Daszak's Unique (COI) Position

Bat Lady (Shi Zheng-li), The Dark Knight (Linfa Wang), & Batman (Pete)

Peter Daszak - The Guardian

Our 15 years of work in China now puts us in a unique position to identify, with a remarkable degree of confidence, the likely origin of Covid-19.  

Agreed - it does.  It also puts you in a unique conflict of interest position - whereby one might be tempted to suppress incriminating evidence and spread disinformation in order to cover one’s unique arse.

(W)e reported 781 genetic sequences of bat-origin coronaviruses previously unknown to scientists (including) the closest known relatives to Sars-CoV-2.

Good job.   Again confirming that the closest known relatives (not only RaTG13) to SARS-Cov-2 were held at WIV ... prior to the Covid outbreak.  That bears repeating, not only RaTG13, but other undisclosed bat viruses collected from all over the SE Asia "hotspots" were held at the Bat Lab. 

If you have other viruses at WIV closely related to Covid, why haven't you released them?  Sorry, made them public is better phrasing, coz you may well have released them, right?  With a few modifications.

All are carried by horseshoe bats that are found across southern China (1000 kilometres away) and neighbouring countries. (even further  away)

But not Wuhan.  That’s why Bat Lady thought it had leaked from the lab. 

Our report firmly concludes that Covid-19 originated in bats, in a hotspot of viral evolution along the border of Yunnan province in China, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam.

Hang on Pete, that’s illogical and/or misleading.   All it proves is that Covid is related to a strain of virus that the Bat Pack held at WIV, which we already suspected & you've now horse's-mouth confirmed.  Still don't know all the different kinds or what crazy GoF-shit you had cooking-up with them though.  We don't know that coz the database was taken down on Sep 12, 2019.  

Whatever: it definitely doesn’t prove the geographical origin of the outbreak to have been 1000s of ks away from where it actually broke-out - right-next-door to the Bat Lab in Wuhan.

Unfortunately, this sort of logic (illogical logic) will not deter conspiracy theorists (such as former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove, the guy you're arguing with).

You're right there, Pete, it won't deter us from getting to The Origin of Covid.  If anything, it casts more suspicion on WIV - the real "hotspot" of viral evolution - with a little evolutionary help from your friends. 

You were all there busily GoFFing-up viruses, to make them contagious to humans (to get more funding, weirdly), when, against all your predictions, there was an outbreak in Wuhan, right-next-door to the Bat Lab.  

Now you want to rule out a leak from WIV?   That’s not logical. 

RatG13, the closest known relative to SARS-Cov-2, was collected from the same Yunnan cave where 6 miners contracted a suspected SARS-like illness in 2012 according to a Kun Ming Medical University paper at the time.   Three of them died.

On one hand, WIV scientists (Shi Zhengli) dismissed that 2102 report as being neither based on evidence nor logic, (b)ut used by conspiracy theorists to doubt me, saying the miners merely had a fungal infection, not a coronavirus.

On the other hand, they’re (EHA/WIV) saying, with a remarkable degree of confidence, that the same viruses collected from that cave, the closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2, are responsible for the super-contagious-to-humans virus, Covid.   Those propositions are contradictory. 

For the record, there is no firm evidence that a deadly bat-coronavirus has ever directly infected a human in the wild & become contagious to other humans.  Despite what you hear.  The narrative always involves some mysterious intermediary species.  The more we investigate the origin of Covid, the more that intermediary species looks to be THE Scientists themselves.