Thread by @Ayjchan

I'm going to try and put this riveting BBC story in context for people who haven't heard about the 2012 Mojiang miners and a potential link to covid/SARS2 before. bbc.com/news/world-asi…

In 2012, miners working in a mine full of bats in Mojiang, Yunnan, China succumbed to a mysterious pneumonia. According to a medical thesis, these were likely caused by a SARS-like bat virus from the mine. Several experts, including WIV, were consulted and tested patient samples.

These cases have "been given new meaning by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Those three deaths are now at the centre of a major scientific controversy about the origins of the virus and the question of whether it came from nature, or from a laboratory."

Why? Because the closest virus relative to SARS2 (the covid virus), named RaTG13, was collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology from exactly this mine where people died from a SARS-like respiratory illness back in 2012.

9+ months after publishing @Nature paper on SARS2 & RaTG13, WIV finally told the world, yes, RaTG13 is from this mine where people died from severe respiratory illness, and they failed to attribute it to their prior paper where RaTG13 was named '4991':
nature.com/articles/s4158…

Not only that, but RaTG13 was only 1 of 9 SARS viruses they collected from the mine between 2012-2015. No idea if more were collected after 2015. Several other labs had also visited this mine to collect bat viruses, including the lab of the Chinese CDC director.

So this BBC team goes down to Mojiang to visit the mine, and what happens?
"We found obstacles in our way, including a "broken-down" lorry, which locals confirmed had been placed across the road a few minutes before we arrived."

".. we met yet another "broken down" car in our path.
We were trapped in a field for over an hour, before finally being forced to head for the airport."

Is there this kind of obstruction at all of the other bat caves visited by the WIV over the past decade?

"For more than a decade, the rolling, jungle-covered hills in Yunnan - and the cave systems within - have been the focus of a giant scientific field study.. led by Prof Shi"

Quote from the @BBCNews article:

Might a Chinese laboratory have had a virus they were working on that was genetically closer to Sars-Cov-2, and would they tell us now if they did? "Not everything that's done is published," Dr Lucey said.

bbc.com/news/world-asi…

Daszak: "I've met and had dinner with them over 15 years.. I'm working in China with eyes wide open, and I'm racking my brain back in time for the slightest hint of something untoward. And I've never seen that."

https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1325277221817356288

Quote: His collaboration with the WIV, (Daszak) said, "makes me one of the people on the planet who knows the most about the origins of these bat coronaviruses in China".

IMO it also makes him not an appropriate member of origins investigation addressing possible WIV lab leak.

"Prof Shi has also faced questions about why the WIV's online public database of viruses was suddenly taken offline. She told the BBC that the WIV's website and the staff's work emails and personal emails had been attacked, and the database taken offline for security reasons."

So, can the data from this database be shared with investigation committees? Wouldn't this be a key piece of evidence either supporting or debunking lab origins?

Did anyone outside of China have access to this WIV database of viruses that was taken offline when covid struck?

"we now know that back in 2013 the closest known ancestor was discovered of a future threat that would claim well over a million lives and devastate the global economy.
Yet the WIV... did nothing with it, except sequence it and enter it into a database." bbc.com/news/world-asi…

Peter Daszak told the BBC. "To say that we failed is not fair at all. What we should have been doing is 10 times the amount of work on these viruses."

Could Daszak please describe what this "10 times the amount of work" would've looked like?

Daszak, earlier in 2020, appeared unaware that RaTG13 had been sequenced in 2017 and 2018. In multiple interviews, he said that RaTG13 sample had been thrown in the freezer for 6 years until covid broke out. He was incorrect.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1279760373147750400

I'm not saying that SARS2 was derived from RaTG13. Would be exceedingly difficult to demonstrate that.

What is clear: Journalists are being obstructed from looking into the Mojiang SARS-like cases from 2012. WHO won't look into lab leak. WIV records and databases not shared.

Daniel Lucey, infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University, speculated that "We should search until we find (origins of covid). I think it's findable and I think it's quite possible it's already been found.. But then the question arises, why hasn't it been disclosed?"

I also concur with this view that someone likely already knows where this virus came from. Otherwise why are pangolins+other exotic animals still being massively trafficked, wet markets are still open (albeit no live animals), frozen food still being imported into China?

In the mean time, @WHO covid origins investigation team keeps telling journalists that finding the source will likely take years and that they're just going to build off China's reports and go looking in SE Asia (not China!) for SARS2-like bat viruses.

Daszak: “I have seen substantial evidence that these are naturally occurring phenomena driven by human encroachment into wildlife habitat, which is clearly on display across south-east Asia."

SEAsia, hope ur experts r thinking about outcomes of virus sampling in your countries.

To forestall any more grassy knoll comments, please see Dr. Shi's - top SARS expert, most familiar with the coronavirus research being done at the WIV - own reaction to first hearing about the outbreak in Wuhan.
scientificamerican.com/article/how-ch…

Short video of the BBC team being stopped by broken down lorries and checkpoints. "We end our trip to Yunnan trapped in a field for over an hour."