Second take on the lab theory

During the recent lab leak orgy, plenty of articles, mostly by scientists, have battled the lab theory.  Three are here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/05/20/no-science-clearly-shows-that-covid-19-wasnt-leaked-from-a-wuhan-lab/?sh=443177be5585, https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-revisited/, https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/column-lab-leak-origin-claim-195301073.html.  Their arguments match those of my 5/27/21 blog perfectly.  No, all the uncertainty is plain scientist talk, never to mean that lab leak possibility is anywhere close to natural origin.  No, there is no new evidence.  No, any “new” evidence, including this at Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, is easily refuted or not evidence at all.  It is a fun read in https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-revisited/ laughing at the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery pre-print and media attention (and other “evidence”), and it just shows how the crap lab made/leak is.  No, it is damn hard (actually impossible, although scientists never say never, right?) to make a new CoV out of known ones without being detected.  Gain-of-function (GOF) is not a magic wand you can simply wave to make a firefly out of fruitfly, or Hamlet out of King Lear, which is exactly what laypeople are led to believe when fooled by conspiracy theorists.

Of course there is also the pro-leak, or simply the “curious” camp, like this: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins.  Even VF admitted no new finding, but a typical propaganda reporting nonetheless, lengthy to look like a real work, but filled with year-old wrong and misleading information, deliberate omissions, outright contradictions, and faulty conclusions.  With detailed analyses in the 5/27/21 blog, select examples are given below.

Wrong and misleading information

Whenever talking about wrong information, the story of Li Wenliang must top the chart, and VF took out the old trash again that Li was arrested, even though for months now the MSM media have been relatively careful in not saying Li was arrested, instead only vaguely “silenced”, because by all accounts, including his own, Li was never arrested (3/16/20 blog).  MSM and VF still consider Li a whistleblower, although what his whistleblowing did is never clear, because by the time he wrote his private WeChat messages on Dec 30, 2019, COVID-19 cases had been reported to the Wuhan Health authority for 3 days, which issued an order for all Wuhan clinics to look for symptoms, an order widely reported by the Chinese media on the same day. 

VF also wrote “The government had shut down the Huanan market, ordered laboratory samples destroyed, claimed the right to review any scientific research about COVID-19 ahead of publication, and expelled a team of Wall Street Journal reporters”, all signs of a Chinese coverup.  But is there a different explanation?  Turns out there are plenty, and VF wouldn’t want you to know or consider, which will happen again and again.  Shutting down the market was simply a way to break the transmission chain, and doing it one day earlier means one fewer day of danger, as people thought the market was the origin.  China had explained the “destroy” order, which didn’t really order lab samples to be destroyed: it said that samples must be properly secured, and if you don’t have the capacity to do so, ship to a better place or destroy to eliminate the possibility of infection.  This is a standard procedure any reasonable person will do, and it came at the time that many hospitals, institutes, and labs were inundated with patient samples, which many of those places had never done or encountered at such a massive scale before.   And the “review” order came after a rush of COVID-19 papers, many of low-quality, including one linking COVID-19 to snakes.  That there are too many poor COVID-19 papers is a well-known fact and considered toxic by scientists.  And about expelling WSJ (and others), the MSM has always faked ignorance and innocence: the US had expelled Chinese journalists earlier, and WSJ had published an article gleefully ridiculing China and COVID-19 in Feb 2020.  Not sure how the author feels about what happened in the US later, but that is a different story.  It is amazing that every sentence in that VF paragraph gave readers an impression that is partial at best or misleading and wrong at worst.  Bombarded with such misinformation days in and days out, casual readers in the West don’t have a chance, do they?

Deliberate omissions

The most blatant offense, which I already indicated as well as predicted on 5/27/21 blog, is here.   VF found out Shi Zhengli is doing GOF, citing “a 2015 research paper by Shi Zhengli and the University of North Carolina epidemiologist Ralph Baric proving that the spike protein of a novel coronavirus could infect human cells”.  Here is the paper: doi: 10.1038/nm.3985, with the author contributions: “V.D.M. designed, coordinated and performed experiments, completed analysis and wrote the manuscript. B.L.Y. designed the infectious clone and recovered chimeric viruses; S.A. completed neutralization assays; L.E.G. helped perform mouse experiments; T.S. and J.A.P. completed mouse experiments and plaque assays; X.-Y.G. performed pseudotyping experiments; K.D. generated structural figures and predictions; E.F.D. generated phylogenetic analysis; R.L.G. completed RNA analysis; S.H.R. provided primary HAE cultures; A.L. and W.A.M. provided critical monoclonal antibody reagents; and Z.-L.S. provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids. R.S.B. designed experiments and wrote manuscript.”  So Shi gave UNC the sequences and plasmids, and that was it.  VF never tells you GOF was done at UNC.  What kind of journalists would omit such vital information, and they and others had the audacity to accuse Shi of lying, how ironic it is!

GOF is now the magic word and magic wand anybody can confidently wave to show they know how to make a new virus.  All GOFs are not the same, and to a biologist, it is a big jump from even what the doi: 10.1038/nm.3985 showed to the mission impossible without anybody detecting (5/27/21 blog).  GOF is always a red herring, because what the lab made/leak people mean has never been done in CoV, no literature, nothing remotely similar in the literature, and Shi has never published anything like doi: 10.1038/nm.3985 as a lead author.  She has said consistently that her interest prior to Dec 2019 was SARS origin.  Her publications back her up 100%.  VF even tried to make her (re-)naming and publication of RaTG13 in 2020 an issue, without noting her timeline and explanation (scim.ag/ShiZhengli) make perfect sense, supported by raw data analyses by others (https://virological.org/t/on-the-veracity-of-ratg13/551).  In RaTG13, Ra means the bat species, TG is the town where the mine belongs, and 13 means 2013, when the sample was taken.  How then is exactly, “But to skeptics, the renaming exercise looked like an effort to hide the sample’s connection to the Mojiang mine”?  

The goal of deliberate omissions is to mislead people deliberately.  Another example: VF mentioned the Chinese published a paper infecting engineered mice with COVID-19, and that based on the timeline of the study, they apparently got the mice earlier than Dec 2019, i.e., maybe they knew COVID-19 was coming before anybody else.  VF wouldn’t educate you that mice were engineered to express human ACE2, the receptor of many CoVs, including SARS.  Is there any wonder whoever like Shi studying SARS for years had such mice before COIVD-19?   Then there is this WIV shutting down its virus database in Sept 2019 due to hacking, so maybe WIV knew COVID-19 was coming in Sept 2019.  But did hacking not exist prior to Sept 2019 and after?  Everybody experiences databases (China and elsewhere) shutting down all the time.  Furthermore, one can bet that plenty of people had downloaded the database prior to shutdown.  Has anyone found any COIVD-19 or close CoV yet?  WIV and Shi have many collaborators around the world, and WIV people travel and study around the world over the years.  In fact, there were/are many international students at WIV who had left China before and since 2020.  Has any of them said anything insidious about COVID-19 and GOF?   A complete negative on the WIV front for 18 months should speak volume.  To think lab made/leak, one must assume a vast conspiracy involving so many people t at so many levels around the world (not just at WIV) working together so perfectly, while China couldn't even “silence” Li Wenliang, who gave many interviews in Jan 2020.

Outright contradictions

VF spent a great deal of time trying to pin Shi on lying, without evidence.  The best it got is an anonymous “former national security official” commenting that WIV must be lying since DOS said three WIV researchers were sick in Nov 2019, while Shi said nobody at WIV was sick with COVID-19 or tested Ab-positive.  But this is funny because DOS “intelligence” never said the three people got COVID-19; in fact, according to the first reporting WSJ, even three people being sick needed confirmation. 

The MSM in general and VF at present always sound scary mentioning the Chinese military, but they fail to provide any evidence of biological warfare experiments, and in every single given example, no GOF is present.  VF echoed the party line that WIV worked with the military and cited joint publications, but how about what is in the publications?  Anything about GOF and engineered viruses?  Of course NO.  Then so what?  Can’t people study biology together?  Noted even by VF, US does the same thing, more and longer.  Chinese military offers public services like medical care, and most visitors are civilians.  Anything wrong?   The paper with “Eleven of its 23 coauthors worked for the Academy of Military Medical Sciences” using the aforementioned human ACE2 mice VF failed to specify, was to establish COVID-19 virus binds the same ACE2 as SARS, and the mice can be used to study infection and tested for treatments and vaccines.  “And by mid-January, a team of military scientists led by China’s top virologist and biochemical expert, Major General Chen Wei, had set up operations inside the WIV.”  Again, what is wrong?  Did they do GOF?  VF won’t tell you this common knowledge: Chen Wei had also gone to Africa for Ebola several years back, designing an adenovirus vaccine against Ebola, and she went to WIV to develop the Ad5 vaccine against COVID-19, the CanSino vaccine, a well-known vaccine of the same design as the Oxford, J&J, and Russian vaccines. 

Faulty conclusions

The only positive feature one can learn from the VF article is it talked about a lot of people and a lot of events.  Its conclusions are usually wrong, not unexpected since so much else is so wrong as discussed above, indicative of a warped mind.  The most dramatic one is DOS discouraged GOF talk, preventing a study of COVID-19 origin, for fear that the US did GOF a lot itself, and as WIV got a grant from NIH, somehow US could be blamed.  But the reverse of this reasoning and conclusion is much closer to the truth.  The US has never stopped the “investigation”.  Only that the “investigation” has yielded nothing if not invalidation.  Most analysts at DOS and others surely knew GOF, together with lab made, is a non-starter, for it is irrelevant, it is beyond human ability, and it is a dead end.  It is this reason that they didn’t want GOF, not that they didn’t want to upset China, a laughable suggestion.  This confirms my prediction in the 5/27/21 blog.

VF talked highly of the lab made/leak advocates DRASTIC.  But what concrete evidence have they uncovered, anything hasn’t been explained away innocently or convincing, usually by science?  In a never-ending circle, they and the like-minded first produce a supposedly smoking gun, like sequences “that must be man made”, but get shut down quickly upon a closer look, next move on to another bombshell, which surely suffers the same fate, but that is just the beginning of another smoking gun.  These are the skeptics that won’t take facts and reasons for answers.  Unlike normal debates, where both sides’ evidence is evaluated.  The natural origin crowd surely produce their own data and debunk every single piece of the lab made/leak “data”, while the lab made/leak crowd keep churning out this and that, but hardly touch the other side.  For example, the COVID-19 virus sequence has no sign of engineering.  The lab made/leak people should then show COVID-19 does have the sign, or if not, how it is possible?  GOF?  What kind of GOF, how to do it, is it doable, any prior example?  In the rare events that debates happen, e.g., the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery and https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-revisited/, the result is not even close. 

But none of these matters to lab made/leak, which simply moves, shifts, comes up with sth new but still wrong, or simply recycles sth old and wrong.  From the very beginning, among many other wild accusations, they said COVID-19 was engineered as a bioweapon.  But since sequence analyses have found nothing unnatural (bad science like at Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery notwithstanding), they morphed into the lab leak, just-skeptics, or want-to-know crowd.  If it was a lab leak, it means the lab must have it first, then where it is evidence the lab had it (also where is the evidence for a leak)?  None, so GOF must get involved, going back to lab made, even back to the Chinese military, the fearsome bioweapons.  No GOF has been done to make a new CoV without trace, but who cares, as long as they sound professional, and GOF sounds magical?  Since scientists hate to say 100%, everything like lab made/leak is still possible, right?  According to Peter Daszak’s numbers, maybe someone at WIV did get infected when collecting bat samples, at the possibility 1:1000000 compared to the general population (5/27/21 blog).  Then where is the evidence he from WIV infected others, instead of a dead end infection?  Fauci said: so it is still from the nature, what is the fuss about?  Does it mean shouldn’t do bat research?  Be more careful?  Sure, but who has or can guarantee 100% safety?  It must be noted that so far there is no evidence anyone at WIV was sick with COVID-19, but even if someone at WIV was infected, how do we know he didn’t get it outside of work?   

DRASTIC and others have pointed to RaTG13 and the Yunnan mine.  To them, six Yunnan miners were infected by RaTG13, which is just COVID-19, or a precursor to be transformed into COVID-19 by GOF at WIV (5/27/21 blog).  Much hinges on the toxicity of RaTG13, but zero evidence exists yet.  Shi’s publications by 2019 showed nothing beyond sequencing of RaTG13, without any hint she ever grew the virus, and she has maintained they had only the RNA but not live viruses (scim.ag/ShiZhengli).  A new pre-print (5/27/21 blog, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.21.445091v1) shows that RBDs in RaTG13 and RaTG15, a closely related CoV from the same mine, had weak or no binding to human ACE2, suggesting that they can’t infect humans.  Other studies have confirmed RaTG13 RBD bind human ACE2 very weakly (references in https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.21.445091v1).  So the miners were almost certainly not sickened by RaTG13 or RaTG15.  No wonder Shi doesn’t think highly of the danger and importance of RaTG13 as DRASTIC and MSM do in the VF article, but to VF, another example of her not to be trusted.

Forget about what DRASTIC has achieved (which is little, beyond keeping the lab talk alive), supposedly DRASTIC is “now knee-deep in examining the WIV’s construction orders, sewage output, and cell phone traffic”.  Sort of suggests nothing has worked so far, but can’t wait to see THAT.  But hasn’t something similar been done already (6/10/2020 blog; https://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-contractors-report-on-wuhan-lab-origins-of-coronavirus-is-bogus)?  What conclusions VF draws from DRASTIC says more about VF than DRASTIC.     

Recycled news

A common refrain is that the media discounted the lab made/leak theory in 2020, which misses the whole picture.  The lab theory had less airing at liberal media in the second half of 2020 largely because they like MSNBC rarely booked Republicans like Cotton during the election.  But the theory has never disappeared or stopped being advocated.  See FOXNews, radio talk shows, and newspapers.  Anti-China is bipartisan, so why is anyone surprised it returns?  If one sees it was a liberal bias before, why isn’t it an anti-China bias now, since no new evidence has emerged (5/27/21 blog, https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/column-lab-leak-origin-claim-195301073.html)?

Incidentally, Fauci e-mails from Jan-April 2020 were released, and the right-wingers are calling for his firing.  Which is stunning since those e-mails revealed absolutely nothing juicy.  Most just casual discussion of science, nothing major Fauci didn’t say in public.  The only semi-legitimate criticism of Fauci was his stands on mask wearing and reasons, not news either.  It is true that he discouraged masks by the public in Feb 2020, and when he explained the decision later, he said he was worried about supplies.  This is revisionist, because the supply issue was maybe the 3^rd or 4^th ranked reason, while the 1^st reason was always masks didn’t work.  On the other hand, going down hard on Fauci for this is uncalled for.  1. It was the consensus of Western medical community that masks didn’t work.  This position is not inherently wrong when disease instances are very, very low.  Replacing Fauci with someone else, s/he would have uttered the same words.  2. More importantly, how many people in the US were dying to wear masks then? Thus, few who wanted to wear a mask would be dissuaded by Fauci to not wear a mask, while we do know how many didn’t wear a mask even after Fauci recommended so later.  In other words, one can fault Fauci for the shifting reasons, but not for his learning on the job.

In essence, the Chinese and natural origin crowd, mostly the scientific community, have been far more consistent and trustworthy than the lab made/leak crowd, even though only the former have been accused of lying and demanded to prove a negative.  Didn’t two US agencies lean towards the natural origin, while at least one towards the lab leak?  Why stop there: all 18 believed in Iraq WMD in 2003, a slam-dunk, remember?