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biorealism.bsky.social
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🧪On covid origins, Angus McCowan has just posted a preprint showing that the two-spillovers story on which the market account rested was based on an explicit mathematical error. Using the data and model of the orignal 2-spill paper, fixing the error reverses the conclusion. arxiv.org/html/2502.20...

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

The nail in the coffin for the double spillover nonsense from Pekar et al: academic.oup.com/ve/article/1... "Working within the Pekar 2022 model and data set, Angus has shown that fixing a plain error in mathematical logic reverses the conclusion." (h/t Michael Weissman) arxiv.org/html/2502.20...

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

On covid origins , Angus McCowan has just posted a preprint showing that the two-spillovers story on which the market account rested was based on an explicit mathematical error. Using the data and model of the orignal 2-spill paper, fixing the error reverses the conclusion. arxiv.org/html/2502.20...

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Angus McCowan: Purported quantitative support for multiple introductions of SARS-CoV-2 into humans is an artefact of an imbalanced hypothesis testing framework https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20076 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20076 https://arxiv.org/html/2502.20076

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Michael Weissman: Just to make sure that people understand, this is not about some judgment call. Working within the Pekar 2022 model and data set, Angus has shown that fixing a plain error in mathematical logic reverses the conclusion. arxiv.org/abs/2502.20076

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Whatever the case, a number of peer-reviewed studies show the argument for Huanan Seafood Market origin rests on biased and incomplete early case data. Hence WHO continues to press for data on both the animal trade and Wuhan labs.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Michael Weissman: What is most striking about Levin’s results is that the unlinked case home address location-time pairs point rather strongly away from the Huanan Seafood Market story unlike the common lore that they point extremely strongly toward the HSM story. substack.com/home/post/p-...

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

There is considerable circumstantial evidence that Paul could point to. Not determinative though and will probably require a credible whistleblower to resolve either way as the late Phil Russell suggested.

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

It's worth noting that the arguments Professor Holmes has put forward to support Huanan Seafood Market origin for SARS-CoV-2 have been seriously challenged over the past 18 months. Particularly, Levin (2025), Chen et al (2024), Bloom (2024), Weissman (2024) and Lv et al (2024).

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Michael Weissman: "Andy Levin has done a though analysis of spatiotemporal data. tl;dr Worobey et al results reverse direction when case time is included in the model. Wipes out last pillar of market story."

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

This has got to be of much concern

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

Andy Levin: odds ratio is 14,900:1, indicating overwhelming evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the pandemic resulted from an accidental lab leak. This conclusion is robust to alternative specifications of the detailed statistical analysis." www.nber.org/papers/w33428

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

Our paper on empirical Bayesian estimation of effect size rankings (in GWAS) is now published onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

submitted 57 days ago • 1 comment

Interview with Yoav Benjamini. At around 5 minutes in he tells the story of how the False-Discovery Rate was published. It took 5 years of submissions and reviews, across three different journals, before it was accepted!

submitted 45 days ago • 0 comments

"As DRASTIC grew, we uncovered more details. I found  patents related to the Wuhan lab’s bat-breeding programme that suggested it was struggling to maintain adequate safety levels." t.co/8rl6xbi517

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

"Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time. In the final weeks of the Biden administration, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, ordered a new classified review of the pandemic’s origin."

submitted 36 days ago • 11 comments

Now on the seventh generation, the tauros cattle, as they have been named, are more than 99% genetically similar to the extinct aurochs. The animals display physical and behavioral changes, such as how they respond to predators like wolves, over time. edition.cnn.com/2025/01/16/s...

submitted 36 days ago • 0 comments

The CIA says the Covid-19 pandemic “more likely” originated from a lab leak than a natural source, shifting its stance after previously saying both scenarios were possible.

submitted 36 days ago • 108 comments

CIA believes the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of an accidental lab leak in China, per assessment just declassified by Trump's new CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Note: the assessment was started under the Biden administration

submitted 36 days ago • 109 comments

Edward Holmes responded to the CIA assessment COVID-19 has a lab origin pointing out there is no evidence the virus was in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. However, they sampled Yunnan and Laos where the nearest relatives are found. Holmes previously said unless a whistleblower would be necessary.

submitted 36 days ago • 1 comment

Christian Drosten on DEFUSE: They wanted to bring SARS viruses from bats into the laboratory and isolate them...they wanted to artificially insert a furin cleavage site into them. From this perspective, that is certainly worrying. archive.is/2025.01.25-2...

submitted 36 days ago • 0 comments

C.I.A. Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid’s Origins A new analysis that began under the Biden administration is released by the C.I.A.’s new director, John Ratcliffe, who wants the agency to get “off the sidelines” in the debate www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/u...

submitted 36 days ago • 0 comments

Not that it much matters, but I agree with the decision to bar Peter Dazsak from federal funding. He led the EcoHealth Alliance, which failed to honor terms of its HHS grant agreements while funding its virology work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology pre-covid19. Daszak also acted like a […]

submitted 40 days ago • 0 comments