Thread by @breakfast_dogs

The French Enlightenment

Recently French state media broadcast a documentary skeptical of a natural origin of Covid-19.

This is a watershed in European coverage, and follows tantalizing rumors from German and Italian IC sources.

How sincere is this new openness? 🧵

The media coverage appeared to trigger further action - the French Academy of Medicine declared a lab accident possible, and a group of scientists is calling for a parliamentary commission.

Some French scientists have long been open to an artificial origin - but nuance matters.

These include Institut Pasteur's Marc Eloit, author of the Banal sequences These lack an FCS, so leave open that it was artificially inserted.

But they paper over other suspect features e.g. the RBM/NTD with human respiratory and neuro-tropism.

Can this really evolve in bats?

Feb 2, 2020: Jeremy Farrar contacted Chen Zhu, former Chinese health minister, to discuss concerns of an artificial origin of SARS-CoV-2.

Francophile Chen did his PhD/postdoc there. Later, with French businessman Alain Merieux, he drove Sino-French cooperation on the Wuhan lab.

It is less well known that Chen and Merieux had in 2018-19 been promoting new collaboration on bio-surveillance. This would have seen the South-East Asian outposts of Institut Pasteur help China hunt novel zoonotic pathogens.

But the agreement wasn't signed as anticipated.

On Feb 14, 2020, Chinese Ambassador Lu Shaye visited Institut Pasteur in Paris with a delegation of scientists, to discuss mutual co-operation over Covid-19.

In a twist of fate, also on Feb 14th, Pyotr Pavlensky, a Russian émigré known for provocative performance art, publicized images sexted by the Republican candidate for Mayor of Paris to a girlfriend.

Barely a scandal by French standards, but a new mayoral candidate was sought.

Two days later, France's Health Minister, Agnès Buzyn, resigned to replace the Republican mayoral candidate (she came 3rd in the vote).

The recent documentary revealed Buzyn had feared a lab origin from the outset, and warned Macron and the PM of her concerns.
h/t @a_kruschke

Her concerns shouldn't be easy to dismiss. She is an immunologist, and her husband, Yves Levy, is head of INSERM (France's NIH).

Levy had expressed concerns about biosecurity and nefarious use of the Wuhan P4 lab long before it opened.

So had the French intelligence agencies.

With the onset of the pandemic, the French China boosters remained unrepentant.

Former Institut Pasteur/INSERM/Merieux director and WIV advisory board member, Christian Bréchot, was defiant - appalled at the "rumors" and railing against "anti-Chinese sentiment".

In May, Alain Merieux announced they would strengthen co-operation between WIV/CAS and France's South-East Asian network.

IP Shanghai announced they had recently recruited new scientists hoping to expand their co-operation - including in South-East Asia.

One scientist who transferred to IP Shanghai in 2019 was former Eddie Holmes postdoc Jie Cu.

Cui's student, Yu Ping, documented the discovery of RaTG13 (Ra4991) in her June, 2019 master's thesis, but omitted the RBD from an alignment. It clearly had been sequenced by then.

Notice that the % identities for Ra4991 for each gene are almost the same as those of Rs8561?

We learned recently Rs8561 is >99% similar to ZC45 in the spike.

Both are ~20% different from SARS (a key DEFUSE criteria), but also to each other. What is going on here?

Cui uploaded ~160 sequences to GenBank (including 2 from RaTG13, but not spike) but didn't make them public. We know about them only because an automatic embargo expired in 2022 making them temporarily visible.

Neither Cui or Yu are named on the Feb 2020 paper describing RaTG13.

At the time IPS was WIV's partner/sister company, a joint venture between IP and CAS, WIV's parent organization.

Cui likely joined the Institut Pasteur network without physically relocating from Wuhan, or leaving WIV. At times he used both affiliations.

In 2017, Institut Pasteur Laos had, with US DoD funding, collected ~500 samples of bats which had never been sequenced for viruses.

In 2020, they left these in their freezer and launched a new field trip to the same caves.

It seems odd to launch a new field trip in the midst of a pandemic with rolling lockdowns and travel restrictions in Laos.

Perhaps the reason was they intended to sequence these in collaboration with IPS-CAS? US DoD may not have approved sharing samples they paid for with China.

Duplicates of these 2017 samples exist, held by others. Different results may have been obtained if independently sequenced.

I wrote to the director of LOWMRU to ask if they could sequence their set.

She seemed open to the idea, but didn't respond to follow-up emails.

No authors from IPS appear on the papers published about the Banal sequences.

For an expert in the field, Jie Cui was quiet, publishing no new sequences. He didn't even disclose his existing sequences, some of which (e.g. RaTG13, Rs8561) were very relevant.

h/t @monarahalkar

A later Cui piece (coming after RaTG13 has been revealed) discusses ZC45, but still doesn't disclose Rs8561, or the other ZC45-like sequences.

Cui drops the Wuhan Insitute of Virology from his affiliation for this one, but that's where it's based.

The 2019-20 annual reports of both Institut Pasteur Laos and the Pasteur Network are clear about the forthcoming involvement of Institut Pasteur Shanghai.

But the next year's report isn't on their website and my emailed request went unanswered.

The Banal viruses are suspect.

Aside from the murky provenance and unlikely discovery, sequences suggest unnatural evolution. There's negative selective pressure in viruses jumping species, and "precision recombination".

Hallmarks of earlier WIV fraud.

In 2023, Pasteur announced its divorce from CAS (backdating its separation to an organizational reshuffle in July 2021). The statement recognizes Paris had little control over its Chinese outpost.

But scientific cooperation with WIV/CAS continued after the separation.

Like this collaboration involving the former head of virology at IP Laos. This group posted sequences to GenBank a few hours before the Banals were uploaded.

Though entirely unrelated viruses (insect viruses sampled in Africa in 1969) there's some unexpected homology to SARS.

The Banals attracted less scrutiny than earlier Chinese sequences, partly due to Pasteur's reputation.

They don't entirely rule out an artificial origin, because they lack an FCS. But - if real -they suggest only this minor modification, not an extensively engineered bioweapon.

Validating them is crucial.

If not genuine, they

• obfuscate unnatural mechanisms of pathogenicity that should inform the design of vaccines
•give credence to a hoax theory of "evolution by horizontal gene transfer" that enables future bioweapon releases without attribution

Is France genuinely interested in finding the origin of Covid? Is there the will to investigate French institutions, scientists, business leaders, politicians?

US engagement with WIV (e.g. DEFUSE) is most discussed, not French. US has at least begun to investigate its own role.

As Europe swings between the orbits of US and China, trade and investment dominate discourse.

Perhaps the shared values rooted in the French Enlightenment should be given more prominence?

China's totalitarian regime is anathema to human rights and freedoms, and open science.

A Substack post with a few more words...

open.substack.com/pub/dogsbreakf…