The reason the wet market hypothesis is extremely dumb is that if you first see an ant in your kitchen, it's very likely not the only ant in your kitchen.

@Marion8w2 I have no idea what you're even trying to refer to, with this pained analogy.

If you see one lab leak pandemic, maybe there were multiple lab leak pandemics? (where are the other ones?)

If the WIV got researchers sick with one virus, maybe they got researchers sick with multiple viruses? (wouldn't they, like, react after the first person got sick in an accident?)

Seems like I could make a much better analogy with natural origins:

If you see raccoon dogs and civets sold in wet markets start one sarbecovirus epidemic (in 2002/2003), then maybe you should expect to see raccoon dogs and civets sold in wet markets start another one (in 2019).

Or maybe just:

If right wing conspiracy theorists were wrong about covid having an IFR less than the flu, about covid disappearing before Easter, about deaths from/with Covid, about Covid vaccines being extremely deadly, and so on, maybe they're also wrong about lab leak.

@PeterMillerc030 Let me spell it out for you - just because some of the infections (ants in the kitchen) were first observed around the market, it doesn't mean those were the only infections (ants in the kitchen) that time.

@Marion8w2 So if you see an ant in your kitchen you probably don't have more ants in your kitchen, but you probably do have more ants in your garage?

@Jasonb They probably came from some ant factory 10 miles away, without leaving any detectable trail in between.

And don’t listen to any of those entomologists telling you that makes no sense — they’re in on the conspiracy to hide the truth.

@PeterMillerc030 Can the OpenAI agents on the loose please decide to collude to take over the dumb online lab leak debate in one direction or the other?

@JimAusman Wow, shocking news, you mean Fauci wrote exactly the same thing that people were writing publicly on January 26th, 2020?
https://www.science.org/content/article/wuhan-seafood-market-may-not-be-source-novel-virus-spreading-globally

@JimAusman I’d suggest you find out why the Lancet study described in the Science article did not hold up upon correcting for patient data than believe that secret info was uncovered from the diaries. That is if you don’t want to burn through more cash based on a wrong premise.

https://x.com/biosrp/status/2092862647679041955?s=61&t=Haq8F5rHkNHGokTmpYVUsQ

The Tell-All Covid-19 Origin Mistakes of the Slack Virologists

@George What are we supposed to take away from a link to an X post linking to the poster’s blog post about chats on the other side of the world from Wuhan… a poster who also thinks Ebola started in a lab?

The latest survey of superforecasters puts lab leak at 20% odds:

https://goodjudgment.io/docs/Covid_Origins_Report_2026.html

35% odds here are definitely too high, the low 20’s price that this settled at before was more reasonable.

@PeterMillerc030 1% is too high if the standards of evidence for this question were the same as for every other question about an underlying fact.

Curious why the superforecasters aren’t given Dali Yang’s book as recommended reading. Lab leak beliefs are mostly premised in believing a kind of cover up is possible that is in fact impossible to square with what was reported on the ground in Wuhan in real time.

@Marion8w2 Lost in all of this is that all of the dumb emails were published and nowhere in the conversations that people preferred to keep private is there any evidence of a lab origin of COVID-19.

@zcoli Given that you couldn't tell there was a conspiracy to defraud the United States, maybe you're missing the evidence because your sleuthing skills suck.

Or maybe you're deliberately lying considering you're close colleagues with co-conspirators of David Morens.

@Marion8w2 Hey it looks like I said I’m not a lawyer and I’m definitely not one of Morens’ lawyers advising him to take the perhaps zero jail time option when facing a selective prosecution. Plenty of examples of people on the lab leak side of things going off the record for arguably official business that no one is investigating.

Stalking me on social media to come up with a weirdo wrinkle in your conspiracy theory was fun?

Again, nothing in there about origins. The only thing arguably obstructed was the congressional witch hunt when it faced a delay in seeing everything Morens wrote. But they saw it eventually, and no original coverup was found.

New paper out from the lead scientist on the FBI COVID origins investigation:

https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1096/fba.2026-00227

Convinced yet?

A reminder about this set of questions that actually resolve.

Today's news that Steven Quay might become NIAID Director might increase the odds a bit if he gets the position and he wants to try to throw his weight around with publishers, but YMMV.

Baric testimony on Defuse, clarifying that much of the speculation of this project is not true. No plans to create a chimera of novel viruses, no description of wanting to insert a feline coronavirus sequence as the FCS. Work was to be done in UNC and workflow involved pseudoviruses first
--
DR. BARIC: Yeah. So from my perspective, let's talk about the grant for a minute. Let's make sure we put it in perspective. So DARPA was interested in addressing a problem about the warfighter. And I think there's, what, about 250,000 troops and their families across the globe. Many of those soldiers go into wild areas of the world where they come in contact with pathogens. So they can then infect members of their group, they can take the virus back to the base, and they can bring it back to the United States. So this is a real threat, potential threat to the public of the United States, because of where they go.

So DARPA came up with a proposal that they wanted to know, down to the nucleotide level, what regulates a virus jumping between species and then develop countermeasures for it. Now, if you want to know, down to the nucleotide level, what drives a cross-species jumping event, you are talking gain-of-function experiments.

DR. BARIC: They said they want you to know, down to the nucleotide level what drives cross-species jumping events.

As part of the thought process, there were two questions. There were two ideas that came forward. One was why don't sarbecoviruses have furin cleavage sites. And I've studied coronaviruses all my life. I know sarbecoviruses. I've seen zoonotic strains. They don't have furin cleavage sites. MERS strains do. Human coronaviruses do. Feline coronaviruses do. Why don't sarbecos? There should be sarbecos out there that have furin cleavage sites, so they were going to look for them.

Once they found them and they sequenced it they were going to work on it with pseudotypes. They were going to drop those spike genes into pseudotypes and ask what's -- we were also going to look at the receptor binding domain, obviously, and I think we hypothesized in there that there should be strains with 25 percent variation in spike that could still use the ACE2 receptor. And those are obviously of interest because if you're interested in developing pan-sarbecovirus vaccines or drugs you want, in essence, the bookends of the heterogeneity that exists in the virus subgenus, right. You want strains that you know and strains that are very different, because you have no idea what would emerge in the future. So if you have breadth then you have a better chance of developing something that could be used immediately.

So those are two major features. The first part would be then to find sarbecoviruses. If we found the sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site it would be dropped into a pseudovirus, and its biological characteristics evaluated by the Chinese. They would remove the furin cleavage site. They would introduce changes into the receptor binding domain and look in the context of those pseudotypes, which is the safe system, to ask questions about what the role of those mutations were in tropism and entry of viruses in receptor usage.

Following gleaning that data, we would then use a zoonotic sarbecovirus as a receptacle to drop the spike genes of some of these viruses, and if we found one with full-on furin site we would put it in there and evaluate its biology. We would also remove that furin cleavage site and ask what the effect was on pathogenesis in replication. So it's a loss-of-function first.

At the end of that there was speculation that if the furin cleavage site looked like it was having effect on replication of pathogenesis we would consider putting it into a gain-of-function scenario where we would drop it into a null backbone. So that's how the experiment was written.

MS. SALAZAR: And who was going to be doing that work?

DR. BARIC: That part would be done by me.
DR. BARIC: So anyway, all the work with pseudotypes was not subject to gain, right. These are single-hit vectors that can't cause disease. As soon as we made full molecular clones, or chimeras, they were done in a WIV backbone, which meant that they're putting a zoonotic spike into a zoonotic strain, to eventually identify vaccine formulations that would be used in the cave, that's not subject to gain-of-function.

@BW So, pseudovirus->WIV1->parent virus; cannot construct novel chimeras because that would violate GoF but WIV1/SHC014 were cleared. Also, a multi-step process which would involve review before getting to FCS insertion much later in the path.

Fauci diary

—

June 4, 2021. Very important and very strange briefing of me by the CIA in the NIH SCIF this afternoon (5:00 PM). I received an extremely strange an unexpected briefing today by the CIA related to the origin of the virus. Beth Cameron from NSC was listening in on one of the other screens. And as it turns out she was as baffled as I was by the briefing. It was very similar to some of the very disappointing briefings that I had previously received in prior years from the CIA. A young woman whose name was Camille Hartman gave most of the briefing. She was accompanied by what was probably the senior male CIA person and another young woman. Camille in my mind was almost pathetic in her naivety an obvious lack of appreciation of any of the science of what  she was talking about. She gave instances of things that she said were gotten by CIA intercepts of conversations in China, particularly in Wuhan. her major point was that she feels but the Chinese have not been transparent about what was going on in their labs since there were no reports publicly of what they found out from intercepts. This included the transfer of Pangolin viruses from a group in Beijing two Wu Han. They felt that this was being used in a study using transgenic mice. I have no idea why this was any great concern to them since it would be perfectly natural for a lab that studies coronavirus to look at Pangolins. In addition, she spoke about the observation that WIV was sampling Pangolins and several members of WIV took a trip to obtain Pangolins. They also spoke about the fact that they have information from sources that unknown experiments well conducted by the military in Wu Han. The thing that blew me away about how naive and uninformed they are was the fact that they mentioned that they had word that in July of 2020 there was a super spreading event in China related to passage of virus in the laboratory. This astounded Beth and I for the same reason. Why would they suspect that a super spreading event that occur in the middle of a major outbreak in China was related to the passage of virus in the laboratory? The naivete of the briefing stunned both Beth and me. Also, in the matter in which she was asking me questions almost made me believe she was grilling me prompting me to say somewhat tongue in cheek whether I should have a lawyer with me. I got on the phone with Beth immediately after the briefing and she was very upset saying that she was going to check up the chain who and why this briefing was called and why there was no forwarding material to prepare us for what they were doing. There is something very fishy about all of this.

July 7, 2021   I had a very important meeting today with the NSC led by Beth Cameron and Maher Bitar who is the senior director for intelligence programs at NSC. We met in the EEOB SCIF and discussed the briefing document that the NSC had presented lto the President a week or so ago. Beth wanted me to have an official briefing because of the catastrophic briefing that the amateurs from the CIA gave me several weeks ago. There were no new surprises for me in the briefing  except that it became clear that the FBI has no idea what they're talking about since they are convinced that the origin of COVID-19 is from a laboratory leak. The reasons that they give do not make any sense. In contrast the NSA gave some reasonable hypotheses leaning heavily towards a natural jump of species in the environment. I spent some time explaining to Maher and Beth my own theories that the Chinese act like they're covering up something even when they have nothing to cover up. They manifested this in their response to the original SARS-CoV-1 when they insisted this was just an atypical influenza when in fact it was the beginning of a coronavirus pandemic. In addition, they likely shot themselves in the foot when they denied the presence of wild animals in the market when we know they were present and the Chinese cleaned out the market before adequate testing of animals could occur. In essence, they clouded the possibility of proving a natural emergence. I urged the NSC folks to work closely with qualified card-carrying evolutionary virologists such as Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, Bob Garry, Andy Rambaut, among others. I also explained to them the multiple reasons epidemiologically and molecularly why it is almost certain that the virus evolved naturally from a species jump, even though I emphasized that I keep an open mind about the possibility of a lab leak . However, in this regard , I emphasized that just because two alternatives are possible that does not mean that they are equally probable. I believe that they understood where I was coming from and that it turned out to be a very good meeting

August 28, 2021 The intelligence community report on the origins came out and in some respects it was good news in that they felt fairly confident that it was not a bioweapon nor that it was bioengineered. They still left open the possibility that it could be a lab leak ; However, more elements of the intelligence community felt that it was a natural occurrence compared to the single component (FBI) who seemed to feel strongly that it was a lab leak , although this is based on no data at all. The reaction to the report was rather typical with Bob Garry saying that he was pleased that it ruled out bio engineering and David Relman making the incredible statement in a Nature news article that he would like to see all of the records of the NIH in their dealing with Chinese scientists. Truly amazing! There is no doubt that he has an agenda here and that is unfortunate.

@BW

In contrast the NSA gave some reasonable hypotheses leaning heavily towards a natural jump of species in the environment.

No one's ever reported that the NSA concluded natural origin was more likely, although for a while it has been something that could be inferred with high confidence by comparing a couple published documents.

Folks might reflect on the breathless coverage across the international news media every time there's a hint that some part of the US intelligence apparatus thinks or once thought that COVID came from a lab, and compare it to the total silence when it comes to the position of the NSA. This is big news! We almost never hear what the NSA thinks, and this would've certainly been redacted had it gone through any review prior to publication.

There have been other examples of this. For example, wall-to-wall coverage when Jesse Bloom announced he'd found some sequences withdrawn from the SRA, and zero outlets revisiting the story when it turned out that the sequences did not support his conclusions and that he had deleted the collection date and not told anyone it was January 30.

Hmm let's check covid.gov to see if they can help us with this question

@BrendanFinan This was such a funny and revealing move by the White House. The case for "lab leak" on the website is copied from a house oversight committee report, which is, in turn, copied from an Alina Chan op-ed in the New York Times.

So, what it accomplished is showing that the White House has no evidence favoring "lab leak" other than the vague and often false arguments in that op-ed.