Open Letter To Nature Medicine – Call to retract "Proximal Origin" paper
biosafetynow.org
biosafetynow.org
1. The paper was had ghost writers
2. Due to ghostwriting the paper failed to properly disclose COI
3. The paper is intentionally misleading, written with the sole purpose of misleading the scientific process
4. The authors both before and after publication expressed different conclusions from the paper itself.
5. The paper was published in Nature Medicine without peer review.
(Submitted title was "STEM professionals ask Nature to retract COVID-19 lab leak paper")
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/08/26/nature-manuscripts...
Also, it's intentionally misleading to call this paper a 'lab leak paper' as it is widely known as the 'proximal origin' paper.
Quite damning if true.
https://www.documentcloud.org/app?q=%2Bproject%3Asubcommitte...
>> “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff. I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good,” he wrote. “The truth is never going to come out (if [lab] escape is the truth). Would need irrefutable evidence. My position is that the natural evolution is entirely plausible and we will have to leave it at that. Lab passaging might also generate this mutation but __we have no evidence that that happened__.”
>> Not that discussing it isn't fun
(My underlining)
The email and Slack messages' significance has been overblown. The communications make it clear that the authors of the paper had no evidence to support a lab leak theory.
It is obvious this whole thing is played for political gains, much like the email leaks of climate scientists a few years ago where held up by "skeptics" as evidence that the whole climate change thing was made up.
> Likely in hopes of fostering that illusion of inevitability, as well as of transparency, the Public crew made the Slacks and a separate document trove containing scientists’ emails available for download. This is also a well-worn tactic seen, for instance, in the mass release of hacked emails from Democratic staffers during the 2016 presidential campaign: You put out a document dump of hundreds of pages that few will have time to read, cherry-pick the lines that best serve your narrative, then set a legion of fans loose on the internet to scream “READ THE SLACK MESSAGES” at anyone who disagrees.
> Well, I did read the Slack messages. And it seems my skepticism of Silver, Shellenberger, and their cohort was well-founded.
And I well remember Climategate, which used the same tactic.
As I see it, there are four questions regarding the lab leak theory that have actionable answers:
1. Is it feasible in principle for dangerous viruses be released into the wild by a lab leak -- Yes
2. Do we need strict regulations to reduce the chance of lab leaks -- Yes
3. Is any form of external pressure likely to push the Chinese government into increasing controls on their labs if that is not already a priority for them -- No
4. Is any form of external pressure or even material evidence likely to push the Chinese government into admitting responsibility for the COVID pandemic -- No
Take note that whether COVID leaked from a lab has no bearing on the answer to any of those four actionable questions listed above. So what's the point of the debate? What are we aiming to achieve other than playing a blame game?
But the reason people pretend is they are against "strict regulations". Given the cost of dealing with Covid and the negligible benefits, they should be so strict the research is basically banned.
How do they usually go? Personally, I hesitate to give an opinion because I need to preserve every little bit of karma that I get (at least till I have enough to throw away).
Also, it's not like the authors of the Nature Medicine paper thought one thing and wrote another. Read their correspondences! Their thoughts evolved over time. It's almost as if that's how science is supposed to work.
From the original paper:
"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to disprove the other theories of its origin described here."
And
"More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another."
I don't see the issue here.
> Wrote Andersen on February 1, 2020, “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” A few days later, he and the other authors were searching for a plausible intermediate host such as a pangolin that would allow them to refute the theory.
Compare that interpretation with https://theracket.news/p/everyone-should-be-skeptical-of-nat... :
> That line, especially the “friggin’ likely,” has been the standout quote from the 140-page document. (Taibbi headlined his summary, “‘So Friggin' Likely’: New Covid Documents Reveal Unparalleled Media Deception.”) But there are a few things that the screenshot quote elides. One is the specific context in which was said. ... I don’t read this as a conversation between people who all know, or even suspect, that COVID didn’t come from nature. It’s a searching discussion — an argument in some ways — about the structure of the virus itself: whether it looks like it was engineered in some way or a product of natural evolution. ... The “friggin’ likely” is not a secret admission of wrongdoing. It’s a scientist talking to himself and his (skeptical) peers, saying, this is my assumption, this is what we need to test. ...
> If you keep reading though, a funny thing happens: the scientists get new data and start revising their conclusions. ... This conviction seems to have grown among the authors over the course of February. On Feb. 25, Holmes sends new data about a virus in a Yunnan bat from March 2019. Garry says: “Holy crap.” Andersen, revising his conclusion, says it “provides a template for how all of this happened in animals.” ...
You write "no new evidence" but in the link I gave, "Feb. 25, Holmes sends new data about a virus in a Yunnan bat from March 2019", and the Slack history shows it was new evidence for them.
But the Furin cleavage site is missing from this bat virus which the authors speculated the following after Holmes shared it:
In reference to it, Holmes said, “Bob [Garry] said the insertion was the 1st thing he would add.”
“Yeah,” agreed Andersen, “the furin site would be the first thing to add for sure.”
Garry explained how easy it would be to engineer the virus. “Transmitting a bat virus like RatG13 in HeLa cells and then asking your graduate student to insert a furin site…” he wrote. “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the GoF [gain of function] research [which increases infectiousness] we know is happening.”
So no the virus from Yunnan only fueled speculation, it did not provide evidence ruling out a lab origin.
There's also a liberal idea in some supporters of "lab leak". They think of how the Bush administration handled Anthrax and falsely accused Iraq of having Smallpox and they think a change of frame will trigger the biosecurity apparatus to protect us from COVID-19. Unfortunately, that was all BS to get the public onboard with the Iraq war and funnel money to defense contractors and their friends. Because the upper class is afraid of freezing the economy with mitigations, these "trigger" words do not hold any weight.
Surprisingly that does not seem to be the case. I believe the security state is more interested in avoiding any gain of function restrictions bans from the Obama era coming back. Given all major economies close collaborations with the lab, as well as our own biodefense efforts lots of effort has been to suppress this, not to protect China but for their own interests.
If COVID is so unserious that people won't clean the air, wear respirators, test, isolate, or vaccinate, then why should anyone care about origins outside of public health professionals?
I personally can't condone people who did nothing to try to mitigate the effects of Covid-19 but that doesn't really have much bearing to the origin of Covid-19. Ultimately we should be trying to understand what lessons we can draw from the pandemic and how we can prevent or forestall the emergence of future pandemics. If the origin is technological in nature then we should be looking for policy directives to prevent such technologies from being misused in the future. Having worked with grad students the idea that they would make a colossal mess of things seems pretty realistic so implementing some basic international restrictions on things like gain of function research seems like it would be a good move going forward, but maybe less urgent if we are 100% sure that Covid was zoonotic in origin.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.