Men’s tennis final at the US Open

In a surprise to many, Daniil Medvedev easily beat Novak Djokovic 3:0 in the final.  Djokovic really had no chance in the match, as Medvedev even out-Novak Novak: served better, moved better, defended better, and, crucially, out-rallied Novak at the baseline.  Djokovic won at the net, but that was simply due to the fact he realized he couldn’t win elsewhere.  It didn’t make much difference anyway since Djokovic is never a serve and volley guy, and his first serve percentage was not high enough, and his second serves were not fast enough.   

Why was that?  The apparent reason is that Djokovic ran out of gas at the end.  He’d played too many give-one-take-three-set matches at the US Open, and it has been a long and historic year for him.  Sort of like Leylah Fernandez in the Women’s final.  This actually begs a deeper question: if he was only 25, could he have done it?  To dig it deeper, it goes back to the GOAT question: since he or Fed/Nadal obviously never did, and Djokovic almost achieved it only when Fed/Nadal are too old and almost out of the picture, then even if Djokovic did it, how significant is it?

At the moment Fed/Nadal/Djokovic all have unique credentials to be called the GOAT, or GOATs.  In a sense, here lies a debate between a big GOAT or a small GOAT circle, or a big HOF vs small HOF.  The small GOAT mindset is that it is better to leave GOAT designation blank than risking a new GOAT discussion coming up every 10 years. A GOAT must have staying power.

In my Aug 20, 2011 blog there are two objective criteria: overall achievements, and head-to-head records.  Fed/Nadal/Djokovic are all tied up in GS totals now, although Djokovic most likely will end up with the most.  Djokovic also has a winning record against the other two, but the advantage is minimal and reflects more on their age differences than anything else.  In essence, the big 3 are very similar.  Djokovic benefits from being the youngest, with Murray, who was supposed to seriously challenge Djokovic, which he indeed did in 2016, getting hurt after 2017 and faded away.   

The Aug 20, 2011 blog also indicated additional factors, although it is safe to emphasize one for the small GOAT mindset: a real GOAT must be obviously better than everybody else in the GOAT discussion.  Because otherwise we will find new GOAT nonstop.  Like Pete Sampras: everybody marveled at his 14 GS in 2002, but in 10 years that record was blown away by Federer, then it was quickly clear that Nadal and Djokovic would handily surpass it as well. 

Right now, and it is predicted that the big 3 won’t blow away each other eventually.  So if one prefers a small and stringent GOAT circle, it is safe to call them all GOATs, but not anyone as THE GOAT.  Because in 10 years’ time there may come a genius like Federer, but no equivalent of Nadal, then he would easily win 30 GS.  GOAT means all-time, perhaps as we foresee to our best ability at the time, but not by the time we talk about it. 

Women’s tennis at the US Open

It has been a dramatic women’s tennis event throughout at the 2021 US Open.  Even though it was only two sets, the final between Emma Raducanu and Leylah Fernandez was entertaining and lasted ~ 100 min, with plenty of high-quality shots from both players.  Fernandez probably felt tired at the end due to her previous 4 straight 3-setters: too many first-serves into the net, and her forehand didn’t produce wide-angled shots as before.  Amazingly, Raducanu was the one who had played 3 more matches, but she didn’t even lose a single set for the whole tournament.  There was a suspicion that Fernandez might have an edge entering the final because she had been beating opponents with a conventional style like Raducanu, while Fernandez is unique and left-handed.  But at the end her stamina likely fell short, and Raducanu is indeed different.  Raducanu looks and plays like Li Na, hitting strong, flat forehand and backhand groundstrokes.  Like Fernandez, Raducanu plays close to the baselines, so Fernandez couldn’t gain more reaction time like before.  And Raducanu was consistent enough to make fewer errors. 

So what can one make of the future of the two?  Raducanu plays like Li Na, but she is clearly more composed, consistent, and much smarter, which bodes well for her future.  Fernandez plays like a lefty Hingis.  In these days when power is everything, this is not a winning formula. 

On the other hand, predicting female athletes somehow has been a losing cause.  See May 23, Aug 12, and Aug 17, 2012 blogs’ high praise and hope for Li Xuerui, who suffered a knee injury in 2016, came back ~ one year later, and retired a further ~ one year later.  But she had been a disappointment even before 2016.  In her case, the blame was her coaching, probably on Chen Jin.  Li was playing an attacking style in 2012 and looked invincible.  Then after her London win, she morphed into a clearing/rallying player.  But she was never a high-stamina person and couldn’t play that style over three long sets.  By 2015 she was no longer any different from other players.  What a big waste of talent.

Another case is Naomi Osaka (Feb 21, 2021 blog), although her story is not over yet.  She has the potential to be an all-time great, but everything is now up in the air.  In her loss to Fernandez at the Open, she seemed not wanting to move, or play at all.  This is mental.  If she can’t think straight, then no chance more achievements.  Maybe her coaching is to blame, so is herself. 

A litmus test for biologists

Like “where were you when 9-11 happened”, all biologists must now have formed an opinion on the question of whether the COVID-19 virus is of natural origin or lab made/leaked, presumably by WIV.  Nobody can hide any longer under the 50-50 cover or fake ignorance, because everybody’s scientific reputation, knowledge, and judgments must be on the line regarding the most scientifically and socially explosive issue since Jan 2020.  Were it not for politicization of the issue, it shouldn’t be something even lay people are talking about, but as now, even if scientists never say never, there can be no grey zone: it is high time that either you believe in one theory, or you believe in the other. 

Behind the natural origin theory are supports from the unequivocal, long human history and results of new, unbiased virus analyses. Behind the other, well, nothing, other than the fact that WIV is at the same city where COVID-19 was first discovered, with some scientists working on bat CoVs.  The lab made/leak theory is essentially one and the same, because for lab leak to occur, WIV must first have the virus.  Then how did the WIV get it?  One is of course WIV invented it, hence lab made.  The other is WIV collected it from the wild, before it escaped from WIV.  If so, Fauci put it well: “But that means it was in the wild to begin with. That's why I don't get what they're talking about [and] why I don't spend a lot of time going in on this circular argument.” (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/anthony-fauci-no-scientific-evidence-the-coronavirus-was-made-in-a-chinese-lab-cvd).  Mind you, no evidence WIV ever had it prior to Dec 30, 2019.  WIV reportedly has 10k bat samples collected from the wide, but it doesn’t mean WIV has or is growing 10k different CoVs.  Based on published work, many samples don’t have viruses, many samples have the same CoV (e.g., see https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.21.445091v1).  Moreover, recovering CoVs from bat samples are notoriously hard, because CoVs are likely inactivated during storage/transport or present in too low a level.  So the actual number of CoVs at WIV is much, much smaller than 10k, and many or most have remained at freezers undisturbed anyway.  What is more, even Ralph Baric, who signed the Science letter (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1), admitted that no matter how many CoVs WIV has collected, natural CoVs outnumber them by many orders of magnitude.  The same conclusion by Peter Daszak: how matter how many times WIV collected CoVs, they are negligible compared to the natural, human infection events.  In fact, WIV would go to the countryside to collect samples only after told by the locals that bats were there.  So whatever CoVs WIV caught, if infecting WIV workers, must have infected the locals without WIV protective gears many times prior.  In essence, the lab leak theory, in its most benign form, still has zero evidence, is a non-issue and an exceedingly long shot simply based on real life numbers, even before considering WIV safety practices.  Consequently, we must view that lab leak is just a backdoor lab made.

In short, the lab theory has no evidence, despite the most intense scrutiny in scientific history, for the past 19 months.  Below lists some of the debunked “evidence” and, more importantly, why it can’t possibly be made by WIV.

1. Evidence that wasn’t

Not for the lack of trying, lab made “evidence” popped up immediately in Jan 2020.  A funny thing is, throughout scientific research, whenever a piece of evidence is disputed, it is rarely completely discredited right away.  Not in the case of lab made theory though: corpses of such “evidence” have piled up mile-high quickly.  For example, the virus is man made because of an HIV signature, furin sites, etc.  Or WIV was shut down due to a leak in 2019 (https://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-contractors-report-on-wuhan-lab-origins-of-coronavirus-is-bogus).   Or COVID-19 cases surged in the fall 2019 based on satellite images around Wuhan hospitals (6/10/2020 blog, https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/42669767/Satellite_Images_Baidu_COVID19_manuscript_DASH.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y).  Three WIV researchers got sick in Nov 2019?  What are their names?  What were they sick for?  Remember the Niger yellow cake in 2003?  Aluminum tubes?  Mobile labs?  The latest was from Jesse Bloom, who also signed the Science letter and then claimed to have recovered “lost” virus sequences, showing China is hiding whatever (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.18.449051v1).  Never mind the sequences were not from the earliest patients, the Small paper associated with the data amply explained and discussed their implications.  After widespread pushback (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/06/claim-chinese-team-hid-early-sars-cov-2-sequences-stymie-origin-hunt-sparks-furor), Jesse Bloom had to backpedal and downplay the importance of his “discovery”.  It turned out that the raw data was originally deposited to NCBI, but when the linked paper, after being revised and accepted, lost the reference to NCBI, the authors asked NCBI to remove the data.  And now the raw data have been re-deposited elsewhere (https://live.baidu.com/m/media/pclive/pchome/live.html?room_id=4621124099&source=search).  Curious what Bloom will say now and do with this work, and whether the media reports hyping his work (some even crying “smoking gun”) will update the information?  Fat chance.

Typically, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  But in any research endeavor, if you have a hypothesis and have tried many different ways to test it, and you come up empty every time-what is more, however you test it, you get the results refuting your hypothesis-you’ve got to question your hypothesis seriously.  A beautiful theory slain by ugly facts, nothing unusual about that.  But what is uglier is clinging to a theory disputed by all the facts while supported by none, which is exactly what the lab theory adherents do.  How can they do this, even when all their hard-earned “evidence” had blown up in their faces?  The fig leaf, of course, is China not being transparent!  But what does it even mean?  As an example, in early 2020, China was also accused of being not transparent, e.g., hiding the case and death numbers, right?  Now, over one year later, can everybody testify China’s numbers or undercounting being any different from those from other countries?  If anything, China’s official fatality number is closer to the truth (https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n415) than most countries’ (http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess-mortality-due-covid-19-and-scalars-reported-covid-19-deaths). But has the West admitted that China had indeed been as good as others in reporting COVID-19 cases and deaths?  Hell no!

In all truthfulness, it is not China being not transparent, it is that some people simply won’t take no for an answer, and don’t believe a word out of China.  More transparency?  WIV is a research institute not unlike other universities and institutes around the world.  WIV works openly with international collaborators.  WIV publishes in scientific journals for all to see.  You can’t be more transparent than that.  Anyone can pool WIV’s papers over the years to see if there is any hint, even remotely, on COVID-19 virus work prior to 2020.  Answer: absolutely nil.  There is no probable cause for any “investigation”-indeed, no cause at all, 19 months later.  Think WIV opening up everything will shut up the diehard?  One can easily imagine that if they still don’t get the answer they want, they will question whether WIV has hid something, or cooked the book, or maybe another place at Wuhan or even China made the virus.  This is a bottomless pit.  Besides, has such “transparency” been demanded for or achieved by anybody else in the world?  How did it work up for Iraq in 2002?

2. Why WIV couldn’t have possibly made the virus (also 5/27/21 and 6/5/21 blogs)

RNA sequence analyses have shown that the virus has no sign of human manipulation.  Humans can’t possibly design viruses with a desired feature from scratch as simply as typing computer codes, so the only way to make a virus that passes bioinformatics detection, in theory, is to propagate a precursor CoV, without or with prior random mutagenesis, in Vero cells, or mice, or ACE2 transgenic mice, while selecting for a certain property.  There are so many obstacles in this GOF that the chance of success is dismally slim, with unknown and never certain outcomes.  (A variation is to recombine CoVs in cells or mice, but its complexity will shoot up exponentially.)  How many cells will be needed?  How many mice?  How long for the propagation and selection?  How and what to select for?  What is the end point?  Are results in cells in vitro or in mice even applicable in humans, a major deal breaker?  Any scientists who have an iota of idea what this experiment entails know how impractical the task is.  Oh, one more thing: what might the precursor CoV be?  Shi Zhengli at WIV has said before 2020 they had grown only 3 CoVs, all closely related to SARS, 80% identical to COVID-19 virus (scim.ag/ShiZhengli). Starting from SARS would have been nuts, because there is no scientific question to speak of, SARS is so far off to COVID-19 and more deadly already.  The WSJ and DRASTIC favorite (6/5/2021 blog), RaTG13 virus, is 96.2% identical, but it doesn’t bind human ACE2 well, meaning it is only weakly infectious if at all (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.21.445091v1), so it would have been tough to establish infection to begin with.  And, did I mention Shi never even had the virus (scim.ag/ShiZhengli)?  Thus, this supposed GOF has no head: don’t have/know the starting CoV, no tail: no idea how the final CoV will act on humans, and a body that may or may not work.  No success, even a tiny and remote one, of such GOF, has ever been reported for CoV.  Why would WIV, by all means a normal research institute, want to do that? 

Suppose WIV did embark on such experiments, a lot of people must be involved and know about it.  Grant agencies, staff and reviewers, grant abstracts searchable, because it would need tons of money.  NIH’s $600K is peanut.  You can’t do it alone in your basement.  It will take a long time (years), using a large lab space and resources.  It will involve a lot of researchers.  WIV is a close-knit community, only several hundred workers, along with many domestic and foreign collaborators.  WIV-associated people travel and reside around the world.  There may be 1000 people over the years that would have an idea, even if grapevine, of what was going on.  Yet, after the loudest clamor and maybe $10 million reward (proposed by David Asher, an anonymous DOS source for the VF article https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins) for 19 months, exactly zero person has come out of WIV.  On the contrary, whoever has spoken, Chinese or non-Chinese, in China or outside, all denied GOF or any knowledge, or anything unusual at WIV (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-27/did-covid-come-from-a-lab-scientist-at-wuhan-institute-speaks-out).  Generally a negative is less telling, but in this case, it speaks volume.  Either no GOF, or a conspiracy theory on par of 9-11 being an inside job.    

3. Why bothers?

What did WIV want to achieve anyway?  Showing CoVs can evolve?  Already knew that.  CoVs can be deadly?  Knew that too, with SARS and MERS.   What is left, and what the lab theory people really want to lead to, is that COVID-19 is a Chinese bioweapon.   But if the Chinese are evil and crazy enough to do it, COVID-19 is truly an odd product.  It kills no more than 0.5% of the infected, with most of the dead the elderly.  Shouldn’t a bioweapon aim at young people, with a much higher kill rate?  Bird flu is much “better” than CoV in this regard: flu viruses mutate and recombine faster, and some already have high mortality rates for the broad population.  Here lies a paradox for the lab theory: the Chinese must be the best scientists, making the most difficult GOF ever by far to work, yet at the same time the worst scientists, choosing/making a wimpy virus instead of an easier and much more deadly bird flu.  Which is it?

4.  All biologists’ professional honor at stake

Most officials, media, public in the West subscribe to the lab theory.  Media reported that two US intel agencies leaned towards the natural origin, while one the lab theory.  But didn’t all 18 believed in Iraq WMD in 2002?  A slam dunk, right? 

To be fair, a vast majority of scientists have consistently sided with natural origin.  A small dissenting voice, preferably amplified by the media, comes from scientists with little bench experience with modern viruses/molecular biology/mammalian screening, and those who did their last experiments 20 years ago or earlier.  Jesse Bloom seems to equate making a new virus to playing computers.  He sounds agonistic once in a while, yet the hype in the media about his “discovery” must have come largely from him.  Alina Chan, an MIT postdoc, is also now computation-oriented.  She is among most vocal lab made theory proponents, yet all her claims, along with DRASTIC’s, including her newest tweets of Bloom’s “discovery”, have invariably fizzled.  How many times can one be wrong before not being taken seriously?  Well, in the US, as many as possible.  

Richard Ebright, a Rutgers professor, is squarely in the lab made camp early on, even though he, like Bloom, occasionally tries to appear 50-50.  He knows bacterial RNAP X-rays, but does he know mammalian systems and virus-host interactions?  Luc Montagnier, a Nobel prize winner for discovering HIV, has waded deep into wackiness in this century, if not before.  He thought the COVID-19 virus was made towards an HIV vaccine.  Considering every possible way to make HIV vaccines has been tried and failed for the past 40 years, while there are now good treatments, one has to really wonder WTF would everybody want to make an HIV vaccine out of a CoV?  Has any CoV ever been used in a vaccine?  What are the advantages of CoV over other, existing vectors?  Then there is David Baltimore, another Nobel prize winner for discovering reverse transcription.  His claim of “smoking gun” gave much credence to Nicholas Wade’s piece, which was as widely distributed as mistake-laden (https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/).   Baltimore later regretted his words and tried to backtrack by saying he just wanted more research, but the damage has been done.  Besides, more research is indeed needed to test early human sera and more animal samples around the world, but not wasted on something that runs counter to established knowledge and common sense.

Some of these people, like Baltimore, should have known better.  But they have now ventured into conspiracy theories.  What they are doing comes with no cost to them, since it is simply opening their mouth, while ignoring all "evidence" debunked and existing research.  On the other hand, refuting their claims or satisfying their demands is energy draining, impractical, and never ending, for they will simply move on to invent new questions.  They claim they simply want to know, to ask questions.  But they are not interested in getting answers they dislike, no matter how irrational, farcical, and fantasy their favorite answers are.

There is no middle ground, no 50-50.   All biologists, particularly the lab made/leak people, with your professional life on the line, must answer these simple and fundamental questions: how do you think WIV got the virus?  How do you think WIV made the virus?  What evidence is there WIV had or made the virus?  If you even waver a second in answering those questions, then you must realize the lab theory is toast.  Don’t hide behind the China-not-transparent crap.  Many more scientists arrive at the opposite conclusion even though China is no more or less transparent to them.   

Everybody must stake his/her professional honor and credential on this litmus test. 

 

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?