Brett Weinstein (PhD evolutionary biology) recently said (I think on Lex Fridman's podcast) that he's seen zero evidence for the Covid virus having evolved naturally and is 95% certain it's lab made.
Originally Posted by Ducbutter
I doubt if Dr. Fauci would question their [Steven Quay's and Richard Muller's] scientific credentials or dismiss them for not being "virologists".
Originally Posted by lustylad
You look at the names brought up in this thread who believe COVID is almost certainly the result of gain of function research and none of them are people who've worked with viruses every day. Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist who's afraid of vaccines. Richard Muller is a physicist. Nicholas Wade is a science writer.
And Steven Quay, the pathologist and breast cancer expert, well, what do you say about someone who announces his self-published papers with PR Newswires. PR Newswire is what NASDAQ companies use to promote their stock, and apparently Quay, who runs a NASDAQ company, has figured out that's a good way to promote himself too.
I took about a 5 minute look at his 193 page master piece, here, where using "Bayesian interference" he concludes there's a 99.8% probability the virus was created in a laboratory:
https://zenodo.org/record/4477212#.YONPouj0lPY
Now apparently back in January when he published this paper the first time (there have been two updates) he wasn't nearly as confident that this was created in the Wuhan lab as he is now, because he's said at least twice on cable news recently that there's a 999,999,999 out of 1,000,000,000 probability this is from gain of function research.
The Bayesian interference Quay's using to come up with this precise number looks like typical "bull shit in, bull shit out" statistical analysis. And in fact on a Zoom call Quay had with virologists and the like, he admitted this was the first time he'd used Bayesian analysis. Here's a critique of Quay and Muller's Wall Street Journal Op Ed and Quay's paper,
https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021...piracy-theory/
The people who really know viruses, like virologists, molecular biologists, molecular epidemiologists who are engaged in virus research, mostly don't believe the virus was the result of gain of function research or they're fence sitters. Even David Baltimore is a fence sitter. He's by far the most eminent person who's actually an expert cited as a believer in laboratory origin mentioned in Nicholas Wades' article that was linked by LustyLad and Why_Yes_I_Do:
https://www.latimes.com/business/sto...ab-leak-theory
Maybe this came from gain of function research. Maybe it went directly from bats to humans. If we abandon either of these hypotheses and either choose to do nothing about the labs or nothing about human exposure to bats and bat guano, we run the risk of fucking up big time.