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Alina Chan Profile picture
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23 Jan, 8 tweets, 4 min read
If people really believe that SARS2, the largest pandemic of our lifetime, killing millions and still going strong, came from the wildlife trade- why aren't we doing something real about this?

Why aren't we banning ALL poaching, all wildlife trafficking, all wild animal markets?
Have we collectively decided we can't give up trafficking, hunting, and selling wild animals even in cities where you can import a vast variety of (frozen) meats from around the world (in other words, where bushmeat is not essential) - even at risk of future covid-like pandemics?
I find it incomprehensible. If I thought that another country had given my city a pandemic virus and made us the blame of the world, I would have immediately ceased ALL wildlife trade and frozen food imports coming into the province (or even the country) to avoid a repeat.
Instead, it took more than half a year to get pangolins taken off the approved list of traditional medicines, despite the research papers that came out of China in Feb 2020 saying that pangolins were the probable intermediate host of SARS-CoV-2 (covid).
ibtimes.com/china-removes-…
This news recently came out on another gang of smugglers busted for trafficking 23 tonnes of pangolin scales (yes, just their scales = 23 tonnes, not including their bodies) in 2018 and 2019.

How many pangolins continued to be trafficked in 2020?
ibtimes.com/china-jails-ga…
What we were told a year ago:

@CurrentBiology "pangolin species are a natural reservoir of SARS-CoV-2-like CoVs" tinyurl.com/sjfrnyd

@nature "these animals have the potential to act as an intermediate host of SARS-CoV-2"
nature.com/articles/s4158…
nature.com/articles/s4158…
What Dr Shi from the WIV said in her most recent review in @ScienceMagazine Jan 2021:
"Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spillover likely occurred from bat and/or pangolin (ancestral virus)..."
science.sciencemag.org/content/371/65…
What they're telling us - through the news and top journals - doesn't match up with how they're actually responding to reduce the risk of another pandemic.

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
24 Jan
Ooh @cbcradio Sunday Magazine @davidcommon interview of @nicholsonbaker8 on the lab leak hypothesis in @NYMag

For US people, listen on @Spotify

cbc.ca/radio/sunday/t…
One point I disagree with @nicholsonbaker8 is that, if covid came from a lab, this is the result of US interest in gain-of-function research. There is global interest in gain-of-function research - has been for years. Even if the US cut off funding, it wouldn't stop.
There's a type of American hubris that imagines that if you cut off some millions of dollars of funding to "gain-of-function" research in other countries and implement some kind of moratorium, that it would grind to a halt.

That doesn't work.
Read 8 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
24 Jan
@razibkhan interviewed me over 🎄 for his new Unsupervised Learning series - got a little emotional at the end revisiting my experience of raising the possibility of covid lab origins which had been and continues to be cast as conspiracy theory. But the search for covid origins..
.. isn’t even close to peaking yet. We haven’t even established a credible independent investigation into the matter. Once that actually happens, we will certainly find out a lot more about where this virus came from.

I am optimistic about this.
I didn’t (and won’t) mention names of absolutely talented, courageous & wise people who supported me during this time. But I’m grateful for the people who know that we need to find the origins of covid and, in the big picture, have a renewed conversation about pathogen research.
Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
23 Jan
I feel that the buzz is growing about studies suggesting covid in Europe, pre-Wuhan.

I told @TheJohnSudworth @BBC "They do not present persuasive scientific evidence that the virus was circulating outside of China before the late 2019 outbreak in Wuhan"

bbc.com/news/world-asi…
For more details, please see my thread examining the evidence presented in each of those studies claiming to have found covid cases outside of China before late 2019 or 2 separate cases of covid in Nov 2019 in Milan.
tldr these studies often did not or could not validate their findings. There was no coherent hypothesis based in reality that could explain what their little data was showing them.

&Although these studies were largely peer-reviewed, we have no insight to what the reviewers said.
Read 7 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
23 Jan
Seriously ☄️ reporting by ⁦@TheJohnSudworth⁩
“if you line up side-by-side the WHO's Terms of Reference with the Shi Zhengli Science article.. it is clear that the overarching strategic narrative is that the origin of the virus is outside of China." bbc.com/news/world-asi…
@bbc reporting from Wuhan: “Instead of publishing its own evidence.. China appears to be taking an anywhere-but-Wuhan approach, with state media cheerleading the idea that the virus may have arrived in Wuhan on frozen food imports or talking cryptically of ‘multiple origins’”
The idea of multiple origins- that sars2 somehow emerged simultaneously in multiple countries around the world in 2019 - is mind bending.

A pandemic pathogen emerging in humans is already rare. Not to mention the same virus emerging in different places around🌏 at the same time.
Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
22 Jan
Journalists have been asking what it's like to propose lab origins hypothesis & consistently present the circumstantial evidence for it.

I thought about this and think the analogy of the boy who cried wolf is the best way to explain it to non-scientists.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_W…
The story: "a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his town's flock. When a wolf actually does appear and the boy again calls for help, the villagers believe that it is another false alarm and the sheep are eaten by the wolf."
At the very beginning of this pandemic, there were people who cried wolf. These included scientists who said that it could be possible that SARS-CoV-2 had come from a lab.
sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/m…

world-class.simplecast.com/episodes/what-…

img-prod.tgcom24.mediaset.it/images/2020/02…
Read 14 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
22 Jan
Can we stop with the new viruses for a bit?

Chinese gov “has not said how widely used illicit vaccines are or who has produced them. But a "vast amount" of pigs in China have nonetheless been vaccinated... a sentiment echoed by many other experts.” reuters.com/article/us-chi…
Story speaks to how much biotech has progressed. Based on just a sequence, hundreds, maybe even thousands of labs around the world can now synthesize any pathogen with good or bad intent. You can’t tell which lab made these illicit swine flu vaccines unless you ask the farmers.
And I just heard this isn’t a country specific mindset.

“an intervention could involve treating the entire animal reservoir to reduce viral load using tools such as anti-virals, vaccines, and interfering particles.”

No live vaccines for 🦇 please!

darpa.mil/news-events/20…
Read 5 tweets

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