It looks like David Baltimore regrets his “smoking gun” comment about the furin site in that article.
Here’s the problem: Baltimore regrets using the phrase “smoking gun” to describe his conclusion, and doesn’t agree that it validates the lab-leak theory.
Baltimore told me by email that he made the statement to Wade, also by email, and granted him permission to use it in print. But he added that he “should have softened the phrase ‘smoking gun’ because I don’t believe that it proves the origin of the furin cleavage site but it does sound that way. I believe that the question of whether the sequence was put in naturally or by molecular manipulation is very hard to determine but I wouldn’t rule out either origin.”
Experienced virologists heavily favor the natural-spillover theory. That’s because the phenomenon has been common throughout history, accounting for the spread of most viruses and indeed for most pandemics. The direct animal source hasn’t been identified; it’s not unusual for investigations of that nature to take years. SARS2 has been known to scientists for only about 18 months.
No one denies that a lab leak is possible. But the theory presupposes a complex series of events coming together perfectly in a Chinese lab — secrecy and coordination, perhaps abetted by extreme sloppiness, or even deliberate malevolence.
Balancing the commonplace nature of animal-human spillover against the complex assumptions required by the lab-leak theory, virologists say, tips the scales in favor of the former.
I read the article by Wade on the Origin of Covid-19 before I knew he is a racist, based on his book on race and evolution. I Looked up references in the Covid origins article, and checked the credentials of the authors and referenced publications (like The Lancet and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists). I also looked up political and funding connections.
I don’t think this article should be canceled:
It’s possible that invisible pink unicorns farted out the virus. Some evidence would be nice, in any of the threads where you are now pushing gain of function research as if it’s some earth shattering thing that will convince us all.
I will state that the NIH and NIAID both said, pretty adamantly, that they did not fund any such research, contrary to what the racist shit-stain Wade would like for us to believe.
So, are you of the opinion that what we are dealing with was engineered and that the engineering and subsequent release was covered up by both the US and China in tandem?
The problem is that “it’s possible” is a huge, smeared-out phrase that can run the gamut from “highly unlikely” to “almost certain”. We really would rather not stare at indistinct bluriness.
Some related news about covid found in sewage and blood samples weeks or months before it was identified, e.g., found in samples from March 2019, test kits in China ordered back in May 2019, and so on, and part of one summit on universal flu vaccines from October, 2019:
