Introduction:
Socialists absolutely have a responsibility to respond to the top scientists of their day. As the socialist revolution aims to construct socialist governments throughout the world united into a federation of socialist states, it must set as its goal also the construction of responsible governments who will make scientific decisions based on scientific evidence. Without science, there could be no representation for the working class, which only social sciences could define and analyze. We must therefore make a thorough review of every scientific debate obligatory for any leadership of a future socialist state, since their decision may ultimately sabotage the world socialist revolution as a whole in the manner observed under the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Dr. Benjamin Mateus’ three-part series: “How science demolishes the right-wing fiction of a Wuhan ‘lab leak’ as the source of coronavirus” offers us the opportunity to observe the nano-bureaucratic approach to science and fight back in the name of the proletarian revolution.
Since the proletarian revolution must rise to combat imperialism and imperialist states, it must disarm the imperialist states rather than allow imperialist states to disarm them. This means recognizing and understanding their weapons rather than denying their very existence. The various treaties and conventions against biological weapons, rather than proving that they do not exist actually prove that motive for their development exists within the government and military. The laws defining their use and development as war crimes means that concealing or aiding and abetting in the use of such weapons also constitute war crimes. The intentional participation of agents of imperialism in the defense of imperialist weapons also constitutes war crimes. The prosecution of war criminals in imperialist and Stalinist governments will give rise and give legitimate purpose to revolutionary war rather than frighten the revolutionary army out of existence.
They have war criminals using illegal weapons? That is more of a reason to make revolutionary war to take these weapons from them.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/21/sci1-j21.html
Part 1: How the Nano-bureaucracy Demolishes Science in the Service of a Fiction of Unity
“There is no factual or scientific foundation for the claim that the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory. To date, the only evidence presented by the White House, the US intelligence agencies, and the media to support the claim is that employees at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill in late 2019 with symptoms that a State Department report acknowledged are ‘consistent with … common seasonal illnesses.’”
This ignores all the gain of function research known to have been conducted by Dr. Shi, head of the WIV, and her partner in the U.S., Dr. Baric, which specifically attached a spike protein to a beta-coronavirus in 2015 and created the first artificial beta-coronavirus in 2003, only two months after the SARS outbreak. This is the exact same idea behind the structure of the Covid-19 virus “discovered”, more precisely unveiled, by Dr. Shi.
Not only that, but as with the “weapons of mass destruction” hoax advanced by the Bush-Cheney administration before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the accused is called on to prove a negative—in 2003, the non-existence of weapons in Iraq, in 2021, the non-existence of a program in Wuhan to engineer a deadly virus.
In fact, no one doubts, except the real conspiracy theorists, that two airplanes hit the World Trade Center towers. Photographic and testimonial evidence abounds that the towers fell after terrorists hijacked planes and rammed the towers from the air. To doubt the very premise of the invasion and leave out the 9/11 attacks constitutes a very poor historical analysis of the events that lead to the invasion of Iraq. In fact, the U.S. had good relations with Saddam Hussein’s government while they made war on Iran’s revolutionary government after the overthrow of the Shah. They had good relations with Al Qaeda. Likewise, U.S. laboratories had very good relations with the WIV laboratories before the Covid-19 outbreak.
The purpose has been to shift public opinion and pave the way for American aggression against China, up to and including all-out war. This has entailed a full-scale assault on science and scientists, who largely reject and refute the “lab leak” claims.
We can see from the graphics below that the assault on science actually came from the Chinese government as much as it did the U.S. The Chinese government also seeks to conceal the drive to war because it sees it as a way of expanding its export markets while defeating the working class uprising through the militarization of society. Imperialist Great Britain and France left out Germany in their expansion through Africa. This led to World War I as Germany tried to break through the barriers to trade created by the British and French empires. Similarly, China will, as the rising empire, need to fight US barriers to trade, such as the economic sanctions placed on Chinese allies Russia, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.
In fact, Chinese scientists and journalists have gone missing, had their labs shut down, seen their work blacklisted, etc. for reporting on the Coronavirus. Scientists around the world widely agree that China has made access to important information related to the virus and its origins difficult or impossible. The US will not overcome Chinese censorship but use it to develop its secret weapons in China, where freedom of information and freedom of the press will never interrupt their work. Google’s censorship of its search engines received great support from the Chinese government, and Google participated with The Great Firewall of China up until 2010.
The purpose of this series is to provide an account of what experts in the field of virology are actually saying about the issue, and what the science actually shows about the claims that the Wuhan lab is the source of coronavirus. This entails extensive citation of scientific reports and communications among scientists, for which the writer asks in advance the reader’s patience and best efforts to follow the intricate details.
The experts have repeatedly stated that no origin for the virus has been pinpointed, whether in the lab or in an intermediary host. They repeatedly state the evidence has not proven one theory with great certainty over another. However, it is important to recognize the general bias in science in a Marxist way. The production of knowledge, as a socially determined production, occurs under the direction of the ruling class. The funding for research comes primarily from the capitalist state, the military, and private donations or endowments from the oligarchy. Researchers, in order to compete for these funds, must not run afoul of any military strategy, capitalist ideology, or the personal interests of their oligarch founders, such as the Howard Hughes Foundation. This is not to say that science does not provide insight into objective truth; the question has to be asked, however, which objective truth? The WSWS breaks with basic journalistic standards by ignoring the conflicts-of-interests normally addressed in scientific literature. When Dr. Shi and Dr. Baric have received more than $10 million for their research from certain sources, including both US and Chinese military funding, these sources must come into conflict with society in general in their production of scientific opinions.
The most comprehensive investigation of this issue was presented by the World Health Organization in their phase one report, in February 2021, on the origin of the virus, which was led by 17 international experts. In no uncertain terms they stated that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely.”
This lie must be denounced in the strongest terms. On page 118 of the report you site, they clearly state:
“We did not consider the hypothesis of deliberate release or deliberate bioengineering of SARS-CoV-2 for release…”
The deliberate and offensive repetition of the lie cannot continue as it amounts to a threat. The “conspiracy theory” slander seeks to silence all conversation on the weapons being used to attack the socialist movement, not only within certain theoretical hypothetical situations but in the present state. The attempt to silence the conversation is the attempt to disarm the working class. We must see it as an attack on the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms, which should include also the right to information on the weapons carried by those threatening to impose tyranny and endless war on the people. Therefore, the deliberate and offensive repetition of the lie that disproving the possibility of an accidental leak disproves any possibility of any laboratory origin must end immediately or go down in history as a deliberate provocation disguised as scientific argument, a clear threat to the scientific community.
Dr. Kristian Andersen vs. Nicholas Wade, no middle ground, and certainly no other disagreement. Perfect acceptance of the dichotomous thinking of the media.
Arguing that only two opinions exist, that of Dr. Andersen and that of Nicholas Wade imposes an unsound structure on the argument that appears to mimic the Republican and Democratic debates. The WSWS must use a similar structure to the political duopoly in order to moderate the debate in such a way as to silence all opposition to nano-bureaucratic complicity.
The authors conclude that further study was required to determine which of the two natural selection processes was more likely, while the laboratory origin was extremely unlikely, particularly because the virus had characteristics requiring development under the pressure of an immune system—in other words, it had to have grown up and mutated within a living organism.
This argument about requiring “development under the pressure of an immune system” attempts to erase the entire history of virology. A known procedure, called “serial passage” or “serial passage in vivo” has existed since the 1800s to artificially reproduce such development. Louis Pasteur used it in his study of rabies.
For a lab to have simulated the natural environment to the extent required to generate the mutations that created SARS-CoV-2, one scientist later observed, it would have to use so many animals that the Wuhan Institute of Virology could open its own zoo.
This hostility to scientific thought, couched in humor, has extra significance as it relates to Marxism and the Marxist movement. Hostility to science, denial of the existence of a technique known as “serial passage”, and arguing that large amount of animals could never fit into a large campus full of laboratory buildings such as the WIV all point to a deeper hostility towards Marxism as a whole. The nano-bureaucracy must ridicule scientific thought in order to attack it, in order to attack the root cause of their contradictory social condition. They must fight Marxism in order to enforce a compromise agreement with bourgeois intellectualism backed by the capitalist state. This, they calculate, will further their careers at the expense of working class political independence.
In particular, Wade and other advocates of the “lab leak” theory cite the existence of what is called the furin cleavage site, a point on the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 where the protein can more easily divide to better invade human cells. They claim (falsely) that there is no such site in other coronaviruses found in nature, so it must have been introduced through genetic engineering.
This lie also demands an immediate rectification and apology. The real argument, that no such site exists on any other sarbecoronavirus nor in any of the many samples of the same species collected from nature.
She added that an “exhaustive” search of coronaviruses in her lab’s databank did not demonstrate any matching sequences.
The existence of many coronavirus samples in the lab, none of which had the FCS except those developed artificially proved that the Covid-19 samples taken from sick human beings differed in this significant way from all the virus samples taken from nature. On top of this, the scientists Dr. Shi and Dr. Baric had done experiments adding this specific site to this specific species and published a report on it in 2015. Furthermore, the databases of the virus had been tampered with, and a recent discovery showed that the hidden samples provided direct evidence contradicting the Dr. Mateus slander theory of the Wuhan animal market as the origin of the virus.
Shi and her team concluded that “RaTG13 is the closest relative of 2019-nCoV, and they form a distinct lineage from other SARS-related CoVs.”
This proves that Dr. Shi had relied on the suspicious RatG13 strain of dubious origins.
(gain-of-function experiments, another hobby horse of the “lab leak” proponents, are efforts to determine different ways that a virus can strengthen its infectiveness, in order to anticipate the future development of dangerous pathogens)
This is preposterous misinformation. The WSWS should apologize immediately and post a correction for the public. The gain-of-function experiments involve genetic manipulation of the virus’s genetic code by laboratory scientists in order to create a new virus, which they then replicate in the lab to create a stable virus that could survive through transmission in nature and human society. The article misinforms the public in an egregious way, arguing that the virus does all this lab work itself, strengthening its own genetic code, choosing its own structure and functions.
She wrote, “According to the findings of our team and our international peers, SARS-CoV-2 is very likely to have originated from bats. It may have evolved in one or more intermediate hosts, become adapted to humans, and eventually spread among humans. However, it remains unclear which animals were the intermediate hosts and how it spilled over to humans.”
No intermediate hosts exist in nature. This has proven that all the intermediate hosts existed in labs. The false theories circulated about pangolins, bats, and civets all exist as concoctions of the very same forces that concocted the virus itself.
In response to the question whether bat viruses were grown at the Wuhan lab, she answered, “We have only isolated three strains of live SARS-related coronaviruses (SARSr-CoV) from bats, which shared 95-96% genome sequence similarity with SARS-CoV and less than 80% similarity with SARS-CoV-2….”
This fact proves the exact opposite. Since no close relative exists, not only in the Wuhan lab but anywhere, a natural evolutionary process could not have occurred. Such a process would leave behind cousins and brothers of the virus with similar sequences, none of which exist. The laboratories studying SARS had thousands of samples gathered from nature over nearly two decades, meaning they would have found a similar strain if it existed. The large evolutionary distance jumped in such a short time from SARS-CoV-1 to SARS-Cov-2 could only come from active laboratory manipulation of the genome of the virus, specifically work combining two separate viruses combined with a process to stabilize the new virus using a technique to speed up evolution of a recombinant strain.
PART 2- A Descent into Fascist Police Work
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/22/sci2-j22.html
RaTG-13: A bat virus found in caves in Yunnan province in China, genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2, but not a precursor, despite the claims of the conspiracy theorists
Attacking the scientific community with propaganda from the illegal weapons development community, the WSWS relies heavily on the bias and conflict of interest behind the theories of Dr. Kristian Andersen from Scripps.
Two previous Presidents of Scripps:
Richard Lerner:
When he was Scripps Research Institute president, in 2005 Lerner’s salary was US$1,212,071, placing among the top ten percent of nonprofit executives in the USA. When he was Scripps Research Institute president, in 2005 Lerner’s salary was US$1,212,071, placing among the top ten percent of nonprofit executives in the USA.[1] Lerner also serves on the boards of six for-profit and nonprofit companies, including Kraft Foods, advises four other companies and two venture capital funds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lerner
While claiming to defend the striking Frito-Lay worker, you site Kraft Foods as the authority! With allies like these, the workers may not even need a capitalist enemy to exploit and oppress them. The work of Democratic Power to eliminate the nano-bureaucracy from the ICFI now takes on far greater importance.
Michael Marletta:
Before becoming the president of Scripps, Professor Marletta worked as an Investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. (HHMI) HHMI spends about $1 million per HHMI Investigator per year. Marletta worked there for four years, receiving then $4 million in four years. With an endowment of over $20 billion, HHMI has gained its fortune in part from Airline mogul and fascist defense contractor and war profiteer Howard Hughes and in part from its ownership by General Motors. What do we know about this Howard Hughes, that we should trust him with all the world’s security against secret weapons? David Walsh wrote about him in a movie review:
[Martin Scorsese’s biographical film about Hughes, The Aviator] avoids his role as a fanatical anti-communist, who purged his own studio, RKO, of left-wingers, and his campaigns against screenwriter Paul Jarrico and Chaplin’s Limelight; his well-known links to the Mafia; his business and personal dealings with bloody dictators such as Cuba’s Batista, the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo and Nicaragua’s Somoza; his sale of TWA for half a billion dollars and his subsequent bizarre retreat to Las Vegas; his alleged participation in an assassination plot against Fidel Castro; his multifarious and lucrative association with the CIA (according to a biographer, for example, in 1963 the US spy agency linked up with mob connections through a Hughes-connected firm “to support fascist governments in South America”); his profiteering during the Vietnam War (the same biographer describes Hughes Aircraft as “an adjunct … of the American government”); his buying up of Republican and Democratic politicians alike (“I can buy any man in the world,” he boasted); his especially intimate ties to Richard Nixon and his apparent role in the Watergate conspiracy; his drug addiction; and, of course, his descent into hypochondria, paranoia and, ultimately, total lunacy. One might legitimately describe Hughes as something of an American fascist type…
…Hughes broke the most new ground not as an aviator, or a lover, but as a gangster-businessman—hostile to any government regulation of his businesses and, according to Higham, hating to pay a penny in taxes; bragging of his ability to bribe anyone, including entire governments; and associating, directly or through his underlings, with thugs like mobsters Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/01/avia-j13.html
Kristian Andersen’s Post-doc Adviser at Harvard and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Dr. Pardis Sabeti, is currently a Howard Hughes Investigator. She is also a significant stockholder and board member of IDT, which from this chart you can see, profited immensely from the pandemic:
These are the people funding and signing off on the work of Benjamin Mateus’s great scientist friend, Dr. Kristian Andersen. Can you really trust the honest intentions of elitist Harvard’s Dr. Andersen after looking at this stock price chart? The rise of the nano-bureaucracy in the revolutionary party goes hand in hand with the rise of war profiteering to the leadership of imperialist governments.
Dr. Kristian Andersen wrote to Fauci in the early days of the pandemic:
“On a phylogenetic tree the virus looks totally normal and the close clustering with bats suggest that bats serve as the reservoir. The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/06/02/it-sure-looks-like-fauci-has-been-lying-about-the-wuhan-lab-leak-n2590339
The natural reservoir of sarbecoronaviruses are bats. Samples of the virus taken from bats existed in various labs, including Chinese military labs. Dr. Shi also published papers studying these samples taken from the Chinese military. The existence of a natural reservoir and the large amount of literature on the subject prove that scientists had ample opportunities to study the virus and develop it into a weapon through gain of function research.
There is a striking contrast between the media promotion of Wade, an overt supporter of pseudo-scientific racism, and the gagging of Andersen, a foremost authority in the science of virology.
Andersen does not represent any foremost authority except that of Hughes-ism, that is racism, anti-communism, and fascism all on the economic foundations of war profiteering. Acting together with fascism does not empower the WSWS but disarms it in preparation for its destruction. Andersen did not get censored or have his account removed by Twitter. He voluntarily brought down his own account to prevent a discussion on the origins of the virus.
…one can surmise that this act of self-censorship was done under the influence of extreme pressures he must have faced from the media and political establishment.
We cannot surmise whether we have self-censorship or censorship of the readership to prevent a conversation from occurring around Andersen uncontrolled by Andersen himself. We cannot surmise, either, that he wanted to suppress his original opinion on the origins of the virus as an engineered virus. Most likely, he may have sought to suppress his public change of opinion, which does not have any scientific backing. The “extreme pressures” that forced him to turn against his original engineering theory could not hide his change of opinion, and this meant he had to suppress his own Twitter account so as not to account for his non-scientific change of opinion on scientific matters.
A recent phylogenetic analysis, done by Suwen Zhao and Yiran Wu in the journal Stem Cell Research, found that furin cleavage sites at the spike portion of the genome have occurred independently several times in their evolution, supporting the natural origin conception.
From the conclusion of the paper Mateus sites:
Such feature of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is not necessarily a product of manual intervention, though our observation does not rule out the lab-engineered scenario.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165
To go from this conclusion to slandering the majority of America as “conspiracy theorists” threatens the foundations of honest science and creates the environment for a return of a fascistic Dark Age. The same conflict of interest laid at the heart of oil-company-funded climate-change-denial research. While the nano-bureaucracy may see light in such a scenario, we must fight back against this unacceptably dark vision. They cannot attempt to ruin careers of established scientists with slander in the manner of Howard Hughes, Hollywood, and McCarthyism. Mateus has really just made himself into a real-world caricature, believing such views can dominate a revolutionary movement. Among corporate executives, political elites, or Hollywood celebrities, perhaps. But among revolutionary professionals, among the future soldiers of a revolutionary war? Impossible! A dark cloud hangs over the nano-bureaucracy.
Subsequently, Dr. Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney has found viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 that can weakly bind human ACE2 receptors without the need for a furin cleavage site at all.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/22/sci2-j22.html
This argument completely refutes Mateus’ own evolutionary theory of the origin of the virus. In order for something like a furin cleavage site to occur as a result of an evolutionary process, it would have to give the virus an advantage from the evolutionary standpoint. If no furin cleavage site is necessary for the virus to bind to a host, what evolutionary advantage would be gained from a furin cleavage site? With the evolutionary theory now disproved, only one option remains: the gain-of-function theory. The furin cleavage site, lab engineered into the new virus, as Zhao and Wu prove,
of SARS-CoV-2 spike S1/S2 is formed by a insertion of PRRA in comparison to other Sarbecovirus including close relative RaTG13, showing it occurred very recently and independently.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165
Dr. Anderson has written, and Mateus has quoted uncritically, perhaps under extreme pressure, an extremely misleading argument, that on behalf of all the Howard Hugheses of the world, seeks to intimidate all researchers:
There is nothing mysterious about having a ‘first example’ of a virus with an FCS. Viruses sampled to date only give us a teeny-tiny fraction of all the viruses circulating in the wild. Fragments – such as the CTCCTCGGCGGG – come and go all the time.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/22/sci2-j22.html
There is nothing mysterious about it! Nothing to see here! Move along. Animals kill animals in the wild all the time, so why not us? This is an argument for murder. We do not have to accept murder as a natural part of the ecosystem. We can call it a crime and investigate the act itself and furthermore the social roots of the crime. In addition, we do not have to accept a killer virus without investigating further. These systematic and well-funded (by the likes of fascists like Hughes) attempts to block investigation into murder prove the criminal nature of the capitalist system.
From 2009 to 2019, PREDICT collected more than 140,000 biological samples from various animals (potential reservoirs)[2] including over 10,000 bats and 2,000 other mammals.[5] Research teams of epidemiologists and wildlife veterinarians identified some 1,200 viruses with the potential to cause human disease and pandemics, including over 160 novel coronaviruses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PREDICT_(USAID)#cite_note-BaumgaertnerRainey-5
Out of all these viruses, thousands and even tens of thousands, taken from the wild and stored in databases, not only for the PREDICT program but in other labs throughout the world– the Wuhan Lab alone had 600 bats housed at the lab at any given time– we have no evidence at all of any other virus of that species having that ‘smoking gun’ furin cleavage site. This pattern does not follow with other species of the virus that do have the FCS. In the other species, we see patterns where multiple versions of the virus of the same species all have the FCS. Finding one in a species that does not normally have one is like finding a human being with wings. It is simply not a trait of that species and could only have been grafted on. The other example from a related species stands out as well since it should not have that trait since it could not have inherited it. Finding a monkey outfitted with similar wings, and wings occur naturally in nature, nearby where the human with wings was found should only trigger alarms that a Dr. Frankenstein has a lab nearby. The Sun hits the Earth with energy produced by nuclear reactions similar to those in nuclear bombs. This does not mean that we should allow nuclear weapons to destroy our cities, since the sun contains exactly the same process naturally.
The fascists have found, naturally, another defender among the nano-bureaucrats in Mateus, but humanity as a whole cannot be fooled by his efforts. Humanity, all the groups and individuals contained within it, for its survival, must unite against the fascists because of their world-destructive war plans and their defense of political murder and mass-murder. These conspiracies to commit murder cannot go unchallenged.
The bureaucracy of the German Communist Party, as contradictory as it may seem, worked with Hitler’s fascists to murder workers’ leaders and get the Nazis into power. The same social forces work upon the nano-bureaucracy, but Trotskyism has learned from this history so that we do not repeat the same mistakes. Trotsky analyzed the role of the bureaucratic leaders of the German Communist Parties and how they openly helped Hitler get into power while suppressing the revolution of the working class. At that time, Trotsky had still been calling for a Left Opposition within the Communist Party rather than an independent Fourth International, a position still associated with British revolutionary leader Sylvia Pankhurst.
The suggestion by the conspiracy theorists is that the furin cleavage site was “seamlessly” inserted into a precursor, the bat virus RaTG13, to create SARS-CoV-2.
This completely ignores the Yan Report’s assertion:
Note that the RaTG13 virus is excluded from this analysis given the strong evidence suggesting that its sequence may have been fabricated and the virus does not exist in nature.
https://randomposter33.wordpress.com/2020/09/15/hong-kong-scientist-publishes-proof-that-coronavirus-was-likely-made-in-labratory/
By combining all science into a single group called “conspiracy theory”, the writer claims the right to respond to any “conspiracy theory” as an answer to all hard science. This may make his job easier, but it does not make his work complete. He can now completely ignore all the work of the top scientists, such as Dr. Li-Meng Yan, associated with the “gain-of-function” theory.
Dr. William Gallaher from LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine:
Given that furin cleavage signals are present in other coronaviruses at exactly that point in the S1/S2 boundary region, it only LOOKS unusual, especially against the backdrop of SARS. The preponderance of evidence, coupled with Occam’s razor (that the simplest explanation is preferred) dictates that the PRRA sequence has been conserved in nCoV2019 from a long-ago ancestor virus. It is not of suspicious origin. The closest bat virus sequence is really not close at all.
The problem here, and this has been stressed by many scientists in the debate, is that it does not come together to form a plausible scenario. The idea that a “long-ago” ancestor exists, which passed on the trait has failed to explain clear evidence to the contrary. Scientists can measure the level of similarity between known strains showing how long ago they diverged from common ancestors. A certain trait could evolve in one strain over time, a process known as evolutionary convergence, a convergence with other coronaviruses with different ancestors based on similar traits as successful adaptations to the environment.
The time involved in such a process would bring with it many more mutations, which could then measure the time since the divergence from the common ancestor. Observing similar viruses that do no have the specific evolved FCS trait shows that they have a common ancestor, a recent common ancestor, and that the mutation event actually occurred recently. This disproves Dr. Gallahar’s “simple explanation”, that he claims dictates what has been disproven by evidence, since it would be simpler to ignore the evidence. The challenge, which these scientists resting their theories on metaphysics seek to avoid, is constructing a scenario in theory that does not have to suppress evidence and known facts to prove itself dominant. The challenge is to construct a scenario in theory that accurately represents the truth about the origins of the virus.
We must quote at length from the Yan Report in order to properly construct the theory:
In the first scenario, the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, a ZC45/ZXC21-like bat coronavirus would have recombined and “swapped” its RBM with a coronavirus carrying a relatively “complete” RBM (in reference to SARS). This recombination would result in a novel ZC45/ZXC21-like coronavirus with all the gaps in its RBM “filled” (Figure 4). Subsequently, the virus would have to adapt extensively in its new host, where the ACE2 protein is highly homologous to hACE2. Random mutations across the genome would have to have occurred to eventually shape the RBM to its current form – resembling SARS-CoV RBM in a highly intelligent manner. However, this convergent evolution process would also result in the accumulation of a large amount of mutations in other parts of the genome, rendering the overall sequence identity relatively low. The high sequence identity between SARS-CoV-2 and ZC45/ZXC21 on various proteins (94-100% identity) do not support this scenario and, therefore, clearly indicates that SARS-CoV-2 carrying such an RBM cannot come from a ZC45/ZXC21-like bat coronavirus through this convergent evolutionary route.
In the second scenario, the ZC45/ZXC21-like coronavirus would have to have recently recombined and swapped its RBM with another coronavirus that had successfully adapted to bind an animal ACE2 highly homologous to hACE2. The likelihood of such an event depends, in part, on the general requirements of natural recombination: 1) that the two different viruses share significant sequence similarity; 2) that they must co-infect and be present in the same cell of the same animal; 3) that the recombinant virus would not be cleared by the host or make the host extinct; 4) that the recombinant virus eventually would have to become stable and transmissible within the host species.
https://randomposter33.wordpress.com/2020/09/15/hong-kong-scientist-publishes-proof-that-coronavirus-was-likely-made-in-labratory/
In regard to this recent recombination scenario, the animal reservoir could not be bats because the ACE2 proteins in bats are not homologous enough to hACE2 and therefore the adaption would not be able to yield an RBM sequence as seen in SARS-CoV-2. This animal reservoir also could not be humans as the ZC45/ZXC21-like coronavirus would not be able to infect humans. In addition, there has been no evidence of any SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-CoV-2-like virus circulating in the human population prior to late 2019. Intriguingly, according to a recent bioinformatics study, SARS-CoV-2 was well-adapted for humans since the start of the outbreak.
So why did Andersen change his mind? Because of the study of “the full genome of RaTG13.” However the Yan report exposes the flaws of this “fabricated” “reported sequence”:
What strengthens our contention further is the published RaTG13 virus [18], the genomic sequence of which is reportedly 96% identical to that of SARS-CoV-2. While suggesting a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2, the RaTG13 virus also diverted the attention of both the scientific field and the general public away from ZC45/ZXC21 [4,18]. In fact, a Chinese BSL-3 lab (the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre), which published a Nature article reporting a conflicting close phylogenetic relationship between SARS-CoV-2 and ZC45/ZXC21 rather than with RaTG13 [35], was quickly shut down for “rectification” [36]. It is believed that the researchers of that laboratory were being punished for having disclosed the SARS-CoV-2—ZC45/ZXC21 connection. On the other hand, substantial evidence has accumulated, pointing to severe problems associated with the reported sequence of RaTG13 as well as questioning the actual existence of this bat virus in nature [6,7,19-21]. A very recent publication also indicated that the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the RaTG13’s Spike protein could not bind ACE2 of two different types of horseshoe bats (they closely relate to the horseshoe bat R. affinis, RaTG13’s alleged natural host)[2], implicating the inability of RaTG13 to infect horseshoe bats. This finding further substantiates the suspicion that the reported sequence of RaTG13 could have been fabricated as the Spike protein encoded by this sequence does not seem to carry the claimed function. The fact that a virus has been fabricated to shift the attention away from ZC45/ZXC21 speaks for an actual role of ZC45/ZXC21 in the creation of SARS-CoV-2.
https://randomposter33.wordpress.com/2020/09/15/hong-kong-scientist-publishes-proof-that-coronavirus-was-likely-made-in-labratory/
Mateus continues to quote his Harvard buddy Dr. Andersen:
So, Baltimore’s first point—that the FCS found in SARS-CoV-2 is somehow unusual—is simply incorrect. FCSs are found in a multitude of different coronaviruses…
Coronaviruses are a family of viruses. A family in the animal kingdom contains a wide variety of species. For example, the smallest fox in the Canidae family, the Fennec, weighs under 2 kilograms while a Gray Wolf weighs around 40 kilograms, 20 times the fox. A 2 kilogram adult Gray Wolf could not survive. A fox that could weigh 40 kilograms at adulthood could never be born, and would weigh 1 pound at birth, a third the weight of his mother. The smallest species of the Felidae family, the Rusty Spotted Cat, measures 35 to 48 cm in length while the largest, the Siberian Tiger, measures from 178 to 208 cm. A Siberian Tiger measuring only 35 cm could never kill its prey and would probably not even hurt it. A new born Siberian Tiger weighs about the same as the Rusty Spotted Cat adult, and so could never be born to such a small animal.
We look at these examples of mammal families to give us an idea of how unusual it is to compare viruses of the same family as if the traits of one species of the family naturally belong to all the others. In fact, certain traits could not exist since they would hurt whatever member of the species possessed those traits by making them maladapted for the natural environment of their species. We should see Andersen’s comparison of human viruses and bat viruses as if every trait that belongs to one belongs to all as an example of very poor science coming from a very rich place. All of Howard Hughes’ defense-contractor, war-profiteer money could not buy them honesty.
“The FCS itself is not an optimal site (for cleavage) and has never previously been used in CoV experiments to the best of my knowledge – unlike more optimal sites, which have been inserted into SARSr CoVs for basic research.”
This point completely contradicts Mateus’s previous quote from Dr. Gallahar: “Given that furin cleavage signals are present in other coronaviruses at exactly that point in the S1/S2 boundary region.” Is it or is it not an optimal site? Clearly it is, because it gives it a natural appearance similar to other coronaviruses from different taxonomic groups. Wouldn’t it be an obvious choice? But Mateus’s buddies are seeing their stocks soar, so why bother with logical connections between these separate quotes?
Another quote from Dr. Andersen:
Specifically, of all arginine codons, CGG is used at these frequencies in these viruses: SARS: 5% SARS2: 3% SARSr: 2% ccCoVs: 4% HKU9: 7% FCoV: 2% Nothing unusual here.
These numbers show the percentage likelihood that the Covid virus originated outside the lab, between 2 and 7 percent. If their theory has a 2 to 7 percent likelihood of being true, then the likelihood of a lab origin, using this data alone, comes to 93 to 98 percent. With the other facts included this likelihood rises from 98 percent to 100 percent. Obviously we should side with the gain-of-function theory and search for further clues.
Dr. Andersen told the WSWS on Twitter:
“When it [SARS-CoV-2] spilled over, it is incorrect to say it was ‘well adapted to humans.’ We know this because 1) The emergence of variants of concern and human adaptation that is ongoing, 2) the virus can jump between species with no evolution—e.g., mink, and 3) Pangolin CoVs bind even stronger to human ACE2 receptors.”
This is obviously a lie which Howard Hughes would be proud to have repeated by the WSWS. The money he spent on his foundation was certainly worth it. The spill-over clue also added a lot of weight to the gain-of-function hypothesis. These answers depend heavily on ignorance and laziness rather solid science.
- The emergence of variants all derived from an original strain that had entered the population. They did not enter into the human population through further exposure to bats, pangolins, or any other creature. The virus would have behaved differently if it had been less well adapted to humans, that is if it had not contained the spike protein inserted into it from viruses known to infect humans. The various strains emerged after the outbreak as we can see from this chart.
2. That the virus can jump from humans to mink and back does not prove, as Andersen claims, that the virus did not emerge well-adapted to humans. A more natural “zoonotic spill-over” would infect only a very few humans. Once inside humans, it could then mutate to stabilize inside human hosts and then further mutate more virulent and contagious properties over time. All these intermediary steps would appear in human populations at their various evolutionary stages. This has not occurred, and we have no virus found in any human population that served as a precursor in this way. The minks catching Covid-19 does not support the idea that it became well-adapted to humans within an “animal reservoir” since it first appeared in the human population and then transferred to the mink. The Covid-19 virus found in Pangolins proved far more effective at infecting human cells than Pangolin cells, proving that the Pangolin virus did not serve as an intermediary. Only a virus that affected humans to a lesser degree than other animals could have possibly served as an intermediary. Again, those possible candidates have been stored in many specimens in laboratories throughout the world and none are consistent with what would be expected in an intermediary.
3. This last point most strongly contradicts Mateus’ own opinion. If the Pangolin Coronavirus had served as an intermediary, the virus would not bind more strongly to human receptors than to Pangolin receptors. This means the Pangolins caught the virus from human beings, the first hosts of the virus outside of the laboratory animals used to concoct the virus.
Part 3: Confusion About “Unprecedented” Gain-of-Function Research
Dr. Baric also noted that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is so different than any other known virus, to engineer it “from an ancestral strain” would have been a truly unprecedented feat of molecular biology. “And of course, you don’t know what you’re engineering, because SARS-CoV-2 would not have existed,” Baric said.
The SAR-CoV-2 virus has an ancestral strain, not the RaTG13 strain but one known as ZC45/ZXC21, which had been studied in Chinese military laboratories. The “unprecedented feat of molecular biology” had enormous financial backing both from foundations endowed by fascist billionaires, the Chinese and US militaries, major universities, and other sources. The recent history of the evolution of genetic engineering or genetic modification shows how the obstacles to such a breakthrough systematically broke down thanks to undeterred research flouting international law designed to prevent precisely this type of “unprecedented feat.” Also, they would know what they’re engineering because all beta-coronaviruses act the same once they have infected the host, replicating themselves within a host, spreading to other hosts of the same species, and then either overcoming the immune system and killing the host or leaving behind an anti-body print reminding the body of its battle for life against the virus. With each new infection, the question becomes, will the anti-bodies rid the body of the invading virus or will the virus take over the regular functioning of the cells until they become useless and even life-threatening to the host.
When discussing Dr. Baltimore’s “smoking gun” comment, Dr. Mateus left out this important information, which he reveals here both unconnected to the context and almost as a side-note when it is absolutely central to the debate:
“Dr. Shi and Dr. Baric published a 2015 report demonstrating the feasibility of attaching a SARS-like spike protein to the backbone of a SARS virus, creating a chimeric virus (so-called after the Chimera of Greek mythology, because it combines two separate microorganisms), that proved pathogenic in mouse models.”
All that remained after that experiment was to engineer mice with human ACE2 receptors, also “proven feasible”, that is accomplished in fact in a laboratory, as discussed in the Yan Report. These infected mice could then serve as a reservoir for a human-infecting virus to stabilize genetically and emerge perfectly adapted to infect humans without any intermediary in the natural world.
Dismissing the actual “smoking gun”, that Dr. Shi and Dr. Baric had genetically engineered Chimera viruses in their work based on the technique of attaching a SARS-like spike protein containing a furin cleavage site (FCS), Dr. Mateus provides us with some circumstantial evidence to the contrary:
The other three related SARS-CoV-2 viruses had genetically distinct spike genes that were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor, though lacking a furin cleavage site. The study acknowledges that the direct progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 remains unclear. However, the study provides strong circumstantial evidence that implicates a natural origin for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
None of the SARS-CoV-2-like virus samples retrieved from nature had an FCS. Not only this, but Dr. Baric and Dr. Shi had produced a SARS-CoV-2 like virus in the lab by adding a spike with an FCS. We must reproduce a long quote from the Yan Report discussing the “Smoking Gun” long before Dr. Baltimore did.
Strikingly, consistent with the RBM engineering theory, we have identified two unique restriction sites, EcoRI and BstEII, at either end of the RBM of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, respectively (Figure 5A). These two sites, which are popular choices of everyday molecular cloning, do not exist in the rest of this spike gene. This particular setting makes it extremely convenient to swap the RBM within spike, providing a quick way to test different RBMs and the corresponding Spike proteins.
Such EcoRI and BstEII sites do not exist in the spike genes of other β coronaviruses, which strongly indicates that they were unnatural and were specifically introduced into this spike gene of SARS-CoV-2 for the convenience of manipulating the critical RBM. Although ZC45 spike also does not have these two sites (Figure 5B), they can be introduced very easily as described in part 2 of this report…
…In 2008, Dr. Zhengli Shi’s group swapped a SARS RBM into the Spike proteins of several SARS-like bat coronaviruses after introducing a restriction site into a codon-optimized spike gene (Figure 5C) [47]. They then validated the binding of the resulted chimeric Spike proteins with hACE2. Furthermore, in a recent publication, the RBM of SARS-CoV-2 was swapped into the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of SARS-CoV, resulting in a chimeric RBD fully functional in binding hACE2 (Figure 5C) [39]. Strikingly, in both cases, the manipulated RBM segments resemble almost exactly the RBM defined by the positions of the EcoRI and BstEII sites (Figure 5C)…
…It is noteworthy that the corresponding author of this recent publication [39], Dr. Fang Li, has been an active collaborator of Dr. Zhengli Shi since 2010 [49-53]. Dr. Li was the first person in the world to have structurally elucidated the binding between SARS-CoV RBD and hACE2 [38] and has been the leading expert in the structural understanding of Spike-ACE2 interactions [38,39,53-56]. The striking finding of EcoRI and BstEII restriction sites at either end of the SARS-CoV-2 RBM, respectively, and the fact that the same RBM region has been swapped both by Dr. Shi and by her long-term collaborator, respectively, using restriction enzyme digestion methods are unlikely a coincidence. Rather, it is the smoking gun proving that the RBM/Spike of SARS-CoV-2 is a product of genetic manipulation. [Emphasis in the original]
https://randomposter33.wordpress.com/2020/09/15/hong-kong-scientist-publishes-proof-that-coronavirus-was-likely-made-in-labratory/
Dr. Mateus then goes further:
Commenting on the findings of Edward Holmes, Goldstein regards the number of changes required to transform RaTG13 into SARS-CoV-2 as an insurmountable hurdle. “Cramming 50 years of evolution into eight is impossible,” Goldstein said. “Forcing 1,000 nucleotide changes—just, no.”
The repeated insistence on following the false trail of RaTG13 should raise immediate suspicions. As Dr. Yan wrote in her report:
The existing scientific publications supporting a natural origin theory rely heavily on a single piece of evidence – a previously discovered bat coronavirus named RaTG13, which shares a 96% nucleotide sequence identity with SARS-CoV-2 [18]. However, the existence of RaTG13 in nature and the truthfulness of its reported sequence are being widely questioned [6-9,19-21]. It is noteworthy that scientific journals have clearly censored any dissenting opinions that suggest a non-natural origin of SARS-CoV-2 [8,22]. Because of this censorship, articles questioning either the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2 or the actual existence of RaTG13, although of high quality scientifically, can only exist as preprints [5-9,19-21] or other non-peer-reviewed articles published on various online platforms [10-13,23].
In other words, the pseudo-science surrounding all discussion of RaTG13 serves as a diversion from known viruses found in Chinese military labs that have very similar backbones to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. All that remains is the science proven by Dr. Baric and Dr. Shi themselves that scientists could artificially insert a spike protein.
To further back this claim, I provide an extra quotation from a scientific article produced by the DRASTIC team discussed in Katherine Eban’s explosive exposure of the “natural origins” theory in her Vanity Fair article on the origins of the coronavirus, which I also criticized on randomposter33.org:
It should be also noted that amplicon and raw data connected to these sequences have been made available only after request from scientists willing to verify the assembled published genomes. Lack of accuracy and missing or conflicting information in the papers describing these key sequences should have been resolved during a thorough peer review process. Considering the criticisms expressed by several researchers about these sequences and related papers, alternative analyses based only on sequences released before the beginning of the pandemic should be taken into account when drawing conclusions about SARS‐CoV‐2′s origin.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8209872/
The other contention, that no one would artificially insert a spike protein there, Mateus already contradicted himself when he quoted Dr. Gallahar saying that other viruses, not of the same species as SARS-CoV-2, have a spike protein in that precise location. Inserting the spike protein there would obviously give the virus a natural appearance, since that’s where other species that do have the spike have the spike. This is like saying a rhinoceros could not possibly have spikes on his head since anyone would much rather have a spike in their hand, where they could better control it. Deer, elk, and other animals have hard projection from their heads, and a rhinoceros would be no different. At the same time, such a spike does not prove the existence of unicorns, despite the wide variety of animals that exist in the animal kingdom, many which we have never actually seen.
Furthermore, Dr. Mateus does not detect even the slightest conflict-of-interest in the opinions of Dr. Shi and Dr. Baric. This represents a great threat to the freedom of scientific thought. A basic precautionary measure necessitates an analysis of every important scientist’s conflicts of interest. Both these scientists receive tens of millions of dollars to spend on their laboratories, on their staff, and on their personal fortunes. In order to keep this money, they cannot allow any investigation into their activities to lead to a shutting down of their labs, an investigation of the funding for their research, or criminal prosecution for illegal weapons development. These conflicts of interest must appear prominently in any consideration of their opinions. Dr. Mateus, in opposing any exploration of such an angle, does great harm both to science and scientific journalism.
The generation of the “O-linked glycans” is unlikely to have occurred from cell-culture passage in a laboratory. The virus would have to be passed through animals to enhance these particular functions.
The Yan Report answered this argument by describing the process by which the virus would have been engineered. Known as serial passage, it would involve, not a petting zoo but groups of mice. Even thousands of mice could fit into a small warehouse, and the WIV where Dr. Shi works would have plenty of space in which to store them.
https://www.the-sun.com/news/3194505/china-execute-scientists-save-face-pressure-wuhan-lab-leak/
The procedure of serial passage is straightforward. Briefly, the selected viral strain from step 4, a precursor of SARS-CoV-2, would be intranasally inoculated into a group of anaesthetized hACE2-mice. Around 2-3 days post infection, the virus in lungs would usually amplify to a peak titer. The mice would then be sacrificed and the lungs homogenized. Usually, the mouse-lung supernatant, which carries the highest viral load, would be used to extract the candidate virus for the next round of passage. After approximately 10~15 rounds of passage, the hACE2-binding affinity, the infection efficiency, and the lethality of the viral strain would be sufficiently enhanced and the viral genome stabilized [101].
In the conclusion, Mateus makes another unsubstantiated claim:
It also took more than 15 years after SARS-CoV-1 was discovered for the animal origin to be identified.
Mateus does not provide any source for his argument that an animal source had been found, only providing an approximate date and not even stating which animal he believes has emerged as the likely origin. Was it the origin as a reservoir? Was it the intermediary which transferred the virus from the origin to humans? A more recent study, by Dr. John Wenzel, proves quite the opposite, arguing many of the studies claiming an animal origin for the virus had been found in “civets” used faulty science in a variety of ways. We quote the urgent message found in the conclusion of this article:
We rely on data and on epistemologically sound processes to make scientific conclusions. It is plain that even in this time of emergency, no one is paying attention to the expertise of professional phylogeneticists. Perhaps it is because especially in an emergency people want to find “the answer.” They do not want to hear that “it is complicated.” How unfortunate. We need to do more to promote our science as being important, relevant, sophisticated, and helpful in this emergency.
All legitimate peer-reviewed papers accept that this virus came from animal pathogens, probably as a novel combination of viruses found in different species, and is not manufactured. This virus has new features that promote binding to human cells, and therefore contagion and disease in humans is a new feature added to older viral elements. Where did the virus come from? If there are partitions of the virus with different histories, what are those partitions, and what are the histories? These are questions of phylogenetics and systematics, rather than medicine and virology. This article states the problem. We are still looking for a solution.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cla.12425
In other words, parts of the virus emerged from nature, but what happened since? Did naturally occuring viruses make their way into laboratories or not? After going through chamges there, could they return to a natural environment? If the virus did not simply combine inorganic parts but organic parts of viruses, what considerations motivated these new combinations?
Part 4: Political Conclusions and the Comments Section
Exposing the Philosophical Weaknesses and Belief in Censorship that Combined to Form the WSWS’s Nano-Bureaucratic Lysenskoism
Part 4. A. Response to Comments on Part 1 of the Series:
BillStewart2012 • 2 months ago
I’m going to have to read this series in more detail, but thank you for putting out one of the two pieces of journalism I’ve seen on the issue.
The other one’s from Katherine Eban at Vanity Fair – https://www.vanityfair.com/… – which concludes that there’s enough evidence that something might have happened, such as researchers getting infected when collecting samples in the wild, but that there’s a huge amount of bureaucratic coverup going on from all sides, in addition to the politicians hate-mongering.
This comment mentions the Vanity Fair article exposing a network of U.S. scientists and laboratories involved closely with WIV in gain of function research on beta-coronaviruses. The strength of the article in scientific terms also benefits from a determination to call out the scientific establishment in the U.S. What the article lacks is historical context, failing to show President Truman’s approach to revealing the nuclear bomb or failing to address the problems of the 9/11 commission. This lack of historical context seeks to obscure the difference between an accidental “lab-leak” and the intentional development and use of viral weapons. This determination to obscure the difference between the two theories united Katherine Eban with the WSWS on Twitter.
The WSWS cannot convince its readers, as this comment by gd1007 shows:
read through this..no direct evidence to support the claims made in this article. Almost entirely editorializing and supposition by the writer with no actual data to back any of the claims.
This comment reflects no bias and only a determination to find truthful arguments. Another comment addresses the glaring logical flaw and the vile slant of the Mateus series.
You can tell how slanted the article is by how they avoid mentioning Gain of Function research.Dr Shi when asked if they are making viruses more dangerous replied-No,we are making it easier to jump from species to species-which is making the viruses more dangerous.Shi is your main source on the article?The head of the lab who might of had the leak?
Gain of Function research(which is not even mentioned in the article) are genetically modified viruses,Viruses that are modified to be more contagious.Gain of Function research is funded by both the US and Chineses governments-where is that in the article?
Gain of Function research was stopped in 2014 because of risk only to be reinstated by Fauci in 2017 during Trump chaos(Fauci did not go thru proper channels when reinstated).There is way more evidence pointing towards a lab leak then any other ‘theory”
No animal tested for Covid origin has provided the genetic link, they have been looking for over a year.The racist wet market “theory” has been proven to be false.
WSWS writes some very slanted articles, not addressing Gain of Function,genetically modified viruses, the risk of this research, the funding of this research and the NIH(Fauci) control over the science community looking to fund their own research.
Trump not only broke liberal’s brains but a few socialist’s, too, like the WSWS’s.Orange man bad, cannot think objectively.
To which Patrick Martin replies:
Please read the article more carefully. Gain of function research is mentioned briefly in the discussion of the Science magazine interview with Dr. Shi, which we cite, as well as Dr. Shi’s response to those claims, which are concocted by the far right. When you make such assertions, ignoring the actual text of the article–which, by the way, has two more parts!– your own ability to “think objectively” must be questioned.
In fact, rather than “think objectively”, the WSWS has simply misdefined a key term. The article states: “gain-of-function experiments, another hobby horse of the ‘lab leak’ proponents, are efforts to determine different ways that a virus can strengthen its infectiveness, in order to anticipate the future development of dangerous pathogens.” For this reason, Mike HW argued correctly that gain-of-function research had been entirely avoided as a topic. They mention gain-of-function, yes, but they say nothing truthful about it! They may have saved themselves some embarrassment by leaving the topic out entirely!
We have here a group of comments from three readers:
So Shi Zhengli and the WIV should have no problem cooperating with a forensic examination by a team of qualified international experts, as was suggested by Dr Tedros, to definitively prove that what she is saying is true. She should in fact welcome such an investigation so why not have one?
Robert Powers Hassle Lam • 2 months ago The World Military Games were held in Wuhan, China in October 2019…no need to look into USA labs for anything. No need to see what actually killed the people who died of mysterious respiratory infections in the summer of 2019 near Ft Detrick and also in Arizona. Can you imagine if USA interfered in other countries’ elections or was the origin of Covid-19? Its much easier to demonize China.
Carolyn Zaremba Will C • 2 months ago • edited Did you not read this article? The bit about being asked to prove a negative? About how the burden of proof is on the accuser, not the accused? Is your head filled with concrete? It must be.
Will C Carolyn Zaremba • 2 months ago So head of the WHO Dr Tedros is a rascist and his head is full of concrete because he wants further investigation into the lab? Also Ralph Baric a leading coronavirus researcher and collaborator of Dr Shi is a racist right wing conspiracy theorist because he wants an investigation? I suggest you muppets actually read the WHO report for yourselves, and give independent thinking a try too. As for the charges of racism what did I say that is racist? This is a disgusting slur levelled by people who have nothing of sunstance to say. I support the opening up of all BSL4 labs worldwide to greater public scrutiny and greater international regulation on research into potential pandemic pathogens. Why does the WSWS oppose this?
In this exchange, three different readers expressed concerns that the investigation into the origins of the virus met obstruction by both China and the U.S. The defender of the WSWS position responds with generalities based on legalism about who must prove what, legally speaking. The WSWS does not address any of the facts, while ignoring their own statement that, “The intermediate host still remains to be determined.” This means that their accusation of “conspiracy theory” violates their own principles, since they have no hard evidence to support their false theory that the viruses moved from bats to an intermediary host to humans entirely outside of labs. Since no such evidence exists, then they put the onus on the scientists that they accuse of promoting conspiracy theories. Everyone else must prove that no such intermediary host exists in nature or else the accusation stands! This absurd violation of their own “higher principles” has turned them into living caricatures, a result of them twisting themselves into odd “philosophical” positions. We can see this humorous argument repeated again by Patrick Martin:
Patrick Martin Will C • 2 months ago
Once again on proving a negative: if the lab is “investigated” and no SARS-CoV-2 or precursors are found, the argument will be, the Chinese moved them, or they are in a different, secret lab, to which the investigators do not have access. No part of China would be off limits. We saw this process in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein had to accede to more or less endless such probes. The Chinese government, with greater ability to resist international pressure, does not choose to go down this road. Without making any brief for Beijing, there is no reason for them to do so. No prizes for guessing the US response if Russian or Chinese investigators demanded access to Ft. Detrick after the anthrax mailings of 2001, or the Dugway proving grounds in Utah after various disasters there.
Now, through his twisted logic, Patrick Martin can endlessly probe people for anti-Chinese racism! Since they have not proven that no intermediary host exists in nature, they must be racist warmongers attempting to bring the U.S. to war with China! This completely ignores the Marxist argument on imperialism, that imperialism is not a choice. If China struck before, they cannot now sit satisfied with their attacks. Due to imperialist rivalry and them starting from the weaker position, they must continually strike first while the U.S. takes a defensive pose. The military situation does not change the economic drive to war within China and world capitalism as a whole: the excess production of capital leading to the absolute need to open export markets by force, destroying the more backwards forms of production, whether in small nations or large ones with large armed forces prepared to fight back. Failure to export excess capital would lead to extreme forms of hoarding and speculation, destitution and slavery, forcing neighboring countries to invade to end the instability and export the capital through military occupation and theft. When the U.S. keeps these doors closed to China, a legally defensible position no different from the private ownership of a monopoly, then China has no choice but to attack the U.S. We saw this in WWII, when the U.S. forced Japan to invade, through an oil embargo, when Japan had no hope of winning against the much larger U.S. military.
Marxists, then, should not deny the existence of Chinese militarism. This will later lead to a correction, “we must join the U.S. military in its wars since China is obviously the aggressor!” Marxists must take the correct positions on both science and politics, based on accepted theory and known facts. Marxists generally argued that Germany needed to act as an aggressor in World War I and World War II as it developed late and needed colonies denied to it by the vast British and French empires. The facts point to a similar process underway in China. The defense of the world against Chinese militarism cannot come from imperialism, which would only match China’s destructive drives with its own, as it seeks to export its own excess capital. The best defense against Chinese militarism is the development of international socialist production as a means of taking the drive for profit out of the economy and replacing it with the drive to meet social needs through planned, sustainable production.
Patrick Martin, if he has his way, will doom the working class to make the same mistakes it made in the past. Only a careful study of history inspired by a determination to fight social chauvinism, the defensism of U.S. bourgeois courts and bourgeois rationality, will remove the darkness that has set in in the minds of the nano-bureaucracy. The effects of this darkness can be seen in the following comment by Skip:
Here is how it works bro…. you have to prove that she would be lying….your anti Chinese racism is not a valid reason to suspect her credibility.
Yeah sorry bro that is not how it works. Your racist mind must have got confused. I’ll try to keep it real simple for you bro. You don’t prove that someone is lying before you investigate them. You investigate them to see if they are lying or not. Got it bro??
The blanket accusations of Chinese racism contradict the claim of the WSWS to having opposed identity politics. They have bought completely into identity politics, only choosing to defend against anti-Asian racism. The Black Lives Matters movement and the largest protests in U.S. history, the George Floyd protests, have purely selfish motives in mind, they argue. On the other hand, scientists who do not prove the negative, that no intermediary host exists in nature, are anti-Chinese racists that want to exterminate Chinese people. For this reason alone, and not because of the millions and millions of dollars of conflicts of interest, the WSWS argues, these scientists distrust Dr. Shi, an Asian, a Chinese scientist, and Dr. Baric, the Asian’s partner in crime. These accusations can only appear to the working class as a declaration of war by the nano-bureaucracy against the politically conscious working class and its revolution to eliminate the root causes of imperialist conflict and global economic and environmental catastrophes. The Chinese counter-revolution has deep roots in the Chinese Communist Party’s Stalinism. The WSWS of all news websites must recognize this and point it out to its readers. Neglecting this responsibility has made the nano-bureaucracy culpable of initiating its own very sinister counter-revolution.
Let’s look at another comment, by Rosa Roja:
What has happened to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists? A journal founded by scientists to save humanity from nuclear annhiliation promotes China-bashing, thereby feeding a new cold war, which could easily become hot (as in thermonuclear).
I followed a link the author of their article provided and found this:
“It’s absolutely horrific that so many scientists and researchers are taking part in what’s clearly a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party”
That pretty much tells you where “journalist” NIcholas Wade is coming from. But where is the Bulletin coming from these days???
Without any shame, so-called Trotskyist are defending the Chinese State Bureaucracy, starting an open counter-revolution against Trotskyism from within the Trotskyist movement. To argue that the Chinese Communist Party does not spread disinformation, does not suppress science, does not carry out its responsibilities as an “agent of imperialism”, as Trotsky referred to Stalinism, to argue this way from within the Trotskyist movement threatens the very existence of the Trotskyist movement. If the entire job of the SEP is to defend Chinese bureaucrats, then the SEP has sacrificed its principles in exchange for bureaucratic privilege. The working class cannot forgive such an attack, and it must organize for an open break with the factional tyranny of the ICFI’s nano-bureaucratic faction.
Just as the WSWS has turned itself into a caricature through its failure to overcome its philosophical idealism, it now shows an extreme and perverted attraction to Nicholas Wade, the right-wing commentator whose essential function is as a living straw man. Anyone who disagrees with Dr. Fauci, the highest paid US federal government employee, must agree with Nicholas Wade. Now the WSWS can ignore all science and humorously respond to Nicholas Wade, their favored straw man. This grotesque submission to the national media’s bias against science combined with left-wing ideology only serves to debunk the WSWS’s claim to represent Marxism.
Marxists would argue with scientists who inadvertently introduce bourgeois ideology into the movement. They also would argue with left-wing public figures who have introduced mistakes into the public debate about scientific socialism or dialectical materialism. These figures deserve an answer to save the party from philosophical diversions from the essential Marxist positions as well as the general public from misunderstandings and misconceptions about Marxism. Marxists would simply denounce and would not argue with right-wing ideologues like Nicholas Wade, giving them political leadership over the science of virology. This extreme submission to fascism, even if for some favor in return, should remind us of Trotsky’s analysis proving that Stalinism and the Stalinist party bureaucracy organically could not organize a struggle against fascism. Democratic Power must lead in the struggle against fascism as the only conscious force against the nano-bureaucrat-ism of the ICFI, the submission to imperialism and transformation into imperialist agents of the ICFI bureaucracy.
A commenter points out the misshapen and unscientific thinking of the WSWS exposed by an MIT Technology Review article:
Mike HW Robert Zhang • 2 months ago • edited
Here is a link to an MIT tech article since you are into giving links.The title of the piece is -No one can find the animal that gave us Covid-
https://www.technologyrevie…No genetic match to the origin of Covid19 has been found in animals and they have been looking for over a year,MERS was found in 2 months,SARS was found in 6 months.
Back at the lab where they have been making coronavirus more contagious through genetic modification……….
The authorities clearly do not have the same leeway as the nano-bureaucracy to caricature themselves. In siding with the intermediary host hypothesis, they must prove that an intermediary host actually exists. The onus of proof is on them. Until that discovery is made, they cannot make the same insidious war-like nano-bureaucratic argument that everyone must prove the negative, the non-existence of an intermediary in nature, or they are racists and warmongers like Nicholas Wade! This violent argument against socialists will act as the source of a destructive conflict if the Socialist Equality Party leadership refuses to submit to equal accountability for its arguments!
The responses to the above comment bring with them more misinformation and more violent filth.
Robert Zhang Mike HW • 2 months ago
You are addressing a separate issue to what has been raised in this thread. It was claimed that the virus has not been isolated. This is false.
The “genetic match” of the virus is yet to be found but it is likely found in bats.
I am not sure which SARS virus you’re referring to, but It took 13 years to confirm the origins of the first SARS virus, and the origins of Ebola are still being researched. The argument that any gaps in the knowledge over the origins of COVID-19 lends credibility to the theory that it originated in a Wuhan lab is completely unscientific.
Actually, Robert Zhang confuses two basic scientific concepts relying simply on ignorance to sustain his argument. The argument here relates to the intermediary host, not the original reservoir for the virus. Confusing these two issues may help them evade responsibility in their own minds, but the responsibility to act socially and morally exists outside the mind. Forgetting this seems to be the trick behind the slander argument. Yet the slander argument still does not produce an intermediary host, which they must admit is their responsibility not those of the scientists that they slander. This, one year later, when the timeline was 6 months for SARS and 2 months for MERS, according to Mike HV, where the intermediate hosts were quickly discovered, civets for SARS and camels for MERS.
Carolyn Zaremba Mike HW • 2 months ago
Your head is truly full of concrete. This issue is also explained in the article. What you really are demanding here is that everyone agree with your crack-brained mulishness. You are not interested in anything that proves your pet theory wrong.
These words reveal the violent direction the so-called intellectual leadership has taken the WSWS. Rather than address the thoughts in the mind, the arguments on paper, the WSWS seeks to drill its positions into the heads, skulls, and brains of its readers. These tactics reveal a desperation stemming from their inability to grapple with the arguments in theory. They will seek heads to hurt, angry at the failures within their own, and in this way alienate the intellectual leadership of the revolution. Democratic Power seeks to calmly, dispassionately discuss ideas in a fairly moderated forum. This will require a political revolution against the nano-bureaucrats, as defenders tasked with covering up the crimes against socialism, to restore democratic-centralism to the governing bodies of the Fourth International. Comments such as the one above, “head… full of concrete”, “crack-brained mulishness” would not belong in a moderated forum for democratic debate. They might belong in a fictional account of the mafia.
Finally, we have Dylan Lubao’s comment to Mike HW, with important misinformation to disassemble:
Dylan Lubao Mike HW • 2 months ago
You say that as if the claim has any credibility. It doesn’t.
Dr. Shi, and Dr. Andersen, explain in this article that the science demonstrates that this virus was not artificially created.
Dr. Shi also explains that her laboratory is subject to a strict quarantine and reporting regimen – one that is overseen by an international body. This also precludes the possibility that the original SARS-COV-2 virus was captured in the wild, then released from the WIV.
It is truly a stretch to claim that if the WIV conducted gain of function research (a big IF, as such claims have not been proven and have in fact been dispelled by figures such as Dr. Fauci), then the WIV “leaked” the virus.
It is these immense leaps in logic, with nothing but empty space in between, that underlie the lies about the WIV leak.
On the other hand, this conspiracy theory serves to divert attention from the very well-documented murderous policies of the Trump and Biden administrations, and their counterparts around the world, that have led to the deaths of millions.
Did or did not scientists at the WIV conduct gain of function research, manipulating viruses to create chimeras (similar to the common practice of grafting in agriculture) that would, if released, kill millions of people? Dylan Lubao admits they did and then says this only “serves to divert attention!” Actually the origin of the virus will show us the quickest and most equitable road to the cure and prevent the use of future weapons of a similar nature. Why has the vaccination effort and prevention failed? The same scientists that funded the weapons research now lead the ineffective vaccination and prevention efforts, most prominently NIAID Director Dr. Fauci and his large network of highly paid co-conspirators.
Part 4. B. Response to Part 2 Comments:
Marley • 2 months ago • edited
A new piece in the NY Times reports that scientific consensus is changing to strongly suggest that COVID 19 was indeed leaked from a lab https://www.nytimes.com/202…
addie Marley • 2 months ago Hardly more that restating Wade’s unsubstantiated claims. Consider the author!Consider reviewing the following:https://fair.org/home/us-me… •Reply•Share ›
Addie’s response to Marley completely illustrates the effect on the readership of the WSWS argument. Encouraging irrational submission to authority leads to open acceptance of Stalinism. The WSWS claims to oppose Stalinism based on the work of the Trotskyist movement, but here it has submitted totally to the false reasoning of party (SEP) and state (China) bureaucracies. Andre Damon falsely states in his biography of the NY Times opinions columnist referenced in the first comment, Dr. Tufekci, that Nicholas Wade’s May 2021 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the origin of all gain-of-function theories. Wade’s reference to the 2015 Nature article by Dr. Shi and Dr. Baric leaves out important facts mentioned in the Yan report:
We also note that in the publication of the chimeric virus SHC015-MA15 in 2015, the attribution of funding of Zhengli Shi by the NIAID was initially left out. It was reinstated in the publication in 2016 in a corrigendum, perhaps after the meeting in January 2016 to reinstate NIH funding for gain-of-function research on viruses. This is an unusual scientific behavior, which needs an explanation for.
Also, Yan points out that Dr. Shi had started these experiments far earlier:
In 2008, Dr. Zhengli Shi’s group swapped a SARS RBM into the Spike proteins of several SARS-like bat coronaviruses after introducing a restriction site into a codon-optimized spike gene (Figure 5C).
As is easily seen, these arguments in favor of Wade resemble nothing more than a Stalin-Hitler pact between the SEP nano-bureaucracy and the far-right represented by Nicholas Wade. They have agreed to tie all gain-of-function research to the far right in exchange for a public argument on Twitter with liberals such as Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban and the New York Times’ Zeynep Tufekci. These arguments end up awfully embarrassing for the WSWS, since they cannot address the facts but only repeatedly speak of their right-wing counterpart, Nicholas Wade, to whom they have promised all the credit for discussing gain-of-function research in the media. This convenient alliance leaves out the science, but gives them access to other allies such as FAIR.org’s Joshua Cho, whose Twitter headline graphic simply states:
One can see from his commentary on twitter, these three connected tweets, that he wholly supports the Chinese government. This runs completely counter to everything the WSWS is supposed to stand for. His main contribution is his unbacked claim that Dr. Yan (MD, PhD), author of the Yan Report, has been discredited. Look at this shameless propaganda for the Chinese government and see what has become of the Trotskyist movement at the hands of the nano-bureaucracy.
The WSWS essentially blames the stupidity of the American people for the actions of their ruling class without any Marxist analysis of class forces. They dismiss all arguments against authoritarian regimes, possibly since the time they accepted money from Saddam Hussein, and they argue that American people should be faulted for not going along enough with the imperialist government. They call the U.S. government homicidal rather than reactionary, a definite position against an analysis of the class forces leading to atrocities by governments against their own people. These are two sides of the same coin: “the government is homicidal and the people are its stupid victims! Why don’t they just follow along? The government is on their side, they only have to listen! They must also be victims of fake news!” Marxists, on the contrary, argue that societies such as the U.S., built upon class divisions, must resort to the occasional brutal atrocity, and they back up this view with references to atrocities committed by the government against their own people. Atrocities against the people are not a choice but an inevitable product of class division and irresolvable contradictions between the interests of the capitalist class and the working class. We must also recognize that this is not a particularly American phenomenon but a phenomenon that appears everywhere that imperialism and capitalism are generally accepted, China included.
A representative comment appears in reply to Andre Damon’s lazy attacks on science:
Will C • 2 months ago • edited
The WSWS is embarrassing themselves with their clumsy attacks on the ever growing scientific consensus that all possibilities should investigated until we have sufficient reason to rule them out. This is the mainstream position held by the head of the the WHO and most other experts in the field. What scientific credential does the WSWS have?
Andre Damon also hypocritically attacks Dr. Tufekci for her attempts to censor Youtube. Andre Damon himself has censored the account of Bertrand Poster, this writer, at almost exactly the same time that he received messages on Twitter from Vanity Fair writer Katherine Eban. As a writer whose writing features prominently in the WSWS, he has a responsibility to debate members and former members of the SEP, but instead he censors the membership while engaging openly in camaraderie with pro-imperialist publications like Vanity Fair.
Barbar hotpumpkinman
2 months ago edited
3. The virus is continually adapting to humans and presumably was doing so at around the same rate for at least several months, if not years, before the first sequence was identified circa 24th Dec 2019…
7. The finding that the initial Wuhan strain is in one respect [ACE2 binding] better adapted to humans than any candidate [intermediate] host species is again unsurprising, seeing as we do not as yet know what the progenitor virus looked like in the as yet unidentified animal, nor when the first zoonotic transfer happened.
These pseudo-scientific claims exemplify the strained logic necessary to maintain the nano-bureaucracy’s control over the party. The identification of the virus followed its appearance in the human population. If it had infected human beings earlier, it would have appeared in the samples of patients earlier. How could such a deadly virus escape detection? Do they really imagine they can get away with fighting humanity for years without anyone noticing?
The second point also fails to mask the pretensions of the nano-bureaucracy as servants of imperialism. The zoonotic transfer began with a virus better adapted to the intermediary host but still capable of infecting human cells. Such a virus would also appear in samples if it existed. We know, however, that the intermediary host had to be laboratory mice engineered with hACE2. (h for human) These mice received the virus and passed it through various cycles of serial passage, enhancing and stabilizing it to effectively infect human cells. Does the nano-bureaucracy really believe it can hide a process known and used for over a hundred years? What a ridiculous presumption!
We have one more comment worth responding to:
Sure glad that this series is being put out. At times, I just have thrown up my hands and lost all hope in understanding any of this. There are so many claims and counter-claims it is hard for the average lay person to know what’s what. One thing I’ll say that cannot be questioned, is that whatever the origin of the virus, the massive number of deaths from it where overwhelmingly because of the social response, or rather lack thereof, by the so called authorities. Had the outbreak been handled appropriately by countries such as Brazil, the US and India, the virus may have turned out to be no worse, at least in the level of deaths produced, than the common flu. As the author of the piece emphasized, the response by the political establishment in a number countries guaranteed that this virus went from the engine that could to the engine that did and the engine that will continue. It is this culpability for the large loss of life, along with geo-strategic concerns, that is driving the Wuhan Lab conspiracy theory.
This argument may be appropriate in certain cases, but in a thread regarding the origins of the virus it takes on a pacifistic anti-Marxist color. “Had the outbreak been handled properly”, or “the authority commits murder!”, while correct in a general sense leave out the historical struggle of Marxism against pacifism. The authority did not slip up but intentionally pursued a policy of “herd immunity”, that is counter-revolutionary violence using biological weapons. The euphemism will not clarify but disguise their intentions. To accuse them of murder goes further but not far enough. As Marxists, we do not see the law as the primary factor influencing the behavior of the state. The law comes from human beings, not from a divine overseer. The main influence is material reality, represented most directly by economic considerations. The ruling class, the part of society that controls its wealth and thereby its state, senses a threat to its rule in the growing militancy and international organization of the working class. Only through the destruction of nations and decimation of populations can they restabilize their rule. We have terms for this: political reaction and counter-revolutionary violence. A coming world war will kill millions, and the WSWS has already admitted the murderousness of the authority. This should serve as a further clue that the authority would certainly have a strong motive and the capacity to engineer such a weapon, a very important part of proving that they did it.
The nano-bureaucracy’s effort to provide the authority immunity from such an investigation will prove fruitless, just like their efforts to defend the capitalist state and the media elite from the prosecution inspired by the massive #MeToo movement. Convinced of the capitalist state’s power to take over the #MeToo movement and shut down the investigation of Governor Cuomo, the nano-bureaucracy became confident in their own ability to shut down any investigation of their activities. Now this illusion has come crashing down, with Cuomo’s administration and the leadership of Time’s Up collapsing together. It will not be long before this structure collapses on the nano-bureaucracy itself as it struggles to uphold the bourgeois courts, hypocritically defending “due process”, in the face of a popular rebellion while denying due process to its own membership. Their habits have become predictable and increasingly desperate, and the working class will soon catch them in the act of sabotaging the revolutionary movement. Only new forms of organization, such as workers’ committees or factions within the party can carry out the necessary work of restoring justice to socialists denied their rights by the capitalist state and its devious, weapons-concealing servants in the nano-bureaucracy.
Part 4. C. Response to Part 3 Comments:
The next comment, by hotpumpkinman deserves to be quoted at length and in full. Somehow, this comment, representing scientific reason, made it past the WSWS censorship wall:
This 3-part series reminds me a bit of a prosecutor’s presentation to a grand jury in the sense that it is entirely one sided. Kristian Andersen and others are great expert witnesses who can help thoroughly “demolish” the science writer Nicholas Wade. But don’t we need to hear from the 18 scientists who issued a letter in the May 14, 2021 issue of Science which stated that “We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data”?
Since so many here have compared any scientist who hasn’t declared allegiance to the zoonotic theory to the paid hacks of the oil and tobacco industries, I am going to include the list with their credentials:
1. Jesse D. Bloom1,2,
2. Yujia Alina Chan3,
3. Ralph S. Baric4,
4. Pamela J. Bjorkman5,
5. Sarah Cobey6,
6. Benjamin E. Deverman3,
7. David N. Fisman7,
8. Ravindra Gupta8,
9. Akiko Iwasaki9,2,
10. Marc Lipsitch10,
11. Ruslan Medzhitov9,2,
12. Richard A. Neher11,
13. Rasmus Nielsen12,
14. Nick Patterson13,
15. Tim Stearns14,
16. Erik van Nimwegen11,
17. Michael Worobey15,
18. David A. Relman16,17,*
1. 1Basic Sciences and Computational Biology, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA 98109, USA.
2. 2Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, MD 20815, USA.
3. 3Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
4. 4Department of Epidemiology and Department of Microbiology & Immunology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
5. 5Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.
6. 6Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
7. 7Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 1A8, Canada.
8. 8Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology & Infectious Disease, Cambridge, UK.
9. 9Department of Immunobiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06519, USA.
10. 10Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
11. 11Biozentrum, University of Basel and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Basel, Switzerland.
12. 12Department of Integrative Biology and Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
13. 13Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
14. 14Department of Biology and Department of Genetics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
15. 15Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.
16. 16Department of Medicine and Department of Microbiology & Immunology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
17. 17Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.The third part of the series notes in passing that Baric “was one of the signatories calling for more investigation into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus” without any further mention of the document he signed or acknowledgment of the implications of his signature.
And the series never acknowledges that every single scientist participating in gain of function research has a conflict of interest on the subject of C19’s origins. That doesn’t mean they are wrong, and of course they are going to be some of the people with the most knowledge on the subject, but it standard practice to acknowledge such things, and I have never seen that in any article by the WSWS.
This series also doesn’t give any indication that gain of function research is dangerous and legitimately controversial. Instead we are told, “gain-of-function experiments, another hobby horse of the “lab leak” proponents, are efforts to determine different ways that a virus can strengthen its infectiveness, in order to anticipate the future development of dangerous pathogens.”
For those who don’t know, as this exert from Wikipedia notes, there have been literally hundreds of scientists with grave concerns about this “hobby horse” well before C19:
The Cambridge Working Group was formed by Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch with fellow scientists at a meeting held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, following a “trifecta” of biosecurity incidents involving the CDC, including the accidental exposure of viable anthrax to personnel at CDC’s Roybal Campus,[40][41] the discovery of six vials containing viable smallpox from the 1950s mislabeled as Variola at the FDA’s White Oak campus,[42] and the accidental shipping of H9N2 vials contaminated with H5N1 from the CDC lab to a USDA lab.[43]
On July 14, 2014, the group published a Consensus Statement authored by 18 founding members, including Amir Attaran, Barry Bloom, Arturo Casadevall, Richard H. Ebright, Alison Galvani, Edward Hammond, Thomas Inglesby, Michael Osterholm, David Relman, Richard Roberts, Marcel Salathé and Silja Vöneky. Since its initial publication, over 300 scientists, academics, and physicians have added their signature.[44][45]
The statement advocates for all work involving potential pandemic pathogens to be halted until a quantitative and objective assessment of the risks has been undertaken. It then argues that alternative approaches that do not involve such risks should be used instead.[44][46][47]
The group engaged in public advocacy, influencing the US Government’s decision in Dec 2015 to issue a moratorium on funding research creating certain types of novel potential pandemic pathogens.Are we to believe that these 300 plus scientists are all members of the far right setting up in advance an attack on Dr. Shi Zhengli regarding a virus not yet in existence when the group was formed?
And where does the funding for gain of function research come from? Even the racist Wade admitted that any lab origin theory necessarily pointed back at the United States. USAID, an organization that has been characterized by the WSWS as a CIA front, gave money to Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, which helped fund WIV, in addition to whatever it does within the United States and around the globe.
The virus may well be entirely from nature. But if it isn’t, hasn’t the WSWS just written a brief that seeks the exoneration of the US intelligence agencies? Daszak has already thanked the WSWS for its coverage, as proudly reported by the WSWS on June 3!
The one mistake above is that listed here:
“Are we to believe that these 300 plus scientists are all members of the far right setting up in advance an attack on Dr. Shi Zhengli regarding a virus not yet in existence when the group was formed?”
In fact, Dr. Shi Zhengli had already formed Coronavirus chimeras as early as 2008 if not earlier. The group he described, formed in 2014, formed later.
The commentator’s exposure of the WSWS’s open pride in receiving praise from an acknowledged CIA front and agent, EcoHealth Alliance’s Daszak, deserves the real praise of the WSWS readership. The editors of the WSWS owe the readership an apology and an explanation. Why have they boasted of receiving praise from a CIA front?
Furthermore, a recent Vanity Fair article proves that even intelligence agencies have publicly concluded that the virus comes from a laboratory while only 4 out of 8 have supported the Zoonotic hypothesis.
Another point to emphasize, in the interests of protecting the rights of scientists to argue, we should defend their rights regardless of which hypothesis they currently support. The scientific reasoning process may take more time for scientists dominated by religious or positivist ideology but this extra time provides for the gathering of evidence to strengthen the final conclusion. Marxists, however, should strongly criticize anyone who argues that one conclusion must be eliminated immediately based on the idea that an imperialist government like the US’s or a Stalinist government like China’s would never develop and use weapons against their own people! The suspicion must always target the government and not individual scientists, not accuse them of race-treason for opposing the Chinese government despite being of Chinese ancestry.
The response to the above from a WSWS supporter appears highly inflammatory and threatening:
Barbar hotpumpkinman • 2 months ago
1. But we have heard from the 18 and the best they could muster was an unfinished sentence “We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data”.
To call this an unfinished sentence either shows a weakness with grammar or, more likely, a much more serious opposition to scientific reasoning forming within the nano-bureaucracy. The hysterical anger evident in the rest of the comment points to the second hypothesis. Democratic Power, however impatient we may feel, must respond then with urgency.
A) Weirdly, they neglect to specify, sufficient data to do what, or who should provide it? This sets up for an open-ended witch-hunt designed (for political expediency) to remain discontented with any amount of data demonstrating its premise is baseless. Indeed it reeks heavily of the Iraqi WMDs trap, whereby the burden of proof is reversed upon the accused who is forced under threats of war to supply endless data to prove his innocence to the Star Chamber of insatiable inquisitors, who are already furiously divvying up the soon-to-be conquered oil-fields amongst themselves.
We have a big difference here, in that the “accused” are not a poor former colony but Chinese Stalinism and US imperialism. The accusations of a witch-hunt are an anarchist call to attack scientists while they investigate hard evidence for clues to fill in the missing parts of the picture. Those accusing the Gain of Function theorists of a witch-hunt, lies, and tyranny must provide evidence of an intermediary host. Otherwise, they must stand down and retract their threats to the scientific process. These do not represent a witch hunt but a legitimate search for truth. Likewise, those who support the Gain of Function theory must provide a “smoking gun” before arresting scientists for treason for suppressing evidence of laboratory Gain of Function manipulation of the evidence. This smoking gun exists, but they must bring it forward to the proper authorities and the media so an orderly investigation can bring to light the destructive inclinations of the ruling class.
B) They add no information of scientific value and in fact decrement from the sum of knowledge by implying that experts like Kristian Andersen have not taken the lab-leak/engineered virus hypothesis seriously, which is proven false by his subsequently published early email correspondence with Fauci.
They do not imply that Kristian Andersen has not taken the hypothesis seriously. This itself must be a joke or the actual beliefs of a caricature. His correspondence with Fauci and his association with the Howard Hughes endowment, in the mind of a revolutionary, should raise the highest suspicions. When General Colin Powell presented his argument to the UN for an invasion of Iraq, did General Powell deserve our respect as an expert in weapons and security, as Secretary of State of the US Federal Government? Didn’t he represent a deceitful advocate for imperialism? Dr. Fauci, the highest paid official in the U.S. federal government, like General Powell, now makes an argument before the international community. He reviewed all the evidence and he has sided with the Zoonotic theory, a clear sign that the interests of US imperialism are bound up with the Zoonotic theory and not a full investigation of the lab origins of the virus. The current retreat from this theory parallels the general retreat of US imperialism to safe ground, outside of Afghanistan, outside of Iraq, along with an open invitation to foreign powers to use secret weapons to attack a rising US-centered, international revolutionary movement.
C) At that time Andersen et al saw sufficient data to convince them the lab-leak/engineered virus hypothesis could be safely discounted and the 18 signatories have in the interim brought no evidence to alter the consensus on that. The accumulating scientific evidence uniformly points in only one direction.
Actually, Andersen, apparently an owner of a research laboratory at Scripps Research, (Why is it called Andersen Lab?) built upon the fortune of the Scripps family known for targeting working class audiences. The Scripps family owned the largest chain of newspapers in the United States, including: The Cincinnati Post, The Cleveland Press, The St. Louis Chronicle, The Toledo News-Bee, the Kansas City Star, The Los Angeles Record, The San Diego Sun, The San Francisco News, The Seattle Star, The Spokane Press, The Tacoma Times, and The Portland News. They founded their newspapers immediately after the end of the Reconstruction as tools of segregation and Westward expansion, combining racism and genocide to create the propaganda that would conquer the West. Today, The Scripps Corporation broadcasts in 170 countries, showing the wide reach of the corporations of the American empire. These newspapers and their associated broadcast stations all supported the crimes of U.S. imperialism: Westward expansion, segregation, the war on socialist ideas and the socialist movement, and inter-imperialist alliances for the conquest of smaller, poorer nations. Andersen’s research follows in this tradition, covering science in such a way so as to fool the working class and systematically eliminate socialist opposition.
D) In short, their statement reduces to a plea to give the CIA more time to confect a passable agit-prop narrative which will serve the pressing but self-evidently rotten political agenda of Yanki Imperialism, namely deflection of responsibility from itself by warmongering against the “enemy” nation which was already scheduled to be
liberateddestroyed in any case.
The 18 signatories of the document do not appear to support the CIA agenda or Yanki Imperialism. The accusation of these scientists of CIA allegiance or imperialist motives only serves to suppress their opinions during the debate. Rather than sow confusion, the socialist movement must elevate the population to the point where they can discuss the history of virology without this angry vitriol which only seeks to silence the debate through threats or acts of violence. The real targets of the socialist movement should be the heads of the top laboratories and the foundations that sponsor them, including the directors of imperialist state agencies related to contagious disease. These targets deserve a full investigation, imprisonment, and a full public exposure of their activities in the illegal development and use of biological weapons.
2. At least one signatory, Pamela Bjorkman, has since withdrawn her support for the letter, having belatedly recognised its politicised nature.
Pamela Bjorkman: “I thought the letter would have the effect of prompting more funding for searching for natural viruses in animal reservoirs, which I personally have always assumed represent the origin of SARS-CoV-2 infections in humans,” she said. “Perhaps naively, I did not anticipate that the letter would be used to promote the lab origin hypothesis.”
A letter from Marta Murphy, Bjorkman’s Administrative Assistant said: “Although she believes that SARS-CoV-2 more likely passed into humans from an animal source than from a lab, she is not an expert in determining the origins of viruses and therefore defers to experts in this area, strongly supporting their funding for origin studies,” said Murphy, who is also a lab coordinator at the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering of Caltech.
In other words, the point of the letter, as she proves, is far from the imperialist agenda that Barbar claims for it. It actually just got the signatures as part of a general consensus of scientists that they need more funding! Imperialists do not fund science properly and all scientists, regardless of their position on a US-China conflict, must confront the reality of imperialist greed and other destructive tendencies. Scientists want more funding for the research of both hypotheses, while imperialists and nano-bureaucrats want to shut down all scientific research and go on a hunch. Scientists believing in one hypothesis should not advocate for the defunding and the shutting down of the research of a contradictory hypothesis, since that would lead to a decline in funding for their own research. Also, further research into a contradictory hypothesis could bring to light evidence useful in proving their own hypothesis, thereby saving them time, money, and effort in collecting all the facts themselves. The nano-bureaucrats and the imperialists have a common agenda in opposition to science and act as natural allies in their war on the scientific community.
Bjorkman’s letters reveal that science depends on funding. If all the funding came from sources demanding scientists that agreed with a particular hypothesis, then all published scientists on the topic would agree with that one position. Could workers at a private car factory suddenly decide to build trains and other forms of public transport? No, because the investors have only provided money for the production of private cars. A change of production, whether of physical or intellectual commodities, depends first upon the existence of capital to finance the new form of production.
3. There is no special implication to Ralph Baric’s signature here: it is quite possible that he succumbed to political pressure and would prefer to carry on in his career, so signing up to this carefully tailored ostensible non-statement may have seemed a small penalty to pay to keep the Neo-McCarthyites off his back.
Actually, we must see Baric’s signature as an admission that he too depends on protections of democratic rights to free speech. Baric, as a scientist rather than a soldier, does engage in gun battles with scientists of the opposite point of view. He cannot advocate that cutting off of all funding to Gain of Function Origin theories because that would lead to the cutting of funding for Zoonotic Origin theories and the cutting of budgets for science in general. He cannot cut himself off so openly from the profession of the scientist, and so he must support the clearly political statement in favor of funding for research so neglected by capitalist society. Under capitalism, only the accumulation of personal wealth for the oligarchy receives priority.
4. “And the series never acknowledges that every single scientist participating in gain of function research has a conflict of interest on the subject of C19’s origins.” — This is utter nonsense, borne of circular logic. You assume (for no good reason & despite all evidence indicating a natural origin) that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of GoF research, therefore all those working in or near that field (namely the most qualified experts) are to be tarred with guilt by association and disbarred from discussing its origins, leaving a clear path for Pompeo, Bannon and such vile dregs to easily drown out the actual science with their blaring propaganda. Objectively, you are acting as their useful idiot in this pursuit.
Actually, if scientific evidence proves that Gain of Function research developed the viral weapon known as Covid-19, this would lead to a backlash and costly investigation of all scientific labs involved in Gain of Function research. This would lead, also, to dramatic cuts in funding for one of the few areas in biology receiving significant funding, the development of biological weapons. Naturally, if the military stands to gain, a lot of money will find its way to those labs. The development of drugs that enhance or elongate lives, on the contrary, only cost the establishment more money than they provide. They increase the costs of pensions, insurance paid by employers, and other costs borne by the capitalist class and the capitalist state. Weapons research, therefore, provides wages for many scientists who would otherwise find themselves underemployed in some other industry. This has a contradictory effect on science, however, since the increased funding also comes with an increased conflict of interest. These scientists must maintain the official political line, sacrificing their scientific authority, in order to defend their sliver of the budget. Great scientific progress, for this reason, very often comes from outside capitalist laboratories or university science departments: whether from abbots in monasteries, like Gregor Mendel, or clerks at patent offices, like Albert Einstein, or like Isaac Newton, a home-bound, unemployed writer after his university remained closed for two years due to plague.
5. Your tortured efforts to equate WSWS’ scientifically & politically reasoned position on this subject, via the funding of EHA, to a defence of the interests of US intelligence agencies, are simply ludicrous.
Actually, even among other real-life caricatures, Barbar stands out as particularly funny. His defense of US intelligence and his making light of attacks against free speech show he has come to the revolutionary movement only as a victim of a joke. Clearly his position alone seeks to starve science of funds, punish scientists for their opinion, and limit debate in general to beneficiaries of conflicts-of-interest, that is bourgeois agents. Such beneficiaries cannot seriously stand up for their positions and if they cared about you they would have recused themselves far earlier.
6. Should Dr. Daszak not appreciate the accurate coverage of WSWS, a lonely rock of reason sticking up in a boiling sea of bourgeois lies and misinfo? You are affronted by the scent of an accused witch, eh? Get used to it is my best advice.
Dr. Daszak has as his main interest the division of the left using pseudo-science combined with a demand for conformity. Dr. Daszak could argue the Earth is flat and praise the nano-bureaucracy, and Barbar would start to argue for a flat-Earth theory. Bourgeois intellectuals can see the weakness of the socialist movement, the lack of democracy and the tendency towards bureaucratic conformity. This weakness, thanks to Barbar and the whole nano-bureaucracy, threatens to undo decades of intellectual struggles against bourgeois ideology within the revolutionary movement. Only an affirmation of the principles defended by Democratic Power, the expulsion of nano-bureaucrats, and the entrance into leading committees of Democratic Power can overturn this concerted effort against science, Marxism, and democratic, i.e. legal, working class control over the revolutionary party. Without a legal Marxist party to participate in public debate, the reaction gains a great advantage.
Besides the above critical comment by hotpumpkinman quoted above, we also have this more succinct criticism by John.McLaughlin:
John.McLaughlin • 2 months ago
From Nobel Prize winners to top virologists, there is still a very convincing case (despite this 3-part series) to be made for a helpful human hand in bringing this virus into final form…..even though it hasn’t been, and never will be, publicly admitted to.
Destroyed evidence from the WIV and outright obfuscation by the Chinese authorities only heighten the suspicions about Wuhan specifically…..but it’s true they aren’t the only candidates.
Barbar John.McLaughlin • 2 months ago
Funny that no-one, including yourself, is bothering to make that “very convincing case” then.
Don’t forget to provide the sources if you ever get around to having more than a lazy passing stab.
Despite McLaughlin bravely disagreeing with nano-bureaucrats and Barbar defending them, McLaughlin received two upvotes to Barbar’s one, while Barbar received three down-votes. The nano-bureaucracy loses votes in its own forum, and for that reason it must strictly control debate and prevent an expression of the general position of the membership with regard to the nano-bureaucracy. Furthermore, as McLaughlin points out, the silencing of debate seems to serve the US intelligence establishment, since a trail of evidence leads back to US involvement.
So after over a year of extensive searching, there is no known zoonotic source for this virus. Furthermore, the Wuhan lab and its coronavirus experiments aren’t really all that likely either.
Maybe time to take a closer look at Fort Detrick?
The Covid Bioweapon, Made in the USA, Aimed at China; by Mike Whitney & Ron Unz
Significantly, the WSWS would have us turn to Ron Unz for factual reporting. Ron Unz, widely reported on in the media, actually sells holocaust denial books on his website. Since the WSWS refuses to present the facts on secret weapons programs, then the readers are left to sift through holocaust denial websites. This denialism of Covid-19, this endless “forensics”, indirectly benefits denialism of the crimes of Nazi Germany, of the use of Zyklon B, serving to further benefit their return to mass politics and even to their open conquest of power.
This also falls into line with the left infantile disorder or Blanquism of the WSWS that provided indirect support for January 6th. Supposedly, a small party is better for the revolution, since it’s not the workers through mass participation with the party but a small sect that takes the power! The ICFI must return to Leninism and turn to the working class as the only means of carrying out a revolution against capitalism and of beginning the construction of socialism. While the Bolsheviks at times had few members, by 1917 they had hundreds of thousands of members, including representatives in the Duma, the elected legislative body of Tsarist Russia. The SEP does not even have a town council member, and this proves not that the workers do not want a socialist representative but that the SEP has abandoned Bolshevism for Blanquism and the anti-democratic politics of January 6th. This connection to Ron Unz emerges as a symptom of the deeper infection of the party with bourgeois, anti-Marxist ideology.
We see here the confused support the WSWS has received:
FireintheHead • 2 months ago • edited
Thanks Benjamin for your obvious hard work on this situation . A mind [sic] field of complexity that is ripe for nefarious exploitation.
Even if we put the central argument aside, other glaring factors and questions exist.
That bacterias and viruses are researched for their ‘weaponising’ potential by ‘any’ nation state is testament to only one conclusion. That the nation state system must come to an end.
So when push comes to shove, this whole debate from the point of view of the interest of the world working class boils down to only one course of action.
The ending of capitalism based on the nation state system and the political overthrow of its apologists ie Stalinism.
While thanking “Benjamin” for his “obvious hard work”, FireintheHead concludes we must “put the central argument aside.” That biological weapons exist and prove the necessity of a world revolution contradicts the WSWS’s central argument: biological weapons do not exist and the state should gain greater surveillance power without any concurrent investigation and exposure of their biological and other secret weapons capabilities. This protection for the state serves to perpetuate capitalism at the expense of the working class, which the WSWS betrays with only disguised, weak protests in its comments section. What explains this? Another commentator, Will C, makes the same observation, not directly in response to FireintheHead, but seemingly so:
It is not that people don’t write critical comments it is that the WSWS censors often won’t allow people to post comments that criticize their articles. They WSWS curate the comments as to not expose their audience to facts that contradict their propaganda. I know I will get hate for this comment but it is true.
In the very comments section of the WSWS, we see that a rebellion within the ranks of the party has taken place. This finds no expression in the leadership committees of the party or the editorial statements of the WSWS itself. This rebellion has exposed the reactionary methods of the WSWS, which will without doubt form the basis for their reactionary conclusions. Only a direct confrontation with reactionary methods used to control debate within the party will free the party to reach revolutionary conclusions. Will C and others have attempted this, but this revolutionary method of exposure of the reaction must go further and never cease. At a certain point, the pressure on the nano-bureaucracy will break it and the working class will enter the party based on its new stronger foundation. A foundation of Marxist politics will intrinsically reject reactionary character assassination, an abuse of moderation privileges that accepts verbal abuse, and bureaucratization of the democratic process. The elimination of these methods of nano-bureaucratic control, the political weapon trained against revolutionary leadership, will open the road for a massive growth of the ICFI as the world party of the working class revolution.
Conclusion:
A twisted argument revealing the isolation the WSWS has brought upon itself.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/01/chin-s01.html
A little over 2 months after the series of articles misrepresenting virology appeared on the WSWS, the Chinese government, in the person of Ambassador Chen Xu, wrote a letter to the WHO exposing US involvement in virological “gain-of-function” research at the University of North Carolina and at Fort Detrick.
These two arguments can be found here:
The argument about University of North Carolina and Dr. Baric: http://www.china.org.cn/world/2021-08/26/content_77714870.htm
The argument about Fort Detrick and USAMRIID: https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202108/26/WS6126ddaba310efa1bd66b2a9.html
The USAMRIID lab also had connections to the Anthrax attacks in 2001 and began research on constructing, using synthetic biology, Coronaviruses immediately after the SARS outbreak of 2003. These short “non-papers” deserve a full read-through and a full reply. Instead, the WSWS has engaged in imperialist propaganda for the US government, attempting to cover up its responsibility.
To quote the non-paper: “[Fort Detrick] remains the development center for US germ warfare research, even after US renouncement of all offensive biological weapons programs in 1969 and ratification to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1975.”
To quote Wikipedia on the use of gas weapons during World War I: “The use of poison gas by all major belligerents throughout World War I constituted war crimes as its use violated the 1899 Hague Declaration Concerning Asphyxiating Gases and the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare, which prohibited the use of ‘poison or poisoned weapons’ in warfare.”
We can see from the comparison of these quotes that imperialism does not fight its wars legally but through war-crimes in direct contravention of its own agreements and conventions. This has to do with imperialism not being a choice made by politicians of any legislative body but by an economic need forced onto states and governments by capitalism, the economic system based on private ownership and private profit. They must break their own agreements and commit war crimes. Marxists emphasize the dominance of economic processes underlying the outcomes in conscious political processes.
Regardless of the facts, the WSWS, two months later, has learned nothing. In these quote from the same article in response to China’s letter, they show their complete apathy with regard to the facts:
Even if everything claimed about Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina were true, and much of it could be, that amounts to nothing more than circumstantial innuendo. To answer one conspiracy theory with another, one lie with another, only undermines China’s own claim to be basing itself on science, not politics.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/01/chin-s01.html
…the only means of halting the pandemic is through international collaboration to forge a scientifically-based plan to eliminate the virus throughout the world. From that standpoint, the Fort Detrick conspiracy theory is reactionary. It fosters divisions between the Chinese workers and American workers and cuts across the international working-class unity needed to combat the pandemic.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/01/chin-s01.html
In fact, as Lenin argued, every revolutionary must oppose their own government in an imperialist conflict. That means that Chinese workers should call for an investigation into and public reports on Chinese biological weapons programs and American workers should demand an investigation into and public reports on American biological weapons programs. Every imperialist country has them or a treaty with an ally that would use them on their behalf. Revolutionaries in other countries should demand investigations and public reports of those countries’ biological weapons programs and their secret treaties with regard to the “appropriate use” of biological weapons.
Despite the arguments of Peter Symonds and Dr. Benjamin Mateus, the facts do matter. A witch-hunt against “conspiracy theorists” aimed at the revolutionary movement undermines the security of the Fourth International by concealing from revolutionaries known weapons in the possession of imperialist governments and, of course, their agents. The divisions between imperialist states, like between the U.S. and China, rather than a source of concern, actually brings hope to the revolutionary movement. The facts exposed by the U.S. about Chinese weapons and by China about American weapons will not disappear. The greatest amount of coordination provided by the WSWS to the witch-hunt against real journalists and real scientists such as Dr. Richard Ebright, Katherine Eban, Dr. Alina Chan, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, Dr. Zeynep Tufekci and others will fail to erase these facts. The WSWS serves only chauvinism with its witch-hunt and with its defense of the US government’s Fort Detrick facilities against the charges of the Chinese government raised by Ambassador Chen Xu.
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