Yeah who cares.cone said:
at this point what difference does it make?
when you know you're over the target
The article wasn't originally published in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, but merely republished by the site. My understanding is that it was originally peer reviewed (I thought I read that in the Post in an article about this article), but I might be mistaken about that.eric76 said:
The title of the thread doesn't seem to be accurate. After all, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is hardly a peer reviewed research journal.
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At this point, The Seeker suspected the issue of how the miners died might be significant and went to work searching a database of Chinese research papers he'd discovered. He doesn't speak Chinese so he used Google translate to put together search strings of Chinese characters. And then he'd spend hours going through the results trying to identify anything that was relevant. After several nights he hit upon a 60-page paper about the miners:That discovery was met with very little media attention at the time but later several media outlets did to try to reach the mine shaft where the six miners had been infected. They found that it was blocked by government minders who offered various excuses for why the road was closed. Meanwhile DRASTIC gained additional help including a Spanish data scientists named Francisco de Asis de Ribera. Ribera helped catch American scientist Peter Daszak in an apparent lie:Quote:
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.)Quote:
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 2018they hadn't stuck it in a freezer and forgotten about it, after all.
Dr. Shi has also claimed that a database of viruses stored at the WIV had been taken offline in Jan. 2020 because it was under attack in the wake of news of the coronavirus. But DRASTIC discovered the database had actually gone offline earlier in September 2019, months before anyone in the world had heard of the coronavirus. In May, The Seeker also found a list of theses supervised by Dr. Shi and that proved to be another treasure trove:None of this proves the lab leak theory or disproves the natural transfer theory. What it does do is make you very suspicious of anything Dr. Shi has to say about her work. All of this information about what killed the miners, about the multiple other viruses found in the same location, about the fact the WIV was working with RaTG13 years after it was discoveredall of that could have been revealed last January.Quote:
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.
Instead, China seems to have been in cover-up mode.
Is there a reason for that or is rampant paranoia just a natural feature of communist dictatorships? The only thing we can be sure of at this point is that China's answers to the questions cant be trusted.
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It seems that every single person who acted as a signatory had a conflict that they didn't disclose. Jeremy Farrar, Josie Golding, and Mike Turner all work for The Wellcome Trust, which works closely with the EcoHealth Alliance. Dennis Carroll partners with EcoHealth Alliance at Texas A&M. Ronald Corley's University of Maryland also released all of the emails concerning Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance, which reveals that Daszak solicited support from Corley. Corley interestingly enough was the source on a New Yorker articlethat slammed Trump for pulling the funding from EcoHealth Alliance.
Christian Drosten and Stanley Pearlman edited Daszak and Shi's paper on gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And the list keeps going
Who isn't on that list? The two godfathers of gain-of-function research, Dr. Ralph Baric and Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka, even though Daszak solicited their support. If it was truly such a slam dunk for a natural zoonotic event, why wouldn't they loan their names to their Chinese colleagues?
Beyond the fact there is no scientific way that Daszak could have proved that the viral outbreak was absolutely a natural spillover, why was he rushing to immediately call any question regarding the lab a conspiracy theory? This effort started in January of 2020, long before we even knew how severe this was going to be. What did Daszak know that the rest of us didn't? Would this letter have ever happened had it not been for Peter Daszak? Why would Daszak be circling the wagons before the start of the pandemic?
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Dr. Carroll officially left CDC and joined USAID in 2005 when he assumed responsibility for leading the USAID response to the spread of avian influenza. He currently oversees the Agency's implementation of the Emerging Threats program in more than 30 countries across Africa and Asia.
