Bravo!!! Outstanding writing Dr Rasmussen. Excellent analysis. What I get frustrated with as well is the few times Dr Jay Bhatt has been to testify before the Senate except for a few harder questions, he gets all soft balls!! The Dems should get together & decide who will ask what questions and for for pete's sake challenge him more than what you do!! Geesh.
In your 1 in 100 billion estimate, did you take account of the fact that SARS is known to have leaked from labs four times, including twice from the same lab in Beijing?
Yes, worrying isn't it. This is the problem with these BS papers; they are used by the most ignorant members of the public, I don't blame them given the level of publicity the lab leak theory has been given, to confirm their ill informed biases.
So anybody, often tin foil hat folk, gravitate to a certain set of sources who direct them, making them feel all sciency and objective to these amateurish, incompetent and frankly 'faux science' papers. Often printed in what are called predatory journals who look legit but aren't.
One of the best papers I ever read from a peer reviewjournal I believe I was the first and maybe only person to have read other than reviewers and the editor. One paper by Kurt Godel, which solved a major problem in my own field, suffers to date the same fate. I even tell people where I got my idea, nobody cares!! I can't remember the last time I saw somebody reference or cite it in fact, despite Kurt's fame. Thanks for pointing the issue out. We are swimming in mis information.
ResearchGate and zenodo and arxiv are not predatory journals, they are just academic repositories with community sharing functions where researchers can upload their reports and investigations. The problem is that with "lab leak" reports or papers, more often than not they will not get published in normal journals because of the controversy, or it will take years sometimes, e.g. Alina Chan's paper. Surely you know all that?
Anyone smart enough to evaluate evidence for themselves can read and review the papers. Billy’s citations are correct, the papers Angela’s citing for her argument have all been proven wrong (I mean proven - bugs in code, bad math, cherry picked samples, etc).
The more you lean on the crutch of some journals, the more those institutions will fall when it all comes out.
Yes, but would you expect them to be printed in Nature? The editor has made their position on the matter clear, and there is no chance Springer Nature would risk being cancelled by its biggest group of clients by far, universities owned by the Chinese government.
Hm.. This is what AI tells me about Springer's largest clients. Not seeing China there...but then again its just AI. Do you have actual insight into this? (I don't)
Springer Nature does not have a single individual client; instead, its largest clients are massive national research consortia and academic alliances that negotiate multi-million-dollar "read and publish" agreements.Its largest institutional customer accounts globally include:Projekt DEAL (Germany): Springer Nature's largest global transformative agreement by article volume is with Projekt DEAL, representing over 700 publicly and privately funded academic and research organizations in Germany.The University of California (USA): This is the largest open access agreement of its kind in North America, covering Springer Nature's entire journal portfolio for one of the world's largest research systems.National Consortia & University Alliances: Other major institutional customers globally include the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the Bibsam Consortium in Sweden, and NERL in the United States.
Chinese universities publish more scientific research papers than any other nation and the Chinese government owns and controls all Chinese universities, therefore the biggest client that scientific publications need to keep happy is the Chinese government.
There was also a major push of Chinese universities and other institutions paying Nature for advertorials from the start of the pandemic, for a couple of years.
Aside from scientific publications, Springer also publishes textbooks, with its biggest client also being the Chinese government.
That sounds like a reasonable iintial hypothesis. However, do you actually know anything about how publishing science journals works or how that Chinese actually decide what journals to pay etc...?
You don’t need to know the details of how publishing works to work out that journals make a big chunk of their income from customers controlled by the Chinese government.
Look at what happened to Australia when it called for an inquiry into the origin of Covid; China cancelled a raft of different exports from Australia, showing other countries (or organisations) what they could expect if they questioned China’s narrative.
If you personally were the CEO of Springer Nature, mindful that your biggest source of revenues is entities controlled by the Chinese government, would you allow impartial inquiries into the origin of Covid, given how critically embarrassing it would be if the Chinese Academy of Sciences had leaked Covid during a five year plan during which China was prioritising improving its science?
There are a lot of people who were previously uninformed, who are now also misinformed. And just because someone downloads a report, that does not mean that they have read it or understood it.
Wow--thank you! Not a very flattering picture of Matt I-prefer-reason Ridley! No surprise he was chosen to speak at NIH forum, but still stunning.
Is there any chance your essay could get a wider spread through publication in, for example, The Atlantic or other similar venue? This is a fantastic essay that deserves a huge audience.
Simple people have seen many times in the movies how sinister scientists in government guarded buildings do nefarious experiments on strange equipment. Then zombies, dinosaurs, killer robots, deadly viruses, mutant rats, sharks, or giraffes come out of there to eat people like them.
I am not a virologist, so neither my funding nor my reputation depends on whether SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally or through a laboratory incident. Here are ten reasons that, in my view, prove a lab origin beyond reasonable doubt. I am referring primarily to very robust, hard-to-manipulate molecular evidence — not to debunked papers or speculative inferences drawn from data released by the CCP.
Appreciate the super detailed explanation here. I don’t really have a dog in the fight on the lab leak vs. zoonotic debate. Doesn’t the fact that we’re having the debate at all indicate that a). international pressure should be ramped up to actually kill wet markets and b). gain of function research seems like a genuinely bad idea, especially since mRNA technology now allows us to get to vaccines for arbitrary viruses more quickly than we once could have? My take is basically if we think something plausibly could have led to a global pandemic, we should stop doing that thing, regardless of whether it actually did cause it. Curious what your thoughts are on that. Fully agree that naming and shaming scientists is completely inappropriate without damning evidence of malfeasance or neglect.
We are in 100% agreement on stopping both gof & the wildlife trade, but both are hard to kill. Virologists rightly fear that their careers will be deeply impacted if it's shown that the virus origin was from a lab activity. That's why they've been so strident promoting a zoonotic origin. Not discussed in the article: the US government was funding this work; they want to avoid culpability and liability so they've been stalling on releasing information.
I'll add: there's only a small fraction of virology research being done in the world that needs oversight and regulation. Most of it is useful and poses no threat to humanity. Only a few cowboys out there.
Thank you so much for expending the time and effort to write this! Even with my minimal virology knowledge I suspected that it was market based and not lab. I gave up trying to find the right answer because of all the quacks out there. This proves it was the market as much as we will ever be able to, unless the lab admits to something. This is very well written for even MAGA to understand (if they wanted to, which they don't). I'm sorry you are not feeling well! Please be at peace with this and stop fighting the cult members. You'll never change their minds and it's not worth making your health worse from the stress! Your answers to online comments were exactly right. You can't fight MAGA with politeness, they don't understand or respect it. The rest of us respect righteous indignation and so as long as it doesn't raise your stress levels, bring it on. :-) Blessings!
Love the prose, and the tone, and the painting. I was at UNC last week and colleagues told me that the eminent scientist Ralph Baric’s life has been made hell by these accusations (my words, not theirs). Shame on the conspiracists, and bravo to scientists. We will find a way to resurrect science as logic, but it is going to take a lot more talking, writing, arguing, being at the table.
I’ve always maintained COVID 19 was zoonotic. It makes perfect sense in an overcrowded world hellbent on destroying itself.
Life is opportunistic. All life including viruses. Survival is stubborn and all life tries to survive by hook or by crook just as a single weed will appear from a crack in the shopping center parking lot. I remember when SARS came around. Had a friend whose mother died of it. Same manner of death we heard endlessly through COVID 19 only 20 something years earlier. Anyone with 2 brain cells knew we dodged a bullet. It took 20 more years but that shopping center weed did find another way.
I’m amazed we’ve been this lucky to avoid worse. I also believe the clock is ticking and far worse is just over the horizon of ignorant arrogance.
This is the most straight forward explanation that a lay person such as my self can follow and understand. Thank you so much for providing this.
Bravo!!! Outstanding writing Dr Rasmussen. Excellent analysis. What I get frustrated with as well is the few times Dr Jay Bhatt has been to testify before the Senate except for a few harder questions, he gets all soft balls!! The Dems should get together & decide who will ask what questions and for for pete's sake challenge him more than what you do!! Geesh.
Great summary, Angie. I took another approach and estimated the probability this could have come from a lab. I get 1 in 100 billion.
https://drbobmorris.substack.com/p/a-deck-full-of-aces
https://drbobmorris.substack.com/p/ten-trillion-mice-and-the-jenga-tower?r=c5emj
In your 1 in 100 billion estimate, did you take account of the fact that SARS is known to have leaked from labs four times, including twice from the same lab in Beijing?
😂😂😂😂😂
The claims above have been shown to be false here:
Weissman (2026)
https://econjwatch.org/file_download/1405/WeissmanMarch2026.pdf?mimetype=pdf
Stoyan & Chiu
https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr537695
Levin
https://nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33428/w33428.pdf
Critiques of your evidence:
Worobey/Pekar
https://researchgate.net/publication/381429602_COVID_Origins_Worobey_et_al_2022_and_Pekar_et_al_2022_Retraction_Request
and
https://researchgate.net/publication/364324900_Zoonosis_at_the_Huanan_Seafood_Market_A_Critique
Pekar
https://researchgate.net/publication/391807760_Critical_Evaluation_of_the_Methodological_and_Evidential_Shortcomings_in_Pekar_et_al_2025
Havens
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/401826874_A_Critical_Examination_of_Three_Related_Studies_on_SARS-CoV-2_Origins/stats
Preprints mostly right?
yup, mostly unreviewed 'publications' from a nonexistent 'lab'
The non existent lab's reports have half a million reads and downloads!
Yes, worrying isn't it. This is the problem with these BS papers; they are used by the most ignorant members of the public, I don't blame them given the level of publicity the lab leak theory has been given, to confirm their ill informed biases.
So anybody, often tin foil hat folk, gravitate to a certain set of sources who direct them, making them feel all sciency and objective to these amateurish, incompetent and frankly 'faux science' papers. Often printed in what are called predatory journals who look legit but aren't.
One of the best papers I ever read from a peer reviewjournal I believe I was the first and maybe only person to have read other than reviewers and the editor. One paper by Kurt Godel, which solved a major problem in my own field, suffers to date the same fate. I even tell people where I got my idea, nobody cares!! I can't remember the last time I saw somebody reference or cite it in fact, despite Kurt's fame. Thanks for pointing the issue out. We are swimming in mis information.
ResearchGate and zenodo and arxiv are not predatory journals, they are just academic repositories with community sharing functions where researchers can upload their reports and investigations. The problem is that with "lab leak" reports or papers, more often than not they will not get published in normal journals because of the controversy, or it will take years sometimes, e.g. Alina Chan's paper. Surely you know all that?
Anyone smart enough to evaluate evidence for themselves can read and review the papers. Billy’s citations are correct, the papers Angela’s citing for her argument have all been proven wrong (I mean proven - bugs in code, bad math, cherry picked samples, etc).
The more you lean on the crutch of some journals, the more those institutions will fall when it all comes out.
Yes, but would you expect them to be printed in Nature? The editor has made their position on the matter clear, and there is no chance Springer Nature would risk being cancelled by its biggest group of clients by far, universities owned by the Chinese government.
Hm.. This is what AI tells me about Springer's largest clients. Not seeing China there...but then again its just AI. Do you have actual insight into this? (I don't)
Springer Nature does not have a single individual client; instead, its largest clients are massive national research consortia and academic alliances that negotiate multi-million-dollar "read and publish" agreements.Its largest institutional customer accounts globally include:Projekt DEAL (Germany): Springer Nature's largest global transformative agreement by article volume is with Projekt DEAL, representing over 700 publicly and privately funded academic and research organizations in Germany.The University of California (USA): This is the largest open access agreement of its kind in North America, covering Springer Nature's entire journal portfolio for one of the world's largest research systems.National Consortia & University Alliances: Other major institutional customers globally include the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the Bibsam Consortium in Sweden, and NERL in the United States.
Chinese universities publish more scientific research papers than any other nation and the Chinese government owns and controls all Chinese universities, therefore the biggest client that scientific publications need to keep happy is the Chinese government.
There was also a major push of Chinese universities and other institutions paying Nature for advertorials from the start of the pandemic, for a couple of years.
Aside from scientific publications, Springer also publishes textbooks, with its biggest client also being the Chinese government.
That sounds like a reasonable iintial hypothesis. However, do you actually know anything about how publishing science journals works or how that Chinese actually decide what journals to pay etc...?
You don’t need to know the details of how publishing works to work out that journals make a big chunk of their income from customers controlled by the Chinese government.
Look at what happened to Australia when it called for an inquiry into the origin of Covid; China cancelled a raft of different exports from Australia, showing other countries (or organisations) what they could expect if they questioned China’s narrative.
If you personally were the CEO of Springer Nature, mindful that your biggest source of revenues is entities controlled by the Chinese government, would you allow impartial inquiries into the origin of Covid, given how critically embarrassing it would be if the Chinese Academy of Sciences had leaked Covid during a five year plan during which China was prioritising improving its science?
You don't have to read them if you don't want to!
There are a lot of people who were previously uninformed, who are now also misinformed. And just because someone downloads a report, that does not mean that they have read it or understood it.
Is that some kind of confession on your part?
Good quip!
I don't see that any of these "papers" were actually ever published anywhere.
Wow--thank you! Not a very flattering picture of Matt I-prefer-reason Ridley! No surprise he was chosen to speak at NIH forum, but still stunning.
Is there any chance your essay could get a wider spread through publication in, for example, The Atlantic or other similar venue? This is a fantastic essay that deserves a huge audience.
Simple people have seen many times in the movies how sinister scientists in government guarded buildings do nefarious experiments on strange equipment. Then zombies, dinosaurs, killer robots, deadly viruses, mutant rats, sharks, or giraffes come out of there to eat people like them.
Good luck trying to tell them this isn’t true.
I am not a virologist, so neither my funding nor my reputation depends on whether SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally or through a laboratory incident. Here are ten reasons that, in my view, prove a lab origin beyond reasonable doubt. I am referring primarily to very robust, hard-to-manipulate molecular evidence — not to debunked papers or speculative inferences drawn from data released by the CCP.
https://vbruttel.substack.com/p/why-sars-cov-2-was-a-lab-manipulated
Sadly, folks just love conspiracy hypotheses. (They call them "theories" so that they can pretend there is some evidence to support their ideas).
Appreciate the super detailed explanation here. I don’t really have a dog in the fight on the lab leak vs. zoonotic debate. Doesn’t the fact that we’re having the debate at all indicate that a). international pressure should be ramped up to actually kill wet markets and b). gain of function research seems like a genuinely bad idea, especially since mRNA technology now allows us to get to vaccines for arbitrary viruses more quickly than we once could have? My take is basically if we think something plausibly could have led to a global pandemic, we should stop doing that thing, regardless of whether it actually did cause it. Curious what your thoughts are on that. Fully agree that naming and shaming scientists is completely inappropriate without damning evidence of malfeasance or neglect.
We are in 100% agreement on stopping both gof & the wildlife trade, but both are hard to kill. Virologists rightly fear that their careers will be deeply impacted if it's shown that the virus origin was from a lab activity. That's why they've been so strident promoting a zoonotic origin. Not discussed in the article: the US government was funding this work; they want to avoid culpability and liability so they've been stalling on releasing information.
I'll add: there's only a small fraction of virology research being done in the world that needs oversight and regulation. Most of it is useful and poses no threat to humanity. Only a few cowboys out there.
Nonsense on the "rightly fear...ergo".
Nonsense on the US govt funding....
Forgive me as I haven’t read the entirety of this well-researched piece, but I wanted to share this finding for consideration as well. It further supports the wet market hypothesis: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DV4T60sgFMv/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
BOOKMARKED for future reference.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for expending the time and effort to write this! Even with my minimal virology knowledge I suspected that it was market based and not lab. I gave up trying to find the right answer because of all the quacks out there. This proves it was the market as much as we will ever be able to, unless the lab admits to something. This is very well written for even MAGA to understand (if they wanted to, which they don't). I'm sorry you are not feeling well! Please be at peace with this and stop fighting the cult members. You'll never change their minds and it's not worth making your health worse from the stress! Your answers to online comments were exactly right. You can't fight MAGA with politeness, they don't understand or respect it. The rest of us respect righteous indignation and so as long as it doesn't raise your stress levels, bring it on. :-) Blessings!
Love the prose, and the tone, and the painting. I was at UNC last week and colleagues told me that the eminent scientist Ralph Baric’s life has been made hell by these accusations (my words, not theirs). Shame on the conspiracists, and bravo to scientists. We will find a way to resurrect science as logic, but it is going to take a lot more talking, writing, arguing, being at the table.
I’ve always maintained COVID 19 was zoonotic. It makes perfect sense in an overcrowded world hellbent on destroying itself.
Life is opportunistic. All life including viruses. Survival is stubborn and all life tries to survive by hook or by crook just as a single weed will appear from a crack in the shopping center parking lot. I remember when SARS came around. Had a friend whose mother died of it. Same manner of death we heard endlessly through COVID 19 only 20 something years earlier. Anyone with 2 brain cells knew we dodged a bullet. It took 20 more years but that shopping center weed did find another way.
I’m amazed we’ve been this lucky to avoid worse. I also believe the clock is ticking and far worse is just over the horizon of ignorant arrogance.
Matt King Coal, brilliant!
Fits with his record on climate change, too. An all-purpose conspiracy theorits.
Congrats on reaching such villainous heights. Hamas! And the most heinous of all - trans activists (all 5 of them)!