Back in March 2020, just as COVID-19 was hitting American shores, a team of researchers published a highly influential article titled "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2." It argued that the evidence was strongly in favor of a natural origin of the virus, and while a lab leak couldn't be completely disproven there was no evidence to support it. "We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible," the paper says, although "More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another."
Recently, a huge trove of internal Slack conversations among the authors—written both before and after the article was published—became public. This has prompted an outpouring of claims that the authors lied in their article—mostly coming from conservatives who say the conversations show that the authors believed a lab leak was highly likely but then said the opposite for public consumption.
I had read bits and pieces of the Slack conversations and saw little more than some researchers modifying their views as more data became available. But an awful lot of people, including some who struck me as fairly reasonable, saw dishonesty at work. So I held back on saying anything.
But last night I finally read the entire 140-page archive of Slack messages. They range from February 1, when the conversations began, through March 17, when the article was published online, to April 30. Four researchers were involved:
- Kristian Andersen, Scripps Institute
- Eddie Holmes, University of Sydney
- Andrew Rambaut, University of Edinburgh
- Robert Garry, Tulane University
Here's what I gleaned from a thorough read of the entire archive.
February 1-3
At the beginning, the researchers all agree that a lab leak is perfectly plausible and needs to be seriously considered. Here's a sampling:
Andersen: Question is - evolution or engineering? My problem is that both really rather plausible.
Garry: I still don't know if nCoV was the results of a deliberate manipulation or not.
Andersen: Bottom line is that we can't prove whether this is natural or escape.
Rambaut: If nothing else - the fact that we are discussing this shows how plausible it is.
Holmes: Bottom line is that the Wuhan virus is beautifully adapted to human transmission but we have no trace of that evolutionary history in nature. Correct?
February 17
After a couple of weeks of discussion, the researchers submit their paper to Nature. Given their current state of knowledge, the paper is carefully worded and considers both natural and lab leak ("passaging") hypotheses. They also post the paper on Virological, a discussion board for virus papers:
Rambaut: People are picking up on the fact that we don't rule out animal passaging. (which we don't because it is still plausible)
Andersen: There is no question this'll be picked up with "top scientists consider this could have come from the lab."...At this stage we unfortunately just can't rule out a potential accidental infection from the lab.
Garry: No, we can't and should not because that would have precipitated the cries of COVER-UP.
February 20
Nature rejects the paper, largely due to a very negative review from one of the referees. In an email, the editor of Nature explains:
One of our referees raised concerns (also emphasized to the editors) about whether such a piece would feed or quash the conspiracy theories. But more importantly this reviewer feels, and we agree, that the Perspective would quickly become outdated when more scientific data are published (for example on potential reservoir hosts).
"Potential reservoir hosts" refers to a rumored pangolin virus that's 99% similar to SARS-CoV-2 and therefore could be confirmation of a natural animal transmission vector. Everyone is waiting breathlessly for this to be announced, though as it turns out, it never is.
February 24-25
The main reason the researchers have continued to be concerned about a lab leak is the existence in the COVID virus of something called a "furin cleavage site." Nothing like this has been seen in any similar virus, and it's amazingly well adapted to human transmission.
However, since Nature had rejected the paper the authors continued to work on it while they looked for a different home. On February 24th Eddie Holmes discovers something big:
Holmes: See attached....Yunnan bat from 2019....Still different in the RBD but other thing is obvious. Discuss.
[The "other thing" is an insertion of four amino acids at the same location as the furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2.]
Garry: Holy crap - that's amazing.
Andersen: I think this lends pretty strong support for an animal origin of the 'confusing' features of the virus....None of this disproves accidental lab infection, however, it shows that all the steps can occur in nature....Makes it much more likely the full furin site could have been acquired very early in humans or potentially in an intermediate host.
Holmes: I am now strongly in favor of a natural origin.
Rambaut: OK. To return to the paper - so are we going to: (1) Re-nuance it to explicitly lower our bet on the lab passaging scenario on the basis that both cleavage site insertions and the full RBD exist in nature.
Garry: Paper will get a significant upgrade.
Andersen: I'm still favoring a pre-circulation scenario and I believe the furin site could have been fully formed in humans.
April 3
The revised paper, which strongly favors a natural origin for the virus, is published online on March 17 in Nature Medicine and becomes hugely influential. This is the version that everyone has read. However, in early April Andersen comes across a 2013 paper he hadn't seen before. The authors of the 2013 paper had passaged a cow coronavirus and created a furin cleavage site:
Andersen: This whole furin site being messed with in T/C has me second-guessing myself....I don't think any of this new knowledge goes against what we said in the paper, but it does make our "definitely not passaging" argument weaker.
Garry: Yeah - definitely food for thought.
April 16-18
On April 14 the Washington Post runs a story about "secret cables" from the State Department suggesting that as far back as 2018 American officials were concerned about safety at the Wuhan labs and the possibility of a lab leak. These secret cables were soon all over the news, causing Andersen yet again to question their paper:
Andersen: But here's the issue - I'm still not convinced that no culture was involved....So are we absolutely certain that no culture could have been involved?
Holmes: Culturing in what? Why would culturing make it more human adapted?....Let's face it, unless there is a whistleblower from the [Wuhan lab] who is going to defect and live in the west under a new identity we are NEVER going to know what happened in that lab. Never.
Andersen: That's why I'm a little worried about these 'cables' - because is it possible they might have something? I'm putting all of this to typical Trump BS smoke and mirrors (and just plain idiocy), but I'm not quite willing to die on this hill.
Holmes: To me there is too long a series of implausible events to suggest inadvertent escape via lab passage. [Reasons follow.]
April 30
In late April lab leak hysteria overwhelms the media, and Andersen is finally fed up:
Andersen: So much bullshit again. I have decided I am going to die on this hill.
This is everything relevant, and I've tried to provide all the proper context—both the questioning of natural origins and the follow-up conversations. It's not cherry picked. Here's what Andersen said on Twitter a few days ago about his second guessing after the publication of the paper:
Given these reports, *any* good scientist would question their own research - is it possible we could be wrong? What are we missing? That is *exactly* what the Slack message shows - me trying to poke hole in our own arguments. And this wasn't the first time, nor the last.
So what is all of this? Scientists doing science and having private conversations - and, of course, the earlier hypotheses end up being even further supported by emerging evidence and the second-guessing of our own conclusions turned out to be nothing.
....I know that science will ultimately prevail and sanity will follow. After all, there *is* an expiration date on bullshit and we're well past due 💩. Serious journalists, take notice.
Having read everything, I agree. There's just nothing here. When the researchers were unsure of what happened, they wrote a paper that said so. Later, when new evidence became available, they revised their opinions in favor of a natural virus origin and rewrote their paper to say so.
There is no evidence at all of any of them writing something they didn't privately believe as well. None. There just isn't.
"...At this stage we unfortunately just can't rule out a potential accidental infection from the lab."
Why "unfortunately"? Because they didn't want to find a lab origin. So it isn't too surprising that they didn't.
"Unfortunately" because it precludes a definitive answer.
Indeed.
For example: Why is James B. Shearer jumping on a single out-of-context line to support his contention that "they" didn't want to find a lab origin? I suspect it's because Shearer is engaging in motivated reasoning and/or is being an argumentative fool, but *unfortunately* I just can't know for sure.
"... and/or is being an argumentative fool ..." I see you two have already met.
Exactly. The title of the article is "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” — of course they very much wanted to give a definitive answer to the implied question, and felt some frustration at being unable to do so. But they wouldn’t go beyond the available data. That’s just how scientists think and work.
I think that’s an unfortunate choice of words. But only because right wing clowns can seize on it and take it out of context. Realistically, there’s no publicly available evidence to support the lab leak hypothesis. It’s simply something that was conjured up out of thin air.
They use "unfortunately" because obviously it would be better to learn that another country's virus research efforts are not hazardous to humankind.
Real on the web home based work to make more than $14k. Last month I made $15738 from this home job. Very simple and easy to do and procuring from this are just awesome. For more detail visit the given interface.. http://incomebyus.blogspot.com
This won’t stop people of bad faith from repeating lies.
The same story as when the Climategate emails dropped.
+1
smh, it IS! He said incredulously.
I find it odd that the general view of covid origins from most people is to assume lab leak and require proof that it wasn't. Seems to me that the assumption should run the other way. Pandemics tend to have natural origins. I can't think of one that didn't - even in early colonial America the diseases were brought over and spread naturally (at least some came via the slave trade from Africa, and could easily make it across to ocean due to the appalling overcrowding on slave ships), not by early modern Dr. Mengeles. Lab leaks tend to infect very few people before being stopped - at least all the ones that I've ever heard of. I guess if this had been ebola or polio I would have learned toward a lab leak hypothesis, but this was a disease that was known to exist naturally all over China. It always seemed to me that a lab leak hypothesis is the one that was unlikely, and would need significant proof.
I think that's right. But I think that there's also a lot of ignorance coming to bear, too. Most Americans had never heard of Wuhan before the pandemic, and likely have very little conception of just how big a place it is (it's bigger than NYC, and much bigger than LA and Chicago combined, and covers almost 600 square miles). Thus, people are more apt to "reason" that (a) virus come from "Wuhan," (b) Wuhan lab *study* virus, ergo (c) virus come from Wuhan lab!, when they would never make a similar assumption about someplace they have a better conception of the scale of.
I mean, I doubt most people know that the virology lab is an 11-mile drive across the Yangtze River away from the wet market in question. It's an interesting question whether, had Chinese cargographers named the north side of the river Huanan and the south side Wuhan, would the lab leak hypothesis have nearly the claim on the popular imagination that it does now?
If you find an 11 mile jump unlikely what about a 1000km jump? Wuhan is 1000km from the Guangxi bat caves where the closest naturally discovered relatives of COVID have been found. Wuhan people also do not eat bats - that is a Guangxi and western Guangdong thing and rate even there.
On the other hand, WIV in Wuhan is the home base of China's top researcher on bat coronaviruses. In addition, the Chinese cover up, the refusal to share data, and the deletion of data from publicly available databases suggest strongly that the Chinese government believes the raw data contains damning information.
Given this, why shouldn't the default assumption be a lab leak?
Probabilities. I am not a virologist (are you?), but I have studied and used statistics throughout my career. Consider: the number of bats in China must be multiple orders of magnitude larger than the number of virology labs, and the number of virus particles in the wild vastly greater than laboratory specimens. Mutations are rare, but the number of opportunities in the wild are vastly greater than in the lab; it is likely that random natural mutations of the critical kind were more frequent than even deliberately lab-introduced genetic modifications, if any such were attempted.
If the PRC were generally open and transparent about life-threatening situations, secrecy around Covid would be suspicious. But, c’mon, man … Also, the decisions about information release are made by Party operatives who don’t understand the science, and probably suspect the scientists are lying, because lying to superiors is a what Party operatives do.
Your statistical analysis is laughable.
China has had billions of bats since time immemorial. However, China does not frequently have bat origin disease outbreaks. Therefore, the odds of such things happening, despite the billions of bats, are obviously low.
Wuhan, in particular, does not have lots of bats. It certainly has some - there are bats everywhere - I have travelled to bat caves in Guangxi and Cambodia (they used to be tourist attractions... don't know if they still are) and I have seen the enormous clouds of bats pouring forth from them at dusk. Hubei has nothing like that.
If COVID was first detected in Nanning or Kunming direct zoonotic origin would be plausible. Not Wuhan.
lol.
The initial comment about statistical analysis being laughable followed by hilarious 'statistic sounding' rational on time immemorial bats and how wuhan has some bats but not a lot of bats because Ive been to a cave......is pretty hilarious. The initial post about Wuhan not eating bats therefore bats in the area cant have caused the transfer is even funnier.
This kind of over the top, comical, motivated reasoning would be hard to believe in a story/movie....but here it is.
The competing hypotheses are a leak from WIV and spread from an intermediate host at the wet market. People being directly exposed to bats is not an issue.
Correct. Quite a few species have been found to have been infected with Covid-19, including deer, cats and hamsters: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/animals.html
Animal-to-human transmission is rare, as the CDC points out; but rare does not mean impossible. Covid-19 was one of the rare pandemics that happen to humans.
"I find it odd that the general view of covid origins from most people is to assume lab leak and require proof that it wasn't."
It's not odd at all; it's these people saying "If you can't make me say I'm wrong I win." Nothing more, nothing less. They aren't honest folk.
"I find it odd that the general view of covid origins from most people is to assume lab leak and require proof that it wasn't."
It's not odd in the sense that the framing sets an impossible target. You cannot prove a negative. So if your goal was to push the lab leak origin, that's exactly the standard you'd demand.
Not to mention that science doesn't deal in "proof," it only deals in the weight of evidence.
It's true that science doesn't in absolute proof per se. But it does have burden of proof standards, to whit: it's on the person making the claim to justify it, not on anybody else to prove them wrong. The people trying to reverse those standards know exactly what they are doing, hence my characterization "If you can't make me say I'm wrong I win." The persistent ones, the ones who keep returning to this tactic are contemptible people. But then again, they glory in your contempt; as they see it, they're 'owning the libs'.
Juvenile cynicism as wit, where 'we', or humanity, are invariably just the worst.
I think your assumptions are off.
- There are plenty of crack pots whose first instinct is tribal. You shouldn't assume that everyone falls into the crackpot tribe -- but that's exactly what you're doing when you create a false narrative re lab-leak folks demanding proof of a negative.
- Lab leaks are a recent thing; you wouldn't be able to look beyond the last 100 years to find any such thing. The closer to current day you examine, the more dangerous our research and capabilities are. Obama paused Gain of Function research for a reason. If this wasn't a lab leak, eventually someone will trigger a lab-sourced pandemic. There are people conducting their own experiments like this illegal lab that was just shut down, or years ago when a California clinic was using Smallpox to treat cancer. Does that sound like I'm conflating WIV and rogue researchers? I put it to you, WIV stated they were using BSL-2 facilities for most of their virus research. That's no different than anyone can recreate in their homes. No need for negative pressure or full suits.
- This is not a disease that exists naturally all over China. Sarbecoviruses exist naturally, primarily, in southern parts of China and Asia. Natural infections in the human population is not widespread; it's geolocated around reservoirs, specifically bats. Spread isn't generally as easy as you seem to think it is. A specific set of mutations are required for any given Coronavirus to become highly infectious and transmittable to humans.
And just a minor point, The Scripps Institute is the former "The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI)." Not to be confused with Scripps Health, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, or Scripps College.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scripps_Research
So what you're telling us is, you're in on it.
Who's paying you? Soros? The Clintons? Big Pharma? The Illuminati?
You can tell us now, or you can tell Jim Jordan's Standing Committee To Bring The Truth To The American People.
It's the cats, der. That's why Hopper was immediately replaced in the spy pair.
Gasp! It’s pusspionage! Who would have suspected? And yet, in retrospect, it was a perfectly targeted honey-trap.
double + 1
Lol!
You didn't do a similar deep dive into the FOIA release of emails -- you should have read through those first.
I don't have to go through the Slack messages to figure out what really happened: Scientists were balancing multiple priorities, between reputational harm, personal safety, future collaborative opportunities within their field of expertise, and hopes not to burn bridges that would prevent nations (China) from cooperating -- all against the general hope to find the truth.
They had multiple reasons for writing Proximal Origins.
They (the folks at the center of Proximal Origins), however, do get one thing wrong in/around/thereafter: Claims of dispositive evidence. None exists to this day.
Anyone claiming dispositive evidence should not be believed.
Anyone flatly stating the evidence points to a lab leak should not be believed.
Love this:
I dont have to read the document to make up my mind about it and assign reasoning to random people I know nothing about!!
Following that statement with a comment pretending to care about evidence after you just told everyone that evidence doesnt play a role in your 'analysis' is even better.
Well, I assumed that reading KD's summary was accurate, reflecting generally what I read in the hundreds of pages of FOIA emails.
Did I make a false assumption about KD's summary?
Do your own homework.
Thanks Kevin. Articles like this are one of the reasons I love this blog, why you have immense credibility with me, and why I have a hard time these days taking anything coming out of Conservative sites about science seriously these days.
Watching sausage be made, especially if you already have specific tastes, can be confusing. And so when read bycertain people, excluding our host, with assumptions already lurking in the hind brain, it must be a conspiracy!
I would like to see the keystroke log of a particular former stone that rolled with Congress recently...
Without going into the details of COVID and it’s origin I would just comment that in the United States 70% of people apparently believe in angels. To them science really doesnt exist and they will believe absolutely anything that they want, Evidence be damned.
1/ Let's not forget the lab leak theory started out as a crackpot idea cooked up by the right-wing Moonie-funded, Washington Times—then amplified by rightwing echo chambers.
2/ The wet markets origin of a novel Coronavirus was being discussed by mid Jan. But the earliest US media reference I can find is this NPR story dated 22 Jan 2020...
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/22/798644707/why-wet-markets-persisted-in-china-despite-disease-and-hygiene-concerns
3/ On 26 Jan 2020 the Washington Times, a newspaper owned by News World Communications, a Rev. Sun Myung Moon organization published this story: “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China's biowarfare program,” which immediately gets picked up by global media.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus-link-to-china-biowarfare-program-possi/
4/ On 31 Jan 2020: Pradhan et al published a paper implying that HIV genes had been spliced into the virus. This got lots of media play until other scientists pointed out that these gene sequences are found in lots of non-HIV viruses.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1
This is typical of the response to Pradhan paper (14 Feb 2020)...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7033698/
5/ 1 Feb 2020: Anthony Fauci sends out email calling a meeting of senior scientists after he has a phone call with Kristian Andersen. Andersen raised some concerns that some features of the virus may indicate lab origins...
6/ 2 Feb 2020: There's a meeting between Andersen and key players. Here are the notes. Andersen's concerns are addressed. Meeting minutes show the lab leak theory was shot down. It's interesting that Andersen continued to have reservations, but it's also clear he was leaning towards a zoonotic origin of the virus.
7/ 17 Feb 2020 he and 3 other authors submitted a preprint of "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" where he stated "the virus is not a laboratory product". Revised and published 17 March 2020. I thought that was in the original draft, but someone correct me if it wasn't.
8/ 15 Feb 2020: Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. makes the claim on Fox News Sunday Morning program that SARS2 was a Chinese biowarfare weapon that leaked from the lab. Two days later NYTimes calls it a fringe theory...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronavirus-tom-cotton-china.html
9/ 17 Feb 2020: Richard Ebright, who is now a lab leak proponent pushed back on Cotton's claims in the Washington Post. Quote: "There is absolutely nothing in the genome sequence of this virus that indicates this virus was engineered,"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotton-coronavirus-conspiracy/
10/ 19 Feb 2020: 27 scientists publish a statement in The Lancet to "condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" They write that data overwhelmingly shows the "coronavirus originated in wildlife."
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext
11/ Later it comes out that Daszak organized this letter, and Daszak and is accused of a conflict of interest because his EcoHealth Alliance procured grants for the Wuhan Institute of Virology and put proposals before NIH and DoD to GoF experiments with wild viruses. But it's important to note the DoD never funded his GoF experiments.
12/ 15 April 2020: CNN reports US officials are investigating the claim that the virus was released from the lab accidentally as scientists were studying infectious diseases (intelligence officials said they didn't believe the virus is man-made or developed as a bioweapon.)
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/15/politics/us-intelligence-virus-started-chinese-lab/index.html
13/ 16 April 2020: Fox News claims "patient zero" worked at the laboratory. The lab employee was accidentally infected before spreading the disease across Wuhan. When asked about this, President Trump says: "more and more we're hearing the story".
14/ 21 April 2020. Trump gets more questions and says the theory "makes sense." Fauci pushes back. Tom Cotton writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, writing: "While the Chinese government denies the possibility of a lab leak, its actions tell a different story."
15/ 1 May 2020: NYTimes reports that Mike Pompeo directed intelligence agencies to continue to look for lab leak evidence.
https://t.co/EL78wNlg2L
16/ 1 May 2020: The same day CNN reports that Trump said he's seen evidence of a lab leak.
https://tinyurl.com/2sk35d3y
From there on out the rightwing is yadda yadda yadda "lab leak" yadda yadda "China!" yadda yadda yadda "bioweapon" yadda yadda yadda...
Nate Silver realized that there's a lot of money to be made by joining the Qanon grifters.
OK, you are totally glossing over how all the scientists take it as a given that China destroyed all of the evidence that would be needed to prove or disprove a lab origin.
In the slack, the scientists talk about the Chinese authorities scrubbing all the evidence from the market. They also talk about how they found out that there were viral culture experiments in the lab they didn't know about it.
Even in this breakdown, there isn't a mention of how a natural Yunnan bat virus with the furin cleavage got to wuhan which is a thousand miles away.
"Wuhan scientists accidentally release a bat virus isolated from a cave in Yunnan" is still a "lab leak" .
The scientists are falling over themselves to make sure that no one takes China to task for performing a massive cover-up.
Yes, China would have done so whether or not they knew about a lab leak. But by pushing so hard on the "natural origin", the scientific community gave China a pass.
The fact that China locked access to all databases, deleted others, and barred international access should have been a huge scandal.
In the slack, there are a ton of messages that are essentially, "We'd love to say that we are sure this is entirely natural and didn't come from a leak at the Wuhan lab, but we can't be sure because China isn't being transparent".
Instead, they wrote that it wasn't a lab leak.
The discussion about only finding Covid results around the wet market is also incredibly dumb.
If the Chinese authorities had found Covid results near the lab, would they have told the WHO? Of course not, they would bury the report and issue one that said, "We only found Covid near the wet market."
The next time a pandemic happens, the world is going to be screwed because the scientific community is going to watch in horror as the government of Bulgaria/whoever destroys all the evidence and blocks access. Why wouldn't they?
The very people who should have been most adamant about demanding that the Chinese government be transparent were too busy making a case for why Chinese transparency de facto doesn't actually matter.
If Trump had lit several buildings on fire before the FBI raided his house, the FBI slack wouldn't be "We did find a lot classified docs in other rooms. While we can't be sure that those burned buildings didn't contain evidence, we found documents in other places so it's plausible that those were all there were. It sucks that Trump burned those buildings, but we wouldn't want people to question the FBI. Let's just say we are sure we found everything. We cannot make any inferences about destruction of evidence."
Rolls eyes.
There are two varieties of bullshit here. First is that if there was a "lab leak," it means an "engineered" virus. False. It could mean that a naturally occurring virus was being studied and a worker got infected. But in idiot media, "lab leak" became equated with "engineered virus." Second is that, for scientists and many other professionals, their fear of being "perceived" by right-wing influencers as hiding something has far too much power over them. Honest people should not react to what the lunatics might say because it usually backfires.
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Sorry, Kristian Andersen, but there is no expiration date on Republican bullshit.
And sorry, Kevin Drum, the lack of evidence to support Republican bullshit does not prevent it from becoming established as fact in the minds of Republican voters or in the articles produced by the political press.
This is wrong. The paper as published discounted "any type of laboratory-based scenario."
This was NOT what the researchers believed at the time. In fact their February submission was rejected in part BECAUSE they couldn't definitely come down against lab leak ( https://twitter.com/franciscodeasis/status/1678901434341810177 ).They were convinced it wasn't a bio-weapon or engineered but couldn't rule out it was not a lab accident from say studying a wild virus. That's the extent of the scandal.
There is at least one argument they used knowing it was misleading. They used Ron Fouchier's argument (without acknowledgement) that WIV would have used a well known reverse genetics system despite Andersen saying that wasn't the case on at least two occasions. He noted they had been created "on a whim" and on 20 Feb if anyone thought these were hard to create from scratch a group of researchers had just created one in a week. They should have acknowledged this.
The Nature reviewer clearly took too hard a line as well. Their initial manuscript was far more balanced. Moving from lab origin was not "necessary" to "not plausible" was not justified. As David Relman emailed Francis Collins there need to be an impartial assessment which acknowledged the lack of evidence either way. A Dept of Defense Working Paper dated 26 2020 noted their conclusions were based on "not on scientific analysis but, on unwarranted assumptions".
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