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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
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2021-06-02, 09:56

I guess I'm not entirely sure what the bombshell story is. I looked at several articles, and…

For example, Newsweek lists 5 revelations

1. A Bill Gates adviser was worried about Fauci's health

2. Fauci offered support to a Chinese health official

3. Experts worried that COVID-19 could 'look engineered'

4. Fauci said that store-bought masks are 'not really effective'

5. Fauci was uncomfortable with people's fascination with him

Of those, I guess the one about being engineered is an ongoing debate. But why shouldn't he be able to speculate on that?
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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2021-06-02, 10:02

You dug more into it than I did. Just passing through my RSS feeds I'm seeing reference after reference about these emails released (some redacted) to/from Fauci and all the headlines are filled with sensationalist verbiage.

On the note about being "engineered" I can see that being a problem given the staunch "not from lab in China" stance out there. He himself even said it couldn't have been lab created.

The more conservative blogs I'm passing through jumped on the mask thing given so many are anti-mask. (Reference my father-in-law who pissed in a parking lot because he refused to put on a mask when waiting for his wife in a medical facility.)

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it.
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709
¡Damned!
 
Join Date: May 2004
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2021-06-02, 10:23

The two outlets that obtained the emails via FOIA each have articles up. Both are worth reading (they're not that long and they do overlap somewhat).

Washington Post
Buzzfeed News

So it goes.
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chucker
 
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2021-06-02, 14:39

Quote:
Originally Posted by turtle View Post
You dug more into it than I did. Just passing through my RSS feeds I'm seeing reference after reference about these emails released (some redacted) to/from Fauci and all the headlines are filled with sensationalist verbiage.

On the note about being "engineered" I can see that being a problem given the staunch "not from lab in China" stance out there. He himself even said it couldn't have been lab created.

The more conservative blogs I'm passing through jumped on the mask thing given so many are anti-mask. (Reference my father-in-law who pissed in a parking lot because he refused to put on a mask when waiting for his wife in a medical facility.)
I think it boils down to an unfair or misguided expectation from scientists. Similar to how the WHO gets criticized for inconsistent and confusing messaging.

Like, yes, Fauci is also kind of a spokesperson, so he'll externally try to have consistent messaging. But internally, it shouldn't be shocking that he looks at things from different angles. And on some things, he was plain wrong; good thing he wasn't too loud about those.
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PB PM
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2021-06-02, 14:58

Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank777 View Post
The Left really is unhinged from reality. It's amazing how only conservative leaders attract this kind of attack.
Please, right winger make plenty of similar attacks on left wing leaders. Give it up, the argument has no validity.

And blanket sensationalist statements like this from the right are somehow better? Let’s face it, when it comes to BS the left and the right are both full of it in some areas. While the left can definitely be out there, the right’s solution (metaphorically speaking) is to stick its head in the sand, throw it’s arms in the air and blame everyone else for their problems. No accountable for the roll they play in the worlds problems. Both sides are boring, and everyone else is tired of it, so take a deep breath and put your big kids pants on.
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Frank777
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2021-06-02, 15:10

Quote:
Originally Posted by chucker View Post
I assumed you were talking about development. If you're talking about manufacturing, you're even more off. Trump effectively banned the export of US-produced vaccines until the US has enough supply (and Biden continued this policy for a while).
The primary responsibility of the American government is to look after the welfare of Americans. No reasonable person should have expected America to export vaccines ahead of their own citizens' needs. Now that the first-run American campaign is largely done, everyone is benefitting from the manufacturing facilities commissioned through OWS. Even countries not served by American supplies are benefitting, since vaccines directed to, say, Canada, means that Canada isn't out hunting for vaccines that should rightfully be distributed to third-world countries.

Quote:
Originally Posted by chucker View Post
Again, Pfizer wasn't even funded by the US, at all.
No one cares. The factories that are making the Pfizer vaccines in the US have definitely received government funding.


Quote:
Originally Posted by chucker View Post
Nor is there harm in seeing that the situation is more complex, multiple events happened in parallel, and given that 1) other nations were first in funding development, and 2) the US didn't even help other nations with manufacturing, there is really no leg to stand on here.
Look, I have no problem acknowledging that Europe funded the development of Pfizer. Europe was also begging the Brexit guys to share their vaccines a few months back. They acknowledged they were late to the party on manufacturing.


Quote:
Originally Posted by chucker View Post
So now you're both arguing that Canada should be thankful for the US but also the US did not in fact help save poor Canada from itself? Interesting.
Canada is very thankful that US vaccine production has been increasingly headed north in the last few months. No reasonable person would have expected the US (or any other country) to deny their citizens the vaccine they were paying for so another country's citizenry could benefit.

BTW, Europe also blocked vaccine exports for a while.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Bobsky View Post
The argument just fails at its face: Trump wasn't using OWS to save the world, nor would any of the policies in the money grab have resulted in a change of outcome (J&J might actually have had some US manufactured vaccines if OWS hadn't occurred). If he truly wanted to make vaccines available to all, he would have taken the bold step of making their discoveries public property using the cash for this endeavour to reward the corporations for the risk they took on, rather than tying this to a nationalistic urge for America First.

In any event: OWS failed to keep the vaccines in the US, failed to make US companies more successful at discovering and delivering vaccines (especially to non-western countries), and failed to stop over 600k Americans from dying from a disease conservatives in the US still struggle to believe exists.
I never said Trump was out to save the world. I said the world was benefitting from the OWS manufacturing rampup. Canada is now well ahead of where we thought we would be as American shipments have ramped up.

How come only Trump gets criticized for America First, when Europe First and China First were also in play?

Nationalizing vaccine R&D is so idiotic of a public policy that I'm not even going to bother to address it. Conservatives - as a group - have no problem believing the virus exists. Many just don't think it's worth trampling centuries of personal freedoms to combat a disease that kills a demographic that could have been protected from harm whilst still allowing the country to function.
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chucker
 
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2021-06-02, 17:07

Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank777 View Post
I never said Trump was out to save the world. I said the world was benefitting from the OWS manufacturing rampup.
No, that's not what you said. The world absolutely benefitted from some of the US investment (it also suffered from, at the time, the crazy messaging).

But that wasn't your claim. It was: "If it wasn't for the Trump admin's Operation Warp Speed, much of the planet (including Canada) would be despondent at this point."

Which, lol.
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Frank777
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2021-06-02, 21:18

Quote:
Originally Posted by chucker View Post
No, that's not what you said. The world absolutely benefitted from some of the US investment (it also suffered from, at the time, the crazy messaging).

But that wasn't your claim. It was: "If it wasn't for the Trump admin's Operation Warp Speed, much of the planet (including Canada) would be despondent at this point."

Which, lol.
Outside of major industrialized countries, national vaccination efforts are desperately waiting for supply to catch up with demand. And that world demand right now is largely not for the Russian or Chinese vaccines, or Astrazeneca. The fact that the American market is largely swimming in vaccines and their manufacturing plants can now turn to meeting world demand is a great source of hope for many developing nations that have had to shut down before their hospital systems become inundated. My comment was never intended to be directed at Europe.
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Dr. Bobsky
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Join Date: Feb 2015
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2021-06-03, 06:44

Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank777 View Post
Outside of major industrialized countries, national vaccination efforts are desperately waiting for supply to catch up with demand. And that world demand right now is largely not for the Russian or Chinese vaccines, or Astrazeneca. The fact that the American market is largely swimming in vaccines and their manufacturing plants can now turn to meeting world demand is a great source of hope for many developing nations that have had to shut down before their hospital systems become inundated. My comment was never intended to be directed at Europe.
This is utter BS. China and Russia have been supplying copious vaccines to the developing world because Trump set on a path of anti-Vaccine diplomacy. That the US has some, small amount of vaccines to send overseas is in spite of Trump and OWS instead of because of it.
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chucker
 
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2021-06-03, 08:03

Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank777 View Post
Outside of major industrialized countries, national vaccination efforts are desperately waiting for supply to catch up with demand.
I can't tell any more if your argument is "the world should be thankful for how much supply OWS gave others" (which seems to be your original argument) or "of course the US prioritized itself with OWS, why wouldn't it?" (which, fair enough, but then don't paint the US as so benevolent and crucial, maybe?).
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Frank777
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2021-06-03, 13:02

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Bobsky View Post
This is utter BS. China and Russia have been supplying copious vaccines to the developing world because Trump set on a path of anti-Vaccine diplomacy. That the US has some, small amount of vaccines to send overseas is in spite of Trump and OWS instead of because of it.
And the Russian and Chinese vaccines have demonstrated lower effectiveness than the Pfizer/Moderna. Everyone can see that in the data.

Canada alone is now getting millions more vaccines from the US much faster than expected. In a pandemic, that's no 'small' thing.
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Frank777
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2021-06-03, 13:06

Quote:
Originally Posted by chucker View Post
I can't tell any more if your argument is "the world should be thankful for how much supply OWS gave others" (which seems to be your original argument) or "of course the US prioritized itself with OWS, why wouldn't it?" (which, fair enough, but then don't paint the US as so benevolent and crucial, maybe?).

My argument is that the situation is improving quicker than expected, in part due to the fact that the US vaccine rollout was extremely efficient in comparison to much of the rest of the world, and those U.S. vaccine plants can now pivot to helping to fulfill demand around the world.
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drewprops
Space Pirate
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Atlanta
 
2021-06-03, 14:56

It's practically impossible to NOT get a vaccination today in my neck of the woods, generally on your own schedule. It was not like that in the beginning. During the earliest days it was confusing, but now it's a breeze. How did we get here? Who gets the credit?


...
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Dr. Bobsky
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2021-06-03, 15:45

Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank777 View Post
And the Russian and Chinese vaccines have demonstrated lower effectiveness than the Pfizer/Moderna. Everyone can see that in the data.

Canada alone is now getting millions more vaccines from the US much faster than expected. In a pandemic, that's no 'small' thing.
Actually Sputnik is as good as AZ and J&J — both of which are excellent vaccines and operate in the wild at efficiencies equivalent to Pfizer and Moderna, and the 25 million doses Biden announced today is a pittance.
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Frank777
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2021-06-03, 17:00

Quote:
Originally Posted by drewprops View Post
It's practically impossible to NOT get a vaccination today in my neck of the woods, generally on your own schedule. It was not like that in the beginning. During the earliest days it was confusing, but now it's a breeze. How did we get here? Who gets the credit?


...
I think no one person gets the credit. But the American effort overall showed the kind of determination that we haven't seen in a U.S. administration since you went up against the Russians to get to the Moon. And I think acknowledging that gets some people antsy, because of who was in the Oval Office at the time the effort began.

Last edited by Frank777 : 2021-06-03 at 17:12.
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chucker
 
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2021-06-03, 17:26

Quote:
Originally Posted by drewprops View Post
It's practically impossible to NOT get a vaccination today in my neck of the woods, generally on your own schedule. It was not like that in the beginning. During the earliest days it was confusing, but now it's a breeze. How did we get here? Who gets the credit?


...
Lots of folks. Multiple governments for doing investment. People like Katalin Karikó for doing early research on mRNA vaccines. Etc.
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Frank777
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2021-06-03, 18:03

Axios has announced that Covid-19 case-counts are so low in the U.S., they are ending their weekly case mapping project.
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drewprops
Space Pirate
 
Join Date: May 2004
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2021-06-04, 05:50

Okay y'all, enough belly-bumping over our golden god past president, I'm bringing you some fresh meat.

I just read an article on the highly questionable website NewsWeek, entitled "How Amateur Sleuths Broke the Wuhan Lab Story and Embarrassed the Media".

What's your opinion on this?

PART 1
Quote:

Exclusive: How Amateur Sleuths Broke the Wuhan Lab Story and Embarrassed the Media
By Rowan Jacobsen On 6/2/21 at 2:23 PM EDT

For most of last year, the idea that the coronavirus pandemic could have been triggered by a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China, was largely dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory of the alt-right. The Washington Post in early 2020 accused Senator Tom Cotton of "fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts." CNN jumped in with "How to debunk coronavirus conspiracy theories and misinformation from friends and family." Most other mainstream outlets, from The New York Times ("fringe theory") to NPR ("Scientists debunk lab accident theory"), were equally dismissive. (Newsweek was an exception, reporting in April 2020 that the WIV was involved in gain-of-function research and might have been the site of a lab leak; Mother Jones, Business Insider, the NY Post and FOX News were also exceptions.) But in the last week or so, the story has burst into the public discourse. President Joe Biden has demanded an investigation by U.S. intelligence. And the mainstream media, in an astonishing about-face, is treating the possibility with deadly seriousness.
The reason for the sudden shift in attitudes is clear: over the weeks and months of the pandemic, the pileup of circumstantial evidence pointing to the Wuhan lab kept growing—until it became too substantial to ignore.


The people responsible for uncovering this evidence are not journalists or spies or scientists. They are a group of amateur sleuths, with few resources except curiosity and a willingness to spend days combing the internet for clues. Throughout the pandemic, about two dozen or so correspondents, many anonymous, working independently from many different countries, have uncovered obscure documents, pieced together the information, and explained it all in long threads on Twitter—in a kind of open-source, collective brainstorming session that was part forensic science, part citizen journalism, and entirely new. They call themselves DRASTIC, for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19.
For a long time, DRASTIC's discoveries stayed confined to the strange world of Twitter, known only to a few nerdy followers. The sleuths ran into a fair number of dead ends, got into the occasional spat with scientists who disagreed with their interpretations, and produced a firehose of reporting. Gradually, the quality of their research and the rigor of their thinking drew a larger following, including many professional scientists and journalists.
Thanks to DRASTIC, we now know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had an extensive collection of coronaviruses gathered over many years of foraging in the bat caves, and that many of them—including the closest known relative to the pandemic virus, SARS-CoV-2—came from a mineshaft where three men died from a suspected SARS-like disease in 2012. We know that the WIV was actively working with these viruses, using inadequate safety protocols, in ways that could have triggered the pandemic, and that the lab and Chinese authorities have gone to great lengths to conceal these activities. We know that the first cases appeared weeks before the outbreak at the Huanan wet market that was once thought to be ground zero.
None of this proves that the pandemic started in the Wuhan lab, of course: it's entirely possible that it did not. But the evidence assembled by DRASTIC amounts to what prosecutors call probable cause—a strong, evidence-based case for a full investigation. It's not clear that the best efforts of the U.S. and other nations to investigate the lab-leak hypothesis will ever turn up unequivocal evidence one way or another, at least without the full cooperation of China, which is unlikely.
But if they do, this small, motley group of amateur sleuths will have broken what may be the biggest story of the 21st century.
This is how they did it.


Strange coincidences
The young Indian man who calls himself The Seeker is in his late-20s, lives somewhere in eastern India, and uses a piece of tribal art from his home region of West Bengal for his Twitter logo, he said via email. His career has been a melange of architecture, painting, and filmmaking—a khichdi, his mother and sister call it, meaning a stew of disparate ingredients that adds up to something surprising and delightful. A voracious autodidact, he'd become an expert at searching the back alleys of the web, far beyond the well-lit places patrolled by Google, for information on whatever topic interested him. He often posted on Reddit, where he had accumulated a massive 750,000 karma points. That's all The Seeker revealed to Newsweek through email and messaging; he maintains his anonymity.


Like most people following the news back when the pandemic started, The Seeker initially believed that the virus had jumped from wild animals to humans at a Wuhan wet market. (On March 27 he tweeted, "Nobody wants to see their parents or grandma and grandpa die over a stupid virus from an exotic animal market.") He believed this because that's what the mainstream press told him, and the mainstream press believed it because that is what a handful of scientists had said.
Chief among these scientists was a biologist named Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit research group that ran a large international program to survey natural pathogens with the potential to cause a pandemic. Daszak had been collaborating for years with Shi Zhengli, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a renowned bat virologist. Daszak co-authored nearly a dozen papers with Shi and funneled at least $600,000 of U.S. government grants her way.


When the pandemic happened to break out on the doorstep of the lab with the largest collection of coronaviruses in the world, fueling speculation that the WIV might be involved, Daszak and 26 other scientists signed a letter that appeared in The Lancet on February 19, 2020. "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," it stated.
We now know, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, that Daszak orchestrated the letter to squelch talk of a lab leak. He drafted it, reached out to fellow scientists to sign it, and worked behind the scenes to make it seem that the letter represented the views of a broad range of scientists. "This statement will not have the EcoHealth Alliance logo on it and will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person," he wrote in his pitch to the co-signatories. Scientists whose work had overlapped with the WIV agreed not to sign it so they could "put it out in a way that doesn't link it back to our collaboration."
At the time, however, there was no hint of Daszak's organizing role. The letter helped make Daszak a ubiquitous presence in the media, where he called a lab-leak "preposterous," "baseless," and "pure baloney." He also attacked scientists who published evidence pointing to the lab. Part of the reason the lab theory made no sense, he argued, was because the Wuhan lab wasn't culturing any viruses remotely similar to SARS-CoV-2. (Daszak has not responded to Newsweek's request for comment.)
For a long time, Daszak was astonishingly influential. Few in the media questioned him or pointed out that his career and organization would be deeply damaged if it turned out his work had indirectly played a role in the pandemic. His unwitting accomplice was Donald Trump, who embraced the theory, turning what should have been a scientific question into a political one.

When the Trump administration canceled EcoHealth Alliance contracts that would have spent millions on new virus research, 60 Minutes ran a segment that painted Daszak as a martyr to the right-wing conspiracy machine. For right-thinking people everywhere, it seemed like an easy call: The enemy of my enemy is my friend: thus, the lab-leak theory is bunk.


A Whiff of Censorship
By early 2020, The Seeker was beginning to question that viewpoint. He had begun to interact with people who were poking holes in the conventional wisdom.
One important piece was an extensive Medium post by the Canadian longevity entrepreneur Yuri Deigin that discussed RaTG13, a virus Shi Zhengli had revealed to the world in a February 3 paper in the journal Nature. In that paper, Shi presented the first extensive analysis of SARS-CoV-2, which had seemed to come from nowhere—the virus was unlike any that had been seen before, including the first SARS, which had killed 774 people from 2002 to 2004. In her paper, however, Shi also introduced RaTG13, a virus that is similar in genetic makeup to SARS-CoV-2, making it the only known close relative at the time.
The paper was vague about where RaTG13 had come from. It didn't say exactly where or when RaTG13 had been found, just that it had previously been detected in a bat in Yunnan Province, in southern China.
The paper aroused Deigin's suspicions. He wondered if SARS-CoV-2 might have emerged through some genetic mixing and matching from a lab working with RaTG13 or related viruses. His post was cogent and comprehensive. The Seeker posted Deigin's theory on Reddit, which promptly suspended his account permanently.
That early whiff of censorship piqued Seeker's curiosity, so he read more of the Twitter group's ideas. "I found a lively group of people eager to debate and explore the topic," he told Newsweek by email.
It was an eclectic group. There were entrepreneurs, engineers, and a microbiologist from the University of Innsbruck named Rossana Segreto. None of them had known each other in advance; they gravitated to the forum after independently concluding that the conventional wisdom of the origins of COVID-19 didn't make sense. Conversations were kept on track by a wisecracking coordinator living somewhere in Asia who went by the pseudonym Billy Bostickson, and whose Twitter icon was a cartoon of a beat-up lab monkey.
The Seeker fit right in. "They helped me catch up on the debate, and I started to educate myself," he says. "Before I knew it, I got hooked into the mystery." He was driven in part by curiosity, but also by a growing sense of civic duty. "COVID has taken the lives of countless people and devastated so many others. But it has also left so many clues that haven't been followed up. Humanity deserves answers."
The Seeker and the rest of the group became increasingly convinced that RaTG13 might hold the key to some of those answers. In a crackling thread, half a dozen participants hashed out its mysteries, combing the internet and the WIV's previous papers for clues.
If there is a moment when the DRASTIC team coalesced into something more than its disparate parts, it would be this thread. In real time, for all the world to see, they worked through the data, tested various hypotheses, corrected each other, and scored some direct hits.
The key facts quickly came together. The genetic sequence for RaTG13 perfectly matched a small piece of genetic code posted as part of a paper written by Shi Zhengli years earlier, but never mentioned again. The code came from a virus the WIV had found in a Yunnan bat. Connecting key details in the two papers with old news stories, the DRASTIC team determined that RaTG13 had come from a mineshaft in Mojiang County, in Yunnan Province, where six men shoveling bat guano in 2012 had developed pneumonia. Three of them died. DRASTIC wondered if that event marked the first cases of human beings being infected with a precursor of SARS-CoV-2—perhaps RaTG13 or something like it.
In a profile in Scientific American, Shi Zhengli acknowledged working in a mineshaft in Mojiang County where miners had died. But she avoided connecting it to RaTG13 (an omission she had made in her scientific papers as well), claiming that a fungus in the cave had killed the miners.
That explanation didn't sit well with the DRASTIC group. They suspected a SARS-like virus, not a fungus, had killed the miners and that, for whatever reason, the WIV was trying to hide that fact. It was a hunch, and they had no way of proving it.
At this point, The Seeker revealed his research powers to the group. In his online explorations, he'd recently discovered a massive Chinese database of academic journals and theses called CNKI. Now he wondered if somewhere in its vast circuitry might be information on the sickened miners.
Working through the night at his bedside table on phone and laptop, fueled by chai and using Chinese characters with the help of Google Translate, he plugged in "Mojiang"—the county where the mine was located—in combination with every other word he could think of that might be relevant, instantly translating each new flush of results back to English. "Mojiang + pneumonia"; "Mojiang + WIV"; "Mojiang + bats"; "Mojiang + SARS." Each search brought back thousands of results and half a dozen different databases for journals, books, newspapers, master's theses, doctoral dissertations. He combed through these results, night after night, but never found anything useful. When he ran out of energy, he broke for arcade games and more chai.
He was on the verge of calling it quits, he says, when he struck gold: a 60-page master's thesis written by a student at Kunming Medical University in 2013 titled "The Analysis of 6 Patients with Severe Pneumonia Caused by Unknown Viruses." In exhaustive detail, it described the conditions and step-by-step treatment of the miners. It named the suspected culprit: "Caused by SARS-like [coronavirus] from the Chinese horseshoe bat or other bats."
The Seeker dropped the link, without fanfare, on May 18, 2020, then followed up with a second thesis from a PhD student at the Chinese CDC confirming much of the information in the first. Four of the miners had tested positive for antibodies from a SARS-like infection. And the WIV had been looped in to test samples from them all. (Shortly after The Seeker posted the theses, China changed the access controls on CNKI so no one could do such a search again.)...


...
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drewprops
Space Pirate
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Atlanta
 
2021-06-04, 05:51

PART 2

Quote:

If a SARS-like virus had emerged in 2012, had been covered up, and the WIV had been sending people back to the mine to forage for more samples and bringing them back to Wuhan, that should have been front-page news the next day. Instead, not a single story appeared for weeks. A few stories appeared in the UK, including a feature in the Sunday Times. The U.S. media took a pass.
"I was definitely expecting it to blow up all over the news," The Seeker admits. "The general lack of interest in facts or reason surprised me. And it still perplexes me that even with all their resources, the corporate investigative media is lagging terribly."
Within days, DRASTIC managed to locate the coordinates of the mysterious Mojiang mine, but it would not catch the attention of the media until late 2020, when a race to get there began. The first attempt was by the BBC's John Sudworth, who found his path blocked by trucks and guards. (Sudworth would soon be forced to leave China because of his reporting.) The AP tried around the same time, with no better luck. Later, teams from NBC, CBS, Today, and other outlets also found their way blocked by trucks, trees, and angry men. Some were told that it was dangerous to proceed because of wild elephants. Eventually, a Wall Street Journal reporter reached the entrance to the mine by mountain bike—only to be detained for five hours of questioning. The mine's secrets remain.


A Huge Sudoku Puzzle
Although the Moijang mine revelation in May 2020 got nowhere in the media, it attracted new members to DRASTIC, which was able to expand its intelligence gathering to cover everything from viral genetics to biolab safety protocols. On May 21, 2020, Billy Bostickson dubbed the group "DRASTIC Research." He also began organizing the team into subgroups to focus on different aspects of the case. Soon, they were regularly posting discoveries that made lab involvement seem more likely.
A key team member was Francisco de Asis de Ribera, a Madrid data scientist who excels at mining big data sets. Over the years, the WIV had published a huge amount of information about its virus-hunting projects in different outlets and formats. Ribera began assembling it all into "a huge Sudoku puzzle," searching for places where he could fill in some of the blanks, slowly assembling a comprehensive map of the WIV's entire virus program. He and The Seeker made a formidable team, The Seeker unearthing new pieces of the puzzle and Ribera fitting them into place. ("I have always seen myself and Francisco as playing Detective McNulty and Detective Freamon from The Wire," The Seeker joked to Newsweek in one message.)
Ribera was responsible for solving another piece of the RaTG13 puzzle. Had the WIV been actively working on RaTG13 during the seven years since they discovered it? Peter Daszak said no: they had never used the virus because it wasn't similar enough to the original SARS. "We thought it's interesting, but not high-risk," he told Wired. "So we didn't do anything about it and put it in the freezer."

Ribera disproved that account. When a new science paper on genetics is published, the authors must upload the accompanying genetic sequences to an international database. By examining some metadata tags that had been accidentally uploaded by the WIV along with its genetic sequences for RaTG13, Ribera discovered that scientists at the lab had indeed been actively studying the virus in 2017 and 2018—they hadn't stuck it in a freezer and forgotten about it, after all.
In fact, the WIV had been intensely interested in RaTG13 and everything else that had come from the Mojiang mineshaft. From his giant Sudoku puzzle, Ribera determined that they made at least seven different trips to the mine, over many years, collecting thousands of samples. Ribera's guess is that their technology had not been good enough in 2012 and 2013 to find the virus that had killed the miners, so they kept going back as the techniques improved.
He also made a bold prediction. Cross-referencing snippets of information from multiple sources, Ribera guessed, in a Twitter thread dated August 1, 2020, that a cluster of eight SARS-related viruses mentioned briefly in an obscure section of one WIV paper had actually also come from the Mojiang mine. In other words, they hadn't found one relative of SARS-CoV-2 in that mineshaft; they'd found nine. In November 2020, Shi Zhengli confirmed many of DRASTIC's suspicions about the Mojiang cave in an addendum to her original paper on RaTG13 and in a talk in February 2021.
Of course, the only reason Ribera has had to perform such Sherlockian feats is because the WIV has not shared the data investigators have asked for. The WIV maintained a database on its website with all the data on the viruses in its collection, including the many unpublished ones, but that page on its website has been empty for some time. When asked about the missing database in January 2021, Shi Zhengli explained that it had been taken offline during the pandemic because the WIV web server had become the focus of online attacks. But once again, DRASTIC poked holes in this explanation: the database was taken down on September 12, 2019, shortly before the start of the pandemic, and well before the WIV would have become a target.
Other databases yielded other clues. In the WIV's grant applications and awards, The Seeker found detailed descriptions of the Institute's research plans, and they were damning: Projects were underway to test the infectivity of novel SARS-like viruses they'd discovered in human cells and in lab animals, to see how they might mutate as they crossed species, and to genetically recombine pieces of different viruses—all being done at woefully inadequate biosecurity levels. All the elements for a disaster were on hand.
Of course, that is not proof that a disaster took place. Barring unlikely eyewitness testimony, we may never have that. But all the evidence DRASTIC has produced points in the same direction: The Wuhan Institute of Virology had spent years collecting dangerous coronaviruses, some of which it has never revealed to the world. It was actively testing these viruses to determine their ability to infect people, as well as what mutations might be necessary to enhance that ability—likely with the ultimate goal of producing a vaccine that would protect against all of them. And the ongoing effort to cover this up implies that something may have gone wrong.

Going Mainstream
By early 2021, DRASTIC had produced so much information that no one could keep up, not even its own researchers, so they launched their own website as a repository. The site contains enough science papers, Twitter threads, translations of Chinese documents and links to articles to keep a curious gumshoe busy for months.
Increasingly, those gumshoes are professional journalists and scientists. "Rossana Segreto and Yuri Deigin are my heroes," says the writer Nicholson Baker, who published an influential feature on the lab-leak theory in New York magazine. "They combed through the research and made inspired connections and uncovered crucial pieces of the story that needed to be told. Same goes for Mona Rahalkar and Billy Bostickson. Crowd-sourced scientific muckraking."
The UK journalist Ian Birrell concurs. "There is no doubt their collective efforts...have been crucial in challenging both China and the scientific establishment to ensure the lab leak theory is properly investigated," he wrote in Unherd. "It has been fascinating to see, in the course of my investigations over the past year, how this group of activists—in tandem with a few brave scientists—has forced the lab leak hypothesis from the shadows."
One of those scientists was Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who recognized the value of the information DRASTIC was producing and began to interpret it for scientists and nonscientists alike in crisp explainers on Twitter that made her a star science communicator. Chan acknowledged the group's accomplishments in a long thread on Twitter. "Without the work done by the DRASTIC team, I don't really know where we would be today with the origins of covid-19," she wrote, adding, "The work of these outsiders...has had a measurable impact on the scientific discourse."
That scientific discourse jumped tracks on January 6, 2021, when the University of Washington virologist Jesse Bloom, one of the country's most respected COVID-19 researchers, became the first major scientific figure to publicly legitimize DRASTIC's contributions. "Yes, I follow the work," he tweeted, sending tremors through the scientific establishment. "I don't agree [with] all of it, but some parts seem important & correct." Bloom singled out Mona Rahalkar's paper on the Mojiang mine, then added that in the early days of the pandemic, "I thought lab escape very unlikely. Based on subsequent work, I now say quite plausible."
Other scientists pressured Bloom to reconsider, but he held his ground, and the wall of silence began to crumble. In May, 17 scientists from Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, and other leading institutions, including Chan, joined Bloom in a letter in Science calling for a thorough investigation of the Wuhan lab.
On nearly the same day, The Seeker struck again. Visiting a database hosted by China's Ministry of Science and Technology, he searched for all theses supervised by Shi Zhengli. Boom. Three hits. "I got it on my first try," he says. "Not sure why no one else thought of this before, but I guess no one was looking."
If there had been any remaining doubt about the WIV's pattern of deception, these new theses put it to rest. They indicated that the WIV researchers had never believed a fungus had killed the Mojiang miners, contradicting Shi's remarks in Scientific American and elsewhere. In fact, WIV researchers had been so concerned about a new SARS-like outbreak that they'd tested the blood of neighboring villagers for other cases. And they had known the genetic sequences for the eight other SARS-like viruses from the mine—which could have helped researchers to understand more about SARS-CoV-2 in the early days —long before the pandemic started, and had kept the information to themselves, until DRASTIC called them out.

Within days of the new revelations and the Science letter, more academics, politicians and even the mainstream media began to take the lab-leak seriously, culminating on May 26 when President Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies "to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion." Biden promised that "the United States will also keep working with like-minded partners around the world to press China to participate in a full, transparent, evidence-based international investigation and to provide access to all relevant data and evidence."
So far China has been ice-cool to the suggestion. It may never cooperate with an investigation. But it's now clear that the question of whether a biolab could have caused this pandemic—and could cause the next—is going to be explored in a way that might never have happened if a radical and decentralized group of outsiders hadn't challenged the status quo.
That's a lesson The Seeker won't soon forget. "I no longer see science as an exclusive domain," he wrote to Newsweek. "Everyone can make a difference."

...


...
  quote
drewprops
Space Pirate
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Atlanta
 
2021-06-04, 06:02

Notes:

NewsWeek is (in my opinion) a highly unreliable source, and those amateur sleuths finally created a dedicated website:

https://drasticresearch.org/

...
  quote
_Ω_
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2021-06-04, 07:32

TL;DR

More beer reqd
  quote
kscherer
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Boyzeee
 
2021-06-04, 10:35

Drew:

Perhaps a Reader's Digest version? I may read when I get time, but what did you get from it?
  quote
drewprops
Space Pirate
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Atlanta
 
2021-06-04, 13:22

People from different countries teamed up, not unlike conspiracy theorists, to track down digital tracks left by researchers in China (who were playing fast and loose with COVID.
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PB PM
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2021-06-04, 14:47

I don’t doubt that humans could/would make such a thing, and release it, accidentally or on purpose, the story is a little over the top. “News” sites with un-named reporters (this part would be required to get info out of China), and gathering random rumors of the internet a true story does not make.
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drewprops
Space Pirate
 
Join Date: May 2004
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2021-06-04, 16:27

Another friend I discussed this with expressed incredulity that anyone could surf behind the Great Firewall and walk away with information like those claimed by this group. He noted that the lead "source" (The Seeker) has not revealed who he is, and that it's a conflation to suggest that labs with poor security necessarily equate to a lab-borne virus.

And I don't like the "sources" here either, because it's not truly science.

It's conspiracy theorist territory.


...

Steve Jobs ate my cat's watermelon.
Captain Drew on Twitter
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Frank777
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Toronto
 
2021-06-04, 17:58

Apparently, news is now starting to break of a Chinese defector in U.S. custody for the last three months, which is said to be the source of much of the lab information.

Interestingly, Defense Intelligence apparently kept the knowledge of the defector away from the FBI and State Department, because they didn't want it to leak. I have no info on the history and quality of the sources, just passing it on.
  quote
drewprops
Space Pirate
 
Join Date: May 2004
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2021-06-04, 18:22

Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank777 View Post
Apparently, news is now starting to break of a Chinese defector in U.S. custody for the last three months, which is said to be the source of much of the lab information.
I'll wait to see this confirmed on an actual news website.



...
  quote
PB PM
Sneaky Punk
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
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2021-06-04, 20:52

Agreed, I wouldn't call that a credible "news" site either. But as I said before, I don't doubt for a second that the lab could have released the virus, maybe by mistake. It happened, China didn't want to say anything because hey why should only their economy be hurt by it, when the entire world can suffer, and benefit China in the long run. Weakened western economies, and our dependence on imported goods is coming back to haunt us. Dumping all those jobs off shore over the last 30-50 years wasn't such a good idea after all, who would have guessed? But hey, rich people got richer, so it must be good! Capitalism/free market is perfect and solves all the worlds problems!!! Guess China got it figured out, and it pulling the strings like a treat. All they had to do was watch what the west did to them in the 1800's (imports of opioids leading to huge amounts of drug addiction, doing things to hurt economies, bringing smallpox to Asia), and now they are paying us back exactly the same way.
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Kickaha
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Join Date: May 2004
 
2021-06-04, 21:26

Quote:
Originally Posted by drewprops View Post
I'll wait to see this confirmed on an actual news website.
Good call. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/red-state/
  quote
709
¡Damned!
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Purgatory
 
2021-06-04, 23:32

Quote:
Originally Posted by drewprops View Post
Okay y'all, enough belly-bumping over our golden god past president,
I've been subscribing to the PS2.0 mantra - I'm not going to change any minds here, and what I would say is probably best left unsaid.

So it goes.
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