falsification

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Yes, my April 1 post was an April fool’s post, written entirely, and surprisingly, by ChatGPT who was in on the gag. This post is not, although it concerns another kind of “leak”. It’s a reblog of a post. from 4 years ago about “the mysteries of the mine” which captivated me during the pandemic.  I was reminded of the saga when I came across a New York Times article last month co-written by Ralph Baric. Baric, the mastermind of an important reverse engineering technique to modify the capacity of viruses to infect humans, is now warning us that “Virus Research Should raise the Alarm”. What alarms him is that the same kind of bat virus research, by the same people, at the same Wuhan lab, is still being conducted at inadequate (BSL-2) safety levels. But let’s go back to a mysterious event in an abandoned mine in China in 2012.
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Have you ever wondered if people read Master’s (or even Ph.D) theses a decade out? Whether or not you have, I think you will be intrigued to learn the story of why an obscure Master’s thesis from 2012, translated from Chinese in 2020, is now an integral key for unravelling the puzzle of the global controversy about the mechanism and origins of Covid-19. The Master’s thesis by a doctor, Li Xu [1], “The Analysis of 6 Patients with Severe Pneumonia Caused by Unknown Viruses”, describes 6 patients he helped to treat after they entered a hospital in 2012, one after the other, suffering from an atypical pneumonia from cleaning up after bats in an abandoned copper mine in China. Given the keen interest in finding the origin of the 2002–2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, Li wrote: “This makes the research of the bats in the mine where the six miners worked and later suffered from severe pneumonia caused by unknown virus a significant research topic”. He and the other doctors treating the mine cleaners hypothesized that their diseases were caused by a SARS-like coronavirus from having been in close proximity to the bats in the mine. Continue reading →