| Hello whomever posted this! I am hoping you are interested in the pursuit of truth and would like to have a conversation with you about this article. I am hoping you can address the following issues: - The lab-leak hypothesis rests on more than WIV’s location. Unpublished WIV bat coronavirus sequences, documented biosafety incidents, and early cases outside the Huanan market (some near WIV) constitute legitimate circumstantial evidence that cannot be dismissed as “fraud.” - Worobey et al.’s market studies are not conclusive; they suffer from ascertainment bias, data-quality flaws, and invalid assumptions, as shown by independent statistical critiques; no intermediate host has ever been found and no live virus was recovered from market animals. - The 2018 DEFUSE proposal explicitly planned insertion of human-specific furin cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses—the exact feature distinguishing SARS-CoV-2—creating valid, unanswered questions about whether similar work occurred under other funding or at lower biosafety levels. - Personal attacks on Ridley’s and Bhattacharya’s backgrounds do not refute the documented evidence in Viral; credentials do not invalidate scrutiny of high-risk gain-of-function research. - Key conflicts of interest are omitted—his organization of the 2020 Lancet letter labeling lab-leak ideas a “conspiracy theory” while EcoHealth funded WIV, private early concerns in the Proximal Origin emails, and the 2025 NIH debarment of EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak himself for grant violations. - Labeling transparency demands (e.g., full WIV database access) as “anti-science” is false; U.S. intelligence assessments remain split, Chinese opacity persists, and the origins question is scientifically unresolved. - Overstated certainty in natural spillover ignores data gaps and politicizes the debate; continued open, evidence-based inquiry—not institutional dismissal—is required. |