7
votes
Wuhan scientists planned to release coronaviruses into cave bats eighteen months before outbreak
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Authors
- By Sarah Knapton,, By Camilla Tominey, By Charles Hymas, By Simon Johnson, By Catherine Neilan, By Henry Samuel, By Ewan Somerville
- Published
- Sep 21 2021
- Word count
- 319 words
The source here is Drastic (https://drasticresearch.org/) and a quick look at their homepage suggests they are a crock of shit.
Consider this "paper" that they are promoting on their landing page: "Understanding COVID-19 and Seasonal Influenza as Quasispecies Mutant Swarms Reveals the Quantum Origins and Cryptic Fates of Human Pandemics"
For a second, let's ignore the obvious bullshit of "Quantum Origins and Cryptic Fates of Human Pandemics" and look at the paper itself.
It isn't a paper. It's two links to a Substack site - somebody's blog. Luckily for us, Substack isn't malware, so it's safe to read a bit of this "paper" and draw your own conclusions: https://harvard2thebighouse.substack.com/p/understanding-covid-19-and-seasonal
The beginning (several paragraphs down) opens as would a blog. It's not academic in the slightest. There's a lot of text, there's a lot of copy-pasted images, and there's a lot of quotes that seem vaguely scientific. But it's not science. It doesn't open with an abstract, it doesn't open with a hypothesis, it doesn't establish methodology. It, instead, opens with:
For this "article" to be promoted by Drastic suggests that Drastic is, as I said above, full of shit.
I don't know anything about drastic so I can't comment about them. I think the question, though, is whether the funding request and proposals the article refers to actually happened, regardless of where the documents came from.
My assumption was that The Telegraph would vet their sources. If they've strayed from ethical journalism somewhere along the way, apologies for the low quality link.
I suppose we'll find out soon enough... If it's legit, it's newsworthy enough to get picked up by other publications over the next couple days.
Edit: So far The Times and The Mirror have also published articles about this, same source documents.
Edit 2: The NY Post (which doesn't really count as a journalistic enterprise anymore) and Newsweek have also published articles about this. Newsweek got a statement from DARPA, which was a standard "cannot confirm or deny".
They haven't done that in the past, and they also have a pretty poor track record when it comes to factual reporting in general (but especially when it comes to Climate Change). It's one of the worst mainstream UK papers, and only the Daily Mail and Mirror are worse, IMO.
https://fullfact.org/search/?q=telegraph&gsc.sort=date
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Telegraph#Criticisms
The Express and The Sun are worse, but The Torygraph is pretty damn awful these days. It used to be highly respected and had an excellent reputation at one point, but those days are very much gone following it's purchase by the Barclay twins.
This got featured a few hours ago in "Découverte" (in French) season 34 episode 3 at around the 18 minute mark. https://ici.tou.tv/decouverte/S34E03
The episode's description is:
I'm open to the idea that it's lab leak (it's very possible, lab leaks have happened before), I'm just very cautious about my sources of info on this particular hypothesis. Too much ideology spoiling the well.
100%, and right now when I search for this source on Reddit, the only subs that come up are conservative, conspiracy or other similar subs. (Not the best way to cut through the crap but it's a good start.)
Also looks like my link above now gives a 404 error. I wonder why (I guess it this thing goes deeper!). Looks like they wiped it from the site. There's a mirror here: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/tele/decouverte/site/episodes/572374/covid-pandemie-laboratoire-wuhan-virus.
One source I'll be more inclined to believe will be MedCram. I found them to be able to cut through the bullshit pretty well so far.
Can someone explain what's a "human-specific cleavage site"
In the case of SARS-2 there is a furin cleavage site which is a location where a certain viral protein chain is cleaved (cut or broken essentially) by an enzyme (furin) in the target cell. This is part of the process that facilitates the entry of the virus into human cells.
It's notable because it's believed to be a key part of what makes SARS-2 so good at infecting humans.
Or, a more technical explanation.
Peter Daszak again. I suppose it's possible that the leaked documents aren't legit, but otherwise the GoF research, both proposed and allegedly undertaken, is crazy irresponsible.
And they were specifically targeting the furin cleavage site in one of the proposals. That's mind blowing. Though still possibly just a remarkable coincidence.
Putting aside the lab leak versus natural origin conversation for a second... I can't believe GoF research is still even on the table and I hope, amidst the pandemic, public sentiment will turn against the practice in a big way.
According to the article they were also trying to do GoF on MERS! A virus that has a 30% fatality rate. A large scale outbreak of modified MERS could legitimately end modern society as we know it.
I'm deeply skeptical about the veracity of documents confirmed by the Trump administration because of that administration's handling of the pandemic and peddling of lies surrounding it, and their hell-bent drive to label it the "China Virus." I'd want at least one well-known , verified watchdog or agency to confirm these claims.b I'd even accept a 3-letter organization that stamped it under the Trump administration.
The story also feels too perfect in a conspiracy sense. Yeah, there is chimeric research, even coronaviruses that resemble SARS-Cov-2 created in labs, but the idea of a team of researchers trying to spread a novel virus in a natural environment just doesn't seem like the sort of thing a normal viral researcher would even consider doing.
I agree that "former Trump administration official" doesn't scream credibility. But it's not as if every member of the the sprawling former administration was a little sociopathic copy of Trump.
Since the documents relate to a grant proposal submitted to DARPA, I imagine someone will submit a FOI request before long.
It would be a credibility destroying move to fabricate documents that can be so easily confirmed or denied. But people have done stupider things so...
Edit: typo
This is a reason I don't want to just say "Nah, didn't happen," because it is well within the realm of possibility that researchers had a "pie in the sky" idea they wanted to execute, and maybe even expected to be shot down. If it went down as described in the article, they're still reaching with that headline.
Pulling the other way, the Times and the Mirror, both UK gossip rags, are also running with the story using the same source. They're known for peddling BS, for sure, even if the Telegraph is generally a competent news source.
Definitely. But if I hear "Trump administration confirms something that looks like conspiracy fuel," I'm immediately skeptical.