Thread by @BillyBostickson

1. I just read the new "report" by 13 infamous US based researchers, 2 from UK & Canada & 1 each from France, Belgium & Australia.

A 5 👁️- NATO collaboration ;)

Genetic evidence of susceptible wildlife in SC-2 positive samples at Huanan Seafood Market

zenodo.org/record/7754299

2. What I noticed...

Does it really take 15 NIH Grants to put lipstick on a raccoon dog?

3. A pithy summary by @gdemaneuf

4. A useful thread by @stevenemassey which exposes some of the technical flaws in this report, who concludes that this is a case study in the perils of making grandiose claims without having completed the analysis:



threadreaderapp.com/thread/1637985…

5. Looking at the Methods used

I get the impression that they repeatedly "filtered out", "excluded" and retained just enough data (based on possibly invalid data from China) to get the results they wanted to support their hypothesis!

6. Probably for the best

"This report is not intended for publication in a journal"

I doubt any respectable journal, even one run by dedicated natural origin proponents, would accept it anyway, hence its magical appearance on zenodo, the oft maligned home of citizen scientists

7. Hypocrisy Exposed!

Do you remember how @jbloom_lab was accused of racism and other nasty things by certain virologists, when he obtained Chinese data?

Well, now it turns out that these compromised virologists have done the same themselves!

8. Also via @tlitb

After Van Kerkhove saw the zoonosis presentation on the data, she concluded that the data revealed nothing new!

9. Talk about stating the obvious!

"Other samples were dominated by animal genetic material linked to the stall where they were collected, such as cattle at a stall selling beef product, and fish in a sample collected on a fish packaging surface"

10. However, an important caveat

"Hence, the most abundant animal in the sequencing data of a particular sample is not necessarily the source of the virus in that sample"

(Page 9)

11. All fur coat and no knickers?

They could have just told the over eager reporters like @KatherineJWu and @benjmueller who bamboozled the public with zoonati propaganda puff pieces, the following:

"we cannot identify the intermediate animal host species from these data"

12. Partial Data used to spread propaganda!

"Our analysis is based on partial data, corresponding only to a subset of environmental samples from the market in which SARS-CoV-2 had been detected. Other sequencing data exist for some of these samples from Illumina NextSeq 550"

13. The Temptation of Saint Zoonati

"It would be tempting to pursue a correlational epidemiological analysis between the presence of animal genetic material & SARS-CoV-2 positivity using data from market samples that tested negative for the virus, when they become available"

14. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

Based on filched, partial & unreliable data, filtered to support their crumbling hypothesis, these discredited charlatans claim "These arguments stand in stark contrast to the absence of evidence for any other SC-2 emergence route"

15. Timely press release from @BiosafetyNow

1 Data not made available for other researchers

2 Data provides no substantive new information about origins of SC-2

3 Researchers have documented track record of exaggerating findings & hiding major COIs

biosafetynow.org/press-release-…

16. Little of Interest..

..except their summary of the timeline of this scientific chicanery from 4th to 14th March 2023

"In an attempt to ensure transparency and engagement towards global partnership, we
would like to provide further context regarding the timeline of work"

17. The Ides of March

"On 13 March, those of us who had downloaded the data or associated metadata, or contacted the author of the preprint, received emails from the @GISAID Secretariat falsely accusing us of having breached the @GISAID terms of use"

18. Yet more hypocrisy as they brazenly claim:

"We acknowledge these circumstances are unusual. We are proponents of open data sharing & ensuring that data from our analyses are broadly accessible in public repositories"

Yet, as @pricklyresearch found out, life ain't that easy!

19. Summary so far of this "Potemkin" Report

All fur coat and no knickers, all hat, no cattle, putting lipstick on a raccoon dog and something is rotten in the state of Denmark!

20. While the Zoonati were sleeping soundly

In early 2020 #DRASTIC collaborators in China contacted the National Institute for Viral Disease Control CCDC authors whose data was obtained

Peipei Liu, Wenting Zhou, Wei Zhen, Xiaozhou He, Yu Lan, William Liu, George Gao, Guizhen Wu

21. A useful #DRASTIC background paper

Oct 2022

Zoonosis at Huanan Seafood Market: A Critique

"We find insufficient data to support a zoonosis hypothesis & instead conclude the most likely scenario is that an infected person brought SC-2 to the HSM"

doi.org/10.5281/zenodo…

22. What's in their GITHUB?

"Supporting code/scripts/tables for a report on analysis of metagenomic environment samples from Huanan market"

github.com/sars-cov-2-ori…

That's it, FFS?

23. Unanswered Questions

Where are the viral reads from each sample?

Why is there no SARS-CoV-2 column in the csv file?

What lineage (A or B) of SC2 was found in the Raccoon Dog sample?

Where is A20?

Does the data support a double spillover or not?

github.com/sars-cov-2-ori…

24. On the unreliability of Gao et al's market data

Just my opinion!

others (e.g @stuartjdneil may disagree)

Gao et al. declared they use Kraken2 in their pre-print

assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-13703…

Shortish thread here on problems with Kraken2

25. Raccoon Dog Sub Species Question

Closest reported relative of the complete raccoon dog mitochondrial genome sequence was Nyctereutes procyonoides collected in the wild in East China, distinct from that of N. p. ussuriensis, the subspecies commonly raised in NE China for fur

26. A Puzzling Omission

Regardless of the exact sub species of Raccoon Dog, as @stevenemassey pointed out in his thread:

"none of the stalls with raccoon dog nucleic acid have a human SARS2 case linked to it (which puzzlingly they fail to mention)"

27. Is it even likely that Raccoon Dogs were the intermediate host for SARS-COV-2?

Hint: They should have stuck to Mink ;)

15 Tweet Thead here:

28. Advice to Journalists

These are the issues that should be raised with the authors, before promoting this flawed Potemkin report.

@katherineykwu @benjmueller @mvankerkhove
@gabbystern @amymaxmen @sciencecohen
@hholdenthorp @jocelynkaiser @fayeflam
@natashaloder @SherylNYT

29. actually I do have something more to say..

h/t @EngineerThe and @zasdak

It seems that @flodebarre and some of her colleagues have now been evicted from @GISAID



Can't say it doesn't serve them right!

30. @GISAID Statement is very pro-Chinese

Money talks, but also distorts the truth..

gisaid.org/statements-cla…

Apart from the fact that CCDC refused to share market sample data for 3 years, despite repeated calls to do so @GISAID misleads us about the 2013 H7N9 bird flu outbreak

31. China CDC Praise from @GISAID

"In 2013, during the H7N9 avian influenza outbreak, they were credited in a Nature Editorial for "openness in the reporting and sharing of data [via GISAID]”

But, why was Michael Callahan "sent" to Nanjing then?

32. More detail on the H7N9 Samples issue

China Has Withheld Samples of a Dangerous Flu Virus

archive.ph/57QER

China Won't Share Its Samples of a Deadly Flu Virus. Here's Why That's a Problem.

livescience.com/63448-china-h7…

33. So @GISAID lied by omission

Now, time for a shameless plug of the October Surprise...

See Pages 72 to 80 for an in depth discussion of Dr. Callahan and his trip to Nanjing to secretly obtain H7N9 samples in late 2019

researchgate.net/publication/35…

34. Back to Raccoon Dogs

Useful thread with great questions from @VBruttel

35. I wasn't actually aware of this

EcoHealth's raccoon dog catch and release program detailed in @WhiteCoatWaste FOIA. Feb 2017 email from NIH sought details on EH testing program.

What did they do with them?

threadreaderapp.com/thread/1637895…

36. This is what EHA did to them

Some are euthanized, but..

"Animals that are sourced from markets & that may be potentially consumed, will be manually restrained without anesthesia, if possible, so that they may be returned to the vendor"

Thanks @HuchiTony and @WhiteCoatWaste

37. Impressive analysis by @mahonylab on human DNA reads & cross-species mapping

"If you can have SARS-CoV-2 showing up without much human DNA on a surface that has lots of animal DNA from meat, the same could be true on animal cages"



h/t @AntGDuarte

38. Joke Time!

39. Nice thread from @jbloom_lab just in

Conclusions (1)

"we have to be circumspect about environmental samples from Jan 2020. e.g., raccoon dog sample Q61 was collected on Jan 12 which is at least 6 and probably >8 weeks after first human infections"

40. Conclusion of @jbloom_lab (2)

"This brings me back to main caveat I noted about Chinese CDC pre-print when posted last year: we are unlikely to get conclusive answers about origin of outbreak that started in Nov 2019 (or earlier) by looking at samples collected in Jan 2020"

41. For the Record

@jbloom_lab analysis of Gao et al. (2022) preprint

From February last year

42. TopHap

"proCoV2 existed 8–11 weeks before the Dec 24, 2019 sampling date of Wuhan-1. This places the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 as evolving in mid-Sep to early-Oct 2019, many weeks earlier than the mid-Nov 2019 date proposed by Pekar et al. (2021)"

academic.oup.com/bioinformatics…

43. Thread by @michaelzlin points out that:

"as most cases in week 1 were not market-associated, this is even better evidence it didn't start at the market"

and

"further evidence of a pre-market origin is the SC-2 sequences discovered by @jbloom_lab "

44. Scandalous!

"A key author of "Proximal Origins" paper that asserted (with no logic) that any lab involvement would be implausible, who claimed a million-to-1 odds for market origin, tried to delay/block posting of the MBE paper in a meeting with Fauci"

@KatherineEban