I’d *love* to hear JB try to explain his biggest objection to the paper in his own words extemporaneously. I bet he’d have no idea what the question was about, though.

I think it’s even funnier that the letter claims to have a basis and the basis is so dumb.

The Copy-Paste Investigation into COVID Origins Ridley’s Viral mirrors the lab leak investigation in part of the intelligence community: copy and paste arguments from the Internet, become more confident when they're debunked, and return to the same...

Even weirder is that the article that was plagiarized itself borrowed verbatim from sources and even manipulated text from sources to change its meaning. And it was also plagiarized in a US government investigation: www.the-gallop.com/the-copy-pas...

Scientist who alleged COVID cover-up circulated a faked NIH email, agency says Ariel Fernández A scientist charged with research misconduct used a fake email communication with an NIH researcher’s address to support his claims of governmental retaliation, Retraction Watch has…

Turns out, it’s this wild story: retractionwatch.com/2026/04/13/s...

Didn’t know until after the fact, and as far as I know after learning about it, previous discussions didn’t cover the plagiarism.

“created a series of “bat-man” CoV chimeric spike proteins” was pretty unique and recognizable phrasing.

Turned out I recognized it because it was plagiarized. Not the only example in the paper.

Journal’s response: it’s ok; it’s a letter so it’s just someone’s opinion.

Median Zebra Pan eaters will definitely be at a disadvantage in a fight

And yet no one in world USA or otherwise will clone the best peanut butter snack and I think it’s only available in one store outside Okinawa.

Tyranny.

Of course that’s a very different issue because much lower risk of someone suing over getting it wrong. I don’t think the ethics change at all, though.

Or this one on another article on the same topic from same reporter.

Nothing was “omitted” — it was a review paper. Can’t imagine how fact checkers could miss that other than by not checking the facts with the primary source.

Bob Kadlec: "I call it virological Russian roulette" And if you believe that, he has a half-billion-dollar air conditioner to sell you

I don’t think anyone will sue over it, but the fact checkers never really got around to this one before or after publication: www.the-gallop.com/bob-kadlec-i...

Just kidding but seriously though there was a great news piece not long ago about how commissaries co-exist with the rest of the US grocery market.

Yeah but can you put a price on the freedom to choose from a hundred different peanut butters?

are you saying that never saying what you want and making threats of war crimes you (hopefully) can't follow through on wasn't a winning negotiation strategy?

But this is more information encoded by a protein than poly(A) polymerase.

Ditto!

yeah same deal as prions and epigenetics not violating the central dogma; information can flow, just not *that* information

60 years ago, Francis Crick changed the logic of biology In September 1957, Francis Crick gave a lecture in which he outlined key ideas about gene function, in particular what he called the central dogma. These ideas still frame how we understand life. This...

Forgot to include the source: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

A little tongue-in-cheek; the original figure still holds as it was intended 😅

Modification of figure from Crick https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2003243.g001

The "I know you are, but what am I" rhetoric is sad.

Aren't you the guy who concluded ascertainment bias based on post-hoc application of a flawed model to a p-value barely under 0.05?

Get over yourself. You said "carefully selected" and you know what you meant by it.

No response to EJW isn’t a sign there’s no response to make. It’s a sign that people recognize they published a manuscript with no serious peer review that badly misrepresented its sources, and will just do so again.

Why would I? You already ignored it in the eLetter that you responded to, just like you ignored the lineage A sample. And you’d do so once more.

Ok so now on top of lying about Pekar 2022 authors’ motive you’re making up a history of carefully cherry picking what to measure.

Everyone can see through your dumb threats of embarrassing others when you’ve got nothing to say in your defense and want to shut down discussion, by the way.

That’s one of the things in my eLetter than you ignored. Along with lineage A being in HSM, which you not only ignored when addressing my eLetter, but omitted entirely.

Yeah I mean the paper that doesn’t have the calculation in it you say you narrowly focused on. You also ignored the bit about clock reversal in the same paragraph.

The article you reference was published before the analysis you complain about was added to the paper during review.

I don’t know why you keep lying about this. Just to get attention for yourself?