Thread by @angie_rasmussen

Not overlooked, but ignored because I don’t wish to further amplify it. But here’s a quick summary:

Like many of his fellow economists with Ivy League credentials but no specific expertise in biology, he suffers from the delusion that he knows what the fuck he’s talking about.

Jeff Sachs is the chair of @TheLancet COVID-19 Commission. This isn’t an official government board with any real mandate. It’s just a prestigious medical journal deciding to make up a task force of prestigious people to write more prestigious content for said prestigious journal.

The Lancet COVID-19 Commission will issue a bunch of reports that are glorified opinion pieces stating the obvious: we weren’t prepared for the pandemic, there are massive inequities, it had huge global impact, need more vaccines/infrastructure, etc.

Some academics will care.

Ultimately The Lancet COVID-19 Commission is an official-sounding name for what is effectively academic busywork for a bunch of smart, well-decorated people & a marketing ploy for an elite journal. Nobody asked Lancet to convene a “commission” & their recs carry no policy weight.

Sachs is a famous Ivy League dude who writes lots of books, makes big, global, society-wide pronouncements, & hangs w/ other famous guys, so he’s a perfect choice to chair.

And since it’s made up for prestige, it doesn’t matter that he knows fuck all about viruses or pandemics.

So he’s had a rough ride with the part of The Lancet: COVID-19 Commission dealing with SARS-CoV-2 origins. It was first chaired by Peter Daszak—so anyone following origins topics on Twitter for 2 seconds can imagine how that went.

Sachs disbanded the group, purportedly for COI.

Sure, fine, no problem, because it’s a toothless committee anyway. Sachs said he was going to revisit the topic w/ the executive commissioners & some experts.

Unfortunately those “experts” included some very non-experts, prompting actual experts to stop wasting their time on it.

The non-expert “experts” included a well-known grifter with a lab leak fantasy fiction book to sell & several academics who have been chronically dishonest about their subject matter expertise in service of self-promotion and advancing their agendas.

This includes Richard Ebright, the human manifestation of Pepe the Frog, who spends his days squatting on his Twitter lily pad croaking at everyone who disagrees w/ his uninformed views on biosafety, virology, & evolution that they are shills, stooges, & thralls of the CCP.

Feel free to lecture me about professionalism here & get blocked w/ a quickness. I gave a talk on Twitter disinfo & had an entire slide cataloguing every time he called someone (inc me) a stooge in the prior 2 weeks. He’s an abusive bigot & I don’t owe him professional courtesy.

It is an eternal truth that powerful men in academia resolutely ignore the bad behaviour of other powerful dudes they vibe with, so Sachs didn’t bother to note what a loathsome crank Ebright is. And I guess he didn’t check into his COI, since he’s overtly a lab leak zealot.

Instead, Sachs took a shine to him and basically accepted Ebright’s “expertise” as gospel.

Ebright is a professor of chemistry who studies bacterial transcription. He is not an expert on viruses in any way, despite Sachs’ insistence that he is “very senior”.

So recently Sachs & a coauthor at Columbia (also not a virologist) wrote a perspective in PNAS. After making some uncontroversial calls for independent investigations, the paper takes a sharp turn and gets into some serious furin cleavage site trutherism.

pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

The perspective argues that researchers at EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, & the University of North Carolina colluded to insert the furin cleavage site from a human gene called ENaC into a bat CoV—et voila, SARS-CoV-2.

This is speculative and based on a leaked grant proposal from 2018…a grant that was not funded. That grant suggests experiments to look at FCS function in bat CoVs and never mentions ENaC, and again it was not funded. There is zero evidence that these experiments were ever done.

Why ENaC? Well, Richard Ebright did a BLAST search and found a short string of identical amino acids and also sleuthed out there are cystic fibrosis researchers at UNC who study ENaC as well as others who study CoV pathogenicity and…WHAT A COINCIDENCE

BTW there’s no evidence that anyone at UNC was sourcing FCS sequences from the human genome or trying to make chimeric viruses with it—ENaC is involved in cystic fibrosis and that was the context in which it was studied at UNC.

So suddenly idle, baseless speculation becomes “questions” and those questions become “evidence.” That gets picked up by media outlets who have been uncritically parroting poorly fact checked lab leak talking points for months.

And guess which experts get interviewed to help elevate speculation to evidence with some scientific insight? Not-virologist Richard Ebright, who does some hand waving about coincidence to invite the reader to follow him down this conspiratorial rabbit hole.

I’ll add here he never mentions his own conflicts, starting with the fact that he alone advised Sachs on this particular theory & basically ghost wrote the PNAS piece or that he came up with the idea in his ceaseless quest to prove a lab origin without a shred of actual evidence.

(I will add that I’m particularly proud of the tweets that the Intercept piece pulled to make me look like a mean spirited bitch, though. I maintain that bad actors exploiting uncertainty during a global health crisis to promote personal interest over science is indeed ghoulish).

And to be clear about my conflicts and expertise, here’s my latest contribution to origins research. An original article about a scientific investigation undertaken by a team of independent experts in virology & viral evolution, currently undergoing peer review.

However, Sachs has not acknowledged that this work, which shows actual evidence that the pandemic started at the Huanan market through at least 2 zoonotic transmission events, even exists & is making the media rounds promoting this ENaC theory as new “evidence”.

But opinions are not evidence and they do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. Scientists, like all people, have opinions but at the end of the day our work is judged by what our data shows, not our opinions or speculation about it.

My coauthors & I have answered the call for an independent, evidence-based investigation into origins. There’s more to be done.

It’s a pity that Sachs has chosen to wield his influence so irresponsibly & has not himself committed to the objective inquiry he demands.