Thread by @Ayjchan

There is a phenomenal amount of content to unpack in this astounding end-of-2020 @APNews article on the origins of SARS-CoV-2/covid. I spent the day thinking about how to go about a thread about their many findings. apnews.com/article/united…

The single line that stuck with me the most:

“It’s pointless to blame anyone for this disease” - Wuhan Huanan seafood market vendor Jiang

"Jiang avoided telling people he worked at Huanan because of the stigma. He criticized the political tussle between China and the U.S."

I agree on this point. I've spent many months not really wanting to be associated with my own twitter account. Not because there's something unscientific about the things I've tweeted, but because of the stigma associated with going against the consensus on covid origins.

Why does blame have so much to do with whether SARS-CoV-2 emerged from the wildlife trade or a lab leak? In both scenarios, it's an accident.

In both scenarios, you're "accusing" someone of an accident.

In both scenarios, you learn how to reduce risk of a future pandemic.

The issue now is how long origins tracking gets drawn out. How many years before we find out, with confidence, with good evidence, SARS2 emerged from a 100% natural spillover from animals into humans vs a lab-based scenario. And what to do during those years when we don't know.

This is where the @APNews article begins, similar to the @BBC team, at a mine in Mojiang, Yunnan, China, where miners suffered a mysterious pneumonia and where the closest virus to SARS2 was collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in 2013.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1341185517921202177

The mine "may hold clues to the origins of the coronavirus that has killed more than 1.7 million people worldwide. Yet for scientists and journalists, it has become a black hole of no information because of political sensitivity and secrecy."
apnews.com/article/united…

Similar to @BBC, the @APNews team was "tailed by plainclothes police in multiple cars who blocked access to roads and sites in late November"

They also obtained intel that a Chinese "bat research team visiting recently managed to take samples but had them confiscated"...

This does not mean that SARS-CoV-2/covid came from that Mojiang mine or from the miners who sickened with a mysterious viral pneumonia in 2012. But it does suggest that there's tight control over who investigates and what results will be published.

This is supported by the leaked CCP documents that @APnews obtained: "publication of any data or research must be approved by a new task force managed by China’s cabinet, under direct orders from President Xi Jinping... The clampdown comes from the top." documentcloud.org/documents/7340…

"Gary Kobinger, a Canadian microbiologist advising WHO, emailed... on Jan. 13. “If we put aside an accident ... then I would look at the bats in these markets (sold and ‘wild’).”"

What kind of accident are we talking about?

Feb 24 China CDC "new approval processes for publication.. from.. President Xi.. notices ordered CDC staff not to share any data, specimens or other information related to the coronavirus with outside institutions or individuals."

So pre-Feb 24, you'd have communications, right?

Exoneration of the Huanan market: "China CDC researcher Liu Jun returned to the market nearly 20 times to collect some 2,000 samples over the following months, nothing was released about what they revealed. On May 25, CDC chief Gao finally broke the silence around the market...

"... in an interview with China’s Phoenix TV. He said that, unlike the environmental samples, no animal samples from the market had tested positive.

The announcement surprised scientists who didn’t even know Chinese officials had taken samples from animals."

"February, Chinese scientists put out 4 separate papers on coronaviruses related to COVID-19 in trafficked Malayan pangolins.. (Linfa) Wang.. Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore said the search for the coronavirus in pangolins did not appear to be “scientifically driven.”

The things we could tell you about these pangolins...

"The Chinese government is also limiting and controlling the search for patient zero through the re-testing of old flu samples.. only published retrospective testing data from two Wuhan flu surveillance hospitals — 520 samples out of the 330,000 collected in China last year."

"info that has dribbled out suggests.. virus was circulating well outside Wuhan in 2019.. child >100km frm Wuhan had fallen ill with the virus by Jan 2, suggesting it was spreading widely in Dec. But earlier samples weren’t tested, according to a scientist with direct knowledge"

My take on this is that it has become basically impossible for an independent (no reasonably perceived conflicts of interest) international team to investigate the top 3 origins scenarios of SARS2/covid: (1) recent spillover from an animal into humans in late 2019 (scenario A)...

(2) low level pre-circulation of SARS2 in humans, likely proximal to Wuhan, over months/years prior to late 2019 (scenario A), or (3) lab-based scenarios of SARS2 emergence (scenarios B, C, D).

A scientist told me that B is a natural scenario, but I classified it as lab-based because the resulting decision-making has to do with limiting/adapting lab or research activities. If SARS2 emerged because lab personnel were sampling too many sick bats and pple, we need to stop.

I think most people will (hopefully) tell you that adding 10,000s of pathogen sequences to a database is not worth millions of lives.