmes 2024. On the other hand, lab leak proponents just repeat the same arguments but are now just louder than ever; which in spite of the fact that the lab leak hypothesis hasn’t gained any evidence since the start of the pandemic. The lack of evidence for the alleged conspiracy is explained (through circular reasoning) by the alleged conspiracy. This is how a conspiracy theory operates. I can’t consider it to be anything else in good faith.

The ‘Terrorism’ argument

Jon makes the following argument as to why he thinks it is inappropriate to call the lab-leak a conspiracy (emphasis mine).

[6:49] JON: Uh, well see, the reason that I disagree with that is that… okay, so technically at this point if it’s true it would either have to be an insane insane coincidence. And we’ll go over this when I show the slides. Or it would have to be technically a conspiracy theory in that a bunch of people conspired to cover it up. But that term is very inappropriate, like what comes with that term. It it’s like saying that the Native Americans protesting the pipeline were terrorists in 2005, because they lit some stuff on fire. They were labeled terrorists, which is technically true they terrorized the construction site. But what that did in the public is it just it just screwed up everyone’s brains. These these Native Americans, they’re terrorists now, and that’s what this conspiracy word does.

Now, I have several issues with this. Firstly, I would define terrorism as (the threat of) violence against non-combatants especially for the purpose of a political goal. Unless these Native Americans were threatening people, this doesn’t count as terrorism, at least not in my eyes. I would rather describe it as vandalism: the deliberate destruction of private/public property. Secondly, even if it was terrorism, I don’t think we should be afraid to call out acts of terrorism for what they are, even if… or I would rather say… especially if it comes from those which we happen to sympathize with. If we don’t, we risk ending up in a very dark place.

Why the lab leak is inplausible

Likewise, we need to be able to discuss a conspiracy theory on it terms; how it operates and reinforces itself by adding more layers of complexity over time. As the amount of evidence against a supposed conspiracy grows and/or the evidence for it is remains absent, then the alleged conspiracy has to become more and more elaborate in order to account for this. The rabbit hole just must go deeper than previously thought. That makes it increasingly less plausible.

Hence why… after Jon stated this:

[9:00] The reason why there’s no evidence [that SARS2 came from the lab] is because we have not been allowed to look no one has been allowed to look

…Daniel and I pointed out that the lab leak requires a large international conspiracy involving thousands of people, not just post-outbreak. There would have to have been an ongoing cover-up years prior to hide the fact that they possessed SARS2 or a precursor. Something that would’ve been out of the ordinary, since the Wuhan lab (and other virology labs) are known to publish their work.

For example, Daniel mentions a draft from 2018 containing all the virus sequences they had in the supplementary files, which they tried to publish but it was not accepted by the journal. I don’t know exactly what he is referring to. Perhaps @dsterncardinale can link it here. So, they had to deliberately exclude the sequence of SARS2 (presumably others as well) from this 2018 draft - for some reason. Alternatively, they obtained the sequence of SARS2 (likely among others) between 2018 and 2019 and kept these secret - for some reason. Furthermore, as I will discuss later (see section ‘thousands of physical samples’), these sequences are not represented by live isolated viruses. It’s meta-genomic data obtained from RNA extractions, which does not leave intact viruses. The only way to get a live virus from this is via reverse genetics using bacteria artificial chromosomes, which is not a small feat and such work has been published before (Ralph Baric’s lab famously does this). Alternatively, they managed to directly isolate a live virus from a sample, which the Wuhan lab only managed to do three times in the past and these were also published. These three are WIV1, WIV16, and Rs4874. These are related to SARS1, not SARS2.

Why would such an impressive achievement (either reverse genetics or virus isolation) be kept a strict secret this time around? And how would they managed to keep such a project hidden considering the scale of the conspiracy it would require? Additionally, as Daniel mentioned later [28:50] the people at Wuhan lab reportedly tested negative for SARS2-antibodies. This would require yet another layer of complexity to keep a conspiracy viable.

Jon does not seem to consider these factors. He underestimates how challenging it would be to maintain such secrecy at such a large scale. At least that’s the impression I got from him, particularly from this short interaction:

[26:52] JON: I said earlier that there’s like two possibilities. There’s it’s either a big cover up, a quite large cover up. It does wouldn’t really require all the thousands of people. I don’t think it might seem. But it would definitely be a cover up where you’ve got top researchers that are sitting down and saying “How do we fool the rest of the world scientists?” Which would be extremely difficult and extremely risky so it either has to be…

NESSLIG: Including all those people working underneath them. They also have to be quiet for some reason as well.

Dr. DANIEL: Yup, all the lab staff. All the clerical staff. The peer reviewers…

JON: That’s not as hard as you think in China, because the culture of not asking questions.

The Market and the Lab

Around [24:33] Jon brings up how close the Wuhan Lab was to the outbreak. He also shows Michael Worobey’s paper on the slide and saying that…

[25:15] JON: he’s always taken lab leak stuff seriously.

Michael Worobey has indeed seriously considered the possibility of a lab leak, but he is not a lab leak proponent, especially not now. The paper he co-authored shows that the Huanan market, not the Wuhan lab, was the epicenter of the outbreak. Which is something you would expect from a zoonotic spill-over at the market. In response, lab leak proponents often respond with suggesting that the market was simply a super-spreader event, not the source. However, this is very unlikely. Super-spreaders are far more likely to happen in venues where there is a high human traffic, which does not describe that wet market (see figure 3 of the Worobey paper). Dr. Daniel also points out that a serological survey on blood banks have shown that there was (in all likelihood) no cryptic circulation before we detected SARS2.

Michael Worobey also explains this in the LA times why the presence of virology labs near a location where a viral outbreak is actually not coincidental considering why both epidemics and high-tech labs tend to occur in population dense cities:

MICHAEL WOROBEY: Lab leak proponents cling to the contention that the presence of a lab that studies viruses and the emergence of a coronavirus pandemic in the same city can’t possibly be coincidental. But my colleagues and I showed in 2021 that this virus wasn’t going to emerge just anywhere in China: It took a city. Simulations indicate that when a virus with the properties of SARS-CoV-2 jumps into a human in a sparsely populated rural area, it will fail to cause an outbreak 99% of the time. But take that same virus into a huge city like Wuhan, and about a third of animal-to-human transmissions will result in an epidemic. We should instead be asking: What is the chance that a big Chinese city like Wuhan would have a lab doing the kind of research that has come under suspicion? The answer is, the vast majority of the biggest cities in China have labs involved in such research. If COVID had emerged in, say, Beijing, there would be no fewer than four such labs facing suspicion.

Contradictory scenarios

Around [37:00] Jon mentions one way how virologists can revive viruses in the lab via reverse genetics from a sequence. Daniel and I explained how this version of a lab leak would entail an implausible a scenario. The people at Wuhan lab must have sequenced virus(es) but these were never published, nor did anyone mention this project to anyone else anywhere; and they later had to use reverse engineering to produce a live virus from the sequences, which was also kept secret. Jon responded by staying:

[38:13] JON: Well okay, but then there’s the other thing that you’re not thinking of. The fact that these people are going out and collecting samples all over China. So, they’re directly interacting with bats, and then they’re coming back into town. That’s another area where you can get an infection.

But then we are no longer talking about a lab leak anymore. This is zoonosis, and patient zero just coincidentally happened to be a virologist working in the field. So, after we criticize one lab-leak scenario that was brought up, Jon defends the lab leak by positing another scenario which does not involve a virus going through a lab at all. I was confused to say the least.

How viruses have leaked from labs before

At [32:49] Dr Daniel explains how experiments on viruses that are passed through cultures pose a very low risk because of the low virion amount and the absence of airborne exposure. Then at [34:41] Jon mentions some examples of incidents when viruses got out from a lab, but none of these examples are what Daniel just described. These leaks came from ongoing work with high titer cultures (containing high concentrations of live virus particles), which involved viruses that were quickly identifiable. No lab leak has ever involved an novel virus. See discussion here.

Thousands of physical samples

[35:46] JON: You were talking about the sequences that we have in the labs. Like we don’t have any record of them having this sequence. A sequence closely related to this. On one hand that’s true but they had just thousands of actual physical samples as well. Actually we don’t even know how many they had, because we weren’t allowed to look.

This is where I jumped in to explained what I mentioned before. These “physical samples” don’t represent live virus isolates or samples from which virus can (easily) be isolated. What we are talking about are samples of bat feces and anal swabs, which is why some virus sequences have names that contain ‘BANAL’ (Bat anal). These are rather poor sources to obtain live viruses. The Wuhan lab only managed to isolate three SARS1 (not SARS2) related viruses in the past; WIV1, WIV16, and Rs4874. They did this by serial culturing using Vero E6 cells.

SIDE NOTE: When this serial culturing is done with SARS2, it consistently loses its furin cleavage site (FCS). This makes it unlikely that SARS2 with an intact FCS could have been isolated in a lab this way. See discussion here.

Most virus genomes that WIV sequenced (e.g. RaTG13) are not from nor represented by live virus isolates. These sequences are obtained via metagenomics from sequencing RNA extractions, a process that kills all viruses present in the sample. Se discussions here and here. It’s possible to revive a virus via reverse genetics, but I already covered that before.

It’s misleading to say that they have ‘thousands of physical samples’ since to a laymen this sounds like they have thousands of hazardous vials containing live viruses, each poised to infect someone, which isn’t the case.

‘Fully plausible’ or ‘Very implausible’?

This is a line that Jon repeated many times [4:42 - 40:05 - 40:30 - 41:45 - 42:20 - 45:45 - 52:45 - 57:32 - 1:03:53] in our discussion: “We can’t rule out a lab leak (because we are stone walled by China)”. For which he cites Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci; who say that the lab leak “POSSIBILITY has to be considered” and that it is not “INHERENTLY a conspiracy theory” respectively. Okay, I would agree. I do not agree that the lab leak is PLAUSIBLE, certainly not at this point as previously discussed, and I doubt that Collins or Fauci would say otherwise.

So, during a particular section of the talk [40:00 to 1:05:00], we were stuck in a loop. Whenever either of us made an argument for why a lab leak is very implausible, Jon would fall back on this statement often mentioning China not being transparent and citing Collins or Fauci. In particular, at one point I said that we don’t need the idea of a lab leak in order to criticize China for their lack of transparency; and in spite of that, we do have a lot of evidence that we brought up which point strongly to the wet market and which makes the lab leak is very implausible. Jon said he agreed it is very implausible… but then he immediately repeated the same line again (emphasis mine):

[57:32] JON: I agree with you that it’s very implausible, but it cannot be ruled out. It it has not been ruled out and it cannot be ruled out until we have full transparency.

If it is not “ruled out” even when it is very implausible, then when can we ‘rule it out’? When it is impossible? That is not how this works. We will always have a degree of uncertainty left. I also have to point out that Jon’s agreement here stands in stark contrast to what he said to Jackson before the live stream (emphasis mine):

JON: Let’s do a video on this together. It’s probably time. Here’s my argument: A lab leak is fully plausible and we need to stop pretending it’s not. I could do something next month.

Putting virology labs outside cities

This is one comment Jon made [1:01:47]. He suggests that we put virology labs away from crowded areas as a precautionary measure. Since virus outbreaks require high density populations, putting labs outside cities will minimize the risks. However, I don’t think this is feasible. Virology labs, like any other research facility, is sustained and maintained by a complex infrastructure which provide human and material resources. There is a good reason why research facilities and universities exist within or nearby big cities.

The price we should not be willing to pay

After [1:05:10] Jon started to make the argument that while these things are not related to the origins of SARS2, one good thing that came out from all this global discussion is the reevaluation of safety practices in virology labs around the wold and the investigation of bad actors. Jon mentions Peter Daszak specifically (I have more to say on that later).

But Jon starts to make the argument that the lab leak discussion (in some sense) is worth it.

[1:08:30] JON: The only thing I’m saying is… if we dismiss this as just a crazy conspiracy theory that you’d have to be dumb to believe, then we’re going to lose this opportunity for the whole world to re-evaluate and actually get a lot of people caring about what are we doing in labs. How safe is it really. Is it appropriate.

DR DANIEL: Do you think we can do that… because I think that’s a perfectly reasonable conversation that we can have… do you think there’s a way to have that conversation without centering it on COVID 19 and without empowering anti-science wackados that are in charge of the US government right now?

JON: It wasn’t happening, so, now it is. And I think that’s a good thing.

This was really alarming to me. I really recommend people to listen to Dr Daniel’s responses between [1:08:30] and [1:32:00]. I can’t do it justice here. He really nails it how dangerous this sentiment is, no matter how well-intented it is. We don’t need to ride the wave of anti-science narratives in order to have good-faith discussions. On the contrary, as Dan pointed out, I would argue that entangling such bad-faith notions with good-faith questions is completely counterproductive to any noble cause. The baby is being poisoned by the bathwater. Let’s not get ourselves trapped in a motte-and-bailey fallacy. We don’t need to, and we should not, entertain a lab leak (nor any other unsubstantiated ideas) in order to either criticize the Chinese government for their lack of transparency, or to improve safety practices in labs. This does not help our goals in defending the practice of science. It will more likely backfire on us badly and only cause more harm.

Why collect viruses from nature

Related to the preivous section, Jon makes some odd suggests to improve safety:

[1:19:56] JON: In 2014 there was an argument. I think it was David Reaman making the argument. He was saying that certainly we should stop creating chimeras. He did not like that. I don’t know if you know who David Reaman is. He’s he’s been a virologists doing this stuff for a long time. In 2014 he says that making chimeras is inappropriate. We’re making things that don’t even exist in the wild. Doing the wild virus collecting is debatable. What I believe it was him who suggested this. Instead of doing actual wild virus collecting why don’t we just survey the heck out of hospitals. Especially near the frontier between human populations and animal populations, because that way… the debate is…

DR DANIEL: I can answer that if you want.

JON: The debate is that, well, we won’t be as ready.

DR DANIEL: Yeah, exactly. You find stuff in nature before it infects us, so we can prepare. You know, like, here are eight potential vaccine targets that we may have to deal with in the next decade. Yes that’s why you do that. Yeah.

JON: I haven’t heard a good, I’m sure someone’s done it by now, but there’s there must be a good analysis to, did that research help with COVID? Maybe it did. Maybe it helped.

I don’t know what Jon was going for here. Dr Dan mentions an example of antibiotic resistance where scientists allowed a pathogen to evolve resistance in the lab, so they can determine what to expect when a resistant strain appears naturally. To me it should be obvious that a better understanding of SARS-like viruses (including those that circulate in animals) would help us be better prepared for the next pandemic. I found this review paper from 2016 in a matter of minutes. Quoting just one section:

Since the S2 region of the human SARS-CoV and bat SL-CoVs are more conserved compared to the S1 region, mAbs that target the S2 domain are broadly neutralizing and can confer cross-protection against bat SL-CoVs.18-20 The identification of broad-spectrum inhibitors targeting highly conserved proteins in human SARS-CoV and bat SL-CoVs, such as the 3C-like protease, as well as inhibitors that target important host proteins required for viral entry and pathogenesis, such as host surface and endosomal cysteine proteases, are other feasible ways to develop novel broadly-neutralizing SARS therapeutics (for a full review see ref.21). For vaccine development, a comprehensive understanding of CoV-induced immunity is necessary. Identification of conserved epitopes in human SARS-CoV and bat SL-CoVs that give rise to cross-neutralizing antibody and T cell responses can lead to vaccine strategies that cross-protect against all the viruses.

Jon may think that the risk of infection is too high, but stopping this won’t help us prevent future outbreaks. Viruses have… are… and will continue to spill-over into humans regardless of what scientists will do. There will be a SARS3. With the current political climate, we are not prepared to deal with it when the time comes. Physically or mentally.

Scientists suppressing debate? [Part I & II]

[word limit reached, see reply below]

[To be continued]

4 Likes

Definitely larger than the average post here but I think it is an important topic. (And it is not like we have a shortage of bandwidth.)

I’ve been wondering what is happening in “Lab leak theory” lately so it was worth a read.

I am prone to agree. We are already at a crisis in anti-science momentum.

6 Likes

[Last part, which I couldn’t include the last part in the head first thread due to word limit]

Scientists suppressing debate? [Part I]

This was briefly mentioned before, but around [1:36:00] we started to focus on this idea that the debate was suppressed by scientists in early 2020. This is not true, there was debate on this issue. Ironically, this is shown in the Fauci emails, which makes it clear that Kristian Anderson (the lead author of the ‘proximal origins’ paper) seriously considering the lab leak. But later, after the evidence was discussed, he changed his mind. Of course, Anderson is vilified by lab-leak proponents for this. Jon specifically appears to believe that scientists (Peter Daszak in particular), did some shady stuff (publishing that Lancet Letter in particular) in order to suppress debate.

[1:36:35] DR DANIEL: I’m an evolutionary virologists. This is my field. I keep tabs on the field. This is the thing I like to follow in science. There were months of debate in the field over where this stuff came from, and nobody was ostracized, or laughed at, or told they couldn’t do whatever based on saying “Hey it might have come from a lab we really need to look into that.” So even this this representation of the early pandemic as like this censorious everybody has to get in line kind of thing is wrong. Now, there were public policies, in terms of things like what Facebook or YouTube would permit. But those are private companies that are making those decisions. That’s not the conversation that’s happening in the scientific establishment among the people practicing the field of epidemiology and evolutionary virology. If Facebook and Twitter want to go out there and say “hey, we’re sorry. We should not have moderated our content in such a way”. Sure, I’m not going to second guess them on that decision. That’s fine but for the scientific community to say we were gaslighting, we were doing this Orwellian stuff. That is not only counterproductive, because it gives ammunition to the bad guys, it’s also not true on the merits.

JON: It’s literally true.

DR DANIEL: No! It’s literally not John. This is my field. I know the people in it, and I have these conversations.

JON: I watched it happen. I lived it. I watched it happen.

DR DANIEL: You had one video demonetized John. That’s not the same thing. I’m talking like the people in the field like Eddie Holmes, the name comes up in all of this stuff.

JON: We have the emails of the orchestration by Peter Daszak to stop the conversation.

DR DANIEL: He wasn’t working on this. He was working on SARS1 and he he got his grant pulled. I don’t… that is not relevant to the origins of COVID and the discussion in the community of what was happening that led to that outbreak. That is not relevant.

JON: Let me show. Let me show you this.

DR DANIEL: No I’m not going to sit here for the slides. I don’t want to do. No we’re not going to go through the Peter Daszak slides. It’s a waste of time.

JON: If you don’t want to look at it, you don’t have to. You can live in La La Land.

At this point I wanted to interject, but I couldn’t. My internet cut off at that moment, and by the time I got back, the conversation moved on further. But I questioned Jon about his claims on Daszak before on twitter. I will include the conversation below with link.

Twitter thread

Link to twitter (emphasis mine)
JON: This is real. It’s NOT anti-science fantasy from the right. It was presented in Biden’s subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Peter Daszak was making it look like coronavirus work would be done in the US when writing grants, but sent it to Wuhan once money was in. You can read about it hear. Side Note: US Gov websites are not always trustworthy, but note the date here. It was posted before the regime change.

NESSLIG: “Peter Daszak was making it look like coronavirus work would be done in the US when writing grants, but sent it to Wuhan once money was in”
What ‘coronavirus work’ specifically did he sent to Wuhan once money was in?

JON: I should have said “planned to send it” because this specific grant didn’t go through. Thanks for the correction but his trick worked in > $100 million worth of other grants. The man running some of our most dangerous research didn’t blink when lying to NIH to avoid safety oversight. I’ll go over details on the 5th on Jackson’s channel. You’ll be there, no?

NESSLIG: Perhaps, if available. But I wasn’t referring to the fact the proposal was rejected. I just want to clear up something. What ‘coronavirus work’ was Daszak planning to sent to Wuhan after the money was in? ALL of it? Or part of the project? If the latter, what specifically?

JON: He doesn’t specify. He says he’s worried that if they say it in the grant, DARPA will reject it so he says “once we get funding we can then allocate who does what work”. We now know WIV has been doing many of the high-risk work that was once primarily associated with Ralph Baric’s lab—engineering chimeric viruses, running assay’s in ACE2 humanized mice and so on. All of that would have probably been on the table for WIV at the time this grant was written. Again, the point is this: The man we trusted to oversee some of the world’s most dangerous research was actively withholding pertinent information from funders to avoid safety oversight. This is madness.

NESSLIG: He does specify in the last part of the sentence you quoted: “once we get funding we can then allocate who does what work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan as well..” These assays… likely binding assays. You also mentioned ‘running assays’. Are these binding assays the ‘coronavirus work’ that Daszak planned to sent to Wuhan after the money was in without informing DARPA?

JON: It’s not clear from his note, what is clear in the note to his collaborators is that he intentionally didn’t put details in the grant because he was worried DARPA would have safety concerns. He didn’t want to deal with those concerns.
You are repeating the trick Peter tried to use against the committee. The committee, luckily, saw through his trick. I wish they’d apply that same careful thinking to Trump, but I digress… Read it again. Peter never said China would ONLY run assays, he said they will figure it all out after to avoid spooking DARPA. He then added that WIV can probably run assays. Why add that detail? Likely because they’d need to start prepping immediately. We learn from Ralf’s [Ralph Baric] testimony that if they were to run the assays they’d need to breed up their humanized ACE2 mice which takes time. Ralf only sent them a single breeding pair. Again, he specifically says they’ll figure it out later, not in the grant, because he’s worried about DARPA. Even the assay work, if done on humanized mice (which WIV had), could raise eyebrows at DARPA. This is deliberate deception to avoid safety oversight. Luckily the committee didn’t bend. For this and a long list of manipulative behavior they uncovered, the Biden administration banned Peter from further funding after seeing his testimony.

NESSLIG: First you said: “He did not specify…” Then after I pointed out that he did specify “assays”, you first accuse me of doing some trick (I don’t need to respond to that) and then you say: “He never said China would ONLY do assays” Which is straw man. I never said he did. Back to my question: what ‘coronavirus work’ was Daszak planning to sent to Wuhan without informing DARPA? Now you mention “binding assays and humanized mice;” and you said that “even this could raise eyebrows at DARPA”*, implying that Daszak hid this from DARPA. Am I correct?

JON: He never specified, he only added that they could do the assays. You have fallen for a con man’s tricks. Luckily, Biden was not so gullible. One of last things Biden’s administration did before leaving was cut Peter’s funding.

NESSLIG: I repeat: You said that the even the binding assay experiments using humanized mice would raise eyebrows at DARPA. We’re you implying that this is (part of) the Wuhan work that Daszak (probably) hid from DARPA? To me, it looked like you were implying this.

JON: Watch the video on the 5th.

To summarize that twitter conversation, Jon makes the claim that Peter Daszak was planning to funnel money to Wuhan to do work on coronaviruses, but he told DARPA that the work would be done in the US in order to get their grant. I asked him what ‘work’ specifically was hidden from DARPA. At first he claimed it wasn’t specified while quoting part of a sentence by a comment made by Daszak. I pointed out that ‘assay work’ was specified in the last part of the sentence that Jon did not include in the quote. So, I asked him again, but I did not receive a clear answer. Instead, I received a straw man argument, and was accused of doing some ‘trick’, and he (tacitly) called me gullible too. Take that from what you will. At one point, he said this (emphasis mine):

JON: [Peter Daszak] specifically says they’ll figure it out later, not in the grant, because he’s worried about DARPA. Even the assay work, if done on humanized mice (which WIV had), could raise eyebrows at DARPA. This is deliberate deception to avoid safety oversight.

To me it appeared he was implying this the assay work and humanized mice was (some of the things) hidden by Daszak from DARPA. I asked him if I was correct to assume he was implying this, but again no answer.

Alright, so what is this about? The 2018 grant proposal in question is titled project DEFUSE which was submitted to but ultimately rejected by DARPA. In draft versions of the DEFUSE proposal, there is one particular comment made by Daszak.

PROPOSAL (DRAFT): Prof. Ralph Baric, UNC, will reverse engineer spike proteins in his lab to conduct binding assays to human ACE2(the SARS-CoV receptor)

PETER DASZAK’s COMMENT: If we win this contract, I do not propose that all of this work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph, but I do want to stress the US side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team. Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan as well…

If we take this comment to mean that Daszak was hiding his plans to send work to Wuhan, such as the binding assays mentioned right there, from DARPA, then that would mean that this is not included in the official proposal. However, the proposal does mention the plans for WIV to do binding assays, as well as viral testing, collecting samples, and work on humanized mice.


So if Peter Daszak was hiding plans from DARPA, it’s not any of these outlined here. So, what was allegedly hidden? I still don’t know.

Scientists suppressing debate? [Part II]

[1:39:55] JON: He [Peter Daszak] orchestrated the Lancet letter which convinced the media that the lab leak was a conspiracy, and that it should be shut down everywhere. The influence of that letter is estimated to have lasted for about a year. It completely silenced people from being able to talk about this publicly. It was orchestrated by him.

DR DANIEL: What was the publication date of that letter.

NESSLIG: It was in 2020. I remember.

JON: February 19th 2020. [CORRECTION: It was actually March 7th 2020]

DR DANIEL: So, it squashed the conversation? That conversation was happening.

JON: It was starting to happen, and then he killed it.

DR DANIEL: No it wasn’t starting to happen. It had been happening since you know February and March and January. We’re saying this letter quashed a conversation that had been going on for months before the letter was published. That’s not possible.

Right after this, I wanted to add to Dan’s point by brining the proximal origins paper, which came about via the discussion between scientists who seriously considered the lab leak hypothesis, including Kristian Anderson (as mentioned previously). This was published before the Lancet letter. So there already was a conversation on this before. But right when I was trying to make this point, I lost connection. This is also why I did not catch Jon saying that he thinks the proximal orignis paper was “orchestrated” too. Sigh… Oh dear.

[1:42:09] DR DANIEL: So there was there was a paper that had very strong data saying it came from this you know natural population spillover zoonosis right. And then there’s a letter subsequently published that says this looks like a pretty open and shut case, we should probably focus on that. Meanwhile, while all this is going on, there’s a robust debate happening among the people in the field, actually doing this work trying to figure it out. There’s nothing about that letter that stopped the debate.

JON: Absolutely, it did in public. In public people were silenced. They were shut down. They were not allowed to talk about this.

Just to make it clear what the letter says, the letter has two lines that Jon finds problematic:

LANCET LETTER: We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. […] Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.

That’s really all there is to it. Calling the lab leak a conspiracy theory. That’s the issue. Dr. Daniel tried to ask whether the paper presented misleading or false data, or whether it ignored or suppressed contrary data. Jon skipped that question entirely and went straight to claiming that Daszak manipulated the public with this letter, to draw people’s attention away from the Wuhan lab. Jackson and Dan tried to ask the question again:

[1:44:28] JACKSON: Well is anything… So, in the letter by Daszak. Dan is saying that nothing in the letter is wrong about for instance like the biogeography of the outbreak, the phylogenetics of the outbreak. That’s what Dan is asking about. He’s not asking about what the public responded with. He’s asking about the science that was referenced.

DR DANIEL: Was there anything wrong?

JON: The letter just condemns the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. That’s what it does.

But, even if we say that it was (or even still is) unfair to call the lab leak a conspiracy theory, all that would entail is that a group of scientists voiced an opinion that was unwarranted. I don’t see how this alone supports the idea that there was a master plan to manipulate the public with this letter. I need to see more evidence for that. Furthermore, I am also not convinced that this letter actually had such an impact on the public. Jon cited examples of youtube demonitization, and censorship on facebook and twitter, but those are actions of private companies who want to sell you adds. Complaining about this Lancet letter is barking up the wrong tree. I also don’t remember lab leak proponents suddenly staying quiet after March 2020 because they suddenly became scared of being labeled a conspiracy theorist. We on this forum can attest. And it certainly did not stop the discussion among scientists. To me this is a nothing burger.

I brought up the example of the Dover trial. The judge ruled against the ID-movement by (basically) concluding that there was a conspiracy to hide the fact that ID is just creationism in disguise in order to circumvent the US constitution and get it taught in science classrooms. That ruling by a judge did not stop ID-proponents. They are still out there. Trying to lobby their way into science curricula. Again… we on this forum can attest. So, if a judicial ruling failed to shut down the people behind an actual conspiracy, then how could scientists, by simply stating their opinion (warranted or not) that something is a conspiracy theory, shut down a conversation? It stretches credulity to think it is that easy. If it was that easy to suppress a conspiracy theory, there would be none to speak of.

FIN

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Whew!! But well worth the read! I’ve learned a lot here and I very much appreciate it.

People who argue for a lab leak commonly use Bayesian analysis, and it’s easy to find papers that use this to then conclude the origin of Sars-CoV-2 came from the lab. Here is but one example:

I know jack squat about Bayesian analysis, other than having a sense that the model is only as good as the data you choose to put into it. Emphasis on choose.

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Great posts Nesslig. And yes this all seems to amount to the claim that when lab-leak conspiracy theorists vent their opinions and get pushback (by their proposal being labeled a conspiracy theory by members of the scientific community), they consider this to be some sort of nefarious act of censorship that prevents them from discussing the subject at all.

It seems that the argument is that when scientists bring in this label, it has this overwhelming effect on public discourse that it makes private social media companies start censoring discussions on their platforms surrounding that specific topic, and therefore the scientists shouldn’t use that label (even if factually appropriate? It’s not clear).

Apparently you’re not allowed to characterize the opposing view’s position with any connotations of involving conspiring to hide the truth and evidence and not based on good science, since this will have an impact on public opinion and the behaviors of politicians and private companies.

Which is just ridiculous, and honestly such cries should just be ignored. It’s a conspiracy theory in essence, and it has been weighed and evaluated and found to be extremely bad at accounting for the data. However private social media companies might or might not react to that is tangential.

Ironically if we propose that scientists start censoring their own language and opinions (by refraining from calling things they genuinely think are a conspiracy theory, a conspiracy theory), have we not then also engaged in shutting down open debate and discussions? I’d be curious to hear what Jon thinks about that perspective.

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I get the feeling when reading this that Jon (and probably many others) believe that the concerns related to the lab-leak suggestion have not been on the radar of the scientific community and/or have been suppressed or otherwise been overlooked. As a sitting member of an IBC going back more than 20 years, I can state that this is false. In every conceivable sense.

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I agree! @Nesslig20, you have our thanks for educating us on a vital topic.

I had no idea there was a limit!

Bayesian analysis is built around a Prior Assumption. In this case probability distribution representing the probability of natural zoonosis and the uncertainty associated with the probability. The Prior is a choice, and can range from a “flat” or uninformative prior to a prior which strongly or overwhelmingly informs the conclusion after adding the data (the Posterior distribution). Usually a reasonable prior is chosen so that it doesn’t overwhelm the data.

I haven’t read the paper yet to see if they have a reasonable prior or not. Hopefully I can this afternoon.

Oh, THAT paper. For starters, this is a pre-print, not accepted for publication anywhere, despite it being cited by others. It’s a very unusual sort of article too, as it seems to be more a collection of rants than an article. I can’t imagine anyone I work with submitting a paper like this and expecting it to be acceptable for publication.

Although Bayes’ Theorem gets a mention, I don’t see any formal effort at a Bayesian statistical model. There is no defined sample, no framework for incorporating disparate findings in a coherent way, no posterior distribution, no modern methods at all. It’s more like he is scrambling to put numbers on opinions.

This is numerology, not a statistical analysis.

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My argument is simple.

If you trust the data approved for release by the Chinese government, a wet market origin is highly likely. But…

  1. Lab leaks happen.
  2. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has not yet been cleared because outsiders have not been allowed to investigate the lab.

Given these facts, claiming certainty about the virus’s origin is not honest.

My position here is not that of Alex Jones, it’s that of Francis Collins.

Nullius in verba.

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Hello @Jon-Perry, and welcome to Peaceful Science. :cowboy_hat_face:

I confess to not know of you prior to @Nesslig20’s post. I still don’t know much and I’m probably not the only one - can you introduce yourself (just a bit) for those who are new to this topic?

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Sure.

I’m they guy who made this video on what was known about the origin of covid back in Feb, 2020: https://youtu.be/NJLXdsO1GBI?si=6iBZd8JuQhCRAQ-B

Here’s my website: https://www.statedclearly.com/

So, IOW, no scientific evidence for a lab leak.

Versus lots of scientific evidence for zoonosis.

The correct conclusion is obvious.

No?

Aha! StateClearly I am familiar with. Thank you. :slight_smile:

I don’t claim certainty. However, the zoonosis theory looks a lot more likely than the lab leak theory.

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Plus all the data that is independent of the Chinese government, such that a lab leak would entail a massive cover-up that involves scientists on both sides of the pacific (to borrow the words of Dr Dan). But yes, I would agree that it is “highly likely” that SARS2 originated from a zoonotic spill over event, particularly occuring at the Huanan seafood market.

We discussed this point during the live stream and I also touched on this in the section [How viruses have leaked from labs before] To reiterate, all known lab leaks involved previously known viruses and were associated with sustained work with high titer cultures (i.e. virus cultures containing large amounts of live virions). The only exception was the Marburg virus outbreak in 1967 in Germany, which was a novel disease at the time, but the scientists were still working on high titer cultures. Furthermore, the first (and often the only) confirmed cases of these lab leaks were all lab workers or people associated with lab workers, or people who received poorly attenuated vaccines; i.e. early cases were directly traceable to the lab. This is similarly true for the November 2021 lab leak of SARS2 in Taiwan, where a lab worker contracted a variant of SARS2 that was only present in the lab, but not circulating outside in the community. For more, see reviews here and here.

In contrast, SARS2 wasn’t known to scientists before November 2019, and high titer culture work wasn’t conducted at WIV lab, and all lab workers were tested seronegative too. UNLESS all these scientists were and still are lying and hid all this activity including the email correspondence between staff, the paper trials for purchasing lab supplies and maintenance, etc. and they had to maintain secrecy for years prior to the outbreak. You mention previous lab leaks in order to establish a precedent, but this case would’ve been completely unprecedented. And that’s not even mentioning all the evidence that points to zoonosis and the wet market.

One does not need to die on this lab leak hill in order to criticize the lack of transparency from the Chinese government… or any other government for that matter.

This is what is very confusing to me. Whenever you make a stance on this issue, you often begin with an open admission (often with words conveying high degrees of certainty) that the lab leak origin for SARS2 is unlikely or implausible. But then you directly follow that up with maintaining that the issue remains uncertain.

One example of this was right in your previous comment:

And during the live stream [57:32] you said to me:

I agree with you that [the lab leak] is very implausible, but it cannot be ruled out.

Which is quite different from what you said to Jackson on Twitter before the live stream:

Let’s do a video on this together. It’s probably time. Here’s my argument: A lab leak is fully plausible and we need to stop pretending it’s not. I could do something next month.

This strikes as double speak to me.

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Sorry, forgot to do this before.

Welcome to the forum @Jon-Perry! Glad you are here. :grinning_face: :waving_hand:

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Well, not so much a cover up, as an extremely massive fabrication of evidence. For instance, the genomes of viruses sampled from the community early in the outbreak would have to have been modified in order to mislead investigators that there had been two separate spillover events in the Huanan market.

Would it be an exaggeration to describe this as one of the most difficult and complicated scientific endeavours ever attempted in human history? I can’t imagine how it could even be done.

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The outside investigation train left the station long ago and its never coming back. IF the Chinese government had been open to such an investigation from the start, THEN we might has learned something useful. They were not open to investigation, which is no surprise since (to my knowledge) they are never open to outside investigation. At this point we can only speculate there might have been some sort of cover up. This doesn’t serve any useful purpose, but it does tend to feed into conspiracy theories.

A defining trait of conspiracy theories is they cannot be disproven in the minds of believers, no matter what evidence is presented. I look at this and see good reasons to see exactly what was observed. The laboratory was built in Wuhan because it is a region where zoonotic viral outbreaks are common. The viral outbreak which epidemiologists have been predicting for decades happens in just the sort of place where they might have predicted it would. There are no surprises here.

I agree it is not possible to absolutely rule out some sort of lab leak, but there is the equivalent of P-hacking going on with conspiratorial speculation that such a leak actually occurred at Wuhan. The Quay (2021) preprint (linked above) is a fine example of this.

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For those readers who are unfamiliar with the terminology: P-hacking is when someone swaps out your urine sample so that you flunk your employee drug test.

I used to believe in conspiracy theories but now I know that they were all manufactured by George Soros and Big Pharma.

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