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> In 2020, he realises that specifically mentioning SARS and Coronavirus in a blog post about pandemics will seem relevant or look prescient so he adds it back into the quote

And that’s the problem isn’t it? He claims that he talked about the risks of Coronaviruses before the pandemic, and yet the only evidence is an article about biolab security (frankly not particularly relevant unless he’s insinuating that’s the origin of this virus too) amended well after the current pandemic began.

An untouched quote from his article:

  > Experiments on viruses that could cause a 
  > global pandemic killing many millions were
  > halted but were recently cleared to resume
  > and will be conducted in these ‘top 
  > security’ labs.

He was talking about pandemics and quoting an article which does mention SARS and coronavirus.

This is a tiny gotcha "oh but you didn't technically use the word SARS or coronavirus yourself when quoting the article the first time so it doesn't count".

So when he quoted a report on pandemic threats and specifically left out the parts about coronavirus that shows he was talking about coronavirus?

It's pretty close. I mean, he wasn't talking about specifically coronaviruses, because that's not the only kind of virus that could escape from a biolab. But he contracted discussion of SARS and coronaviruses to "[An example]".

Editing old blog posts is probably not the right way to do this. But bear in mind the whole biolab escape theory is entirely plausible. Such things have happened before. The 2007 foot and mouth epidemic in the UK was traced back to an escape from a lab at Pirbright. There were at least two outbreaks of Marburg Virus (ebola) in the USSR due to lab escapes.

I don't really understand the certainty many people here seem to have, about how it couldn't possibly have come from the Wuhan lab. How could you know that? Such escapes have happened repeatedly, that was sort of the point of Cummings' blog post.

So, the problem is being poorly reported.

At his press conference Cummings said that he was definitely not in favour of herd immunity, and was not against lockdown. And he said that he could prove this because of his writing about coronavirus.

To me the problem isn't that he edited the blog to include the word coronavirus (because I agree, it's pretty clear he was talking about coronaviruses and flu viruses). The problem is that his blog post says nothing about lockdown or herd immunity. It's a moderately interesting idea about increasing security at biolabs. So his blog doesn't support his claims.

> Cummings said that he was definitely not in favour of herd immunity, and was not against lockdown.

Well, we already know that he was actively pushing for earlier lockdown within the SAGE meetings (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-28/top-aide-...) so he should be off the hook for that bit of misinformation (earlier in the year the media were trying very hard to make it seem like he was the architect of "herd immunity").

> It's pretty close.

Imagine CNN has a report on the chances of Hillary and Donald in 2015. A few weeks later someone copies the stuff about Hillary's chances and makes no mention at all of Trump.

After the 2016 election they then edit their post to paste in the Trump stuff and use that new edit to claim they were writing about Trump's chances a year before the election.

Is that pretty close to the truth or is it virtually the complete opposite of the truth?

> But he contracted discussion of SARS and coronaviruses to "[An example]".

Not sure why you keep saying this. [An example] refers to the example that follows those words, about CDC labs, not an example that he specifically didn't mention.

The fact that he added the word 'coronavirus' does not change the fact that SARS (which he in fact did mention before) was a coronavirus. He just added the word 'coronavirus' next to SARS in an existing sentence to emphasize that SARS is a coronavirus. He updated his article but didn't really change its meaning.

It's not that big a deal IMO.

No need to lynch the guy over this.

> He just added the word 'coronavirus' next to SARS in an existing sentence to emphasize that SARS is a coronavirus.

That isn't what happened.

He copied a wall of text about Holland, the US, the UK, the CDC, influenza, H5N1, bird flu, Ebola and specifically snipped out the part about SARS/coronavirus and China. (The text he edited in just last month, in bold.)

He basically did the opposite of what he lied about doing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190331190550/https://dominiccu...

Even if all he did was correct a typo, he hid it, that's dishonest

I think this is a big "gotcha".

I'm not sure from your post if you've noticed that he yesterday held a press conference with the national UK media in which he cited the fact that he predicted the threat from coronaviruses a year previously.

>he cited the fact that he predicted the threat from coronaviruses a year previously.

He did, at least about viruses in general. I was specifically remembering him warning about pandemics preparedness when this started. I assume others familiar with him were well aware, too and that it was partially why he played such a big role in the UK's response.

He was talking about pandemics and quoting an article which does mention SARS and coronavirus.

This is a tiny gotcha "oh but you didn't technically use the word SARS or coronavirus yourself when quoting the article the first time so it doesn't count".

He was specifically talking about biolab incidents, which are not how this pandemic started. Using the word "coronavirus" is the only plausible connection to the current crisis, and he fabricated it after the fact for political ends.

We do know that they were studying coronavirus in Wuhan so it is possible that somebody could have been exposed to it in Wuhan's biolab. And, my understanding is that it hasn't been ruled out.

I also disagree that people that had read his blog and that article in particular didn't see them as connected. I had read that article earlier in the year, and I remember being surprised that the UK lockdown hadn't happened earlier since in 2019 he appeared to understand the dangers.

We have quite a lot of evidence for:

* recent zoonotic origin (closely related to bat coronavirus samples, with likely pangolin recombination - https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0092_article)

* initial spread at an open-air market

Whereas our evidence for spread from Wuhan is mostly wild speculation about research on the same very broad family of viruses.

The article quoted says:

"Although the Wuhan market was initially suspected to be the epicenter of the epidemic, the immediate source remains elusive. The close relatedness among SARS-CoV-2 strains suggested that the Wuhan outbreak probably originated from a point source with subsequent human-to-human transmission, in contrast to the polyphyletic origin of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (14). If the Wuhan market was the source, a possibility is that bats carrying the parental SARSr-BatCoVs were mixed in the market, enabling virus recombination. However, no animal samples from the market were reported to be positive. Moreover, the first identified case-patient and other early case-patients had not visited the market (15), suggesting the possibility of an alternative source."

And there are people online that read it very differently from you (https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/1263536558482866176).

He's using his rambling blogpost to suggest that he has always supported lockdowns, has never suppoorted herd immunity, and has been aware of the risk of pandemic for some time.

The blog does mention the serious risk of pandemic, but it doesn't mention the other stuff. And it's not talking about public health measures to reduce the impact of pandemic, but using the idea of tiger teams to test biolab security.

He lied about the content of the blog.