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Way too soon to rule out the alternative hypothesis that periodic so-called blooms are what happens when the kaiju feeding off of hazardous waste from Baltimore Chrome Works enters a new stage of growth.

Who knows what happens when it gets angry over the cleanup.

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Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 2d

I was feeling left out that I wasn’t also responsible for a lab leak in any of his conspiracy theories; so now I can check that off the list.

Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 2d

The response to my fairly simple points on a handful of facts is going as expected over at X.

Here’s Valentin Bruttel pitching in about how unfair my criticism is. And here’s the email he’s whining about.

Picture of Tweet from Valentin Bruttel: since years, Zach has accused us of cherry picking data in our preprint (biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…). he never answered, when i reached out to discuss the key findings. when i gave an interview in the @berlinerzeitung (berliner-zeitung.de/politik-…), he later contacted them with all sorts of accusations. same when i gave an interview in german tv (3sat.de/wissen/nano/250630-s…). he always refuses to have a public, 1 on 1 discussion.
IMO he was either involved in generating this virus somehow, or lost someone close to the pandemic. he just can't face the truth, and like a cultist, fights it behind others backs whereever he encounters ist, while fearing an open debate.

Email to Berliner Zeitung:

Hello --

I am writing about today's article by Franz Becchi. He quotes Valentin Bruttel as an expert and describes a preprint that Bruttle co-authored. That manuscript is very obviously fraudulent and its theory is very obviously false, but I'm not going to argue that here.

I'm just going to tell you that Bruttel thinks that all of these are also lab leaks:
- HIV
- RSV
- the SARS2 Omicron variant
- Ebola
- Monkeypox

None of these viruses had lab leak origins.

In short: Bruttel is not a credible person. He's a conspiracy theorist. A credible newspaper would never quote him as an expert.

Regards,
Zach

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Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 3d

However, Ringling Bros relied on outsourcing to manufacture its animals, so that’s not right either www.mentalfloss.com/article/7955...

The Curious Case of Ringling's Living Unicorn

In 1984, Barnum and Bailey bought four unicorns from a wizard. They weren't lying. Technically.

www.mentalfloss.com

Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 3d

Why is the clown factory filled with circus animals?

More of a general purpose Ringling Bros workshop than a factory.

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Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 3d

Thanks for reading! And yes I tried to be as concise and kept the scope narrow to cope with Brandolini's law. The main point was to quickly move beyond the odd falsehoods and address a pretty broad misconception about what the data says about the end of 2019.

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Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 4d

Neither they nor Pierre Kory types were anti-vax, per se, in terms of second guessing efficacy and safety. That was led by Peter McCullough and Steve Kirsch types in mid-2021.

Bhattacharya was embarrassed about the association when I asked about it. That didn't last long, of course.

email exchange between myself and jay bhattacharya from July 2021

Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 4d

GBD folks were big on back seat driving the complexities of optimally distributing available vaccines in the midst of ~January 2021, which one might recall was a politically chaotic moment.

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Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 4d

I guess it's fair for him to have a distaste for modells in that case

Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 5d

Anyway the most comical one was HUD that had a pop up with a message blaming Dems, revealing a giant red banner with the exact same text.

Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 5d

How many admins across the government were put on leave before they got ones to agree to update the sites?

The fact that several sites have had the notice change suggests the answer isn’t zero.

Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 5d

I do wonder why I notice. For those who can’t hear in the back, the absurdity was that all of science utilizes modelling, modeling, modelização, 建模, モデル化, النمذجة, etc

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Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 5d

Thanks for the hint that there’s a Europe tour… now just need to remember I have tickets until April

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Reposted by Zach Hensel

Greg Folkers @gregfolkers.bsky.social · 5d

Lancet: Offline: Those one should not forgive (Makary and Bhattacharya)

by Richard Horton

bit.ly/3IPC0PD

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Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 5d

There’s already such a book; it’s called “Mysteriet i Wuhan”

The op-ed isn’t intended to be remotely comprehensive or cover the worst errors. Just a few of the ones relevant to the very common misconception that there’s lots of solid evidence of spread months before December 2019.

Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 5d

Here I was thinking the absurdity here was self explanatory; oh well

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Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 6d

Since the point of my op-ed is to refocus on the facts and get past this superficial meta nonsense, here’s some fairly new evidence there wasn’t space to discuss in that context: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

An updated dataset of early SARS-CoV-2 diversity supports a wildlife market origin

The origin of SARS-CoV-2 has been intensely scrutinized, and epidemiological and genomic evidence has consistently pointed to Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market as the epicenter of the COVID-19 p...

www.biorxiv.org

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Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 6d

Thanks! The covid dot gov page was a lightly adapted version of Alina Chan’s NYT OpEd.

Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 6d

Anyway, enough of that -- like the op-ed says, let's get back to the facts.

Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 6d

You can also download the endnotes of the book from Langsikt here: www.langsikt.no/en/publikasj...

Pictured: portion of the endnotes running from the letter Bratlie signed calling for retract to the fraudulent paper that Bratlie cites to support a false lab leak theory.

Forespørsel om tilbaketrekning av Cell-artikkelen om genetiske spor på markedet (Crits-Cristoph et al): https://biosafetynow.substack.com/p/crits-christoph-et-al-2024-retraction
Offentlig opprop for å få Proximal Origin-artikkelen trukket: https://www.change.org/p/retract-the-proximal-origin-of-sars-cov-2
Redaktør i Nature Medicine, Joao Monteiro, sin post på X: https://x.com/JMinImmunoland/status/1239966983279366145
Redaktør i Science, Holden Thorp, sin post på X: https://web.archive.org/web/20230313205435/https://twitter.com/hholdenthorp/status/1634578066205802500
Høring i kongressen om academic malpractice der redaktør i Science, Holden Thorp, deltok: https://oversight.house.gov/hearing/academic-malpractice-examining-the-relationship-between-scientific-journals-the-government-and-peer-review/
Alina Chan sitt pre-print: Zhan, S.H., Deverman, B.E. & Chan, Y.A. (2020). SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence? bioRxiv.
Pre-print om restriksjonsseter (skjøte-mønster)l:
Bruttel, V., Washburne, A. & VanDongen, A. (2022). Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2. bioRxiv.
Omtale av prosessen hos eLife: https://x.com/VBruttel/status/1843733244124246175

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Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 6d

Regarding the employer and the publisher; I asked them both what was wrong with our paper, since the book says it should be retracted.

The employer is the Langsikt and you can find out more information about Bratlie's book on their page called "Our Work" www.langsikt.no/en/publikasj...

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Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 6d

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

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Zach Hensel @zachhensel.bsky.social · 6d

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.