Thread by @GMWatch

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis: For decades scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if ...? asks @nicholsonbaker8 (author of the book 'Baseless' about seeking the truth about US bioweapons) nymag.com/intelligencer/… #COVID19

@nicholsonbaker8 We were warned, repeatedly. The intentional creation of new microbes that combine virulence with heightened transmissibility poses extraordinary risks to the public. In 2012 Lynn Klotz warned there was an 80% chance of a leak of a potential pandemic pathogen in the next 12 years.

@nicholsonbaker8 A lab accident—a dropped flask, a needle prick, a mouse bite, an illegibly labeled bottle—is apolitical. Proposing that something unfortunate happened during a scientific experiment in Wuhan where #COVID19 emerged isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just a theory. It merits attention

@nicholsonbaker8 Jonathan A King, a molecular biologist from MIT, says he “absolutely” thought lab accident when he first heard about the epidemic. Other scientists he knew were concerned as well. But there are “v intense, v subtle pressures” on scientists not to push on issues of lab biohazards.

@nicholsonbaker8 Collecting lots of bat viruses, and passaging those viruses repeatedly through cell cultures, and making bat-human viral hybrids, King believes, “generates new threats and desperately needs to be reined in.” #COVID19

@nicholsonbaker8 .@R_H_Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers, has been concerned for yrs about the Wuhan Lab and work there to create “chimeric” SARS-related bat coronaviruses “with enhanced human infectivity.” “In this context, the news of a novel coronavirus in #Wuhan screamed lab release.”

Pompeo & Trump claiming #COVID19 escaped from a Chinese lab made the notion politically toxic, even among scientists who say it could have happened. Whatever Trump & Pompeo were saying must be wrong. It became almost taboo to admit that of course, SARS2 could have come from a lab

If one of the first thoughts that goes thru the head of lab director Shi Zhengli is that the new virus could have come from her lab, then we're obliged to entertain that scientific possibility. There should have been a comprehensive fully public investigation in Wuhan right then.

Fact: This patchwork pathogen 1st came to notice in the only city in the world with a lab performing experiments on certain obscure strains of bat viruses that turn out to be, out of all the organisms on the planet, the ones most closely related to the disease. What are the odds?

Back in 2012 Lynn Klotz warned about creating deadly new viruses, and that SARS “now presents the greatest risk. The worry is less about recurrence of a natural SARS outbreak than of yet another escape from a lab researching it to help protect against a natural outbreak” #COVID19

Is it so unimaginable that something could have gone wrong in a climate of gonzo laboratory experimentation, at a time when all sorts of tweaked variants and amped-up substitutions were being tested on cell cultures and in the lungs of humanized mice & other experimental animals?

Great to see @nicholsonbaker8 in his superb @NYMag piece drawing on *and crediting* the "tireless" @BillyBostickson @MonaRahalkar @Rossana38510044 @ydeigin @BioSRP @R_H_Ebright and @Ayjchan for their insights, skilful explanations and remarkable detective work. #DRASTIC