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Originally Posted by DeluxeMoustache
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Most of what's written in there is debunked by virologists in This Week in Virology in their last few episodes.
1) Virologists doing "gain of function" don't start with a candidate and then change a whole bunch of things. They start with a basically complete virus. There was nothing close enough known to anyone or described to be the candidate for this.
2) The codon nonsense isn't correct, and the rarity of the Furin site is also wrong.
3) We haven't found the animal it came from in 15 months supposedly suggests this was created in lab except that it took 14 years to find the one for SARS.
4) Apparently the range for the horseshoe bats the betacoronavirus came from is only 50km and it's in the south so it can't have made it to Wuhan. He was wrong about the bats range (it's huge and not 50km), and it wouldn't be relevant anyways due to the fact that virologists believe there was an intermediary host and the wet markets sell animals from all over China.
5) This one is my favorite. He maligns Peter Daszak for "orchestrating" a bunch of prominent scientists to push back against the "China did it" narrative. Here's a snippet from his evidence:
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The emails obtained via public records requests show that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak drafted the Lancet statement, and that he intended it to “not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person” but rather to be seen as “simply a letter from leading scientists”. Daszak wrote that he wanted “to avoid the appearance of a political statement”.
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Doesn't that just sound like a scientist asking other scientist to help push against a harmful and counterproductive narrative?
6) Wade goes off a few times about what was and wasn't able to be accessed by the investigators. I really suggest listening to the This Week in Virology episode where they interview the actual investors. The accusations really fall apart
The Wade blog was the same "this is possible and the Chinese lie, so it must have happened" all over again. It was an incredibly slanted piece really light on data. He really suggests a cabal of virologists created a monster virus and it escaped, then they all covered it up without any proof except vague "they're not trustworthy" insinuations, and "well it's possible". Then looking at natural origin (again, dozens of examples just like it out there) he suggests it isn't likely due to a codon issue he's wrong about, a Furin cleavage site he's wrong about, and other stuff virologists disagree about.
It's a really slanted blog