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Alina Chan Profile picture
@Ayjchan
Sep 20, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
I’m hearing from some readers that fb and maybe twitter are flagging this article as misinformation ~24h after posting. Let’s see what happens! bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/0…
I think I figured out what's happening. It's past 24h now and I have not seen a misinformation warning on shares of the article (thank goodness). The misinfo tag pops up when people share the article alongside text saying that SARS2 was most likely engineered in a lab.
For the record, I think all 3 scenarios: pre-adaptation, pre-circulation in humans, lab-based origins are -plausible- and must continue to be investigated. It's not productive to be guessing the probabilities of each scenario. Game-changing evidence can emerge any time.
Take a look at the past 9 months: people were going crazy about the seafood market & Chinese people eating bats in early 2020, then we went through a pangolin phase (some continue to swear by pangolins being the intermediate host), and now pre-circulation in humans is in vogue...
How SARS2 transmitted from bats, maybe through an intermediate host, into humans is still an open question with no evidence of the virus having ever passed through an intermediate. Despite testing millions of people & animals worldwide, we haven't found a SARS2 precursor/sibling.
It's like someone looking for their keys the morning after a long night of partying. They've ransacked their coats, laundry, living room (the most likely places), but are refusing to check the bedroom or kitchen because they've never left their keys in these areas before...
It could be unlikely, but maybe in a few minutes, they'll remember that they raided the fridge for leftovers last night and left the keys in there by accident for the first time ever. You may as well check the kitchen/fridge before pulling the floorboards out of the living room.

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
Mar 9
I am not 100% convinced Covid came from a lab. I still think there is a small chance the virus emerged in Wuhan without the help of research activities. However, this would mean:

1⃣ The Wuhan-US scientists' entire framework about the spillover risks of SARS-like viruses, building on research and data collected over more than a decade, was incorrect.

2⃣ A highly transmissible, super stealthy virus well adapted for causing uncontrollable outbreaks in multiple animal species left zero trace of its origin in the wildlife or fur farms of China/SE Asia after emerging in only Wuhan out of 1000s of other populous cities.

3⃣ Out of all possible viruses to cause a pandemic and all times for a pandemic to occur, it was an unprecedented SARS-like virus with a novel furin cleavage site, matching the description of a 2018 US-Wuhan research proposal, emerging in Wuhan where scientists worked with such viruses at low biosafety, less than 2 years after said proposal was drafted.

It's not impossible that leading experts were completely mistaken about the exceedingly low odds of such viruses emerging in Wuhan.

It's not impossible that, in 2019, nature churned out a virus matching the scientists' 2018 research plans and that virus emerged in only Wuhan of all places.

But you'd have to be very motivated to believe Covid-19 emerged naturally.
We are unlikely to reach 100% certainty unless a whistleblower appears or the Chinese authorities one day assess that it is in their interest to share the truth.

I am still hopeful that this will happen one day. I believe in human courage.
Before that day, there are several routes of investigation that remain to be explored by the US gov.

Conducting a rigorous, credible investigation of Covid origins can unearth more key evidence while also informing the implementation of new measures to prevent lab pandemics.
Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
Mar 8
Top journals have the power to set global biosafety standards.

It's a problem that they do not see this as their moral responsibility. By publishing & celebrating risky research done at questionable biosafety, they incentivize the 'work fast break things' model of research.
I've given up on journals taking the initiative to be responsible members of the scientific community.

It is up to the U.S. government to tell them to behave responsibly or do business elsewhere.
I would love to be corrected if any top journal can show us that fostering a culture of accountability, scientific integrity, and 'do no harm' is one of their measurable goals as an organization & a strict criteria for decision-making regarding what research/groups to publish.
Read 6 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
Mar 2
Dear @NSAGov I've just google searched several human transmissible viruses with the aim of understanding how many are not governed by the Federal Select Agents Program and can be used in gain-of-function research by privately funded groups.

I am not doing anything nefarious 🙏
@NSAGov The answer is there are a lot of human transmissible viruses that are not governed by the Federal Select Agents Program and can be used in gain-of-function research by privately funded groups.
@NSAGov Novel SARS-like and MERS-like viruses are not select agents. Meaning scientists in the US can bring these to their labs in major cities and enhance them without informing the authorities.

At any biosafety level they see fit.
Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
Feb 21
Leading science organizations and journals appear to be utterly tone deaf.

Up till last month, the National Academies kept Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance as head of their forum on microbial threats. Nature journal continues to play the mouthpiece of the Proximal Origin authors & friends.

There appears to be zero introspection that they created/are part of a system that incentivizes risky research including the work in Wuhan that likely caused the pandemic.

Just this month, another top journal published 2 studies where MERS-like viruses were used in human cell infection studies at low biosafety (BSL-2) in Wuhan. The journal did not attach notices of concern to either paper.

Are we just waiting for another outbreak of ambiguous origin to occur? And will we endure more years of "it was the pangolins/bats/raccoon dogs/name your favorite intermediate host?"
@CellCellPress when you publish papers that handle animal pathogens with unclear (human) pandemic potential at low biosafety, you signal to the rest of the scientific community that this is totally fine and will be celebrated in the best scientific journals.
@CellCellPress At the very least, there should be a note of concern. For example, pointing out that the human pathogen MERS coronavirus has a ~30% fatality rate and, in the US, has to be handled at BSL-3. And that researchers should take extra precaution when handling its close relatives.
Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
Feb 5
There is speculation that US funded collaborations with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to keep an eye on virus research there.

The problem is that, when a pandemic happened, the middleman did not produce intelligence but also actively suppressed the lab leak theory.
When the SARS-CoV-2 sequence was released in Jan 2020, EcoHealth could've said
1⃣They planned to put furin cleavage sites in SARS-like viruses
2⃣In 2013, the Wuhan lab discovered a new lineage of SARS-like viruses that the covid virus belongs to
3⃣Work was done at low biosafety
Instead we had to go through 5 years of the lab leak hypothesis being painted as a racist, anti-science conspiracy theory and a ton of misinformation from EcoHealth about the work being done in Wuhan.
Read 7 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
Jan 9
No punches pulled piece on #OriginOfCovid by @ianbirrell

"The pandemic revealed the arrogant and contemptuous behaviour of leading scientific figures, aided by prominent academic journals, patsy journalists and weak politicians."
unherd.com/2025/01/chinas…
@ianbirrell I suggest one correction @ianbirrell please replace 'despite' with 'because of':

WHO "hired Sir Jeremy Farrar, despite the former Wellcome Trust boss’s exposure as a central player in... branding any suggestions Covid could have come from a laboratory as conspiracy theory."
@ianbirrell On Feb 19, 2020, the authors of Proximal Origin realized that Jeremy Farrar - who had convened them and led their efforts - had signed the Lancet letter by Daszak condemning all lab #OriginOfCovid as conspiracy theories. Image
Read 5 tweets

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