MERS

Dwyer: (0:00) Well look uhm ..it's happened with SARS, it’s happened with MERS ... uhm … so therefore uhmm ... that’s always been the pattern.

Well, no, it hasn’t, Dominic - we saw that the provenance of SARS is still unresolved, so that’s the end of the pattern theory. But for interest’s sake, what about MERS - the other example of a lethal coronavirus that you bring up?

Firstly, the ‘evidence’ of MERS's origin comes from a study conducted by none other than Lipkin and Daszak that claims MERS traveled from bats to camels to people. That’s a worry straight-off-the-bat.

Lipkin (and his team) was the sole external investigator invited by the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia to assist in identifying reservoirs and vectors for transmission of the MERS coronavirus.

If you're on sole-investigator terms with the Saudi regime, that's a worry. 

Daszak was also on that team.  Talk about patterns emerging  - if you’re a murderous totalitarian regime wanting to bury the origin of a coronavirus, better call Ian & Pete!

The fact that those two researchers were involved, is enough to dismiss their report, but let’s take a look anyway.

New York Times: In a paper published online by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a research team comprising veterinarians from EcoHealth Alliance, virologists from Columbia University and Saudi health officials said they had found a stretch of viral RNA in the feces of a bat that matched similar stretches of viral RNA found in humans infected with ..MERS.

Sounds ok on the surface.

New York Times:  But the matching fragment was found in only one bat. And it was a tiny sample: from a genome composed of about 30,000 base pairs, building blocks of genetic material, the matching fragment was only 190 base pairs long.

Why was it a tiny sample? According to:

Lipkin/Daszak et al’s paper: The Oct 2012 shipment was inadvertently opened at customs in the United States and sat at room temperature for 48 hours before transfer to Columbia University. At arrival, all samples had thawed.

Whoops! That sounds not good.

Lipkin/Daszak paper: (T)he sensitivity for viral nucleic acid detection in samples collected in October 2012 was probably reduced because of failure in cold chain transport. We were unable to recover additional sequences beyond the 190-nt RdRp fragment.

None of which stopped them from proclaiming: We are confident in the fidelity of the finding.

I’m not confident. Neither was Stanley Perlman, a virologist at the University of Iowa (or several other virologists). In the NYT article he said he:

...would have been more convinced by a match of at least 400 of the base pairs that encode the virus’s surface spikes, which mutate frequently; the 190-pair match was for viral replication machinery, which mutates less.

Hmm, so, a shady trip to Saudia Arabia at the exclusive invitation of a totalitarian regime - where the samples thawed out and were rendered useless in terms of making a definitive conclusion. But you made one anyway.

There were other MERS studies claiming a bat-camel-human provenance - but they're also mired in controversy.

Science: The Saudi scientists said they had .. sequenced the virus directly from samples taken from the patient and the camel—and those two were also 100% identical. But the two sets of sequences differed in two positions.

That's impossible to explain, (Christian) Drosten says; a virus can change slightly when put into cell culture, but why would the camel and the human virus show exactly the same two changes when cultured, changes never seen before?

Good question.

Science: Drosten suspected that contamination had happened, and that what the researchers called the camel virus was actually the human virus as well.

Thomas Briese, virologist at Columbia University, Lipkin colleague (One Health editorial board), said although the duplication seemed unlikely he "can not exclude the possibility". In other words, offering partial support to the Saudi scientists.

Science: Frustrated, Drosten stopped working with Madani’s group in mid-December.

Michael Osterholm, University of Minnesota: It really is a sign of the overall scientific investigation dysfunction that has occurred to date in Saudi Arabia.

The kindest thing you could say is that the Saudi MERS studies have been bungling affairs.

An alternative conclusion is that it was scientific deceit. 

So why have Dwyer, Lipkin, Daszak, and Saudi scientists been fudging data to try and pin the MERS origin on the bat-camel-human transmission chain?  I don't know. But there will be a good reason.  Not say that camels may not be involved, but it's a sci-lie to saying it's certain.  That's far from the truth.

Therefore:

Dwyer’s conclusion that it was: Extremely unlikely the virus escaped from a lab (and that it) .. most likely arose in bats, and then spread to humans via an as-yet unidentified intermediary animal ...

because:

(0:10) we have many other viruses that have clearly gone from bats into animals into humans .. it happened with SARS, it happened with MERS ...

Is: demonstrably wrong.

Not only is it wrong, it’s inconceivable that Dwyer, a supposed expert in coronaviruses, didn't know it was wrong when he was repeatedly advancing it on all major media platforms.

On the flip-side, we can still draw conclusions from Dwyer’s deceitfulness:

You are using your power/privilege, funded by the public's money - to lie - on the world's biggest stage - about the origin of Covid - at a time when we needed our experts to tell the truth.   These lies cost millions of lives.  What would make a person do that?