I can’t work out whether Offit is so behind the curve that he’s living in 2020 still, or thinks everyone else is so dumb & ignorant that we don’t know about the genesis of the proximal origins paper, who its authors were, and what vested interests they had?
Either way: he’s stupid, or he thinks we are all stupid. Which makes him stupid.
I don't think calling people stupid is helpful, but I grant you he lights his credibility on fire when he refers to "overwhelming evidence of animal to human spillover." In fact, there's pretty much no evidence of that, and quite a bit to suggest a lab leak. We don't know for sure, and probably never will. But animal to human is pure speculation while there's a lot of evidence pointing to lab leak.
My guess is that he has been well-paid or well-blackmailed. It's the only logical explanation for his continued drum-banging for the totalitarian covid regime.
I prefer to use the principle of Occam’s razor here… what is more likely, that Offit is being blackmailed or paid to produce info about Covid (that you don’t like), or that he does it because he’s an infectious disease researcher, clinician and author who has spent decades writing and informing others about infections?
You may be right, but of the multitude of epidemiologists, doctors, science writers and researchers who write on this topic, Offit is easily the most unhinged from reality, and he can always be relied upon to jump at the most intrusive and heavy-handed, authoritarian solution to a virus with a negligible fatality rate. I bet he's fun at family gatherings. "Uncle Paul, what's with the full-body condom...?"
Your categorisation of him is delusional; he's clearly one of the most rational and reasonable scientists on the block.
You may call a disease that has killed 1.2 million Americans as having "a negligible fatality rate", but then, given your faulty characterisation of Offit, I'm unsurprised your idea of reality in its other forms is also highly skewed.
You say it's authoritarian, but he's just restating what was already known to be true where numerous myths continue to thrive.
That's how science works or how it should work. Of course there's tolerance for other theories, and this theory has now been tested, and disproved, ruled out. Tolerance for dis- or misinformation, however, should not exist in matters of life and death.
Perhaps that seems heavy-handed and intrusive to you but I think his frankness and refusal to humor the word vomit that comes out of some influential figures' mouths is extremely refreshing. He doesn't cut corners but he doesn't beat around the bush either.
they definitley have something very strange on this guy. he's too into it. it's very strange. he pretends to "cape for the kids" just not ones maimed by shoddily made medical products.
I bet he's got some deep darkies and ugly secrets in that closet of his...
Stupid for cutting through the myths and lies that Covid-19 was lab-grown and released (whether accidentally or purposely)? That's just wrong. It's not true. It's not a cover up. We can't know the truth for certain and that's just the matter of fact. We can't simply put pieces together and say, "Well doesn't that kinda LOOK like it's this way? It probably is!" and then declare that to be objective evidence. Least not when the "evidence" is completely imaginary.
Yes, the fact that Offit is pointing to an old podcast from the Proximal Origins authors is telling. The podcast was made just before they were exposed by the release of their 2020 Slack chat accounts threads saying the opposite, that a lab leak looked likely.
It's been known publicly since 2020 SARS COV-2 has been quite modified with HIV, SIV, and a little of one strain of Malaria ( Plasmodium yoelii).
" everything converges towards possible laboratory manipulations (End Note below) which contributed to modifications of the genome of COVID_19, but also, very probably much older SARS, with perhaps this double objective of vaccine design and of "gain of function" in terms of penetration of this virus into the cell..."
The first to find it was not Montagnier, it was Indian researchers Prashang et al .) who were forced to withdraw their paper, Montagnier and Perez followed up and that and found MUCH more.
Funny how many ( but not all) of these HIV insertions trace back to 2003, back to the original SARS. There were those who said it was a bio-weapon back then as well. The SIV and the one Plasmodium yoelii insertion appear novel to Covid-19.
My goodness, Offit make a claim of overwhelming evidence of a natural spillover and then proceeds to leverage unrelated logical fallacies to prove it.
The Chinese took their virus database offline to prevent access to it. They also requested specific virus registered elsewhere be removed from other datsbase throughout the world. Me thinks these co-conspirators had plenty to hide.
If what you just stated is true, then why in god’s name was Fauci and the NIH funding EcoHealth to further that research, then lie under oath multiple times to cover that fact up?
We did not call him an idiot… we regularly point out his unscientific and unethical conclusions about SARS-2, Covid, the mRNA experimental shots and his profound conflict of interest. Want to disprove any of those points?
“In 2021, The Intercept published a leaked 2018 grant proposal for a research project named Defuse, which had been written as a collaboration between EcoHealth, the Wuhan institute and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who had been on the cutting edge of coronavirus research for years. The proposal described plans to create viruses strikingly similar to SARS‑CoV‑2.
Coronaviruses bear their name because their surface is studded with protein spikes, like a spiky crown, which they use to enter animal cells. Although never funded by the United States, the Defuse project proposed to search for and create SARS-like viruses carrying spikes with a unique feature: a furin cleavage site — the same feature that enhances SARS‑CoV‑2’s infectiousness in humans, making it capable of causing a pandemic.”
“While it’s possible that the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally (as seen in some distantly related coronaviruses), out of the hundreds of SARS-like viruses cataloged by scientists, SARS‑CoV‑2 is the only one known to possess a furin cleavage site in its spike. And the genetic data suggest that the virus had only recently gained the furin cleavage site before it started the pandemic.
Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted.”
....oh, and three--that engineered spike protein gene was inserted into a genome of an inert virus that did not have the rest of the genes to cause health problems!!
Scientific claims are published in the peer reviewed scientific literature, where the claims can be subject to scrutiny and comment from scientific peers.
….Not in a book, produced specifically aimed at the public and bioengineered to tap into a visceral fringe perspective scientifically, but a very populist one in terms of potential sales and profits, which is what Chan has done.
An autobiographical book about Fauci’s life in public service isn’t aimed at making a mint out of gullible rubes, but to serve as a record of his life as a doctor.
So it was successfully inserted into one virus. The same toolkit and skills required to do that could try it again with other virus.
Obviously, if it was tried on the base virus for sars-cov-2 we will not be informed of that, and most likely no one outside the handful of people (perhaps 2 or 3) directly involved will have unequivocal knowledge. The consequences for admitting fault would be rather worse than job re-assignment.
So we don't have and probably never will have an official document confirming the creation if this virus either by gene splicing or via taking a wild virus and introducing it to lab animals or cell cultures.
Yet if one stacks up the available evidence, the scale (as I understand it) leans towards one of the labs in Wuhan playing an essential role. I think that "probably but not provably" is the best we'll get. Maybe that PLA officer who fell off the roof of WIV knew the story.
That's not enough for some people, they want a dramatic, movie-style reveal. Perhaps the chance of that died the moment a mysterious PLA officer hit the concrete.
What point in time? My point wasn't that the COV-2 virus was involved in a particular experiment at a particular point in time, I have utterly no way to ascertain that. My point that was that engineering to enhance virus in general including members of the coronavirus family was performed, and in a way that is curiously similar to the end result which became known as sars-cov-2. It needn't have been created exactly as s-cov-2, perhaps a related coronavirus was made, and then propagated in lab animals or cell cultures, leading to many virus including sc2.
It's difficult for a non-biologist to untangle what is known, what's likely, and what's possible here. I have read the commentary of Alina Chan, Matt Ridley and others who are either molecular biologists or science writers with a reasonable amount of fluency. There are others who dispute their conclusions, so an observer must weigh factors other than A said this, B said that.
The zoonosis theory is still lacking in anything beyond wisps of half-evidence, leaving substantial holes. Where's the intermediate species, where are blood samples of intermediate virus stages? Where's the reservoir species? Now, absence of evidence etc, sure. But given the extraordinary effort to find a zoonotic chain of transmission there would have been at least several links in the chain discovered by now. "But this market that we sterilized and fumigated without cataloguing every creature and pathogen passenger in it, it's must have been right there!" somehow lacks persuasive power.
Lacking any substantive rather than speculative zoonotic chain, what are we to conclude? Virus creation via space lasers? An unknowable unknown?
We're left with unsolvable mystery or an inconvenient truth. Given the vast resources available to find evidence, I'll put my $2 bet on the latter.
Chan was extremely disingenuous in this comment. First, the idea was to engineer a VERY SMALL PART of the spike protein to be like what CoV-2, and other viruses have turned out like. Second, that is a coincidence that totally lacks any cause and effect evidence!! Chan is being dishonest and you are being gullible.
Thank you for taking the time to make a specific rebuttal here. I respect Dr. Offit very much and his opinion carries a lot of weight with me. I admit that I have been suspicious about a lab leak from the very start of the pandemic, solely based on my emotional reaction to Chinese secrecy and our apparent immediate denial that it could possibly have come from a lab. But I'm just a regular person who finds this topic interesting...I have ZERO knowledge or expertise in this area and have to recognize that I absolutely can be swayed by a jazzy interactive presentation, like what came out in the Times yesterday, if facts are twisted or omitted. I would love to hear a more in-depth rebuttal from Dr. Offit because I do think he could illustrate any error in Chan's argument beautifully.
Thanks for your comment. I am glad you found my blog post useful. That is why I make them. Note that Alina Chan has a bit of a spotty past. She also seems to be a climate denier. Offit talks a bit about her some more in his recently published book. I am about 3 or 4 chapters into it. It is a pretty good read. And no, I get no kickbacks for endorsing it!! I am writing my own, so he is the competition!!
If anything, being a "climate denier" only enhances her credibility. There is literally zero proof of AGW, and next to zero evidence of it other than garbage modeling structured to fit pre-existing biases.
Sigh....It is a HUGE list that is available via computer database!! It is accessible via the scientific literature to any scientist in the world or to anyone else who wants to go to a science library and look it up!! Genome databases just are NOT published in the popular press! When was the last human genome sequence you saw?? THAT is the way science data works!!
And I keep linking to what I have previously written (with citations to back up what I write!!) so I don't have to write it all over again!! Why re-invent the wheel for you??
You simply don't know what you are talking about. Go away!!
Yea I remember posters showing me the genome and what was on it. It is postable, or atleast notable enough that someone in the press and in our government should've went through it and published it.
Link where I could access it please.
I did read your article. You link in the first part of the article, and then stop about 10 paragraphs in. then its all what you say happened without a single link to another primary source. Cool story bro. Again its a story.
I may not, but I can tell when someone is utilizing appeal to authority to make a logical fallacy.
I'm sorry, but it is simple. GOF was illegal, they wanted to keep doing it. they did it in that lab, and it got out. then the world went crazy and became anti freedom overnight.
Oyy Vey. Hey public, in other words, if the gaslighting from the last 3 years hasn't satisfied your naivety, here's another heaping dose.
"Indeed, overwhelming evidence continues to support an animal-to-human spillover event that occurred in the western section of the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market at the end of 2019." 🤯
If all the work they were doing in these labs was so benign, why was it so hard to get the information out of them? A group working in the best interest of the society they claimed to represent would have held press conferences and put all of this information on the table back in Jan / Feb 2020. They did not, they are not telling the truth. Clearly society would be better off not doing any of this work. The shots they created to deal with the problem they created caused more harm than good, just as the clinical trial results showed, no wonder they wanted those not made public for so many years. The thing about chronic liars, many of them actually believe their own bs.
is it? Especially considering they haven't provided the chain of custody to where Covid was captured. I mean if I was a scientist doing research, I'd catelog the animals i'm capturing and tying it to the virus's i'm finding...
first, covid was never captured. It is a disease not a virus. did you mean SARS-CoV-2?
Second you say: "I mean if I was a scientist doing research, I'd catelog the animals i'm capturing and tying it to the virus's i'm finding.."
It has been done! see the preprint:
"Genetic tracing of market wildlife and viruses at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic"
They found co-isolation of SARS-CoV-2 RNA with DNA from civets, racoon dogs, and others in environmental swabs taken at the Wuhan fish market early January 2020.
LOL I'm going to chalk that up being a wee bit inflexible that you can't see what I was talking about. I'll lay it out like your intelligence demands. The topic was about the virus coming, either from an animal in the lab, or GOF done in the lab. So I didn't have to specify the virus name, as everyone knew what i was talking about.
Second this thread aggreed it came from a lab and that is what the disccusion was about. Not sure why I needed this article, as this was only about the wet market, with samples taken while the pandemic was raging. Did you even read it?
It also makes this comment. It is not possible to conclude which of these species may have been infected and/or introduced the virus to the market from this data alone. Nonetheless, our analysis provides a small and actionable list of species with genotypic details.( page 15)
Your getting closer, add those two, and put them through the Ecoalliance research, and boom we have Sars2 virus.
Btw where is your info coming from? can you link? This would be the first time i've heard they published their list and identified I'd love to read more.
You admit ignorance re the 2 horshoe bat coronaviruses, yet confidently claim SARS2 arose through GOF research on them.
Doesn’t your ignorance and hypocrisy embarrass you even a little?
That’s not how the GOF work was done anyhow. Have you any biological or scientific background at all, or are you just throwing out any and every conspiracy you’ve read about on Rumble?
Yes, I haven't read that they had that in all my research. I'm wondering where it was published so I could learn. I don't think thats ignorance, thats lack of knowledge.
Yes because we have yet to find SARS2 in the wild. in a spill over event we should, and have been able to do so in every past pandemic. So based on the ecoalliance funding grant, i'm trying to bridge the gap on why we don't have an answer 4 years latter.
Haha rumble... haha yea thats not even where the fun ones are. No I'm simply asking for evidence, that should've been available and explained right away after the pandemic started. I'm also taking Evidence(Funding documents) and applying them to situations that don't ring true.
Why did we know the Pig flu outbreak in 2009 came from Mexico, Why did we know SARS1 was in bats? because we found the original virus's within a few years time.
You don't need an education in Virology to understand when someone isn't being truthful. Evidence, it is actually what makes science happen.
Bioengineering viruses is what they were doing at the Wuhan Lab, with US taxpayer dollars. The attempt to claim that it was a naturally created virus that they just happened to have and leak from the lab is egregious.
Evidence for natural origin is robust, and evidence for animal-human transfer is fairly strong. Lab leak cannot be ruled out definitively, therefore it remains possible, but is still not probable.
get it together. quit the cope. no one with a brain actually believes any of this sh!t!? what is the point of trying to re-write what everyone knows as basic fact. this makes you look stupid and I don't think youre very stupid.
although that quote you used at the annual conference was total cringe. so that was pretty stupid.
covid came from a lab and the mrna medical products hurt more than they helped. the worse part of the pandemic was the public health response.
What's amazing is what you leave out of this story.
There are 40,000+ wet markets in China, but four biolabs that research viruses. What are the odds that the largest such biolab in the world, the one studying bat viruses, is co-located with the one wet market that generated the COVID virus?
In 2018, just before the outbreak, Ecohealth alliance asked the U.S. government, as part of the DEFUSE program to fund studies in Wuhan that would have generated a virus remarkably similar to COVID 19. The proposal aimed to study and potentially insert human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses to understand their potential to cause pandemics. This type of research is considered high-risk due to the potential for creating more virulent or transmissible viruses. DARPA rejected the proposal, citing concerns about the risks involved and the potential for creating dangerous pathogens.
While the U.S. government declined to fund that study, it doesn't mean that the study was not performed by the Chinese government. The Chinses have stopped providing access to the records.
Also, in 2004, two researchers at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention contracted SARS in Beijing, China and then spread the infection to around other people. The two researchers contracted the virus in two incidents, two weeks apart.
The evidence of a natural spillover is far from overwhelming. Michael Worobey, Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes are good at what they do, but they have no expertise at investigating the cause of a disaster like this. And it shows.
The premier investigative body in the world, the FBI, has found it more likely than not that a lab leak caused the pandemic. They didn't find conclusive proof, but the weight of the evidence favors a lab leak over a natural spillover.
Defer to the experts, scientists. They know better than you do.
Michael Worobey does interesting work on evolutionary biology, examining the genome of viruses to track their evolution and work backward to guess at their origin using phylogenetic tools. That is his scientific specialty. He is also a bright person who has studied epidemiology and the evidence available as to the origin of the virus.
But he's not an expert on investigating whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged in Wuhan through a natural spillover or lab leak. That's not scientific research. That's a forensic investigation. That requires not scientific expertise, but expertise in interviewing witnesses and experts, gathering other evidence, and analyzing that evidence to reach a conclusion.
The difference between science and investigation is a big one, as detailed in this report: www.heartlandforensic.com/writing/forensic-science-and-the-scientific-method/ That report shows the problem with Michael Worobey with its analogy of scientists to Sherlock Holmes. The temptation is for scientists to build a scenario on incomplete evidence, assign a convincing probability to that scenario, and then insist that their scenario is correct based on science.
That is just what Michael Worobey has done. He used incomplete data from testing done at the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in Wuhan to pin down the origin to raccoon dogs sold in a corner of that market. He used incomplete data as to the location of initial patients with Covid-19 to again trace the origin of the disease to the market. He then claims to have proven a natural spillover and ruled out a lab leak, claiming expertise as a scientist specializing in investigating the origin of viruses. He poses as a Sherlock Holmes (or in his case, John Snow).
That is similar to what Tony Fauci did when he set federal public health policy during the pandemic. He instructed people to keep apart six feet of "social distancing" with no basis for that rule. He claimed the vaccines would prevent transmission and that they provided stronger immunity than infection even though neither of those things was true. And he said that when he made those pronouncements, he represented science.
The FBI is the premier investigative body in the world. They were tasked by Joe Biden to investigate the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They interviewed scientists with knowledge about the subject. They gathered information from a variety of sources, some not available to the public. After analyzing that evidence, they came to the conclusion that a lab leak was more likely than not the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic, which is contrary to Michael Worobey's confident conclusion of a natural spillover.
I'm a lawyer with some experience in questioning witnesses, evaluating evidence, and building cases. I'm also a computer scientist with some experience in using the tool of causal inference (based on the work of Turing prizewinner Judea Pearl). My opinion is that the evidence backs up the FBI, and not Michael Worobey, though there is not enough evidence to make a firm conclusion. Either one could be right.
That's why I question why all scientists seem to march in lockstep to back up Michael Worobey, Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes in insisting that the lab leak theory has no evidence to back it up. No evidence? There's plenty of evidence. Not to make a firm conclusion, but more than the evidence for a natural spillover.
In my opinion, scientists should defer to the experts in investigation, and the FBI by their very name makes them that. If scientists put forth a theory, as scientists, they need to give us the evidence to support their theory, not insist that we accept their theory because they are experts. After all, as Richard Feynman put it, "science is the belief in the ignorance of experts".
“So, while it was true that the United States government funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, no function was gained.”
That is one of the worst, most gaslighting and heartless statements that could be made.
Then points to the Wet Market conspiracy theory with zero evidence or statement of facts, zilch. Go listen to a podcast, because he can’t defend himself in the slightest.
$710M flowed from the manufactures of this “vaccine” back to the scientists at the NIH, including Fauci.
These people all need to be in prison for the deaths of millions of people worldwide, both from the virus and from the novel treatment that they pushed on us.
Several government agencies came to a different conclusion. The behavior of the Chinese government and the odd happenings at that lab near the time of the outbreak point to nefarious things. While Dr. Offit often provides laudable information and clarity; he is, in my estimate gravely mistaken. I shall, however, review more of his ideas and data on the subject to see if I can conform with his opinion. I would prefer it was a natural event, however, the evidence I have seen and the assessment of probabilities would lead me to believe it is indeed from a lab. The Chinese communist government is not to be trusted, some have suggested even asymmetrical warfare via the virus, which may seem outlandish, but less so when you consider their long-term goals, and methods of attack to weaken an enemy; the consequent death toll among even their own citizens would be counted as part of the equation. While such a hypothesis may be dismissed by most, I think it is a viable consideration aside from that of a mere accident from a lab, or a natural event. I vote lab leak motivation unknown, I may revise my opinion pending further review of information. I am not opposed to other conclusions, but, I am opposed to so-called solid conclusions at this time. I spent several decades in analysis of statistics and, for me, at this point, there are far too many strange "coincidences" to point to anything other than human intervention via the lab.
the one thing we should all recognize that paul is telling us is this:
The worrisome experiment took place at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Researchers took a strain of influenza virus found in birds and altered it to grow in ferrets (which, like humans, are mammals). In other words, these researchers had taken a strain of influenza virus that was limited to birds—to which no one in the world had immunity—and altered it so that it might cause disease in people. They had created a potential pandemic virus.
these people indeed know what theyre doing. and theyre doing it on purpose. if you believe for a moment there are no other releases of virus youre fooling yourself. CSIS recently held a symposium and one of the attendees was a man from the intelligence community who said "after bin laden died I was worried where my career was going. that is until covid happened..."
I can’t work out whether Offit is so behind the curve that he’s living in 2020 still, or thinks everyone else is so dumb & ignorant that we don’t know about the genesis of the proximal origins paper, who its authors were, and what vested interests they had?
Either way: he’s stupid, or he thinks we are all stupid. Which makes him stupid.
I don't think calling people stupid is helpful, but I grant you he lights his credibility on fire when he refers to "overwhelming evidence of animal to human spillover." In fact, there's pretty much no evidence of that, and quite a bit to suggest a lab leak. We don't know for sure, and probably never will. But animal to human is pure speculation while there's a lot of evidence pointing to lab leak.
Paul isn't stupid but smart, so smart, that he tries to outsmart you pushing his mercenary agenda.
It's impossible that he doesn't know the following:
http://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-real-covid-timeline
Is the elite for depopulation or extermination of us, the “useless eaters”?
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/depopulation-or-extermination
Bill Gates: vaccines for depopulation means extermination
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/depop-vaccines-no-myth
Comparing Vax-Unvax
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/vaxxed-v-unvaxxed/
I know you are stupid from your comment.....
🤣
Then you are also stupid
My guess is that he has been well-paid or well-blackmailed. It's the only logical explanation for his continued drum-banging for the totalitarian covid regime.
I prefer to use the principle of Occam’s razor here… what is more likely, that Offit is being blackmailed or paid to produce info about Covid (that you don’t like), or that he does it because he’s an infectious disease researcher, clinician and author who has spent decades writing and informing others about infections?
You may be right, but of the multitude of epidemiologists, doctors, science writers and researchers who write on this topic, Offit is easily the most unhinged from reality, and he can always be relied upon to jump at the most intrusive and heavy-handed, authoritarian solution to a virus with a negligible fatality rate. I bet he's fun at family gatherings. "Uncle Paul, what's with the full-body condom...?"
Your categorisation of him is delusional; he's clearly one of the most rational and reasonable scientists on the block.
You may call a disease that has killed 1.2 million Americans as having "a negligible fatality rate", but then, given your faulty characterisation of Offit, I'm unsurprised your idea of reality in its other forms is also highly skewed.
You say it's authoritarian, but he's just restating what was already known to be true where numerous myths continue to thrive.
That's how science works or how it should work. Of course there's tolerance for other theories, and this theory has now been tested, and disproved, ruled out. Tolerance for dis- or misinformation, however, should not exist in matters of life and death.
Perhaps that seems heavy-handed and intrusive to you but I think his frankness and refusal to humor the word vomit that comes out of some influential figures' mouths is extremely refreshing. He doesn't cut corners but he doesn't beat around the bush either.
they definitley have something very strange on this guy. he's too into it. it's very strange. he pretends to "cape for the kids" just not ones maimed by shoddily made medical products.
I bet he's got some deep darkies and ugly secrets in that closet of his...
Stupid for cutting through the myths and lies that Covid-19 was lab-grown and released (whether accidentally or purposely)? That's just wrong. It's not true. It's not a cover up. We can't know the truth for certain and that's just the matter of fact. We can't simply put pieces together and say, "Well doesn't that kinda LOOK like it's this way? It probably is!" and then declare that to be objective evidence. Least not when the "evidence" is completely imaginary.
Yes, the fact that Offit is pointing to an old podcast from the Proximal Origins authors is telling. The podcast was made just before they were exposed by the release of their 2020 Slack chat accounts threads saying the opposite, that a lab leak looked likely.
It's been known publicly since 2020 SARS COV-2 has been quite modified with HIV, SIV, and a little of one strain of Malaria ( Plasmodium yoelii).
" everything converges towards possible laboratory manipulations (End Note below) which contributed to modifications of the genome of COVID_19, but also, very probably much older SARS, with perhaps this double objective of vaccine design and of "gain of function" in terms of penetration of this virus into the cell..."
"HIV MAN-MANIPULATED CORONAVIRUS EVOLUTION TRENDS"
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jean-Claude-Perez/publication/344153988_HIV_MAN-MANIPULATED_CORONAVIRUS_EVOLUTION_TRENDS/links/5f56197992851c250b998f72/HIV-MAN-MANIPULATED-CORONAVIRUS-EVOLUTION-TRENDS.pdf?_tp=eyJjb250ZXh0Ijp7ImZpcnN0UGFnZSI6InB1YmxpY2F0aW9uIiwicGFnZSI6InB1YmxpY2F0aW9uIn19
The first to find it was not Montagnier, it was Indian researchers Prashang et al .) who were forced to withdraw their paper, Montagnier and Perez followed up and that and found MUCH more.
Here is the revised paper:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342926066_COVID-19_SARS_and_Bats_Coronaviruses_Genomes_Peculiar_Homologous_RNA_Sequences_Jean_Claude_perez_Luc_Montagnier
Funny how many ( but not all) of these HIV insertions trace back to 2003, back to the original SARS. There were those who said it was a bio-weapon back then as well. The SIV and the one Plasmodium yoelii insertion appear novel to Covid-19.
You are unfit to roll Demosthenes barrel uphill.
You are the guy stuck in 2020. You probably think Trump is President.
Hey Paul, the trolls are out .. you are doing something right !!
My goodness, Offit make a claim of overwhelming evidence of a natural spillover and then proceeds to leverage unrelated logical fallacies to prove it.
The Chinese took their virus database offline to prevent access to it. They also requested specific virus registered elsewhere be removed from other datsbase throughout the world. Me thinks these co-conspirators had plenty to hide.
The Chinese have always hid things, going way back. It’s in their DNA 😉
But I can see that any/everything they did can be inflated into a grand conspiracy of your choosing.
If what you just stated is true, then why in god’s name was Fauci and the NIH funding EcoHealth to further that research, then lie under oath multiple times to cover that fact up?
Here’s their logic .. I don’t agree with offit therefore he’s an idiot
We did not call him an idiot… we regularly point out his unscientific and unethical conclusions about SARS-2, Covid, the mRNA experimental shots and his profound conflict of interest. Want to disprove any of those points?
To be fair, I did say either he’s an idiot or he thinks we are all idiots.
Which does make him an idiot.
or you an idiot. Seeing as how you clearly have zero science background, that makes you the idiot....
Ok. I’m a published scientist but you carry on making stupid assumptions
Yeah, tell us what degree and field. Your comments suggest one or both are irrelevant here....
If you’re a published scientist why are you using a pseudonym?
Because I work in pharma related field & like my salary.
Excerpt from Alina Chan’s evidence:
“In 2021, The Intercept published a leaked 2018 grant proposal for a research project named Defuse, which had been written as a collaboration between EcoHealth, the Wuhan institute and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who had been on the cutting edge of coronavirus research for years. The proposal described plans to create viruses strikingly similar to SARS‑CoV‑2.
Coronaviruses bear their name because their surface is studded with protein spikes, like a spiky crown, which they use to enter animal cells. Although never funded by the United States, the Defuse project proposed to search for and create SARS-like viruses carrying spikes with a unique feature: a furin cleavage site — the same feature that enhances SARS‑CoV‑2’s infectiousness in humans, making it capable of causing a pandemic.”
“While it’s possible that the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally (as seen in some distantly related coronaviruses), out of the hundreds of SARS-like viruses cataloged by scientists, SARS‑CoV‑2 is the only one known to possess a furin cleavage site in its spike. And the genetic data suggest that the virus had only recently gained the furin cleavage site before it started the pandemic.
Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted.”
....oh, and three--that engineered spike protein gene was inserted into a genome of an inert virus that did not have the rest of the genes to cause health problems!!
Hush, Steve! There are people here who don’t want to know the facts.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html
I'd find her opinions more believable if she weren't pushing a book specifically about them.
So publishing a book makes one's notions in the book uncredible? I heard Fauci has a new book out about his life in public service.
Scientific claims are published in the peer reviewed scientific literature, where the claims can be subject to scrutiny and comment from scientific peers.
….Not in a book, produced specifically aimed at the public and bioengineered to tap into a visceral fringe perspective scientifically, but a very populist one in terms of potential sales and profits, which is what Chan has done.
An autobiographical book about Fauci’s life in public service isn’t aimed at making a mint out of gullible rubes, but to serve as a record of his life as a doctor.
So it was successfully inserted into one virus. The same toolkit and skills required to do that could try it again with other virus.
Obviously, if it was tried on the base virus for sars-cov-2 we will not be informed of that, and most likely no one outside the handful of people (perhaps 2 or 3) directly involved will have unequivocal knowledge. The consequences for admitting fault would be rather worse than job re-assignment.
So we don't have and probably never will have an official document confirming the creation if this virus either by gene splicing or via taking a wild virus and introducing it to lab animals or cell cultures.
Yet if one stacks up the available evidence, the scale (as I understand it) leans towards one of the labs in Wuhan playing an essential role. I think that "probably but not provably" is the best we'll get. Maybe that PLA officer who fell off the roof of WIV knew the story.
That's not enough for some people, they want a dramatic, movie-style reveal. Perhaps the chance of that died the moment a mysterious PLA officer hit the concrete.
the CoV-2 virus was NOT EVEN AROUND AT THAT TIME!! And we have been very well informed of the "base virus". It is called WIV1 and is well published and described. And hundreds of scientists around the world know in detail what was going on. Read this: https://stevensclark.typepad.com/coronavirus_news_and_view/2023/08/part-2-gain-of-function-research-at-the-wuhan-labwhat-exactly-was-the-wuhan-lab-doing-with-coronavir.html
What point in time? My point wasn't that the COV-2 virus was involved in a particular experiment at a particular point in time, I have utterly no way to ascertain that. My point that was that engineering to enhance virus in general including members of the coronavirus family was performed, and in a way that is curiously similar to the end result which became known as sars-cov-2. It needn't have been created exactly as s-cov-2, perhaps a related coronavirus was made, and then propagated in lab animals or cell cultures, leading to many virus including sc2.
It's difficult for a non-biologist to untangle what is known, what's likely, and what's possible here. I have read the commentary of Alina Chan, Matt Ridley and others who are either molecular biologists or science writers with a reasonable amount of fluency. There are others who dispute their conclusions, so an observer must weigh factors other than A said this, B said that.
The zoonosis theory is still lacking in anything beyond wisps of half-evidence, leaving substantial holes. Where's the intermediate species, where are blood samples of intermediate virus stages? Where's the reservoir species? Now, absence of evidence etc, sure. But given the extraordinary effort to find a zoonotic chain of transmission there would have been at least several links in the chain discovered by now. "But this market that we sterilized and fumigated without cataloguing every creature and pathogen passenger in it, it's must have been right there!" somehow lacks persuasive power.
Lacking any substantive rather than speculative zoonotic chain, what are we to conclude? Virus creation via space lasers? An unknowable unknown?
We're left with unsolvable mystery or an inconvenient truth. Given the vast resources available to find evidence, I'll put my $2 bet on the latter.
did you read my blog post on what research was going on at the Wuhan lab? It explains all your questions.
Chan was extremely disingenuous in this comment. First, the idea was to engineer a VERY SMALL PART of the spike protein to be like what CoV-2, and other viruses have turned out like. Second, that is a coincidence that totally lacks any cause and effect evidence!! Chan is being dishonest and you are being gullible.
Thank you for taking the time to make a specific rebuttal here. I respect Dr. Offit very much and his opinion carries a lot of weight with me. I admit that I have been suspicious about a lab leak from the very start of the pandemic, solely based on my emotional reaction to Chinese secrecy and our apparent immediate denial that it could possibly have come from a lab. But I'm just a regular person who finds this topic interesting...I have ZERO knowledge or expertise in this area and have to recognize that I absolutely can be swayed by a jazzy interactive presentation, like what came out in the Times yesterday, if facts are twisted or omitted. I would love to hear a more in-depth rebuttal from Dr. Offit because I do think he could illustrate any error in Chan's argument beautifully.
Thanks for your comment. I am glad you found my blog post useful. That is why I make them. Note that Alina Chan has a bit of a spotty past. She also seems to be a climate denier. Offit talks a bit about her some more in his recently published book. I am about 3 or 4 chapters into it. It is a pretty good read. And no, I get no kickbacks for endorsing it!! I am writing my own, so he is the competition!!
If anything, being a "climate denier" only enhances her credibility. There is literally zero proof of AGW, and next to zero evidence of it other than garbage modeling structured to fit pre-existing biases.
thanks for showing your colors. We can now ignore anything you contribute.
Why then can we not see the viruses involved with the grant that was funded by our tax dollars? It'd go a long way to clearing this whole thing up.
The lab's research was to sequence and publish as many new viral genomes as they could and that is what they did. The sequences are available to all researchers in the world. Read more here: https://stevensclark.typepad.com/coronavirus_news_and_view/2023/08/part-2-gain-of-function-research-at-the-wuhan-labwhat-exactly-was-the-wuhan-lab-doing-with-coronavir.html
Where is the list? Why hasn't it been published in the NYT to prove Covid couldn't have come from that lab???
You keep linking to your own article. Cool man. Good for you, doesn't make what you right correct.
Sigh....It is a HUGE list that is available via computer database!! It is accessible via the scientific literature to any scientist in the world or to anyone else who wants to go to a science library and look it up!! Genome databases just are NOT published in the popular press! When was the last human genome sequence you saw?? THAT is the way science data works!!
And I keep linking to what I have previously written (with citations to back up what I write!!) so I don't have to write it all over again!! Why re-invent the wheel for you??
You simply don't know what you are talking about. Go away!!
Yea I remember posters showing me the genome and what was on it. It is postable, or atleast notable enough that someone in the press and in our government should've went through it and published it.
Link where I could access it please.
I did read your article. You link in the first part of the article, and then stop about 10 paragraphs in. then its all what you say happened without a single link to another primary source. Cool story bro. Again its a story.
I may not, but I can tell when someone is utilizing appeal to authority to make a logical fallacy.
I'm sorry, but it is simple. GOF was illegal, they wanted to keep doing it. they did it in that lab, and it got out. then the world went crazy and became anti freedom overnight.
Prove me wrong bro.
Didn’t Intercept also publish the leaked document showing Putin’s crew had hacked into election servers in 2016?
Oyy Vey. Hey public, in other words, if the gaslighting from the last 3 years hasn't satisfied your naivety, here's another heaping dose.
"Indeed, overwhelming evidence continues to support an animal-to-human spillover event that occurred in the western section of the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market at the end of 2019." 🤯
If all the work they were doing in these labs was so benign, why was it so hard to get the information out of them? A group working in the best interest of the society they claimed to represent would have held press conferences and put all of this information on the table back in Jan / Feb 2020. They did not, they are not telling the truth. Clearly society would be better off not doing any of this work. The shots they created to deal with the problem they created caused more harm than good, just as the clinical trial results showed, no wonder they wanted those not made public for so many years. The thing about chronic liars, many of them actually believe their own bs.
https://rumble.com/v3302bc-the-never-isolated-the-virus.html
Glad you admit there was no lab leak!
LIterally the same day the NY Times has an opinion piece that it probably came from a lab. But that's uncomfortable and painful to think about.
Here's the NY Times article:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html?unlocked_article_code=1.w00.8JGK.XlP0qBRKHdWB
Leaking from a lab and being manufactured in a lab are totally different things, but I hardly expect you to draw that distinction.
is it? Especially considering they haven't provided the chain of custody to where Covid was captured. I mean if I was a scientist doing research, I'd catelog the animals i'm capturing and tying it to the virus's i'm finding...
But what do I know?
first, covid was never captured. It is a disease not a virus. did you mean SARS-CoV-2?
Second you say: "I mean if I was a scientist doing research, I'd catelog the animals i'm capturing and tying it to the virus's i'm finding.."
It has been done! see the preprint:
"Genetic tracing of market wildlife and viruses at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic"
They found co-isolation of SARS-CoV-2 RNA with DNA from civets, racoon dogs, and others in environmental swabs taken at the Wuhan fish market early January 2020.
Yes the difference between HIV and AIDS..
But when you say "AIDS", everyone knows you ALSO mean HIV....not just the clinical manifestation of the underlying virus.
LOL I'm going to chalk that up being a wee bit inflexible that you can't see what I was talking about. I'll lay it out like your intelligence demands. The topic was about the virus coming, either from an animal in the lab, or GOF done in the lab. So I didn't have to specify the virus name, as everyone knew what i was talking about.
Second this thread aggreed it came from a lab and that is what the disccusion was about. Not sure why I needed this article, as this was only about the wet market, with samples taken while the pandemic was raging. Did you even read it?
It also makes this comment. It is not possible to conclude which of these species may have been infected and/or introduced the virus to the market from this data alone. Nonetheless, our analysis provides a small and actionable list of species with genotypic details.( page 15)
so what is your point?
The lab didn’t “capture” covid [sic], or SARS-CoV-2.
They “captured” 2 strains of coronavirus similar to SARS2 from Horseshoe bats.
Their research was on these.
So yes…as to what you know…very little it seems.
Your getting closer, add those two, and put them through the Ecoalliance research, and boom we have Sars2 virus.
Btw where is your info coming from? can you link? This would be the first time i've heard they published their list and identified I'd love to read more.
You admit ignorance re the 2 horshoe bat coronaviruses, yet confidently claim SARS2 arose through GOF research on them.
Doesn’t your ignorance and hypocrisy embarrass you even a little?
That’s not how the GOF work was done anyhow. Have you any biological or scientific background at all, or are you just throwing out any and every conspiracy you’ve read about on Rumble?
Yes, I haven't read that they had that in all my research. I'm wondering where it was published so I could learn. I don't think thats ignorance, thats lack of knowledge.
Yes because we have yet to find SARS2 in the wild. in a spill over event we should, and have been able to do so in every past pandemic. So based on the ecoalliance funding grant, i'm trying to bridge the gap on why we don't have an answer 4 years latter.
Haha rumble... haha yea thats not even where the fun ones are. No I'm simply asking for evidence, that should've been available and explained right away after the pandemic started. I'm also taking Evidence(Funding documents) and applying them to situations that don't ring true.
Why did we know the Pig flu outbreak in 2009 came from Mexico, Why did we know SARS1 was in bats? because we found the original virus's within a few years time.
You don't need an education in Virology to understand when someone isn't being truthful. Evidence, it is actually what makes science happen.
In this case, they’re not mutually exclusive. But I hardly expect you to draw that distinction.
Offit has with this article though.
Attempts to conflate the natural origin of the virus with lab leaks (or with lab bioengineered virus) are egregious.
Bioengineering viruses is what they were doing at the Wuhan Lab, with US taxpayer dollars. The attempt to claim that it was a naturally created virus that they just happened to have and leak from the lab is egregious.
I’m not making that claim, nor did Offit.
Evidence for natural origin is robust, and evidence for animal-human transfer is fairly strong. Lab leak cannot be ruled out definitively, therefore it remains possible, but is still not probable.
Literally every single expert who’s not on the Big Pharma payroll disagrees. Stay ignorant, my friend.
hey, paul.
get it together. quit the cope. no one with a brain actually believes any of this sh!t!? what is the point of trying to re-write what everyone knows as basic fact. this makes you look stupid and I don't think youre very stupid.
although that quote you used at the annual conference was total cringe. so that was pretty stupid.
covid came from a lab and the mrna medical products hurt more than they helped. the worse part of the pandemic was the public health response.
What's amazing is what you leave out of this story.
There are 40,000+ wet markets in China, but four biolabs that research viruses. What are the odds that the largest such biolab in the world, the one studying bat viruses, is co-located with the one wet market that generated the COVID virus?
In 2018, just before the outbreak, Ecohealth alliance asked the U.S. government, as part of the DEFUSE program to fund studies in Wuhan that would have generated a virus remarkably similar to COVID 19. The proposal aimed to study and potentially insert human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses to understand their potential to cause pandemics. This type of research is considered high-risk due to the potential for creating more virulent or transmissible viruses. DARPA rejected the proposal, citing concerns about the risks involved and the potential for creating dangerous pathogens.
While the U.S. government declined to fund that study, it doesn't mean that the study was not performed by the Chinese government. The Chinses have stopped providing access to the records.
Also, in 2004, two researchers at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention contracted SARS in Beijing, China and then spread the infection to around other people. The two researchers contracted the virus in two incidents, two weeks apart.
The evidence of a natural spillover is far from overwhelming. Michael Worobey, Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes are good at what they do, but they have no expertise at investigating the cause of a disaster like this. And it shows.
The premier investigative body in the world, the FBI, has found it more likely than not that a lab leak caused the pandemic. They didn't find conclusive proof, but the weight of the evidence favors a lab leak over a natural spillover.
Defer to the experts, scientists. They know better than you do.
Worobey also did seminal research on the origins of HIV.
He has good form here. As you say, defer to the experts. They know better than you.
Michael Worobey does interesting work on evolutionary biology, examining the genome of viruses to track their evolution and work backward to guess at their origin using phylogenetic tools. That is his scientific specialty. He is also a bright person who has studied epidemiology and the evidence available as to the origin of the virus.
But he's not an expert on investigating whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged in Wuhan through a natural spillover or lab leak. That's not scientific research. That's a forensic investigation. That requires not scientific expertise, but expertise in interviewing witnesses and experts, gathering other evidence, and analyzing that evidence to reach a conclusion.
The difference between science and investigation is a big one, as detailed in this report: www.heartlandforensic.com/writing/forensic-science-and-the-scientific-method/ That report shows the problem with Michael Worobey with its analogy of scientists to Sherlock Holmes. The temptation is for scientists to build a scenario on incomplete evidence, assign a convincing probability to that scenario, and then insist that their scenario is correct based on science.
That is just what Michael Worobey has done. He used incomplete data from testing done at the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in Wuhan to pin down the origin to raccoon dogs sold in a corner of that market. He used incomplete data as to the location of initial patients with Covid-19 to again trace the origin of the disease to the market. He then claims to have proven a natural spillover and ruled out a lab leak, claiming expertise as a scientist specializing in investigating the origin of viruses. He poses as a Sherlock Holmes (or in his case, John Snow).
That is similar to what Tony Fauci did when he set federal public health policy during the pandemic. He instructed people to keep apart six feet of "social distancing" with no basis for that rule. He claimed the vaccines would prevent transmission and that they provided stronger immunity than infection even though neither of those things was true. And he said that when he made those pronouncements, he represented science.
The FBI is the premier investigative body in the world. They were tasked by Joe Biden to investigate the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They interviewed scientists with knowledge about the subject. They gathered information from a variety of sources, some not available to the public. After analyzing that evidence, they came to the conclusion that a lab leak was more likely than not the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic, which is contrary to Michael Worobey's confident conclusion of a natural spillover.
I'm a lawyer with some experience in questioning witnesses, evaluating evidence, and building cases. I'm also a computer scientist with some experience in using the tool of causal inference (based on the work of Turing prizewinner Judea Pearl). My opinion is that the evidence backs up the FBI, and not Michael Worobey, though there is not enough evidence to make a firm conclusion. Either one could be right.
That's why I question why all scientists seem to march in lockstep to back up Michael Worobey, Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes in insisting that the lab leak theory has no evidence to back it up. No evidence? There's plenty of evidence. Not to make a firm conclusion, but more than the evidence for a natural spillover.
In my opinion, scientists should defer to the experts in investigation, and the FBI by their very name makes them that. If scientists put forth a theory, as scientists, they need to give us the evidence to support their theory, not insist that we accept their theory because they are experts. After all, as Richard Feynman put it, "science is the belief in the ignorance of experts".
Dr. Worobey is a specialist in investigating the origins of viruses. He's renowned for it.
It's hard to trust what this guy and the other approved experts have to say now.
You forgot to explain why these gain of function experiments are carried out at all. To the layman they sound insane, even if they didn't cause covid
“So, while it was true that the United States government funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, no function was gained.”
That is one of the worst, most gaslighting and heartless statements that could be made.
Then points to the Wet Market conspiracy theory with zero evidence or statement of facts, zilch. Go listen to a podcast, because he can’t defend himself in the slightest.
$710M flowed from the manufactures of this “vaccine” back to the scientists at the NIH, including Fauci.
These people all need to be in prison for the deaths of millions of people worldwide, both from the virus and from the novel treatment that they pushed on us.
Several government agencies came to a different conclusion. The behavior of the Chinese government and the odd happenings at that lab near the time of the outbreak point to nefarious things. While Dr. Offit often provides laudable information and clarity; he is, in my estimate gravely mistaken. I shall, however, review more of his ideas and data on the subject to see if I can conform with his opinion. I would prefer it was a natural event, however, the evidence I have seen and the assessment of probabilities would lead me to believe it is indeed from a lab. The Chinese communist government is not to be trusted, some have suggested even asymmetrical warfare via the virus, which may seem outlandish, but less so when you consider their long-term goals, and methods of attack to weaken an enemy; the consequent death toll among even their own citizens would be counted as part of the equation. While such a hypothesis may be dismissed by most, I think it is a viable consideration aside from that of a mere accident from a lab, or a natural event. I vote lab leak motivation unknown, I may revise my opinion pending further review of information. I am not opposed to other conclusions, but, I am opposed to so-called solid conclusions at this time. I spent several decades in analysis of statistics and, for me, at this point, there are far too many strange "coincidences" to point to anything other than human intervention via the lab.
https://stevensclark.typepad.com/coronavirus_news_and_view/2021/06/the-origin-of-the-virus-redux-did-it-really-come-from-the-wuhan-lab-.html
https://rumble.com/v3302bc-the-never-isolated-the-virus.html
the one thing we should all recognize that paul is telling us is this:
The worrisome experiment took place at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Researchers took a strain of influenza virus found in birds and altered it to grow in ferrets (which, like humans, are mammals). In other words, these researchers had taken a strain of influenza virus that was limited to birds—to which no one in the world had immunity—and altered it so that it might cause disease in people. They had created a potential pandemic virus.
these people indeed know what theyre doing. and theyre doing it on purpose. if you believe for a moment there are no other releases of virus youre fooling yourself. CSIS recently held a symposium and one of the attendees was a man from the intelligence community who said "after bin laden died I was worried where my career was going. that is until covid happened..."