2 minutes ago, Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand said:

How do you feel about Aaron Rodgers lying about his vaccination status, @Anastasis?

Aaron Rodgers has been and always will be a chump. Holiday Bowl 20 years ago out front should have told you.

Do you even know where you are right now?

1 minute ago, Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand said:

You can't remember your own posts from 2 weeks ago.

5 minutes ago, Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand said:

Anastasis apparently agrees with you, but as usual, he is too much of a coward to explicitly state his point.

Total clown shit. I am more than happy to let objective readers of this thread come to their own conclusions about the points being made.

Not messing with un-armybrating these from tonight. Beef back ribs and pork belly burnt ends.

19 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:

oohhohoh the pediatrician is mad at me

Not a pediatrician. The username should give it away. Despite his multiple posts to the contrary, he kept up with this thread during its early times and beyond. There are plenty of likes of posts upthread as evidence. I think that he got mostly mad at me when I told him that he treated the principles of evidence based medicine in the particular context of one topic with the same disregard that that quack @triplehorn did when it came to ivermectin and HCQ wrt covid. It's a wild world out there, I don't hold it against him.

6 hours ago, BrickHorn said:

It’s important to distinguish clearly between these different levels of lab leak theory.

This is not really news. Some posters have been doing so consistently over the course of this thread. You may have missed it though while you were penning posts about pulling a red ball out of a bag.

8 hours ago, BrickHorn said:

That is important because it undermines the criticism of gain-of-function research, which is based primarily on the hypothesis that Covid was specifically engineered by humans to have increased function (in terms of transmissibility, etc.)

Also discussed previously up thread. GoF includes a variety of techniques, ranging from sophisticated deliberate and highly directed engineering to more passive and undirected culturing and passaging.

8 hours ago, BrickHorn said:

But because he didn’t tell us what that information is, we can’t possible judge its evidentiary value.

I agree with this. His language is not particularly precise, and it would be interesting to sit down with him and unpack exactly what is in and out of the scope of his comments, and what made him change his view from the time he entered the admin to when he left. I would take note of the use of the "deliberate" terminology. Accidental release in context of culturing, genomic analysis, or even light passaging would certainly fit the framing. And where I am in terms of the mostly likely scenario given all the data points.

8 hours ago, BrickHorn said:

Remember: his hypothesis is essentially that Covid first passed naturally from an animal at WIV rather than the wet market.

He doesn't mention an animal at WIV, unless I just missed it. We know that WIV was collecting and culturing viruses from Yunnan, for example, for ongoing research at WIV. We were funding some of that work. You don't necessarily need an animal at WIV, but yeah they were there too.

8 hours ago, BrickHorn said:

But the geographic evidence shows that the first cases were all clustered around the market, not WIV. And they point to a specific place within that market, which is known to have housed wild animals such as raccoon dogs in the recent past.

Already hashed out up thread, but you are not really presenting the balance of the work on the topic. The findings are very sensitive to the methods used to analyze the data. Raccoon dog actually had a negative correlation with SAR-Cov-2 genetic material when analyzed quantitatively. Fish and cows were the highest. The findings of the market analysis can be viewed as consistent with human transmission. All the live animal samples taken at the market were negative. What you are referring to is environmental analysis that again, is not robust to different methodology to analyze the data. I don't know if you are just regurgitating what you read in Markolin's book or not, but here is the link to the actual analysis I am referring to: https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/9/2/vead050/7249794

Overall, my study validates the approach of Crits-Christoph et al. (2023) of using metagenomic analysis of environmental samples to identify animals and animal products sold at the Huanan Seafood Market. As noted by Crits-Christoph et al. (2023), this innovative approach could usefully inform tracing of animals supplied to the market. However, the results described here suggest that the utility of these metagenomic analyses does not extend to indicating whether animals at the market were actually infected by virus. For instance, the presence of 1 of ~200,000,000 sequencing reads mapping to SARS-CoV-2 in a sample containing raccoon dog genetic material does not suggest raccoon dogs were infected, given that material from many other species that certainly were not infected (such as fish) is far more consistently co-mingled with SARS-CoV-2. Of course, the lack of association also does not disprove the possibility of infected animals at the market, particularly at a date substantially preceding the Chinese CDC’s collection of samples—it simply suggests that the analysis of the combined viral and animal content of the available environmental samples is not informative for shedding light on this question either way.

When considered in the larger context, the inability of the environmental samples to inform on the origins of the virus is unsurprising. These samples were all collected on 1 January 2020 or later, which is at least several weeks after the Huanan Seafood Market became a superspreading site for human infections (Li et al. 2020). Therefore, by the time the samples were collected, SARS-CoV-2 had been spread widely across the market by humans regardless of its original source—as evidenced by the results reported here, which show viral genetic material coincident with material from myriad animals ranging from fish to snakes to mammals. The first human infections with SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan probably occurred no later than November 2019 (Zhang et al. 2020; van Dorp et al. 2020; He and Dunn 2020; Pipes et al. 2021; Pekar et al. 2021; ODNI 2022; Pekar et al. 2022), which is over a month before the Chinese CDC reports that it began to collect samples from the market. For this reason, further insight into the origins and early spread of SARS-CoV-2 will likely require learning more about events or cases that occurred no later than November or early December 2019.

56 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

He was hired to the NIAD role in 1984 and the pay grade exception legislation for public health execs dates back to WWII. He oversaw a major health research center with 1,000s of employees.

Look, 400k plus is a great salary. He could have made multiples more leading a decent med school or doing admin at a medium to large hospital, which would have loved to have him.

Honestly have no clue what his salary or Cheney/Gwot stuff has to do with anything.

Certainly, he had $1+MM offers from the private sector in the early 2000s. He got a permanent pay adjustment in 2004, justified specifically on the basis of his expanded role in biodefense research activities. One of the really interesting sections in his journal is that timeframe right around 9/11 to 2004 or so. Lots of stuff going down, 9/11, anthrax letters, HIV/AID initiatives under the Bush admin, Cheney pushing a biodefense manhattan project and pushing the position that Iraq was going to attack Israel or the US with smallpox, preparations to roll out smallpox vaccine to everyone in the US, Fauci getting rug pulled on NIH director position, SARS-1, Fauci positioning himself to the be the public face on smallpox WMDs in Iraq, etc. Some inside baseball, some interesting context. It's really fascinating how much was going down during that time frame, and how it clearly fed into his personality. No doubt primed a few of his later tendencies.

35 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

its a meme with a precedent over the course of this thread you moron.

12 minutes ago, Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand said:

Lol!

That's what you're going with?

Quote the whole post. Then go and read the thread. Its not hard.

24 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

WE aren't tying politics to this.

Not sure we are reading the same thread, and certainly uncertain that you are self aware here twice.

20 minutes ago, Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand said:

- Dude who bumped thread in tandem with Rand Paul's Oscar performance

in tandem with a bunch of releases of relevant contextual information.

15 minutes ago, Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand said:

Here's an example of an absolute.

its a meme with a precedent over the course of this thread you moron.

5 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Legacy of the Cheney administration.

Building on this, if you want to tie politics to any of this there are clear lines of inquiry that should be explored. Most of those point back to republican administrations given the relevant timeframes. The politically brain damaged are too stupid to make the obvious hay, but that is not really surprising given the short attention spans involved.

8 hours ago, B00M said:

So for the sake of argument, let’s assume Fauci knew it was a lab leak and decided to lie to the public. If true, Covid was arguably a Chinese bio weapon.

Lab DNE bio weapon. This is a really common conflation from both sides.

Lab leaks are quite common. Despite the rhetoric that natural spillovers are the cause of most pandemics, actually lab leaks are quite common. Far more SARS break out events tie back to lab incidents compared to natural spillovers.

54 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

People way above his pay grade would have made the call about what info to release publicly and when.

Funny thing was, there was no one above his pay grade. He was the highest paid federal government employee. Legacy of the Cheney administration. Post 9/11 shit.

So Ashish Jha, COVID response leader under Biden administration, came out as an ignorant conspiracy lab leak lean on the Sunday circuit this morning. Some of you should be more than aware of how silly you look at this point with your propaganda and conspiracy talking points. But I don't expect a course correction from the pot committed.

• 
• State of the Union @CNNSOTU

Former Biden White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, Dr. Ashish Jha, tells Dana Bash, "When I went into the White House, my view was this was almost surely a natural outbreak, maybe a lab leak. Based on information I learned and based on information I've seen, I have come to

• 3:24 PM · Aug 2, 2026

8 hours ago, BrickHorn said:

Acknowledging the real origin of this pandemic is critical for several reasons, including: (1) increasing our chances to prevent the next one and (2) avoiding a fucking world war spun up on the back of an idiotic blame game.

So when propagandists spread conspiracy theories, it’s important to rebut their bullshit. Throwing up our hands and saying we don’t care surrenders public health policy to liars and morons.

Allowing conspiracies to drive public policy would kill our most critical lines of defense against pandemic diseases. Monitoring wildlife reservoirs, collecting samples, and understanding the genetic mechanisms that make viruses particularly dangerous are all critical to preventing the next pandemic and treating any novel diseases that do emerge. Virology is effectively mankind’s frontline vaccine against the REAL threat: relentless microbial evolution happening worldwide in wildlife. And these liars and idiots want to tear it all down—putting us all at risk—for selfish, myopic reasons.

Fuck that. You’re generally a solid poster with rational points. But your perspective on this issue now, while understandable, is dangerous. We don’t have the luxury of bowing out of this debate. As long as the hucksters keep pushing their dangerous lies, we either continue to push back or let them dismantle critical defenses against potentially catastrophic disease.

I got to say. I am not sure that there is another post on the sub that does a better job of begging the fn question. Kudos brick. Didn't think that you had it in your bag of tricks to pull out yet another prime logical fallacy.

On 7/30/2026 at 8:46 PM, Sawbonz said:

My gut tells me it was a wild-type virus strain being studied at the Wuhan lab and there was an exposure that broke containment.

9 hours ago, Sawbonz said:

I think it's also safe to say, though with less certainty, it is much more likely (like orders of magnitude more likely) to have originated in the wet market than the lab.

You are all over the place bonz.

The reality on some of this, at least wrt to the exemplar of the scientific method, is that it actually took a group of mostly autistic, hyper skeptical, asshole researchers outside the traditional ivory tower scientific establishment to step up and challenge and push some on issues to bring clarity to the public. That resulted in numerous errata addendums in like the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. Lots of lessons from the pandemic times. Goes back to some of the comments wrt the peer review scientific journal process from a few pages back. This distributed open source world is kinda wild. The scientific "authorities" have been slow to respond, as have many other fields.

hell yeah.

5 minutes ago, Captainant said:

no shade to you, but that's a good example of epistemic trespassing which PhD's are frequent culprits of

I'd suggest JDs even moreso.

1 hour ago, BrickHorn said:

It’s way harder to prevent what actually happened (and what has been the cause of every pandemic in history): sloppy, unsanitary, or purely unlucky interactions with animals.

I would include climbing down a cave in Yunnan and sticking a q-tip up a bat's ass, trucking it a 1000 miles away, and culturing it as an example of one of those interactions. You can choose which category to assign it.

6 hours ago, BrickHorn said:

There was a whole goddamned panel of virologists and epidemiologists investigating this very possibility from an extremely early stage. They came into it with a wide range of views of the likelihood of a leak. Some prominent virologists in that group famously initially believed, based on genetic evidence, that COVID was the result of gain of function work. But, when the dust settled and more complete data had been collected, lab leak seemed very unlikely and the zoonotic explanation far more consistent with the evidence. Because that’s how science fucking works. You consider various hypotheses, test them against data, and filter out the ones that don’t fit. Which, in this case, included a lab leak.

Andersen et al. did not reject a lab escape, they rejected deliberate engineering. There are substantive discussions in their private exchanges on these topics, and the paper was ultimately watered down in the context of the politics involved (not US politics necessary, WHO politics and access to China). It's kinda wild to see the Proximal Origins paper held up as exemplary of the scientific method. Here is a way tl;dr three part series that unpacks the manuscript development process in the context of the various FOIA disclosures describing the sausage making. https://gillesdemaneuf.medium.com/summary-proximal-origin-a-tragicomedy-of-our-times-1ed5b4dae506

10 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

Another thing they conveniently ignore is that there were two different lineages found at the market. Not only would it have had to leak from the lab and somehow thereafter travel without infecting anyone else to a market across town, it would've actually had to happen again the exact same way a few weeks later with the other lineage.

Kinda wild to see someone talk about conveniently ignoring something while they conveniently ignore the ongoing debate around the Pekar analysis. Or to think confidently that no one has thought through and proposed alternative scenarios to the one they strawman. As an example of the ongoing debate in the literature, here is a paper from 2025 that gets as some of the challenges wrt to the phylogenetic tree and the various lineages and how it impacts the perspective on spillover event(s).

https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/42/6/msaf118/8158589

The Data are Insufficient to Confidently Root the SARS-CoV-2 Phylogenetic Tree

Here is a helpful narrative that may (or may not) be more accessible:

https://nextstrain.org/groups/jbloomlab/narratives/SARS2-rooting/early-SARS2-trees-v1

Some of the exchanges in the recently released materials kinda puts the spotlight on EcoHealth's (EgoHealth as the Proximal Origin authors refer to it) systematic attempts to keep good faith researchers like Bloom from getting access to their genetic data (disclosure of which was just one of the unenforced requirements of their NIH funding).

2 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

It was always a mistake that our health leaders especially in the CDC refused to entertain the idea that COVID accidentally escaped a lab.

I think Redfield was actually one of the only ones who has stated his view favoring lab origin. Of course he only publicly vocalized that after he was no longer head of CDC. He got death threats from other scientists over it.

I'd like a shot at fixing her.