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"should convene an independent expert committee to review all correspondence, data and evidence related to these papers, theses and pre-prints that are in possession of the relevant academic journals"

Ha! Knock yourselves out.

Dr Chan is actually referring to a new set of theses from July 2019 which described the clade of around 9 virus sequences that Sars CoV-2 belongs to. These 9 sequences (or rather RdRp segments) were published in Nature in August 2020 - but Dr Chan and her "internet sleuths" were too incompetent to check the supplementary materials. They were also named by Dr Shi Zhengli in a talk at Rutgers University in March 2021. Aside from RaTG13, the other 8 viruses I believe are only 90% similar to Sars CoV-2

The fact that there is a paper thesis from July 2019 describing this entire clade WITHOUT Sars CoV-2 would - to any sane person - be powerful evidence supporting the WIV's claim that this virus had not been known to them. But conspiracy theorists are never looking for evidence that tends to discredit their theories, only evidence that supports them.

Anyway, just to say I am all in favor of your committee of Americans or British to snoop through all pre-prints and emails etc.

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I'm confused... Latinne et al was used, while a pre-print, to support a natural-origin case in multiple letters, including the NASEM letter to OSTP & the Lancet letter. It doesn't add anything to that conversation.

Are you really accepting that no one would withhold sequences from a paper if there was a political reason to do so? Because Baric did that himself in 2015 - and waited 5 years to publish SHC014. Which is interesting - both that neither Nature or PNAS complained, and because his chimaera was exactly what he claimed no one was considering the previous November during a conference on the GOF ban implementation.

Baric was answering a question from.... David Relman.

Therefore, if Baric was able to flout the rules here in America, why would anyone be naive enough to refuse to even consider the possibility that a scientist in an oppressive communist country might not publish a sequence of something that was being actively experimented with due to its pandemic potential?

I'll grant that you might not be familiar with global DURC programs, or the ins and outs of the BWC, but I am [I used to teach them to others]. I know Baric is.

Andersen et al were able to get away with such BS reasoning because he was present when the powers that be decided how to handle the origin question. He knew that no substantial opposition would be allowed - between Fauci and the NIH, the academies, HHS, Science & NEJM for sure, since each were represented in those discussions.

Someday, 'Proximal Origins' will be retracted. It's amazing to see how hard Andersen and others are willing to fight to defend something with indefensible claims, although I'm sure they never dreamed that the outbreak in Wuhan would kill 4 million people. Shit, I'd be reticent to speak up in that situation, too.

But, the longer they hold on, the worse the blowback will be.

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Untrue. I believe it *was* DRASTIC that first found them in the supplementary materials. They were not described in the paper itself. Probably why they had to discuss them later.

DRASTIC already knew about and were searching for Ra7896 after spotting the name in mislabeled amplicon data. We know they have much more sequenced than just partial RdRp which is not enough even to distinguish them from each other--most are identical. WIV won't release this or answer questions about them

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"They were not described in the paper itself."

Well, only in Figure 2b and Figure 3a and 3b. But "finding" something in a publication suggests that DRASTIC doesn't quite understand the function of scientific publication.

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Are you talking about Latinne et al? I just see unlabeled trees and no discussion in the text. I believe even in the supplement there's no SARS like label or anything to draw attention. You'd think they'd want to talk about them and how they came from the same mine as Sars-Cov2's nearest relative

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Just because you are unable to understand phylogenetic trees, it doesn't mean other people can't.

In any case, the paper was originally submitted October 19, 2019 where presumably it was seen by the Editors of Nature as well as reviewers - now possibly they are all in collusion with the CCP. But even if the original draft was made available and it showed that the publication of 600 new coronavirus in October 2019 none of which was Sars CoV-2, this would have absolutely no effect at all on the conspiracy theorists. Its a bizarre situation where the more information becomes available refuting them, the more convinced they are they are right

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