The COVID Clinic

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101

Yes, claimed censorship.

There was no actual censorship. As I have said before, the Barrington declaration is trivial to find. It is still available in full at https://gbdeclaration.org/ to anyone who wants to read it.[1] If Facebook etc don’t want to host it, they don’t have to. Anti-vaxxers and lab leak theorists are still able to present their ideas on innumerable other websites and other publications.[2]

Refusing to publish, advertise or provide a platform to someone is not censorship.
Persuading or pressuring third parties not to publish, advertise or provide a platform is not censorship.
Preventing the authors and their supporters from publishing, advertising or speaking out on their own presses/platforms would be censorship - but did not happen.

There wasn’t any censorship. But even if the restrictions on posting on twitter/facebook/etc had been censorship, they wouldn’t have prevented the scientific dialogue, which took place elsewhere.

  1. located via Google, who clearly aren’t removing it from their search results. It’s also accessible from Wikipedia. ↩︎

  2. such as the recent publication in The Times of an opinion piece supporting the lab origin theory. ↩︎

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102

No paper yet, but if it holds up (note how real scientists view these things, @Giltil), it would be very strong evidence.

103

Let’s take a Bayesian approach to this issue and ask what is the likelihood of observing the following facts under the zoonotic/Huanan Seafood Market vs the lab leak/DEFUSE grant theories

  • emergence of SARS2 in Wuhan
  • After more than 3 years, no animal reservoir has yet been identified, despite considerable effort.
  • Surfaces near animal handlers and vegetable stalls in the Huanan Seafood Market were found to have the same rate of positivity.
  • Samples collected from the market were found to be be admixed with human only but not animal genetic material.
  • presence of a furin cleavage site in the spike protein of SARS2, considering, as Whasburne noted, that « over 1,000 years of evolutionary time, we see no evidence of a furin cleavage site in any SARS CoV, except for the SARS-CoV that emerged in Wuhan 2 years after researchers proposed to insert a furin cleavage site in a SARS CoV in Wuhan. »
  • the codon bias of the furin cleavage site
  • In September 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took its database of SARS CoVs offline, around the same time the institute switched from civilian to military control, and contractor was hired to fix HEPA filters in the lab where broken HEPA filters can cause lab-acquired infections. In assessing these events, bear in mind that there are now phylogenetic evidence that the SARS2 emerged as soon as September 2019!
  • China began severely restricting the export of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gowns and masks, months before notifying the world of the outbreak of Covid-19.
  • etc…

The above points are quite surprising under the zoonotic origin but makes perfect sense under the lab leak theory. IOW, the latter displays much more consistency than the former.

104

These new results come from a more detailed analysis of the sequencing reads I mentioned above (post 61 in this thread).

In other words, the claim:

  • Samples collected from the market were found to be be admixed with human only but not animal genetic material.

is categorically wrong.

105

The lab leak hypothesis is not only based on absence of evidence (see my post at 103), even though, as Washburne shows in the piece below, the absence of some evidence that should exist under the zoonotic hypothesis strengthens the case for the latter.

106

Just another example of fabricating evidence, not interpreting the same evidence differently.

@Art just pointed out that you made an objectively false statement about very relevant data, Gil. Gish Gallop much?

107

And, of course, you are not in the least bothered by the fact that every single piece of evidence that should exist if the Lab Leak Theory was true is absent.

Typical behaviour for a science-denying creationist.

108

Examples?

109

The 9th biggest city with a population approaching 10 million. Maybe you should also mention that it’s emergence was centred on a wildlife market? Kind of relevant factors to include in a Bayesian analysis, don’t you think?

Depends whether you think “effort” equates to “looking in the right way/place”. You realise that even in the engineered lab leak scenario you believe, there must be a wild virus out there that is extremely closely related to SARS-CoV-2, just lacking a couple of features like the furin site. Having not found that virus in an animal reservoir is no different to having not found SARS-CoV-2.

Your phrasing here is vague to the point of meaningless, but as presented is untrue. Nowhere in the Gao paper do they suggest that viral genetic material only found in association with human genetic material, and no animal genetic material. That wouldn’t even make any sense - animal DNA and RNA would abound all over the market, and even just by chance we’d expect some samples to contain both animal and virus genetic material. I think you mean to refer to the claim in the Gao preprint that virus RNA abundance is most correlated with human RNA abundance, but I’ve already pointed out this is pretty shaky.

You’ve repeated this idea that the DEFUSE proposed to insert furin cleavage sites in Wuhan - where are you getting that idea from? It’s quite obvious that this work (if the proposal had been funded) would have been carried out in Ralph Baric’s lab in North Carolina, not Wuhan.
We know furin cleavage sites can evolve in other betacoronaviruses, so there’s no a priori reason to expect them to be difficult to evolve in sarbecoviruses, especially given that there is obviously a strong selectivve pressure to evolve one. There’s an element of putting the cart before the horse here too: if evolving a furin cleavage site was practically a prerequisite for being infectious enough to cause a global pandemic, then we shouldn’t be surprised to see a furin cleavage site in a pandemic-causing virus. Performing probability calculations on these kind of events is meaningless in hindsight.

Rare in terms of frequency in the viral genome, but not especially targetted to humans, either.

The database is claimed to have been taken offline in response to repeated attacks by hackers to infiltrate the system, and there’s no evidence of the database containing any sequences not already public. We already know from other data releases that the WIV didn’t possess anything looking like the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 prior to 2018, so there’s a relatively short window of time for them to have supposedly sequenced and then hidden this virus.
Not sure where you’re getting this story about a contractor fixing broken HEPA filters in the lab from. When is this supposed to have happened?

“evidence”. Conclusive evidence? Weak evidence? Who knows. If there’s “evidence”, I guess that’s enough. Sure.

This would have been quite the feat, considered they “notified the world” on the 31st of December 2019. Where’s the evidence of htem restricting the export of PPE “months” before that?

110

Samples of SARS-CoV-2 found in the lab or isolated from personnel early in, or prior to, the pandemic.

Staff at the lab coming down with illnesses resembling COVID-19 early in, or prior to, the pandemic.

Early cases clustering around the vicinity of the lab, or around people who work there.

Any evidence that any virus closely enough resembling SARS-CoV-2 to have been its evolutionary precursor was ever stored or investigated at the lab.

Any evidence whatsoever that SARS-CoV-2 was the result of human manipulation rather than having a natural origin.

Etc, etc.

111

And even if it’s true, so what? Is it surprising that a virus research lab would regularly maintain and repair its HEPA filters? I could just imagine if this wasn’t the case: “The Lab Leak is true, 'cuz the WIV wasn’t maintaining its HEPA filters!!”

112

Here is a Bayesian type analysis by Washburne pertaining to the location of SARS2 emergence:

For example, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan. What are the chances of that?

Under the Zoo theory, we can estimate the probability of a SARS CoV emerging in Wuhan by using pre-COVID methods to forecast spillover. By looking at the biogeography of SARS-CoVs, summing the total populations within the known range of SARS CoVs, and dividing the population of Wuhan by this total SARS-overlapping population, we can estimate a <1% chance of a SARS-CoV pandemic emerging in Wuhan under the zoonotic theory.

Under the lab theory’s scenario involving the DEFUSE grant proceeding with the means & opportunities available to those researchers, we can read the grant and see the live virus would be studied in two labs: University of North Carolina and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. At first pass, we might then say there’s a 50% chance of SARS-CoV-2 emerging in Wuhan under the DEFUSE scenario. However, we may improve that estimate by noting the documented, dilapidated nature of coronavirus research facilities in China relative to those of UNC, including the WIV not having funds to update its critical infrastructure, hiring contractors to fix HEPA filters (uh oh) and patenting duct-taped approaches for cheaper seals on animal cages. Conditioned on this information, the DEFUSE scenario would place a much higher chance of the DEFUSE research product emerging in Wuhan than UNC.

To combine these, we have <1% chance of a Wuhan emergence under the Zoo theory and a >50% chance of a Wuhan emergence under the Lab theory. A Wuhan emergence is >50x more likely, and thus 50x easier to explain, under a lab origin than a zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2. Quantifying the odds of key pieces of evidence under both theories helps us advance science at the speed of the evidence.
Taken from the piece below:

113

This is Washburne trying to use logic.

Words fail.

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114

Here is the relevant passage in Washburne piece:

The DEFUSE proposal

We’ve gone over the geographic and genomic evidence that makes SARS-CoV-2 highly unusual among other SARS coronaviruses. SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan in 2019 far from the hotspots of wildlife coronavirus diversity, right next door to world leading labs studying wildlife coronaviruses, and it emerged with a human-specific furin cleavage site and the restriction map of an infectious clone.

Less than 1.5 years earlier, researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and elsewhere proposed to insert a human-specific furin cleavage site in a SARS coronavirus in Wuhan.

Read those last two paragraphs again.

The DEFUSE proposal is where researchers laid out their intentions to make a virus shockingly similar to SARS-CoV-2 in all of the ways in which SARS-CoV-2 is glaringly different from wildlife SARS coronaviruses.

The DEFUSE proposal was a grant proposal written by Peter Daszak at EcoHealth Alliance in NYC (EHA), Zheng-Li Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Linfa Wang at Duke-NUS Singapore, and others. The proposal was submitted to DARPA’s PREEMPT call, a grant call looking for innovative ideas to preempt pathogen spillover before it occurs.

The DEFUSE proposal contained many specific aims: catching bats, sending samples from bats to labs, looking for viruses in the samples, studying and modifying the viruses in labs, developing raccoon poxvirus vaccines to boost immunity & protect bats against the viruses, testing the viruses + immune-boosting in bats, forecasting where spillover is most likely to occur, and deploying vaccines in wild bats to preempt spillover.

If you look on page 11 of the main document, page 13 of the online PDF above, under the section labelled “S2 proteolytic cleavage and glycosylation sites”, you can find the most important passage in this document.

The researchers propose to scan SARS-CoV genomes for potential furin cleavage sites and, where none exist, they propose to insert the appropriate cleavage sites. Specifically, they say:

”… we will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in Vero and HAE cells”

115

Already described in detail. Stop sealioning.

116

So… are you actually going to take such an approach? Put down your numbers.

117

Washburne has already shown how it’s done: Pull the numbers “<1%” and “50%” out your ass, put them up on a blog, and watch people like @Giltil lap them up.

And what would be really funny, if it wasn’t actually sad and even dangerous, is that you actually think that is relevant, or even answers @evograd’s question.

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118

This is idiotic. Simply summing the total populations ignores the fact that the virus would most likely require a dense population centre to take off, i.e. a city.

This is also conditional on the relevant insertion of furin cleavage sites actually happening at all (zero evidence), and that this work was performed in Wuhan in addition to North Carolina, while the type of work is directly in Ralph Baric’s area of expertise, not something done by the WIV.

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119

It’s even stupider. It’s like arguing that we can estimate the odds of a Lab Leak from the WIV being the cause by calculating frequency with which global pandemics are caused by an engineered virus escaping from a lab, and dividing this by the number of virus labs in the world.

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120

@Giltil, this excerpt is embarrassing. It is beyond bad.

Others in this thread have debunked this insult to logic.

Let’s add in a few crucial pieces of information to this:

Under the lab theory’s scenario involving the DEFUSE grant proceeding with the means & opportunities available to those researchers, we can read the grant and see the live virus would be studied in two labs: University of North Carolina and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In addition, looking at the scientific productivity of the two groups, we can be sure that they would have published the sequences of any live virus they would be studying. Since no near-identical viral precursor to SARS-CoV-2 has been described by these groups, there is a 0% chance that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in these laboratories.

To combine these, we have an unknown but finite chance of a Wuhan emergence under the Zoo theory and a 0% chance of a Wuhan emergence under the Lab theory. A Wuhan emergence can only be explained with a zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2. Quantifying the odds of key pieces of evidence under both theories helps us advance science at the speed of the evidence.

So much for Washburne’s “Bayesian” analysis.

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