I do not wish this to come across as crass. But taking the WIV reports as conclusive seems somewhat akin to asking a student suspected of academic foul play to grade their own paper.
Moreover, the claim that people have ignored those scientists on the natural origins side might be accurate in 2025, but it was the lab origins proponents who across 2020-22 were presented to the public by the establishment as "conspiracy theorists" / "Sinophobes" / "racists" etc. This massively shut down open debate on an unbelievably important topic. (I previously wrote about this politically correct suppression of debate in these very pages https://hxstem.substack.com/p/surety-brings-ruin )
While not a subject matter expert capable of evaluating the biology, the vast body of evidence put forth by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley, for example, is extremely convincing. As such, do you have a recommendation for a written/video rebuttal against the arguments put forth in their book Viral?
Thank you for the article and, in advance, for your time in reading this comment.
This is not my area of expertise, at all, but the US funded gain of function research carried out at Wuhan (proven) and all the suppressed e-mail traffic on the theory by Fauci and others in the business sure makes it looks like Wuhan had something to do with it.
The US contributed a pretty small amount of money compared to WIV's. It amounts to a good-faith "lets' work together" payment that gave us access to research.
This whole "But Gain of Function!" business is an actual conspiracy to con you into thinking there is something terrible happening. It is equivalent to screaming, "Weapons of mass destruction!" because "They use steel!" at a factory that makes forks, spoons, and other cutlery. Really. It is that bad.
OK, I don't have a strong view either way. I do find it instructive that the CIA now views Lab Leak as the dominant thesis, albeit with low confidence.
I am prepared to buy the idea that Gain Of Function is a red herring. But the e-mail traffic (originally hidden) by various science actors in the drama is real, as far as I can tell, where THEY surmise the issue was a lab leak.
That was the early question everyone thought in the beginning. As I said in the article, I had that question. Everyone with a brain did. WIV is right there, they were collecting bat viruses, swabs, and trying to culture them, as labs do, etcetera. All totally obvious. There was the precedent of the USSR accident with anthrax.
And every serious scientist that looked at it saw that there wasn't anything except reason to ask the question. No link. None. Still is no link. No forensics tie WIV.
China was ALSO collecting bats for the table from far and wide - whole live bats, housing them without any isolation protocol, together with everything from racoon dogs to civet cats. Both of those are susceptible to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We know that raccoon dogs at Wuhan Wet Market were in cages where SARS-CoV-2 was also found. The volume of bat collection for food purposes dwarfs what WIV collected. (Here's a similar stat. the quantity of meat for humans through a single urban grocery store is greater than all the mass of animals used in research in a year.)
So you see the logical problem here? One facility, WIV, carefully harvests a small number of bats, takes swabs, and isolates it all. The other system for food consumption gathers hugely more, takes zero precautions, and serves the WHOLE BAT sitting up in a bowl as bat soup. The diner eats the bat. If there's a viable virus in that bat, it's getting into that human. And the cooks grab and handle the live bats, which are not happy to be dropped into boiling water. The bats shit, scream (spitting out virus both ends) and leave the virus all over the cages and wherever. It's in the air.
And all along the supply chain there are opportunities for infected bats to infect other animals used for food. This aspect is even more concerning, because cross-infections in the supply chain help evolve the virus into something pathogenic to humans.
Can you see what I'm getting at here?
There is NO BASIS AT ALL for surmising that the issue was a lab leak. Nothing. And after the virus was found in cages and samples from the wet market? And then linked to raccoon dogs in the same cages?
I don't really think these arguments hold water, and I bristle a little bit at the author's appeal to monolithic "scientists". However, I'm glad that heterodox STEM published this. It marks this substack as truly heterodox, not just anti-institutionalist. This is exactly what I signed up for. And to the author's point, I could see the potential for a sort of environment where disagreement is unfairly excluded.
The genetic sequences weren't in the databases because they had been deleted. We KNOW about several deletions and requests that indicate central control requiring anti-scientific practices. We KNOW the early Covid-19 sequences were deleted in 2019.
"... [that's] just China being its paranoid Chinese self..." Why yes, yes it is, being specifically anti-scientific with data you depended on. It doesn't matter WHY Chinese authorities didn't cooperate. That is evidence in itself. Why are you excusing it? If the information CAN be deleted on demand, and we even know information WAS deleted, how can you POSSIBLY wave that away?
Why did Shi Zhengli look again at the databases years after it was known sequences had been managed this way? That's not conclusive of anything! This is no longer science.
"The genetic sequences weren't in the databases because they had been deleted."
You made that up, or got it from someone else who did. You constructed a circular box that excludes any information you don't like.
Tell me. Does the US cooperate with "Chinese authorities" demands? If so, when?
You ask why was there a formal examination presented of the sequences in 2024?
- There it is again. The damned if you do and damned if you don't game. Prior to that China and Zhengli was attacked for not being forthcoming. Yes? So now when you get it, you dismiss it by asking. "Why look?"
So I don't think he made that up. I am not saying I agree or disagree with the validity of this, but this is where people are getting this claim from from what I can tell.
Maybe this has already been deemed not a big deal and explainable by other factors so don't shoot the messenger, just showing you where it came from and that Barking Toad didn't make it up.
Bloom says that a set of early SARS-CoV-2 patient sample sequences from the pandemic were deleted for unknown reasons by those that deposited them and that Jesse recovered them. And that those sequences indicated they were closer to the bat progenitor virus than the Wet Market sequences. Those were deleted from NIH’s Sequence Read Archive. These deletions were requested by an entity in Wuhan.
There are not clear dates on each sample. Without that, construction of a tree is less reliable.
The claim made by Barking Toad was that WIV deleted their bat sequences. These were all patient samples unrelated to WIV. They came from hospitals. Does that point to a WIV lab leak? Not without sequences at WIV that are plausibly close.
This is an interview about the Jesse Bloom article, probably with Wang, who submitted the pre-print. The explanation makes sense. The data was not intended to be used for origin tracing as it was incomplete reads. It was for diagnostic use.
Is there a question about origin? Probably. We don't live in a Star Trek universe where near-magic instruments can know virtually everything. I remember the Chinese CDC saying there was a case in November, but that was later said to be incorrect.
(The two editorials are not particularly substantive.)
It is not really compelling. I have plenty of contrary arguments and questions. A lot of the supporting material which I was led to believe would be in this essay are not there. Instead there is a lot of...other stuff.
As others have suggested, it is almost as though Spartacus were attempting to argue for the lab leak theory by making the natural origin theory look as silly as possible.
I know because "Spartacus" has always blocked this account that it is pointless to engage. I have no idea if I have ever been in contact with Spartacus before, or if this is an error.
So, I will not bother.
At least, Spartacus was given a platform to state his case. And I, for one, am not particularly impressed. Wow, what a diatribe.
There are some strange assertions in there, ones that made me briefly wonder if the article were intended as a spoof.
The claim that Angie Rasmussen has not been quoted enough seemed like a joke.
Some of the more relevant claims are just wrong. E.g. contrary to the article Wuhan Institute of Virology and their EcoHealth Alliance partners routinely collected samples from southern Yunnan and Laos.
The over 10k readers of this account include some of the group that is most dismissive of the lab leak idea. Problems have been repaired in response to their comments. Revisions for new data are always possible, but at this point the result favoring lab leak looks quite stable.
This is not to say that you're wrong about the dangerous lunatic RFK Jr, or the dangerous demonization of the mRNA vaccines. Or your sense that aiming for more stable epitopes would be a good idea.
I just disagree that the path to increasing some degree of trust about such issues lies through sloppy arguments that Covid didn't leak from a lab. It looks like a leak from a lab doing almost exactly what WIV and collaborators from the US and Singapore had described in their DEFUSE proposal to DARPA.
I absolutely agree that RFK is an enormous menace. I agree also that Bhattacharya's reputation as the honest, reasonable guy in the room is entirely undeserved, On mRNA I agree that it's essential for large-scale rapid response to new pathogens and probably for detailed fast response to individual neoplasms. For longer-term use more conventional vaccines (e.g. Novavax) seem to have some advantages.
In light of our agreement on these action items I'll hold off on listing more of the errors of fact on which your argument about origins is based.
I am still plenty skeptical of the natural origin theory, for a variety of reasons.
I am associated with a different part of the IC, and we do not view the CPC as some benign entity. And we have lots of evidence which cannot be revealed to substantiate our position.
However, I am still glad that we enticed Dr. Hanley to write this piece.
This is how science should be done. All sides should be heard and carefully considered.
Seriously? You trot out Bhattacharya? The man has an agenda aligned with RFK Jr.'s as everyone that professional liar has appointed does. He is the conspiracy chief, and you are being conned.
That claim? It is just not happening. It is a lie. The truth is that hundreds of thousands of people died because they believed that.
While I can't speak authoritatively about the DNA sequence, this sliming of Bhattacharya proves to me that you are a partisan hack. His credentials and the many presentations he has made are honest and compelling - yours are not.
It is funny. I think you are right it is not a lab leak it is deliberate war operation. The virus was released from BSL4 lab in Wuhan, where Dani Anderson tested bat LAV with Moderna unique furin sequence on Chinese bats. Baric and Munster collaborators in Wuhan had it released in August-September, intelligence and analysis was done by late fall 2019. Trump ignored the intelligence agency plan and WHO played it differently. Was it planned to trigger third world war I am not sure. They played pandemics and Fauci told CIA to scrap their lab-leak theory of COVID origin. War for power just started,let them eat each other -it will be an interesting show. Somehow this interesting virus delays interferon response, has super spreading character, binds and gets in t lymphocytes, cytotoxic to t lymphocytes. The most desirable live attenuated bat vaccine.
I am wondering how many readers understand how incredibly dangerous RFK Jr, and the dunce lords at NIH and FDA actually are?
Do you get that demonizing mRNA and RFK's intentional destruction of the vaccine industry to line his pockets with billions through jury trials is as great if not greater a threat than nuclear war?
That is where the conspiracy is. There is no conspiracy of scientists in the USA or at WIV. There is a set of conspiracies here in the USA. The politics of Taiwan is one of those. RFK Jr and his lie-juggernaut "Children's Health Defense" is the biggest one.
Distrust of the process is a long time in the making because of the suspicion that vaccine ingredients have side effects that are being ignored or worse, hidden. We deserve to know (informed concent) what it is and what it does. RFK Jr is doing what the people expect him to do. The scientific community has let the people down and it's a long crawl back to integrity. You may be a scientist, but the general public will not trust you anymore or any scientific journal where you promote each other instead of making reproducible claims. Prove yourself. This article and your responses to comments are not even slightly convincing to the layperson. Furin cleavage site, masks, lockdowns for thee but not for me, two weeks for the curve, lies, lies, lies, more lies. Where were the scientists then?
"...furin cleavage site, masks, lockdowns for thee but not for me, two weeks for the curve" <= These are different matters, totally separate from vaccines.
You are correct that for me personally, lockdowns didn't exist, or barely did. And I was traveling all over the country by plane and car during COVID. Why? Because I was vaccinated March 12, 2020. Two weeks later I started visiting people who were on lockdown to expose myself to COVID-19. People were happy to have the company. Yes, I wore masks whenever people asked because, why not? I watched masking turn into a flag of identity and party affiliation.
I spoke out against lockdowns by June. Several reasons. First, moving the goalposts erodes trust. Second, with my background in biodefense, I knew that what people do in response to quarantine is often to resist and break it. I was totally unsurprised to see Gavin Newsom ignore lockdowns and have parties. Prostitution also went up during lockdowns, which vectored disease. Third, I noted that states that never did lockdowns (like Idaho) could have lo transmission stats. Last, and most important, lockdowns threatened to kill more people than COVID-19. (And COVID was killing a lot of people.)
I published an editorial August 14, 2020. Myself, Steve Keen, and George Church
The editorial is not long. This editorial was supposed to go into The Economist. If it had, it could have changed things. It wasn't shot down by scientists. It was shot down by a "health desk editor" who didn't like vaccines. Me? I was treating COVID-19 as a "live fire exercise" for biodefense. That's what it was, and we failed miserably.
So, that's where scientists were. Some of us were fighting as hard as we could to do the best thing possible. Some of us recognized serious problems and spoke up.
And this is where we part ways. RFK Jr has been the primary architect of the anti-vax movement in this century. RFK Jr is the primary con man who has lied to you about vaccine ingredients. Nothing has been hidden. But RFK has lied, and then lied over and over and over. It is a very simple strategy to confuse you.
He makes an accusation, like "What about aluminum in vaccines?! Why aren't you studying this?!" Scientists say "It's not a problem." RFKJr says, "Why aren't you addressing this?! What are you hiding?" Scientists say, "Not hiding anything. Here are the studies that show it's not a problem." RFK Jr says, "What about aluminum in vaccines?! Why aren't you studying this?!"
It's just a con. RFK Jr is a con-man because he is a litigator, and that's what litigators learn to do to win cases. The trust is not lost because of scientists. The trust has been lost because you were conned by a professional liar. The claims scientists make are absolutely reproducible. Have been, over and over and over.
Here is yet another study of aluminum in vaccines. Short version: No association of aluminum in vaccines with anything. But please, read it.
To my recollection, Bret Weinstein used a similar argument in the opposite direction: to implicate WiV at the time when the 'lab-leak' hypotheses was a taboo. Namely, he claimed that out of only a dozen of 'gain-of-function' genes known to 'gain-of-function' researchers, COVID-19 does have one. What are the chances, Weinstein asked, that out of probably thousands of potential but mostly unknown 'gain-of-function' genes, a naturally evolved virus would have one of the few known to scientists? His second argument was that COVID-19 virus' vulnerability to ultraviolet (allegedly it spreads indoors much easier than outdoors) indicated that it evolved indoors. Neither argument sounds conclusive, but in any case, the only general conclusion one can derive from all this is that when science is politicized, there is no way for an outsider to derive any reliable conclusion.
I have looked through the COVID-19 genome, and I never saw anything like that. Unlike Bret, I have actually worked on bioweapon scenarios and defense. I don't bother myself with what Bret says because he's become a professional (wealthy) grifter and liar. I don't waste my time.
The second argument? If Bret Weinstein actually said that, he's worse than I thought. You should be able to spot the not-so-bright in that if you stop and think it over. Think about bats. And I'll give you some basics about viruses.
Evolution has plenty of ways to spread disease protected from UV. Forests, burrows, caves, clouds, water, night time. Also bites, sex, and close contact. That's why viruses circulate in birds so well. Birds live in flocks. So do bats.
Do bats spend time out of sunlight? Yes, they do. Most bats come out at night and roost in dark places during the day. Humans happen to like to be out of sunlight. We like light, but we also like shade. Most places you go are shaded at least.
Brian, dismissing a conjecture by calling its proponent "a grifter and a liar" is not a legitimate scientific argument. I cannot remember now what exactly Weinstein was referring to, but according to ChatGPT, several genetic features of SARS-CoV-2 are debated as potential (though inconclusive) indications of human manipulation, e.g. :
"The PRRA insertion—a 4–amino acid sequence (proline-arginine-arginine-alanine) forming a furin cleavage site (FCS)—is central to debates about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. While this exact sequence was not previously published as part of gain-of-function (GoF) research, the concept of introducing furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses was actively studied before the COVID-19 pandemic."
For folks like you, it helps to realize that the scientific consensus is clear. Everything else is founded in political motivations and the ecology of the grifter-sphere, which has volunteers.
There is plenty about the furin cleavage site. It is not proof, nor indication of lab-leak in any sense.
Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses.
Harrison and Sachs’s (1) claim that alignment of sarbecovirus Spike amino acid sequences illustrates“the unusual nature of the [SARS-CoV-2] FCS” is misleading. FCSs are common in coronaviruses, and present in representatives of four out of five betacoronavirus subgenuses (8). The highly variable nature of the S1/S2 junction is easily ascertained by inspecting a precise alignment of sarbecovirus Spikes (Fig. 1C).
Consensus? According to ChatGPT, and even the US IC report you cite, there is no consensus - only absence of conclusive evidence of manipulation. Your argument, as far as I understand, is that all the suspicious genetic features could and do arise naturally. But this does not imply they could not arise in a lab.
Imagine that there is a single case of COVID-19 infection among the Wuhan lab staff which was concealed and occurred before the spread of the disease. Then all the arguments against the lab leak fall apart. In the case it did occur, what are the chances the Chinese authorities would not conceal the event?
Your other reference https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715 shows a map of early COVID-19 cases centered around the Huanan Market (while the WiV lab is on the other side of the river). This looks conclusive, but: If the Chinese authorities wanted to conceal the lab origin of the pandemic, this is exactly what they would do: feed partial or falsified data to Western scientists who would then confirm that the Market was the starting point.
Well, at a closer look into the source document of the map: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part-joint-report.pdf , I can see (on page 98) numerous stalls in the Huanan Market which tested positive for COVID-19, while none of the animal products tested positive (page 99). Doesn't it suggest that all positive tests come from infected people who worked there, not from food? So, it looks like the market is just the crowded place where the virus easily spreads between people.
And indeed, why would a virus native to bats end up in a bat-free market? Sorry for contributing into the conspiracy theory!
ChatGPT is a machine that parrots back whatever is fed into it. Grok 4 has been saying Hitler is a great guy. (Elon's "mechahitler".) LLM tech does not "know" anything, it's just a superannuated search engine that statistically predicts.
My argument is: There is no evidence that sequences at WIV matched SARS-CoV-2 meaningfully. This eliminates them. The "gain of function" was minor and not related to changes affecting virulence, and in viruses that don't match. That eliminates them. The virus was identified at Wuhan Wet Market. The virus was detected together with raccoon dog DNA in the same cage, and raccoon dogs are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. That makes Wuhan Wet Market the most likely origin. However, it may not be the only origin. More about that later.
Imagine a case of infection among WIV staff? Imagine doesn't count. No evidence that ever happened. Without a matching sequence at WIV, there is no reason to believe that.
The early cases do support Wuhan Wet Market, and human superspreading could be part of that. (More later.) But again you resort to an "If..." You have to have some evidence supporting your if. You also postulated perfect control is reasonable to presume. That starts reaching around into a pretzel where everything depends on, "But what if..."
The market was closed January 1. I've read that the animals were removed from the market before anyone could test them, and that Chinese authorities tested them and found the virus (but don't have a reference for that). It's hard to test an animal that isn't there, but what is a clear reference is that raccoon dog and SARS-CoV-2 was detected in the same cage samples.
How could a bat virus get from bats in Laos to Wuhan in at least one raccoon dog? There was wildlife trade. Conditions for trade are not well controlled by US standards. I remember a video of racoon dogs being slaughtered. The animals were skinned alive, and the body was thrown into a bin where it stared back whimpering and blinked its eyes in the sun. The skins were ripped off so fast in one piece.
I can't answer that specific question about how the bat virus might get to Wuhan, except in general terms. Can I believe that bats could have been quietly brought in and sold, perhaps to special customers, to make bat soup on the quiet? Sure. I've been in similar markets in other parts of the world. What would surprise me would be the market NOT selling contraband anywhere. The place was pretty big, a warren of cages stacked up. Contraband has a risk premium. Animals are minor risk compared to other things. There could be payoffs, which opportunities are appreciated by inspectors quite often.
We don't need to have contraband sold at Wuhan though. Bats would probably be delivered to an intermediate warehouse and stored there for shipment elsewhere. A wholesaler facility. This is how things usually move in the food business. The virus could have been delivered elsewhere, to multiple locations.
Indeed, SARS-CoV-2 could have had multiple starting points. There may not have been one patient zero. It may have jumped to humans multiple times, even at multiple locations.
I developed an epidemic simulator 20 years ago. In the process of writing it, studying transmission, and testing it, one of the things I learned is that even fairly contagious diseases don't take off into an epidemic and then pandemic most of the time. Mostly, a few people get infected, and it dies out. You have probably heard of R0, the measure of how many people are infected per case? In the real world, R0 does not exist. It's a number calculated after the fact. In the real world transmission is mostly from superspreaders. The rest are dead ends, or barely manage to get to one infection per case. R0 fluctuates based on the super-spreaders who might infect 100 people or more because they are public facing.
With SARS-CoV-2 we know that about half of people get no significant symptoms, and recover. They range from mildly contagious with an asymptomatic infection to quite contagious for some short period of time. The cases that were initially written up were 41 in December, the worst cases. One third of those had not visited Wuhan. No international cases were traced back to Wuhan.
SARS-CoV-2 was an extraordinary virus in terms of contagion because it has a 3-5 day contagion period where people feel fine. So this one blew up better than most. It could not be controlled the way original SARS was.
Could Wuhan Wet Market have been a human superspreader event? It is not impossible. It is quite likely it became one. But it could also have been a raccoon dog superspreader event at the Wuhan Wet Market. And that would probably turn into human superspreader event.
Back when I did the world tour of mostly tropical nations in 2009's flu pandemic (https://doi.org/10.1186/1743-422x-7-98), one of the things I noticed was that prostitutes were out in every country. I started talking to them about what they did, and collected quite a lot of interviews. In Thailand, I got a policeman interested in this and he was happy to take me around to bordellos in Bangkok. In all the locations, conditions were good for transmission of enveloped viruses. And, every single woman said that she took drugs from sudafed to illegal drugs to keep working when she was sick. They all said they would not tell a customer they were sick.
Obviously, prostitution is a likely vector for transmission of infectious disease. And I tried to include it into the transmission conditions paper above. But that was taken out. Scientists didn't want to see it. My coauthor didn't want to be associated with it. Technically, I hadn't gotten an international IRB for asking questions of prostitutes. So prostitution vectored respiratory disease, from influenza to coronaviruses, is a bit of a blind spot. Was that active in COVID origins? It was probably part of picture in some way. But no data.
Bottom line, the first case recorded, Dec 1, 2019, was virtually certain to not be the first human case. We don't live in a Star Trek world where we can necessarily know exactly how SARS-CoV-2 originated in humans. We can only draw Occam's razor best estimates.
I am sorry, but you have just proved quite convincingly that the first human case did NOT originate in the Huanan Market.
1. While out of 923 'environmental' samples from the market, 73 tested positive, none of 457 frozen food samples tested positive. There is no evidence that the raccoon dog whose DNA was found in the market (BTW, where did you get this?) was carrying the virus; it is the other way around at best: among lots of species whose DNA was present in the Huanan Market, DNA of only two species who could potentially carry SARS-CoV-2 virus were found: raccoon dogs and homo sapiens. The latter is by far more abundant in the market than the former.
3. If that singular transmission event can result in the 175 early cases concentrated around the market as shown on page 44 in the same WHO report, then the same distribution map can result from another singular event: an infected human visiting the market. That human could be infected anywhere else, and this leaves absolutely no reason to connect the first (unidentifiable) animal-to-human transmission event to the market.
Now, isn't it much more likely that the virus jumped to humans directly from bats? The closest (geographically) bat viruses are stored in the WiV lab. Their database doesn't contain any viruses (genetically) close enough to SARS_CoV-2, but -- very inconveniently -- the access to the database was shut down on September 12, 2019 (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-000608_EN.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com#def1 ). What does Occam's razor tell us?
As the comments already made indicate, people are extremely suspicious of the US funding of the WiV, and this article does not address that at all. I don't necessarily see that as evil, but why does the US not have its own labs? Having said that, this article should give people pause when thinking about the lab-leak hypothesis. Fauci's apparent suppression of that hypothesis could be explained by extreme exasperation that the hypothesis kept coming up, not that he was necessarily hiding anything. As an aside, I'm also very concerned about RFK Jr's antipathy toward vaccines. I'm old enough to remember lots of people in iron lungs from polio. That vaccine was essential to public health, as are others. We are indeed in a very weird world.
"Fauci's apparent suppression of that hypothesis could be explained by extreme exasperation that the hypothesis kept coming up, not that he was necessarily hiding anything".
For me, the disparity of narrative between experts and intelligence agencies (who know different things than biologists) made it only possible to keep an open mind to the fact of the situation.
But Fauci tried to make it look as if he was an objective observer to the debate. He had a massive conflict of interest as far as the outcome of the debate was concerned. Suppression or subterfuge plus conflict of interest - bad strategy for generating trust, wouldn't you say?
Do "intelligence" agencies have a deserved reputation for lying?
Did the CIA lie about: MK-Ultra? Project Mockingbird? Extraordinary rendition? (Also known as torture by proxy.) Iran Contra? Lying about lying to Congress? We could go on asking.
Your wording assumes that anyone disagreeing with you has a closed mind. Fauci's so-called "conflict of interest". He, along with many other NIH scientists got royalty payments for treatments he worked on. Why does NIH do this? Because scientists in private industry have opportunities to make money from the treatments they work on because of patents. To keep scientists willing to work in government patents provide royalty income to those who succeed.
- I could ask you why you are against capitalism. Are you?
- In Fauci's case, he donated his royalty payments to charity.
Yours is the closed mind.
You put Fauci in a damned if he does, damned if he doesn't box. You presume subterfuge or suppression. That is precisely the game I talked about: "Why are you suppressing this story!" "We're not. It's just wrong and has no evidence." "Why are you suppressing this story!"
Lies repeated often enough become the narrative. That is what you are repeating. The narrative of lies.
The conflict of interest I refer to is of course the fact of that the NIH was in a funding and information cooperation with Wuhan. In my book that counts as a conflict of interest when you are involved in advancing or denying narratives regarding a possible lab leak. The one thing Fauci and others should have done early on is make that relationship transparent and publish all relevant communications in terms of the extent of the cooperation. Otherwise I have no idea how you read what you do into my statement. Anti-capitalist?? Wow. So you think some of the intelligence agencies might be lying? Fine. Which ones in this case. And why.
NIH has the mission to do virus research. Collaborations with other nations are normal. The head of NIH has the obligation to support sensible collaborations. It would have been irresponsible of the head of NIH to "cank the op" and shut it down. That region is where original SARS came from.
What lack of transparency? It's a science project. It had been going since 2004. There wasn't a huge amount of productivity, but some, and that's how science goes. A lot of stuff is humdrum, just data collection. Field work and the back end sequencing of viruses can be glacial.
I could not imagine your strange interpretation of "conflict of interest". I have read other stuff about Fauci and COI, all of it is about money. So I asked if you were anti-capitalist because that is what it would mean if you didn't want Fauci or many other scientists to be paid royalties for their inventions.
Your concerns as you have stated them, are that for Fauci to have done his job as NIH director, creates a conflict of interest. If he later speaks about it as he needs to for a different job, then he is at fault because he approved it. If he later speaks about it because congress called on him to testify, he is at fault because he speaks about it.
That is bizarre. What else could he possibly do?
Your conflict of interest is that you wrote a book.
Of course the US has its own virology labs. We have them at Universities across the nation. (We also have labs like CAHFS in California that receive animals killed by anthrax and plague pretty regularly. Those diseases are endemic to the US, and dengue has recently gotten established. ) What we don't have is free access to the territory of China, and all the viruses in the wild there.
What would you think of Chinese scientists going across the USA collecting rabies, plague, and anthrax samples, as well as coronaviruses in bats? That could be portrayed by conspiracy theory grifters as a Chinese biological warfare program, yes? Why would anyone think Chinese people would think differently? China actually was attacked with bioweapons in WW2 by Japan.
Partnering with labs in China is no different than partnering with labs in Netherlands, France, or Ukraine. Remember that noise during the Russian invasion about bioweapons labs in Ukraine funded by the US? Those were labs monitoring anthrax, plague, etcetera, By partnering with and supporting science in other nations, those nations know that they are in charge. It calms down suspicions. Or it should.
I wanted to be taking swabs and samples, but the regulations and permissions needed made it impossible. So I didn't. If I had done it anyway, I might have gotten away with it, but if it became known could cause a big political fuss.
What is biodefense? In the broadest sense, biodefense is infectious disease medicine. Today in the USA, there is for all practical purposes no biodefense at all. There is the intentional destruction of basic medical capability to detect and treat disease.
The motives for funding WIV were:
- To get access to viruses collected in China by Chinese researchers. This way we would get a view into potential pandemic disease. Remember SARS, the original had barely been contained 20 years before. MERS was active in the middle east.
- To promote a spirit of cooperation between our nations.
Dr Hanley,
I do not wish this to come across as crass. But taking the WIV reports as conclusive seems somewhat akin to asking a student suspected of academic foul play to grade their own paper.
Moreover, the claim that people have ignored those scientists on the natural origins side might be accurate in 2025, but it was the lab origins proponents who across 2020-22 were presented to the public by the establishment as "conspiracy theorists" / "Sinophobes" / "racists" etc. This massively shut down open debate on an unbelievably important topic. (I previously wrote about this politically correct suppression of debate in these very pages https://hxstem.substack.com/p/surety-brings-ruin )
While not a subject matter expert capable of evaluating the biology, the vast body of evidence put forth by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley, for example, is extremely convincing. As such, do you have a recommendation for a written/video rebuttal against the arguments put forth in their book Viral?
Thank you for the article and, in advance, for your time in reading this comment.
God Bless,
Ciaràn.
What article did you read? Did you see the citations list at the end?
I know. TL;DR
This is not my area of expertise, at all, but the US funded gain of function research carried out at Wuhan (proven) and all the suppressed e-mail traffic on the theory by Fauci and others in the business sure makes it looks like Wuhan had something to do with it.
Learn more about gain of function.
https://rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/gold-standard-gain-of-function
People yell about gain of function, and haven't got the slightest idea WTAF they are talking about.
The US contributed a pretty small amount of money compared to WIV's. It amounts to a good-faith "lets' work together" payment that gave us access to research.
This whole "But Gain of Function!" business is an actual conspiracy to con you into thinking there is something terrible happening. It is equivalent to screaming, "Weapons of mass destruction!" because "They use steel!" at a factory that makes forks, spoons, and other cutlery. Really. It is that bad.
Learn about Gain of Function.
https://rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/gain-of-fiction-research-of-concern
OK, I don't have a strong view either way. I do find it instructive that the CIA now views Lab Leak as the dominant thesis, albeit with low confidence.
I am prepared to buy the idea that Gain Of Function is a red herring. But the e-mail traffic (originally hidden) by various science actors in the drama is real, as far as I can tell, where THEY surmise the issue was a lab leak.
That was the early question everyone thought in the beginning. As I said in the article, I had that question. Everyone with a brain did. WIV is right there, they were collecting bat viruses, swabs, and trying to culture them, as labs do, etcetera. All totally obvious. There was the precedent of the USSR accident with anthrax.
And every serious scientist that looked at it saw that there wasn't anything except reason to ask the question. No link. None. Still is no link. No forensics tie WIV.
China was ALSO collecting bats for the table from far and wide - whole live bats, housing them without any isolation protocol, together with everything from racoon dogs to civet cats. Both of those are susceptible to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We know that raccoon dogs at Wuhan Wet Market were in cages where SARS-CoV-2 was also found. The volume of bat collection for food purposes dwarfs what WIV collected. (Here's a similar stat. the quantity of meat for humans through a single urban grocery store is greater than all the mass of animals used in research in a year.)
So you see the logical problem here? One facility, WIV, carefully harvests a small number of bats, takes swabs, and isolates it all. The other system for food consumption gathers hugely more, takes zero precautions, and serves the WHOLE BAT sitting up in a bowl as bat soup. The diner eats the bat. If there's a viable virus in that bat, it's getting into that human. And the cooks grab and handle the live bats, which are not happy to be dropped into boiling water. The bats shit, scream (spitting out virus both ends) and leave the virus all over the cages and wherever. It's in the air.
And all along the supply chain there are opportunities for infected bats to infect other animals used for food. This aspect is even more concerning, because cross-infections in the supply chain help evolve the virus into something pathogenic to humans.
Can you see what I'm getting at here?
There is NO BASIS AT ALL for surmising that the issue was a lab leak. Nothing. And after the virus was found in cages and samples from the wet market? And then linked to raccoon dogs in the same cages?
Seriously. WTAF is required to convince you?
I have no strong opinion. You don’t have to convince me, you have to convince the CIA.
The US paying one cent to the scientists of the murdering, dictatorial CCP to conduct any gain of function research is an unacceptable mistake.
And stop spamming and hyping.
I don't really think these arguments hold water, and I bristle a little bit at the author's appeal to monolithic "scientists". However, I'm glad that heterodox STEM published this. It marks this substack as truly heterodox, not just anti-institutionalist. This is exactly what I signed up for. And to the author's point, I could see the potential for a sort of environment where disagreement is unfairly excluded.
I agree whole-heartedly.
Which arguments don't hold water? Be specific. Explain your reasoning.
The genetic sequences weren't in the databases because they had been deleted. We KNOW about several deletions and requests that indicate central control requiring anti-scientific practices. We KNOW the early Covid-19 sequences were deleted in 2019.
"... [that's] just China being its paranoid Chinese self..." Why yes, yes it is, being specifically anti-scientific with data you depended on. It doesn't matter WHY Chinese authorities didn't cooperate. That is evidence in itself. Why are you excusing it? If the information CAN be deleted on demand, and we even know information WAS deleted, how can you POSSIBLY wave that away?
Why did Shi Zhengli look again at the databases years after it was known sequences had been managed this way? That's not conclusive of anything! This is no longer science.
"The genetic sequences weren't in the databases because they had been deleted."
You made that up, or got it from someone else who did. You constructed a circular box that excludes any information you don't like.
Tell me. Does the US cooperate with "Chinese authorities" demands? If so, when?
You ask why was there a formal examination presented of the sequences in 2024?
- There it is again. The damned if you do and damned if you don't game. Prior to that China and Zhengli was attacked for not being forthcoming. Yes? So now when you get it, you dismiss it by asking. "Why look?"
So I don't think he made that up. I am not saying I agree or disagree with the validity of this, but this is where people are getting this claim from from what I can tell.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8436388/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01731-3
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deleted-coronavirus-genome-sequences-trigger-scientific-intrigue/
Maybe this has already been deemed not a big deal and explainable by other factors so don't shoot the messenger, just showing you where it came from and that Barking Toad didn't make it up.
Thanks.
Bloom says that a set of early SARS-CoV-2 patient sample sequences from the pandemic were deleted for unknown reasons by those that deposited them and that Jesse recovered them. And that those sequences indicated they were closer to the bat progenitor virus than the Wet Market sequences. Those were deleted from NIH’s Sequence Read Archive. These deletions were requested by an entity in Wuhan.
There are not clear dates on each sample. Without that, construction of a tree is less reliable.
The claim made by Barking Toad was that WIV deleted their bat sequences. These were all patient samples unrelated to WIV. They came from hospitals. Does that point to a WIV lab leak? Not without sequences at WIV that are plausibly close.
This is an interview about the Jesse Bloom article, probably with Wang, who submitted the pre-print. The explanation makes sense. The data was not intended to be used for origin tracing as it was incomplete reads. It was for diagnostic use.
https://www.beijingchannelnewsletter.com/p/exclusive-chinese-researcher-at-the
Is there a question about origin? Probably. We don't live in a Star Trek universe where near-magic instruments can know virtually everything. I remember the Chinese CDC saying there was a case in November, but that was later said to be incorrect.
(The two editorials are not particularly substantive.)
I finally had a chance to read this essay.
It is not really compelling. I have plenty of contrary arguments and questions. A lot of the supporting material which I was led to believe would be in this essay are not there. Instead there is a lot of...other stuff.
As others have suggested, it is almost as though Spartacus were attempting to argue for the lab leak theory by making the natural origin theory look as silly as possible.
I know because "Spartacus" has always blocked this account that it is pointless to engage. I have no idea if I have ever been in contact with Spartacus before, or if this is an error.
So, I will not bother.
At least, Spartacus was given a platform to state his case. And I, for one, am not particularly impressed. Wow, what a diatribe.
There are some strange assertions in there, ones that made me briefly wonder if the article were intended as a spoof.
The claim that Angie Rasmussen has not been quoted enough seemed like a joke.
Some of the more relevant claims are just wrong. E.g. contrary to the article Wuhan Institute of Virology and their EcoHealth Alliance partners routinely collected samples from southern Yunnan and Laos.
I've tried to summarize the various lines of evidence in a standard systematic Bayesian way. https://michaelweissman.substack.com/p/an-inconvenient-probability-v57
The over 10k readers of this account include some of the group that is most dismissive of the lab leak idea. Problems have been repaired in response to their comments. Revisions for new data are always possible, but at this point the result favoring lab leak looks quite stable.
This is not to say that you're wrong about the dangerous lunatic RFK Jr, or the dangerous demonization of the mRNA vaccines. Or your sense that aiming for more stable epitopes would be a good idea.
I just disagree that the path to increasing some degree of trust about such issues lies through sloppy arguments that Covid didn't leak from a lab. It looks like a leak from a lab doing almost exactly what WIV and collaborators from the US and Singapore had described in their DEFUSE proposal to DARPA.
I have yet to read any argument for lab-leak that holds any water. Including your claims here.
If we can agree that mRNA is critical, and that RFK Jr is a menace that must be stopped, that's positive.
I absolutely agree that RFK is an enormous menace. I agree also that Bhattacharya's reputation as the honest, reasonable guy in the room is entirely undeserved, On mRNA I agree that it's essential for large-scale rapid response to new pathogens and probably for detailed fast response to individual neoplasms. For longer-term use more conventional vaccines (e.g. Novavax) seem to have some advantages.
In light of our agreement on these action items I'll hold off on listing more of the errors of fact on which your argument about origins is based.
I am still plenty skeptical of the natural origin theory, for a variety of reasons.
I am associated with a different part of the IC, and we do not view the CPC as some benign entity. And we have lots of evidence which cannot be revealed to substantiate our position.
However, I am still glad that we enticed Dr. Hanley to write this piece.
This is how science should be done. All sides should be heard and carefully considered.
Whom were we going to believe you or our lying eyes? mRNA vaccine is great bioweapon not biodefence tool. https://x.com/CartlandDavid/status/1921241944576888854?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1921241944576888854%7Ctwgr%5Eda2b1dc1a1e3a975949aa424c987499e990c531f%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthepeoplesvoice.tv%2Fnew-nih-director-warns-dangerous-mrna-jabs-are-causing-millions-to-die%2F
Seriously? You trot out Bhattacharya? The man has an agenda aligned with RFK Jr.'s as everyone that professional liar has appointed does. He is the conspiracy chief, and you are being conned.
That claim? It is just not happening. It is a lie. The truth is that hundreds of thousands of people died because they believed that.
While I can't speak authoritatively about the DNA sequence, this sliming of Bhattacharya proves to me that you are a partisan hack. His credentials and the many presentations he has made are honest and compelling - yours are not.
It is funny. I think you are right it is not a lab leak it is deliberate war operation. The virus was released from BSL4 lab in Wuhan, where Dani Anderson tested bat LAV with Moderna unique furin sequence on Chinese bats. Baric and Munster collaborators in Wuhan had it released in August-September, intelligence and analysis was done by late fall 2019. Trump ignored the intelligence agency plan and WHO played it differently. Was it planned to trigger third world war I am not sure. They played pandemics and Fauci told CIA to scrap their lab-leak theory of COVID origin. War for power just started,let them eat each other -it will be an interesting show. Somehow this interesting virus delays interferon response, has super spreading character, binds and gets in t lymphocytes, cytotoxic to t lymphocytes. The most desirable live attenuated bat vaccine.
I am wondering how many readers understand how incredibly dangerous RFK Jr, and the dunce lords at NIH and FDA actually are?
Do you get that demonizing mRNA and RFK's intentional destruction of the vaccine industry to line his pockets with billions through jury trials is as great if not greater a threat than nuclear war?
That is where the conspiracy is. There is no conspiracy of scientists in the USA or at WIV. There is a set of conspiracies here in the USA. The politics of Taiwan is one of those. RFK Jr and his lie-juggernaut "Children's Health Defense" is the biggest one.
Distrust of the process is a long time in the making because of the suspicion that vaccine ingredients have side effects that are being ignored or worse, hidden. We deserve to know (informed concent) what it is and what it does. RFK Jr is doing what the people expect him to do. The scientific community has let the people down and it's a long crawl back to integrity. You may be a scientist, but the general public will not trust you anymore or any scientific journal where you promote each other instead of making reproducible claims. Prove yourself. This article and your responses to comments are not even slightly convincing to the layperson. Furin cleavage site, masks, lockdowns for thee but not for me, two weeks for the curve, lies, lies, lies, more lies. Where were the scientists then?
"...furin cleavage site, masks, lockdowns for thee but not for me, two weeks for the curve" <= These are different matters, totally separate from vaccines.
You are correct that for me personally, lockdowns didn't exist, or barely did. And I was traveling all over the country by plane and car during COVID. Why? Because I was vaccinated March 12, 2020. Two weeks later I started visiting people who were on lockdown to expose myself to COVID-19. People were happy to have the company. Yes, I wore masks whenever people asked because, why not? I watched masking turn into a flag of identity and party affiliation.
I spoke out against lockdowns by June. Several reasons. First, moving the goalposts erodes trust. Second, with my background in biodefense, I knew that what people do in response to quarantine is often to resist and break it. I was totally unsurprised to see Gavin Newsom ignore lockdowns and have parties. Prostitution also went up during lockdowns, which vectored disease. Third, I noted that states that never did lockdowns (like Idaho) could have lo transmission stats. Last, and most important, lockdowns threatened to kill more people than COVID-19. (And COVID was killing a lot of people.)
I published an editorial August 14, 2020. Myself, Steve Keen, and George Church
A Call for a Three-Tiered Pandemic Public Health Strategy in Context of SARS-CoV-2. Rejuvenation Research. https://doi.org/10.1089/rej.2020.2363
The editorial is not long. This editorial was supposed to go into The Economist. If it had, it could have changed things. It wasn't shot down by scientists. It was shot down by a "health desk editor" who didn't like vaccines. Me? I was treating COVID-19 as a "live fire exercise" for biodefense. That's what it was, and we failed miserably.
So, that's where scientists were. Some of us were fighting as hard as we could to do the best thing possible. Some of us recognized serious problems and spoke up.
And this is where we part ways. RFK Jr has been the primary architect of the anti-vax movement in this century. RFK Jr is the primary con man who has lied to you about vaccine ingredients. Nothing has been hidden. But RFK has lied, and then lied over and over and over. It is a very simple strategy to confuse you.
He makes an accusation, like "What about aluminum in vaccines?! Why aren't you studying this?!" Scientists say "It's not a problem." RFKJr says, "Why aren't you addressing this?! What are you hiding?" Scientists say, "Not hiding anything. Here are the studies that show it's not a problem." RFK Jr says, "What about aluminum in vaccines?! Why aren't you studying this?!"
It's just a con. RFK Jr is a con-man because he is a litigator, and that's what litigators learn to do to win cases. The trust is not lost because of scientists. The trust has been lost because you were conned by a professional liar. The claims scientists make are absolutely reproducible. Have been, over and over and over.
Here is yet another study of aluminum in vaccines. Short version: No association of aluminum in vaccines with anything. But please, read it.
Aluminum-Adsorbed Vaccines and Chronic Diseases in Childhood: A Nationwide Cohort Study. (2025) https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997
To my recollection, Bret Weinstein used a similar argument in the opposite direction: to implicate WiV at the time when the 'lab-leak' hypotheses was a taboo. Namely, he claimed that out of only a dozen of 'gain-of-function' genes known to 'gain-of-function' researchers, COVID-19 does have one. What are the chances, Weinstein asked, that out of probably thousands of potential but mostly unknown 'gain-of-function' genes, a naturally evolved virus would have one of the few known to scientists? His second argument was that COVID-19 virus' vulnerability to ultraviolet (allegedly it spreads indoors much easier than outdoors) indicated that it evolved indoors. Neither argument sounds conclusive, but in any case, the only general conclusion one can derive from all this is that when science is politicized, there is no way for an outsider to derive any reliable conclusion.
I have looked through the COVID-19 genome, and I never saw anything like that. Unlike Bret, I have actually worked on bioweapon scenarios and defense. I don't bother myself with what Bret says because he's become a professional (wealthy) grifter and liar. I don't waste my time.
The second argument? If Bret Weinstein actually said that, he's worse than I thought. You should be able to spot the not-so-bright in that if you stop and think it over. Think about bats. And I'll give you some basics about viruses.
Every virus is vulnerable to sunlight. Enveloped viruses (https://virologyresearchservices.com/2022/05/22/enveloped-vs-non-enveloped-viruses/ ) tend to be sensitive to everything. But all viruses are UV sensitive.
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2023/ew/d3ew00277b
https://viralzone.expasy.org/30 - SARS-CoV-2
Evolution has plenty of ways to spread disease protected from UV. Forests, burrows, caves, clouds, water, night time. Also bites, sex, and close contact. That's why viruses circulate in birds so well. Birds live in flocks. So do bats.
Do bats spend time out of sunlight? Yes, they do. Most bats come out at night and roost in dark places during the day. Humans happen to like to be out of sunlight. We like light, but we also like shade. Most places you go are shaded at least.
Brian, dismissing a conjecture by calling its proponent "a grifter and a liar" is not a legitimate scientific argument. I cannot remember now what exactly Weinstein was referring to, but according to ChatGPT, several genetic features of SARS-CoV-2 are debated as potential (though inconclusive) indications of human manipulation, e.g. :
"The PRRA insertion—a 4–amino acid sequence (proline-arginine-arginine-alanine) forming a furin cleavage site (FCS)—is central to debates about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. While this exact sequence was not previously published as part of gain-of-function (GoF) research, the concept of introducing furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses was actively studied before the COVID-19 pandemic."
Among references you provided, the 9-page US Intelligence Community report https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-on-Potential-Links-Between-the-Wuhan-Institute-of-Virology-and-the-Origins-of-COVID-19-20230623.pdf exonerates WiV (though, also not very confidently, and without ever mentioning the 'gain-of-function' research), but the 520 page report https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/2024.12.04-SSCP-FINAL-REPORT-ANS.pdf
of a (Republican-led) congressional committee, on p. 37, uses essentially the same input data to arrive at exactly the opposite conclusion.
How do we decide whom to believe?
For folks like you, it helps to realize that the scientific consensus is clear. Everything else is founded in political motivations and the ecology of the grifter-sphere, which has volunteers.
There is plenty about the furin cleavage site. It is not proof, nor indication of lab-leak in any sense.
Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165
-Phylogenetic tree of spike proteins reveals major groups of coronaviruses.
-Furin cleavage sites at spike S1/S2 are common in coronaviruses.
-Furin cleavage sites at spike S1/S2 naturally occurred independently for multiple times in coronaviruses.
SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was not engineered.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119
Harrison and Sachs’s (1) claim that alignment of sarbecovirus Spike amino acid sequences illustrates“the unusual nature of the [SARS-CoV-2] FCS” is misleading. FCSs are common in coronaviruses, and present in representatives of four out of five betacoronavirus subgenuses (8). The highly variable nature of the S1/S2 junction is easily ascertained by inspecting a precise alignment of sarbecovirus Spikes (Fig. 1C).
Consensus? According to ChatGPT, and even the US IC report you cite, there is no consensus - only absence of conclusive evidence of manipulation. Your argument, as far as I understand, is that all the suspicious genetic features could and do arise naturally. But this does not imply they could not arise in a lab.
Imagine that there is a single case of COVID-19 infection among the Wuhan lab staff which was concealed and occurred before the spread of the disease. Then all the arguments against the lab leak fall apart. In the case it did occur, what are the chances the Chinese authorities would not conceal the event?
Your other reference https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715 shows a map of early COVID-19 cases centered around the Huanan Market (while the WiV lab is on the other side of the river). This looks conclusive, but: If the Chinese authorities wanted to conceal the lab origin of the pandemic, this is exactly what they would do: feed partial or falsified data to Western scientists who would then confirm that the Market was the starting point.
Well, at a closer look into the source document of the map: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part-joint-report.pdf , I can see (on page 98) numerous stalls in the Huanan Market which tested positive for COVID-19, while none of the animal products tested positive (page 99). Doesn't it suggest that all positive tests come from infected people who worked there, not from food? So, it looks like the market is just the crowded place where the virus easily spreads between people.
And indeed, why would a virus native to bats end up in a bat-free market? Sorry for contributing into the conspiracy theory!
ChatGPT is a machine that parrots back whatever is fed into it. Grok 4 has been saying Hitler is a great guy. (Elon's "mechahitler".) LLM tech does not "know" anything, it's just a superannuated search engine that statistically predicts.
My argument is: There is no evidence that sequences at WIV matched SARS-CoV-2 meaningfully. This eliminates them. The "gain of function" was minor and not related to changes affecting virulence, and in viruses that don't match. That eliminates them. The virus was identified at Wuhan Wet Market. The virus was detected together with raccoon dog DNA in the same cage, and raccoon dogs are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. That makes Wuhan Wet Market the most likely origin. However, it may not be the only origin. More about that later.
Imagine a case of infection among WIV staff? Imagine doesn't count. No evidence that ever happened. Without a matching sequence at WIV, there is no reason to believe that.
The early cases do support Wuhan Wet Market, and human superspreading could be part of that. (More later.) But again you resort to an "If..." You have to have some evidence supporting your if. You also postulated perfect control is reasonable to presume. That starts reaching around into a pretzel where everything depends on, "But what if..."
The market was closed January 1. I've read that the animals were removed from the market before anyone could test them, and that Chinese authorities tested them and found the virus (but don't have a reference for that). It's hard to test an animal that isn't there, but what is a clear reference is that raccoon dog and SARS-CoV-2 was detected in the same cage samples.
How could a bat virus get from bats in Laos to Wuhan in at least one raccoon dog? There was wildlife trade. Conditions for trade are not well controlled by US standards. I remember a video of racoon dogs being slaughtered. The animals were skinned alive, and the body was thrown into a bin where it stared back whimpering and blinked its eyes in the sun. The skins were ripped off so fast in one piece.
I can't answer that specific question about how the bat virus might get to Wuhan, except in general terms. Can I believe that bats could have been quietly brought in and sold, perhaps to special customers, to make bat soup on the quiet? Sure. I've been in similar markets in other parts of the world. What would surprise me would be the market NOT selling contraband anywhere. The place was pretty big, a warren of cages stacked up. Contraband has a risk premium. Animals are minor risk compared to other things. There could be payoffs, which opportunities are appreciated by inspectors quite often.
We don't need to have contraband sold at Wuhan though. Bats would probably be delivered to an intermediate warehouse and stored there for shipment elsewhere. A wholesaler facility. This is how things usually move in the food business. The virus could have been delivered elsewhere, to multiple locations.
Indeed, SARS-CoV-2 could have had multiple starting points. There may not have been one patient zero. It may have jumped to humans multiple times, even at multiple locations.
I developed an epidemic simulator 20 years ago. In the process of writing it, studying transmission, and testing it, one of the things I learned is that even fairly contagious diseases don't take off into an epidemic and then pandemic most of the time. Mostly, a few people get infected, and it dies out. You have probably heard of R0, the measure of how many people are infected per case? In the real world, R0 does not exist. It's a number calculated after the fact. In the real world transmission is mostly from superspreaders. The rest are dead ends, or barely manage to get to one infection per case. R0 fluctuates based on the super-spreaders who might infect 100 people or more because they are public facing.
With SARS-CoV-2 we know that about half of people get no significant symptoms, and recover. They range from mildly contagious with an asymptomatic infection to quite contagious for some short period of time. The cases that were initially written up were 41 in December, the worst cases. One third of those had not visited Wuhan. No international cases were traced back to Wuhan.
SARS-CoV-2 was an extraordinary virus in terms of contagion because it has a 3-5 day contagion period where people feel fine. So this one blew up better than most. It could not be controlled the way original SARS was.
Could Wuhan Wet Market have been a human superspreader event? It is not impossible. It is quite likely it became one. But it could also have been a raccoon dog superspreader event at the Wuhan Wet Market. And that would probably turn into human superspreader event.
Back when I did the world tour of mostly tropical nations in 2009's flu pandemic (https://doi.org/10.1186/1743-422x-7-98), one of the things I noticed was that prostitutes were out in every country. I started talking to them about what they did, and collected quite a lot of interviews. In Thailand, I got a policeman interested in this and he was happy to take me around to bordellos in Bangkok. In all the locations, conditions were good for transmission of enveloped viruses. And, every single woman said that she took drugs from sudafed to illegal drugs to keep working when she was sick. They all said they would not tell a customer they were sick.
Obviously, prostitution is a likely vector for transmission of infectious disease. And I tried to include it into the transmission conditions paper above. But that was taken out. Scientists didn't want to see it. My coauthor didn't want to be associated with it. Technically, I hadn't gotten an international IRB for asking questions of prostitutes. So prostitution vectored respiratory disease, from influenza to coronaviruses, is a bit of a blind spot. Was that active in COVID origins? It was probably part of picture in some way. But no data.
Bottom line, the first case recorded, Dec 1, 2019, was virtually certain to not be the first human case. We don't live in a Star Trek world where we can necessarily know exactly how SARS-CoV-2 originated in humans. We can only draw Occam's razor best estimates.
Hope this helps.
I am sorry, but you have just proved quite convincingly that the first human case did NOT originate in the Huanan Market.
1. While out of 923 'environmental' samples from the market, 73 tested positive, none of 457 frozen food samples tested positive. There is no evidence that the raccoon dog whose DNA was found in the market (BTW, where did you get this?) was carrying the virus; it is the other way around at best: among lots of species whose DNA was present in the Huanan Market, DNA of only two species who could potentially carry SARS-CoV-2 virus were found: raccoon dogs and homo sapiens. The latter is by far more abundant in the market than the former.
2. Your theory is that the virus jumped from a bat to a raccoon dog (very unlikely) which somehow, dead or alive, reached the Market without prior spreading the virus among other humans or animals (2480 wildlife samples came out negative, see page 99 in https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part-joint-report.pdf ) and then somehow jumped to a human (unlikely, https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/data-suggest-sars-cov-2-could-jump-raccoon-dogs-people-species-barrier-may-interfere ).
Sounds akin to a conspiracy theory.
3. If that singular transmission event can result in the 175 early cases concentrated around the market as shown on page 44 in the same WHO report, then the same distribution map can result from another singular event: an infected human visiting the market. That human could be infected anywhere else, and this leaves absolutely no reason to connect the first (unidentifiable) animal-to-human transmission event to the market.
Now, isn't it much more likely that the virus jumped to humans directly from bats? The closest (geographically) bat viruses are stored in the WiV lab. Their database doesn't contain any viruses (genetically) close enough to SARS_CoV-2, but -- very inconveniently -- the access to the database was shut down on September 12, 2019 (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-000608_EN.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com#def1 ). What does Occam's razor tell us?
As the comments already made indicate, people are extremely suspicious of the US funding of the WiV, and this article does not address that at all. I don't necessarily see that as evil, but why does the US not have its own labs? Having said that, this article should give people pause when thinking about the lab-leak hypothesis. Fauci's apparent suppression of that hypothesis could be explained by extreme exasperation that the hypothesis kept coming up, not that he was necessarily hiding anything. As an aside, I'm also very concerned about RFK Jr's antipathy toward vaccines. I'm old enough to remember lots of people in iron lungs from polio. That vaccine was essential to public health, as are others. We are indeed in a very weird world.
"Fauci's apparent suppression of that hypothesis could be explained by extreme exasperation that the hypothesis kept coming up, not that he was necessarily hiding anything".
For me, the disparity of narrative between experts and intelligence agencies (who know different things than biologists) made it only possible to keep an open mind to the fact of the situation.
But Fauci tried to make it look as if he was an objective observer to the debate. He had a massive conflict of interest as far as the outcome of the debate was concerned. Suppression or subterfuge plus conflict of interest - bad strategy for generating trust, wouldn't you say?
Do "intelligence" agencies have a deserved reputation for lying?
Did the CIA lie about: MK-Ultra? Project Mockingbird? Extraordinary rendition? (Also known as torture by proxy.) Iran Contra? Lying about lying to Congress? We could go on asking.
Your wording assumes that anyone disagreeing with you has a closed mind. Fauci's so-called "conflict of interest". He, along with many other NIH scientists got royalty payments for treatments he worked on. Why does NIH do this? Because scientists in private industry have opportunities to make money from the treatments they work on because of patents. To keep scientists willing to work in government patents provide royalty income to those who succeed.
- I could ask you why you are against capitalism. Are you?
- In Fauci's case, he donated his royalty payments to charity.
Yours is the closed mind.
You put Fauci in a damned if he does, damned if he doesn't box. You presume subterfuge or suppression. That is precisely the game I talked about: "Why are you suppressing this story!" "We're not. It's just wrong and has no evidence." "Why are you suppressing this story!"
Lies repeated often enough become the narrative. That is what you are repeating. The narrative of lies.
The conflict of interest I refer to is of course the fact of that the NIH was in a funding and information cooperation with Wuhan. In my book that counts as a conflict of interest when you are involved in advancing or denying narratives regarding a possible lab leak. The one thing Fauci and others should have done early on is make that relationship transparent and publish all relevant communications in terms of the extent of the cooperation. Otherwise I have no idea how you read what you do into my statement. Anti-capitalist?? Wow. So you think some of the intelligence agencies might be lying? Fine. Which ones in this case. And why.
NIH has the mission to do virus research. Collaborations with other nations are normal. The head of NIH has the obligation to support sensible collaborations. It would have been irresponsible of the head of NIH to "cank the op" and shut it down. That region is where original SARS came from.
What lack of transparency? It's a science project. It had been going since 2004. There wasn't a huge amount of productivity, but some, and that's how science goes. A lot of stuff is humdrum, just data collection. Field work and the back end sequencing of viruses can be glacial.
I could not imagine your strange interpretation of "conflict of interest". I have read other stuff about Fauci and COI, all of it is about money. So I asked if you were anti-capitalist because that is what it would mean if you didn't want Fauci or many other scientists to be paid royalties for their inventions.
I am now fully aware of your perspective. Not seeing my own concerns addressed by what you say, but this is how it goes sometimes.
Your concerns as you have stated them, are that for Fauci to have done his job as NIH director, creates a conflict of interest. If he later speaks about it as he needs to for a different job, then he is at fault because he approved it. If he later speaks about it because congress called on him to testify, he is at fault because he speaks about it.
That is bizarre. What else could he possibly do?
Your conflict of interest is that you wrote a book.
Of course the US has its own virology labs. We have them at Universities across the nation. (We also have labs like CAHFS in California that receive animals killed by anthrax and plague pretty regularly. Those diseases are endemic to the US, and dengue has recently gotten established. ) What we don't have is free access to the territory of China, and all the viruses in the wild there.
What would you think of Chinese scientists going across the USA collecting rabies, plague, and anthrax samples, as well as coronaviruses in bats? That could be portrayed by conspiracy theory grifters as a Chinese biological warfare program, yes? Why would anyone think Chinese people would think differently? China actually was attacked with bioweapons in WW2 by Japan.
Partnering with labs in China is no different than partnering with labs in Netherlands, France, or Ukraine. Remember that noise during the Russian invasion about bioweapons labs in Ukraine funded by the US? Those were labs monitoring anthrax, plague, etcetera, By partnering with and supporting science in other nations, those nations know that they are in charge. It calms down suspicions. Or it should.
I did a circuit of tropical nations sampling conditions for spread of influenza (and respiratory diseases in general). https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-422X-7-98
I wanted to be taking swabs and samples, but the regulations and permissions needed made it impossible. So I didn't. If I had done it anyway, I might have gotten away with it, but if it became known could cause a big political fuss.
Dear Dr. Hanley,
Was biodefefense the motive behind our funding of the Wuhan lab?
thanks,
randy
What is biodefense? In the broadest sense, biodefense is infectious disease medicine. Today in the USA, there is for all practical purposes no biodefense at all. There is the intentional destruction of basic medical capability to detect and treat disease.
The motives for funding WIV were:
- To get access to viruses collected in China by Chinese researchers. This way we would get a view into potential pandemic disease. Remember SARS, the original had barely been contained 20 years before. MERS was active in the middle east.
- To promote a spirit of cooperation between our nations.