Alina Chan Profile picture
Scientific Advisor at Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard 🧬 Co-author of VIRAL: the search for the origin of Covid-19 📖 A dangerous young investigator 🕵🏻‍♀

Nov 6, 2021, 10 tweets

Spending a Saturday morning going through the EcoHealth x NIH emails FOIA'ed by the White Coat Waste.

Interesting email from Peter Daszak in 2016:
scribd.com/document/53702…

Essentially, the local wildlife trade was dwindling in South China (back in 2016), forcing Wuhan scientists to travel to or seek novel pathogen samples from 7 neighboring countries.

In 2016, they proposed collecting about 2,300 of these high risk pathogen host animal samples in China and SE Asia.

May we see the full data and databases resulting from these studies for which testing was partially funded by the NIH or NIAID?

Another possibly important point, all the human pathogen surveillance work had been shifted to Wuhan University for the last half of the 2014-2019 EcoHealth-WIV grant. Meaning that thousands of samples from high risk human populations would've been sent also to Wuhan.

Pages 224-225. Since it's approaching 5 years now (from 2016), according to protocol, the original data and electronic files describing high-risk human samples will begin to be permanently deleted.

Went to read @gdemaneuf’s earlier thread on the same emails and realized that most of these samples from high risk animals in SE Asia must mostly be unpublished because the latest EcoHealth-WIV batch of data only described viruses sampled up to 2015.

August 2020 EcoHealth-WIV publication:

“our study collected and analyzed samples solely from China”

“Bat oral and rectal swabs and fecal pellets were collected from 2010 to 2015 in numerous Chinese provinces”

nature.com/articles/s4146…

I find it very unlikely that the EcoHealth Alliance was acting as an undercover intelligence collecting agency. Unless somehow the sheer amount of incompetence and gaslighting we’ve witnessed is their cover.

No pathogen database. Key information, documents, and emails withheld.

These FOIA’ed communications reveal an extremely relaxed approach to ensuring accessibility to samples and data.

Let’s send all of the thousands of pathogen samples from 8 countries to Wuhan! They won’t get tested anywhere else so no one will know what was even sent to China.

For this reason, I also don’t have the view that EcoHealth was an organization bent on DURC or bioweapons. The communications suggest their trust in the WIV was complete. The level of insight and oversight could hardly be lower.

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