By Alex Washburne, Brownstone Institute
Lab Origin: The Case is Even Stronger Now
I had previously made the case that the totality of circumstances surrounding SARS-CoV-2 origins is sufficient for probable cause to believe the virus originated in a lab. In addition to the circumstances surrounding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the evidence we lack for a zoonotic origin makes our case even stronger.
Outside the narrow lens of mainstream media outlets unable to cover this globally pertinent forensic case, the biggest scientific murder-mystery of the century is being solved.
New evidence has emerged to strengthen the lab origin case. The flawed papers claiming a zoonotic origin have been revealed as even more hopelessly flawed – while those of us independent subject matter experts could see this from the beginning, now it is becoming more obvious even to the lay public. Additionally, the lab-origin theory has made remarkable predictions about the contents of recently FOIA’d drafts of the DEFUSE grant.
The case for a lab origin is now clear enough that not only can we see the lab origin beyond reasonable doubt, but we are starting to accumulate evidence consistent with a cover-up, that this research-related accident was known to some who knew they funded the work, who knew they subcontracted the work, and who knew they did the work.
Let’s recap what we already knew, what’s new, and what we can reasonably deduce about who knew what and when.
The Fall of the Zoonotic Origin Papers
SARS-CoV-2 is a bat sarbecovirus that emerged in Wuhan far from the hotspots of wildlife bat sarbecoviruses, in a city without bats, at the doorstep of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the largest repository of bat sarbecoviruses in the world.
The outbreak started sometime in October-November 2019, well before the Huanan Seafood Market outbreak. While Worobey et al. claimed “early” cases were centered around the wet market, they failed to account for earlier cases preceding the wet market outbreak, the Chinese government’s order to destroy early cases or the ascertainment protocol that required a connection to the wet market, and a study of social media data indicated the earliest surge in care-seeking terms was not near the Huanan Seafood Market, but across the river at hospitals nearest to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
New: Michael Weissman, a quantitatively sharp physicist who has been estimating the likelihood of lab vs. zoonotic origin theories, made a simple observation that shows Worobey et al.’s own analysis disproves their own assumptions and conclusions. Worobey et al. report that the average distance to the wet market from “unlinked” cases was lower than the average distance to the wet market from cases linked to the wet market. This is a statistically significant indication of sampling bias – if there were no sampling bias, no preferential ascertainment of cases based on proximity to the wet market, then these distances should be the same, or unlinked cases perhaps farther.
Worobey et al. made conclusions based on the assumption that unlinked cases were ascertained at random, but their...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE HERE).
