Liberal media's dramatic Covid flip-flop

[Spider-Dan]

The key sentence:

DailyMail.com exclusively obtained the new 22-page paper authored by British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen set to be published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery

So the Daily Mail - seemingly one of your favorite websites, CF - exclusively obtained a study (so, no one else has seen it) that has yet to be published (so, no one else has seen it).

It sounds like these authors made a "Chinese bioweapon" claim over a year ago, didn't provide sufficient evidence to back up that claim, and are just now getting ready to release a paper on it.  And the fact that people didn't believe them a year ago is somehow some sort of anti-Trump conspiracy...?

Call me a mindless zombie, but I think we should wait to see what their study actually says (and importantly: what other epidemiologists say in response) before we declare this study has proven COVID is man-made.

[CF DolFan]

The key sentence:

DailyMail.com exclusively obtained the new 22-page paper authored by British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen set to be published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery

So the Daily Mail - seemingly one of your favorite websites, CF - exclusively obtained a study (so, no one else has seen it) that has yet to be published (so, no one else has seen it).

It sounds like these authors made a "Chinese bioweapon" claim over a year ago, didn't provide sufficient evidence to back up that claim, and are just now getting ready to release a paper on it.  And the fact that people didn't believe them a year ago is somehow some sort of anti-Trump conspiracy...?

Call me a mindless zombie, but I think we should wait to see what their study actually says before we declare that it has exonerated Trump.

Here you go straw man. They were stopped from publishing there findings. There is much more to the article so you should find plenty of other semantics to argue. 
They said they tried to publish their findings but were rejected by major scientific journals which were at the time resolute that the virus jumped naturally from bats or other animals to humans.

Even when former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove spoke out publicly saying the scientists' theory should be investigated, the idea was dismissed as 'fake news.'

[Spider-Dan]

Many people are "stopped" from publishing their papers in reputable scientific journals because those papers don't survive peer review (i.e. they are obviously bogus).

So again, maybe we should wait to see what this paper actually says before we make any further declarations as to what it proves.  If the only outlet these guys are willing to trust with an advance copy is a British tabloid, I have a fairly good guess as to how this study is going to be received.

[Spider-Dan]

Hey guys, look what I found from the Daily Mail!

Wild theories that didn’t stand up to scrutiny

Analysis by John Naish
June 5, 2020

BACK in April, a slickly produced investigative documentary, Tracking Down The Origin Of The Wuhan Coronavirus, was released online. It claimed conclusive proof that the Covid-19 virus had been created as a biological ‘weapon of mass destruction’ in a Chinese lab.

At first sight, it seemed a shockingly convincing piece of journalism.

On behalf of this newspaper, I cross-checked every claim: The experts it cited and the factual evidence unearthed. I also researched the backgrounds of its makers.

I then approached some of the world’s best independent scientific authorities to ask their opinion. They all agreed - this enticingly spicy story just didn’t stand up.

It had been produced by a US based anti-Chinese government media organisation called the Epoch Times. Its ‘experts’ were veteran hard-Rightists. Most damningly, its scientific ‘facts’ were twisted out of shape.

So much, then, for the Chinese-manufactured coronavirus conspiracy... Well, not quite. Around the time I was researching the film, I became aware of rumours emerging about a ‘blockbuster’ piece of biological science by British and Norwegian investigators to be published in a reputable journal.

Experts who were sent the paper for ‘peer review’ prior to publication were astounded because it claimed to have established ‘beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 is an engineered virus’.

The authors alleged the Covid-19 virus had ‘unique fingerprints’ that could not have evolved naturally, and were ‘indicative of purposive manipulation’.

In other words, someone had manufactured this virus. Who exactly? The paper reportedly concluded Covid-19 should correctly be called the ‘Wuhan virus’.

When the paper was finally published this week, it sparked global headlines, largely thanks to former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. In a newspaper podcast interview he claimed the research was smoking-gun evidence the virus pandemic had ‘started as an accident’ when a man-made virus escaped from a Chinese lab.

The paper - co-authored by Professor Angus Dalgleish, a renowned oncologist and vaccine researcher who works at St George’s Hospital, University of London, and Birger Sorensen, a Norwegian virologist - contains none of the stark allegations that originally stunned its reviewers.

The initial paper that triggered wild rumours failed stringent tests of verification and is understood to have been rejected in April by eminent international journals such as Nature and the Journal of Virology. Biomedical experts from the Francis Crick Institute and Imperial College London are said to have refuted its conclusions.

Then one of the paper’s co-authors, Dr John Fredrik Moxnes, chief scientific adviser to the Norwegian military, asked for his name to be withdrawn. This week, after numerous rewrites, the paper was published by the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery. And those original world-shaking conclusions have now withered to innuendo. No accusation of Chinese manipulation appears.

[etc and so on.]

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Are COVID bioweapon truthers recycling "soon to be released" studies already published long ago, to try to gin up fake controversy about ideas that are already thoroughly discredited?  Say not so!

Rather than trying to pretend that you guys are making scientific objections, conservatives should just stick with the "Science is corrupt and evil, and cannot be trusted" angle.  At least that's a subjective opinion, instead of a falsifiable claim that's already been debunked.