Thread by @Ayjchan

Dear @WHO since you had a good conversation with Wuhan scientists, did you ask how many bats & coronaviruses they sampled in each province in China & when, & how many wildlife pathogen sequences they obtained from each province?

This is a question other scientists have asked me.

Without these numbers, it's hard to grasp the extent of risk associated with this research.

And I think even @EcoHealthNYC wouldn't know these numbers for each province in China. So I'm surprised that other scientists think I would know😆 My postdoc powers are very limited!

According to @MarionKoopmans the WIV told you they only isolated 3 SARS viruses from their decade+ of very expensive research. But what's the true value of their work? How many animals did they actually sample, and where and when? How many pathogen sequences were discovered?

I don't think it's good value for money (ultimately coming from taxpayers) to just know that they sampled 5000+ bats.

You need to get better resolution on this data. Where. When. What sequences came out of it. How can you not have a database or even a spreadsheet with this info?

How can you spend millions of dollars on this and not even have a spreadsheet with this information?

Surely this information can't be classified.

We also know from the scientific literature that you sampled thousands of humans in rural areas in South China provinces, purposefully searching for human SARS pathogens.

Got a spreadsheet on that data?

If it's all hidden away in supplementary materials in journals, with most of the new data as old as 2016 still sitting in "manuscripts in preparation", I advise preprinting it all now so we can have an informed discussion about wildlife pathogen sampling and downstream research.

If the @WHO and @EcoHealthNYC don't even have the numbers of pathogen and animals sampled over the last decade, where and when, not to mention the actual sequences, then how can you possibly even be voting to determine how likely a lab origin is?

Even internet sleuths have a good guess of which 3 published virus isolates the WIV told you about. But the last one was isolated years ago. You believe no new SARS viruses have been isolated by the world's leading SARS sampling lab in the past few years?

https://twitter.com/franciscodeasis/status/1361456159530639367

You're saying that since 2016, the WIV has had this dry spell of not isolating ANY new SARS viruses?

Ok, we know by now that the WIV does some serious dangerous human pathogen work.
2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-act…
cbc.ca/news/canada/ma…

If they weren't doing serious dangerous pathogen work on bat viruses in China, can't they share a spreadsheet of the numbers (not even the sequences)?

But if they can't share their Chinese bat/wildlife virus numbers (not to mention database) because they were doing some serious dangerous pathogen work on it, maybe we should know that now instead of a press conference a few months from now?

World governments and 🧪funding agencies, you're going to keep pouring 100s of millions of $ into projects that don't even produce a spreadsheet of the numbers of animals and pathogens they sampled in each area over time?

Is this really helping us to predict the next pandemic?

Now @WHO team is investigating cold chain origins of SARS-CoV-2 #PopsicleOrigins

That's fine.

But if you don't even have these numbers from the bat/wildlife pathogen sampling in China over the past decade, please state that clearly in your summary and full reports.

Thank you.