Lancet: Offline: Those one should not forgive (Makary and Bhattacharya) by Richard Horton bit.ly/3IPC0PD

Sigrid Bratlie posted a response. It doesn't dispute anything that I wrote.

HUD with a pop up ON top of a giant red banner. Interesting to see NIH, FDA, DOD (all I checked) admins not agreeing to do something illegal.

Who says LLM is such a problem? Thanks, Gemini, for the very unearned compliment.

Here’s an op-ed I wrote arguing to get back to a focus on the relevant facts when it comes to pandemic origins. I wrote it in response to a debate that’s played out over the last year in Norwegian media that rarely slows down to check what’s true and false.

The *original* standard?

Excellent paper on the origins of SARS-CoV-2! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40905595/

I guess it’ll be some time before the DOGE guys making the tax avoidance card website get an AI video generation model that doesn’t hallucinate how birds blink.

Any rich dems want to fund an independent science news and commentary outlet, hmu (climate, vaccines, energy, public health, biomedical research, assults on science writ large, etc)

I guess I'm a day too late, but here's what I sent in as a comment on the NIH policy for publication fees. TL;DR Why is the guy from the Hoover Institution running the NIH selecting from a menu of price controls?

Regarding the call to reform publication with a paternalistic policy to save scientists from themselves by banning resources going to some publishers, now is not the time in my opinion.

Asher salivating at finally breaking into US media from Australian conspiracy docs.

@zachhensel.bsky.social and I have a new paper on the origin of SARS-CoV-2! 🧪 There are a lot of reviews on the topic already, so we tried to do something different: characterize "lab leak" scenarios, and directly address those on SARS-CoV-2's furin cleavage site.▫️1/9 doi.org/10.5802/crbi...

Turns out all those people who spent 2020-2024 backseat driving while other people dealt with messy realities of public health are only competent at ignorantly sniping from their home podcast studios.

NASA’s primary mission is presumably the first objective listed in the law that established NASA, right? It’s atmospheric and space science, not space exploration. www.nasa.gov/history/nati...

7 months into the job. Empty shelves; office full of podcasting gear.

Commissioner Gomez's dissent to the FCC approval is worth a read: docs.fcc.gov/public/attac... Scientists frustrated with inefficiency of journals who see a silver lining in exploiting this assault on the first amendment e.g. to ban paying publication fees from grants could take a step back.

We stealing plots from Mr Show now?

This lie is always near the top of the list when Makary and company try to justify cutting science research funding. Makary starred in and endorsed a movie that says Ebola, Lyme, and HIV were lab leaks, too -- www.the-gallop.com/from-fauci-t... -- opportunistic fraud.

Good to see a few people sticking their necks out today by simply writing what's true.

"To the dispassionate reader the findings of this report [June 2025 SAGO report] only point in one direction, so these attempts to soften the conclusions are jarring." Yup.

Apparently Robert Kadlec, who thinks SARS-CoV-2 was a biological mind-control weapon, is on track to be Assistant Secretary of Defense 🤯

Here's an example of how weirdly bad this is. Kadlec implies that some suspicious vaccine disappeared off the face of the earth. In reality, development on this vaccine continued. There's even a paper on an omicron-targeted version of the vaccine from 2023: doi.org/10.1080/2222...

Here is what I mean by this from Kadlec's report. Kadlec imagines that it will take 40 days after a booster to get data. Data in the patent application is +12 days from a single dose. FYI @katherineeban.bsky.social why not correct this?

Robert Kadlec’s latest report on COVID-19 origins is out. And it’s dumber than anyone can imagine. @eddieholmes.bsky.social evergreen prediction proves right again.

Colbert 2028 would be interesting

100% agree with this. I have fought that idea my entire time in journalism. I don’t dumb down my reporting. People might need things explained, but it’s almost always because the system/law is poorly devised — not because people are dumb. www.lawdork.com

The movie opens with a video that's odd to juxtapose with "It was named SARS". It's stock footage -- www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-1... -- here is some of the artist's equally realistic other work.

New "lab leak" documentary out. Producers hand @ayjchan.bsky.social the SARS2 genome on a giant sheet of paper so she can dramatically highlight 15 nucleotides coding for PRRAR (insert is only 12 nucleotides). The filmmakers' sources are so solid that no one noticed all of the zeros in the sequence

FYI to reporters @3sat.bluesky.com.de and @sciencesetavenir.bsky.social -- read the bioRxiv comments before you publish creationist theories. The "endonuclease fingerprint" preprint was disproven a month before it was published and @acritschristoph.bsky.social explains why in the comments.

The "news" from X yesterday was inevitable. This has been the trajectory of every Internet community that's rewarded racism. Over on X, a bunch of 100k-follower monetized accounts exclusively dedicated to racism are celebrating what they got the LLM to write and cashing checks from Musk.

The 3-decade-old competition that enabled the emergence and evaluate of AlphaFold has run out of NIH funding. The program will be terminated in weeks. This is terminating success. www.science.org/content/arti...

Quick thread on the WHO's SAGO report on the origins of COVID-19, highlighting key points and even *new* data. Their summary is that a zoonotic origin of COVID-19 is best supported by available data. This is consistent with most scientific reviews and statements in the rest of the literature.

SAGO report says all the evidence points in the same direction. Some weird logic in a couple places when it comes to rebutting conspiracy theories. Sneaking cherry picked nonsense through peer review isn't a reason to take someone's underpants gnomes origins theory seriously.

Did @nytimesoped.bsky.social make an infographic to support "lab leak" and accidentally leave out the data point that was once the very best evidence there was against origin in a wildlife market?

Right on

Here’s a @pubpeer.com comment about a strange old article. Others have already shown the conclusions were wrong; I was curious about the methods. I didn’t hear back from the first author (who was also once the world’s youngest doctor), so I wrote what I found out here: pubpeer.com/publications...

+1 ❤️

Luckily no scientist would ever fall for such an obvious conspiracy theorist

Erm... This is data manipulation...

Hello everyone! I am pleased to share information on the first ever Computational Structural Virology Symposium, conducted August 4th on zoom and highlighting work in this emerging field. You can register for this event here: forms.gle/CNiqskMwQEuV.... Please re-post!

There is so, so much good science being shared and discussed on bsky right now. The news of its demise is quite backwards. If you are having trouble finding it among all of the very important political news, use the papersky feed that filters posts you follow to just papers: bsky.app/profile/pape...

I've read through the short version here -- tjomlid.com/lab-leak-pro... One point of disagreement one of the things that "prevent zoonosis from being 100% certain". The Vanity Fair article got basic facts on the vaccine timeline wrong, so experts consulted either did a bad job or were misled.

What Noem said right before this: "We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into this city."

In summer 2021, @jbloomlab.bsky.social concluded that the only two plausible progenitors of all human SARS-CoV-2 genomes were lineage A+C18060U ("proCoV2") and A+C29095U Our paper shows how this conclusion required unreported data exclusion and selective annotation: academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Four years ago, Jesse Bloom announced the recovery of SARS-CoV-2 sequences and suggested they could come from very early COVID-19 patients. Zach Hensel and I found out that Bloom's claim relied on the deliberate omission of a January 30, 2020 collection date contradicting his narrative. 🧪 #PopGen

@zey.bsky.social are you going to attack my work inaccurately by sharing the opinions of conspiracy theorists over at X again or are you going to do it over here where I have an account as well this time? Do you just assume everything negative you read about @flodebarre.bsky.social and I is true?

Sigrid Bratlie has a book out in Norway with a theme of complaining about being called a conspiracy theorist. Today, she's reading a story illustrated by three mad scientists photoshopped around a witch's cauldron, and speculating that there's a conspiracy stretching from Wuhan to Oslo to La Jolla.

Quite entertaining while managing to be more accurate than almost any other bit of popular media on the subject I've heard.

"... he was a chef and often handled live poultry and wild animals from the South China Seafood Market." "... he went to the South China Seafood Market for the last time on December 3 ... began to have a fever in early December." finance.sina.cn/2020-01-28/d...