Thanks for reading and commenting Andrea - much appreciated! And I love your own breakdown of the situation and how you think about it.

Something you might want to consider. For many of the things you discuss, Wade takes particular pains to maximize the “guilt by association”, since he knows all too well that it is a particularly effective way to indict in the court of public opinion. And I tried to show how he manipulates facts to bias reader opinions on other topics - so I have little trust on any of his presentation of his “facts”.

This guilt-by-association is precisely the reason our justice system (when it works properly) insists on innocence until proven guilty. That is such an important foundation of our own legal system because it is so easy to be set up or be caught in a situation that looks bad to the supposedly guilty party.

I totally agree that the situation doesn’t look good for either the WIV or the Chinese government. Which is precisely why we need to look at the biological evidence which should then have telltales.

(Speaking of which, I think one regulatory requirement I’d like to see is that anyone doing GoF research must have genetic “barcodes” containing the who, where, when info built into the genetically engineered organism in order to obtain funding at any level of sub-contracting.)

I am with you on the uncomfortable optics of the situation, and the alarm bells in my own head about the research, the funding, etc.

However, the biology and the data should back it up clearly if there was an engineered organism and an accidental release at the heart of this. So far the evidence is far from indicting WiV or the Chinese.

The Chinese govt is certainly guilty of being uncooperative and withholding essential information - but just as for an individual that is not in itself a guilty verdict (imagine the cop looking at you asking “what do you have to hide, you don’t need a lawyer to answer my questions…”).

Anyways, thank you for commenting and supporting - You Da Best!!

SD