the Bayesian boys thought they were the smartest students in the lab leak class
But they were the simpletons of this complex debate
Let’s start with the most famous Bayesian boy on the internet:Nate Silver
Lab leakers often use the collective phrase “we know” and then link to their own argument as proof that we KNOW. The Bayesian model will become gospel, a self-fulfilling prophecy because we know.
While the model may point at the geography of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it doesn’t tell us who collaborated with the WIV. Fredric Bastiat called this phenomenon ‘the seen versus the unseen.’ We see an outbreak of a novel coronavirus, near a coronavirus lab in Wuhan, but we don’t see who is collaborating on coronaviruses.
Dr Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina defended his lab mice collaboration, while linking to a UNC bubble chart showing “more extensive collaborations.” Baric was surprisingly asked to collaborate with a “red team” meeting at the State Department in Jan 2021. David Relman of Stanford gave Baric a heads-up on what was going to be discussed: Dr Steven Quay’s Bayesian analysis.
Quay used Baric’s humanized mice in the WIV to prove a lab leak with a 99.8% probability, but SARS2 doesn’t infect mice. Another piece of evidence was a No See’m paper from Baric’s lab. It details how Baric can hide the engineering scars in a genome, but he didn’t include Dr Shi Zhengli of the WIV.
Four months later, in May 2021, Baric clarified one of the conspiracy theories that had emerged on the internet: why did he upload the 2015 SHC014 genome in 2020? He was keeping his No See’m method “obscure” from the Chinese. He then brilliantly signed a letter calling for an investigation into Shi’s lab at the WIV, and lab leakers still cheer!
The best biological evidence of a lab leak was the furin cleavage site, but in a country of 1.6 billion people, not one paper was published showing interest in a bat CoV furin site (I know; I’ve asked). Another piece of Bayesian evidence accused Shi of trying to hide the site (RRAR) even though she brought attention to the site by publishing RaTG13.
The illogical idea of “trusting China” made Quay’s Bayesian analysis very emotional:
It is telling that when Dr. Shi introduced the world to SARS2 for the first time in January 2020. She showed hundreds of gene sequences of this novel virus, but stopped just short of showing the furin site. The one she is purported to have introduced, seemingly not wanting to call attention to her handywork. She apparently failed to realize that an accomplished but innocent virologist, finding the first furin site ever seen in this class of viruses apparently coming from nature, would have featured the presence of the furin site prominently. Shi also would have used its presence and her experience with furin sites in other viruses to predict what it would foretell for the world due to its aggressive nature.
The WIV used Windows 95-based software, which had the same result for two decades. And it was actually Fauci and Baric who hid the furin cleavage site from both the US military and Congress.
Shi could have perhaps saved many lives just by telling the world that she saw a furin site in the virus sequence. It would be left to a French and Canadian team to later identify the furin site in a paper. They would write: “This furin-like cleavage site…may provide a gain-of-function to the 2019-nCoV for efficient spreading in the human population compared to other betacoronaviruses.”
Where were the American teams?
Dr. Shi has denied the virus came from her lab, but she has created such a record of multiple examples of obfuscation, half-truths, contrived specimens, genetic sequences taken from thin air but published in premier journals and US NIH databases, etc. that her veracity is deeply damaged. Perhaps her words and actions on December 30, 2019 show the truth. Her very first response when told there was an unknown outbreak in Wuhan and to return back quickly from a meeting she was attending in Shanghai was to say, “Could this have come from our lab?”
Where was Dr Danielle Anderson’s BSL4 lab?
“I wondered if they got it wrong,” Shi said. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. After all, the US equivalent of the distance, climate change, and human population density change between Yunnan and Wuhan is comparing the Everglades National Park in Florida and New York City.
Did you know New York City deer were infected with Omicron and NYC’s rats carry Covid?
Shi’s other action on December 30 was to alter WIV computer databases of novel coronaviruses used by the world’s virologists for research. And to make it more difficult to search for which coronaviruses she had in her building. In short, the day she was asked to address the pandemic in Wuhan, she chose to spend time to make unavailable to her fellow scientists of the world her decades of coronavirus work.
The WIV database stayed online until Feb 2020. And do you think we need to see the rest of the database, after aligning SARS2 with RaTG13?
I asked simple questions about “a robust Bayesian look at Covid origins,” only to receive blank stares. Here’s one at 69% and another at 89%! DRASTIC members reviewed the “Chinese literature” to conclude a 54.5% chance of lab leak. Dani’s BSL4 was conveniently ‘ignored’ from the analysis, but the same author later noted that it was “used a lot for cooperation with the West.” And we wonder why Baric always pointed at Shi’s BSL2?
EcoHealth used Bayesian models to help fund its $100M non-profit operation. It also referenced Bayes 14 times in the $14M DARPA Defuse proposal. By vaccinating wild Chinese bats (in the WIV), we can predict the next zoonotic spillover event. The winning DARPA Preempt team used Bayesian models in the SARS2 transmission model, so talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy!
Some have called Bayesian reasoning a religion since a minister first applied it, but the only problem with Bayes was the Bayesians. We stick to the facts, even though it’s updated by the hour. Their models were ‘wrong,’ but my model was right! It’s hard to convince ‘them,’ but it was easy to convince me! Want to read a ‘Bayesian’ case for zoonotic origins? Here’s one at 0.1%
Another model showed a 99.93% chance of engineering but discounted the Vero cells deleting the furin cleavage site. Milton Friedman’s son,David Friedman chimed in with “A Bayesian approach.” Even Fauci funded a Bayesian model pointing at the Wuhan wet market, but it didn’t pass the DRASTIC review. I’m just waiting on someone to run an American deer model?
This lab leak lesson started with a bubble chart showing virologists sharing reagents, bat cells, viruses, and vaccines. It was the Baric way: dividing labor and tasks and trying to win big (DARPA Defuse) grants. In the Red Dawn emails, Baric was asked about any signs of engineering. He replied, “Absolutely no evidence,” since the greatness of his own creation blinded him.
One anonymous attendee described Baric as a “bully” during their ‘red team’ meeting. There was a good reason he was bullying and bluffing since DARPA Defuse leaked four months later. Baric had proposed in 2018 to insert furin cleavage sites into live coronaviruses, and test them on live bats, in Wuhan. What are the Bayesian priors on that?
The Bayesian boys use the models in poker but still can’t call a bluff when it’s obvious. Baric has since gone radio silent, and Fauci has awarded him $65M to shut up, in what has become the dumbest coverup of all time.
Fascinating. Thank you for a very interesting read.