Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

He's a smart kid.  Takes after his daddy.

Heh. Daughter takes after Aggie?

Heh.

Wuhan market was epicentre of pandemic’s start, studies suggest (nature.com)

Scientists have released three studies that reveal intriguing new clues about how the COVID-19 pandemic started. Two of the reports trace the outbreak back to a massive market that sold live animals, among other goods, in Wuhan, China^1,2, and a third suggests that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals — possibly those sold at the market — to humans at least twice in November or December 2019³. Posted on 25 and 26 February, all three are preprints, and so have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

no need to even read a single other word after this.

We'll never know what was really going on in that lab and if there was an accidental leak, because the CCP went into document shred mode, deleted entire databases, and nothing to see here folks, move along mode. 

A biologist named Jesse Bloom was able to miraculously recover 13 genetic sequences from some of the earliest patients infected with COVID in China- off Google Cloud. They were deleted everywhere, but someone in China forgot to delete them from google cloud and this clever fellow did sleuthing and backtracing and guessed the google cloud url links. This is just a tiny sliver of data recovered - 99% of it probably gone forever- because, well...China is asshole and went into cover-up mode. We'll probably never know.

"Thirteen genetic sequences — isolated from people with COVID-19 infections in the early days of the pandemic in China — were mysteriously deleted from an online database last year but have now been recovered.

Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist and specialist in viral evolution at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, found that the sequences had been removed from an online database at the request of scientists in Wuhan, China. But with some internet sleuthing, he was able to recover copies of the data stored on Google Cloud.

The sequences don’t fundamentally change scientists’ understanding of the origins of COVID-19 — including the fraught question of whether the coronavirus spread naturally from animals to people or escaped in a laboratory accident. But their deletion adds to concerns that secrecy from the Chinese government has obstructed international efforts to understand how COVID-19 emerged.


Bloom realized that the copies of SRA data are also maintained on servers run by Google, and was able to puzzle out the URLs where the missing sequences could be found in the cloud. In this way, he recovered 13 genetic sequences that may help answer questions about how the coronavirus evolved and where it came from.

Bloom found that the deleted sequences, like others collected at later dates outside the city, were more similar to bat coronaviruses — presumed to be the ultimate ancestors of the virus that causes COVID-19 — than sequences linked to the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. This adds to earlier suggestions that the seafood market may have been an early victim of COVID-19, rather than the place where the coronavirus first jumped over from animals into people."


That leaked DARPA rejection of EcoHealth Alliance's grant to build SARS-COV2 by inserting furin cleavage sites in 2018- which DARPA deemed as too risky- is basically a smoking gun to me. EcoHealth Alliance was already partnering/funding research in said Wuhan lab. They had been doing so for years. Said lab in Wuhan would've had the blueprints available to them which EcoHealth proposed to DARPA which DARPA rightfully shot down. Would be a coincidence of MONUMENTAL massive proportions the exact same virus EcoHealth was proposing to create with DARPA funding breaks out naturally just a year later. I do not believe in such incredible coincidences.

Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. Of particular interest was a type of cleavage site able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells.

GEE...what a coincidence....you know....the EXACT way this virus infects human cells.

I think it fine to read preprints before peer review.  Peer review is not some panacea to bad research of course.  This work is at least interesting, to me anyway, if short of compelling "proof", it's another link in a chain perhaps.  And it's possible the studies are flawed, but peer review often cannot pick up on that.

First, it was dismissed because it was cited by CNN, and now because it isn't peer reviewed.  Neither carries any water for me personally.  I have done peer review, I have some understanding of how flawed it can be.

yeah, I'll take your word on the peer review stuff, not going to argue with an expert. And I never mentioned anything about CNN by the way.

The Intercept has done some wonderful reporting on this. The reports they did on the leaked EcoHealth grant that DARPA rejected is a virtual smoking gun in my mind. The odds that literally the exact same thing breaks out naturally roughly a year later are astronomically low. It'd have to be one of the greatest coincidences in history. 

I cast doubt on anything cited by CNN, same as I would cast doubt on anything cited by Fox.  Just two cheerleaders for different teams.

That doesn't mean that whatever they're pimping is illegitimate of course.  Obviously their agendas are even better served if there is (at least partial) truth to what they choose to report.

As always I reserve the right to read it and make up my own mind.

A peer review is by far no guarantee of validity.  It's a step, it's the best we have, but plenty of peer reviewed articles were later taken down (it's a small percentage of course).  And a peer review often results in pretty minor changes to the offering.

Talk to any STEM professor, he gets barraged with peer review requests.  There is no way he can spend much time on them.  He has to do them, but it's often cursory, or he gives them to senior grad students or post docs to do.

While peer reviews are no guarantee of validity it at least gives an informed opinion and will point out obvious flaws

to say theres no added value generated when peer reviewed is really silly