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Alina Chan Profile picture
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9 Mar, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Had a great conversation with @politicalmath over the weekend on what we know about #OriginsofCOVID

For me, it’s been 💯 interesting to hear about how smart, rational & curious people came to the question of whether SARS2 could’ve originated from a lab...
polimath.substack.com/p/on-covid-ori…
For people who are interested in the basics behind the different origins hypotheses - whether zoonotic, lab or frozen foods #PopsicleOrigins - I think this is the podcast to listen to 🎺
I also really like the article @politicalmath wrote around the podcast (because it was so flattering to me 💎) which pointed out that “When I (Polimath) try to track down information, all the “lab escape” info comes from Fox News or Breitbart...”

This is a serious problem.
That news organizations are often being very selective about which stories to investigate carefully and report on - based on what is politically useful at the time.

When this happens, no one is “following the science.” People are just using the science or, rather, part of it.

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
11 Mar
Hoping to press the point here about why it is so important to understand whether the current pandemic arose from the wildlife trade/environmental destruction vs research activities.

The pandemic prevention strategies are in complete conflict for each scenario.
We've heard from experts who believe that this pandemic MUST have arisen from 100% natural spillover (no research activities or personnel involved). They want us to ramp up virus hunting and virus study in labs worldwide. So that we can predict and prepare for the next pandemic.
But if COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 emerged due to the exposure of research or lab personnel, whether during the extensive fieldwork or in-lab experimentation, then this "pandemic prevention" strategy is actually accelerating the emergence of the next lab-related pandemic pathogen.
Read 6 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
10 Mar
If Daszak has seen the WIV pathogen database and it is also EcoHealth’s data, why not just post the spreadsheet for the public to evaluate? No need to put up a website susceptible to hacking.
Furthermore, the biggest clue to SARS2’s zoonotic origins are those closest virus relatives in bat caves in Yunnan, China that have been frequently sampled by various labs over the past decade.

Why not search there first?
I think we should let Daszak give more public webinars.
Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
10 Mar
If you’re curious about how SARS viruses can leak from a lab, @politicalmath and I discuss on his podcast.

One misconception is lab origins = creation of a novel virus from scratch.

But there are many lab-based scenarios by which pathogens can emerge.

soundcloud.com/matt-shapiro-8… Image
I listened to a BBC podcast this morning that stated that it is incredibly unlikely that SARS2 was designed or created to infect humans. 💯 agree.

But the issue is that we aren’t evaluating the risks of outbreaks stemming from research fieldwork or simple experiments in the lab.
Sometimes experiments that were not designed to create a dangerous pathogen can still surprisingly produce a dangerous pathogen.

You might be working with an attenuated or mouse-adapted strain, engineer in a novel feature (eg the FCS), and suddenly it has pandemic potential.
Read 6 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
6 Mar
Time to debunk another myth.

Some people are suggesting that you need to be making monstrously large amounts of virus in the lab in order to get infected.

Yet, the times SARS leaked from labs shows us how easy it is to catch it in the lab. One person didn’t even work with SARS.
Another pervasive misunderstanding that even @WHO convened team seemed to have:

“WIV did SARS work at BL4. Nothing can escape from a BL4.”

Incorrect on both counts. All the SARS work & infection experiments were done at BL2/3 all these years and SARS has leaked from BL4 before.
If SARS2 came from a lab, that lab may not have known about it (for a while).

When SARS leaked multiple times from a lab in Beijing, it wasn’t till a month later when people died that they detected the lab escape, 1000+ quarantined, investigators didn’t know how this happened.
Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
5 Mar
Just listened to this interesting @nature podcast on COVID's origins and the 'lab leak' theory. First reaction is that it's very light on evidence and heavy on motive speculation.

Some top points below...
nature.com/articles/d4158…
One, in terms of evidence available to date, there's just as much evidence for a lab leak as there is for a natural spillover causing the current pandemic.

People speculating lab vs natural origins are either way building off zero definitive evidence.
Two, there's a weird myth going around that the WIV was built in Wuhan because it's a SARS spillover zone.

100% incorrect.

Wuhan city is NOT a SARS spillover zone. The human population there has even been used as a negative control in studies for human exposure to SARS viruses.
Read 15 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
5 Mar
“based on what we know so far.. the W.H.O. investigation appears to be biased, skewed, and insufficient.. without full transparency and access to the primary data and records, we cannot understand the basis for any of the comments issued so far” nytimes.com/2021/03/04/hea…
... as @R_H_Ebright said, the open letter was released in anticipation of an interim report from the WHO-convened covid-19 origins study team. Our letter was communicated to high levels of @WHO on Tuesday, and we only heard this morning that no interim report is coming after all.
We can talk about the full report when it comes out but should not wait to call for global efforts as @FilippaLentzos described, possibly involving the U.N. General Assembly where all nations are represented and can vote on whether to formally investigate #OriginsofCOVID
Read 11 tweets

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