Just in Time for the Holidays: Fauci’s Latest Attempt to Rewrite Pandemic History

X thread by Libertarian_Virologist

Just in time for Thanksgiving, Anthony Fauci and Greg Folkers are out with a new paper on the HIV and COVID pandemics—they claim that SARS-CoV-2 is very likely to have a natural origin, citing the deeply flawed work of the Proximal Origins and Friends author group.

Fauci neglects to mention that Worobey et al 2022 (citation 35) has two published rebuttals in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A that detail its use of flawed statistical methods and data suffering from ascertainment bias.
The flaws in the Worobey paper are glaring.

Stoyan and Chiu were shocked that Science would publish Worobey et al. (likely lack of competent peer review). While it may seem tedious to go through all the flaws in both papers, I do think it is necessary given the high prestige of Science as a journal. https://t.co/HW2YyeHgHa pic.twitter.com/JY3g0fFt33

— Libertarian_Virologist (@ban_epp_gofroc) August 25, 2024

The flaws in the Worobey paper are glaring.

What theory of disease spread would explain why the chain of infections seeded from an HSM outbreak would create a pattern where subsequent infections moved closer to the market and became more geographically concentrated? 10/

— Libertarian_Virologist (@ban_epp_gofroc) March 18, 2024

Pekar et al 2022 (citation 36) had a copy/paste coding error: correcting it dropped their Bayes factor in favor of 2 spillovers dropped from 60 to 4. But they had a further error that if corrected totally demolishes their claim for 2 spillovers

P(X, Y | N = 1) = P(X | Y, N = 1) * P(Y | N = 1). Can meaningfully compare P(X | N = 2) and P(X | Y, N = 1). Instead they compare P(X | N = 2) to P(X | Y, N = 1) * P(Y | N =1). P(Y | N = 1) is stacking the deck in their favor for the N = 1 scenario and pure chicanery.

— Libertarian_Virologist (@ban_epp_gofroc) March 18, 2024

Pekar 2022’s claim of 2 spillovers is based on nonsense. And so is their suggestion that lineage B probably spilled over before lineage A.

The abstract of Pekar et al 2022 says it is likely that lineage A spilled to humans after lineage B. Their simulation results are nowhere close to being statistically significant. The 95% HPD covers -30 to +44 days, the Bayesian equivalent of spotlighting a p-value of 0.7. pic.twitter.com/uZwVA1eFuc

— Libertarian_Virologist (@ban_epp_gofroc) October 6, 2024

Fauci also neglected to mention that George Gao (whose team took environmental samples of Huanan market and published the results in Nature) does not believe there was a zoonosis (or two) at Huanan market.

Gao and Baric both said they don’t think the pandemic started at Huanan market and that it was a superspreader. You omitted the fact that lineage A0 and intermediate A/B genomes were not found in Huanan linked cases and all human cases linked to Huanan were lineage B. pic.twitter.com/qpEtqEU1Sx

— Libertarian_Virologist (@ban_epp_gofroc) May 17, 2024

Even after the Slack and email messages of the Proximal Origins authors revealed their undisclosed discussions with Fauci and their private doubts about dismissing a lab origin, Fauci continues to cite them as if they are providing independent corroboration of his conclusions.

Any self respecting journal editor would not have let Folkers cite papers by Kristian Andersen after revelations that Folkers was referring to him as “Anders$n”—likely a crude attempt to evade FOIA.

Here’s one of Folkers’ last tweets that did not have replies limited. I asked Folkers a simple question about why he misspelled Andersen’s name as “Anders$n” and whether he was trying to evade FOIA—will he respond? pic.twitter.com/aHU2uaFcNs

— Libertarian_Virologist (@ban_epp_gofroc) June 8, 2024

And to complete the circle, now Eddie Holmes is promoting Fauci and Folkers’ paper on Blue Cry.

The “Critical Review” paper (citation 37) is also a dumpster fire of nonsense. In particular, the claim that mouse passage can be ruled out for SARS2 due to the lack of N501Y—citing a paper that found N501Y arises after passage in BALB/c mice.

Peer reviewers at Cell failed to catch Rasmussen and co-authors making a totally boneheaded error mixing up BALB/c mice and hACE2 mice. They still refuse to correct this false claim. https://t.co/tbMIdW1LSC pic.twitter.com/bOgdl75Xcm

— Libertarian_Virologist (@ban_epp_gofroc) August 21, 2024

More importantly- why would he publish this document—- and why do it now?

1 reason only exists for the now retired co-conspirator:

it will be used in his defense trial next year. @R_H_Ebright @RandPaul

— @StreetCred2018 (@StreetCred2017) November 29, 2024