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Alina Chan Profile picture
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12 Mar, 5 tweets, 2 min read
If you’re hearing some BS that the Mojiang miners were infected with a fungus, please read one of my older threads...
And this one too:
And this thread for people who are hearing for the first time about the Mojiang miners and the connection to the closest virus relative to SARS2
For the historians:
Just a little bit inconsistent that several top pathogen labs including WIV would spend the years following the 2012 Yunnan miners cases repeatedly sampling that same mine for bat viruses if they thought the miners had only been infected by fungus.

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
13 Mar
I think that it is important for scientists & public stakeholders across diverse fields of training to convene and discuss the range of pathogen research occurring worldwide as we tweet.

I wouldn't raise this except in the context of a pandemic that has shut the world down...
We may not know for years or even decades, for sure, how COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 came to be.

In this situation, we just have to prepare for each of the plausible origin scenarios - natural spillover, lab leak, and unfortunately, for some subset of 🌏, cold chain #PopsicleOrigins
Before we set up another forum or advisory board (which mustn't just be scientists this time) to discuss how to evaluate the risks of pathogen research, it's important to look back on the past few years of this type of debate among scientists on Gain of Function (GOF) research.
Read 29 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
13 Mar
Here is the layperson-appropriate coverage of the Mojiang mine and its relevance to COVID-19’s origins. Thanks! ⁦@TheSeeker268⁩ ⁦@thetimes⁩ play.acast.com/s/storiesofour…
Three major issues by a scientist’s review.

One, most of WIV’s SARS work had been done at BSL2/3 not BSL4. It doesn’t matter what their BSL4 looks like. The work was done at a level where undergrads can be touching their faces and personal belongings with contaminated gloves.
Two, we keep hearing this expert stance that there’s no evidence for lab leak.

Guess what. There’s also no evidence for a natural spillover.

If a lab accident is a baseless conspiracy, then so is an accidental natural spillover.
Read 12 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
11 Mar
Another @washingtonpost opinion: "whether it caused this pandemic or not, a lab accident could certainly cause the next one. Scientists have been sounding that alarm for some time, well before the current pandemic began."
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
It cites this @WIRED article: "It should be obvious that no one with any connection to either organization (WIV or US partner) can play a formal role in any truly independent investigation into the pandemic’s origins." wired.com/story/if-covid…
I don't know if the @WHO understands what is happening, but in your convened team, at least one of the members is investigating work that he funded and is part of. I don't know who the Chinese half of the WHO-convened study team is.
Read 14 tweets
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…
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

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