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Alina Chan Profile picture
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14 Mar, 6 tweets, 3 min read
We don't know when the WHO-China report on the origins of covid-19 will drop. Maybe in the next week. Maybe the week after. Maybe next month.

Their interim report was supposed to have been released in February.

These are basics journalists should ask...
Who is on the team?
"The joint international team comprise 17 Chinese experts and 17 international experts from ten other countries."

Who are these experts and do they have reasonably perceived conflicts of interests?
who.int/publications/m…
What data did the team have access to?

Based on this access, which origins hypotheses could they have even possibly have studied properly?

We know they were not even able to access the original, full data on early cases or suspected early cases.
If the team is going to pursue supply chains from South China and even SE Asia, possibly implicating frozen foods #PopsicleOrigins, do they have any actual well-documented, independently verifiable evidence that people can catch coronavirus from frozen meat?
Do they have access to the data describing those thousands of SARS2-negative animal samples across 31 provinces in China?

How can we explain that no original animal source in China has tested positive for SARS2?

Where and what has been tested?

who.int/publications/m…
If the WHO-China team only has the powers to investigate #PopsicleOrigins with a focus on frozen meat being shipped from outside of China - just make it clear that they don't have the ability to investigate lab origins or even natural spillover within China #MojiangMiners

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
16 Mar
Dear @NPR @FoodieScience it's become quite clear to me that you need help with researching what questions to ask the WHO-China team and SARS experts. Please reach out. I can also recommend top experts of indisputable renown that you should be interviewing.
npr.org/sections/goats…
Linfa Wang says there were SARS2-positive samples in the live animal section - were these the environmental samples that have already been analyzed, suggesting introduction by an infected human into the Huanan seafood market, rather than any on-site animal to human spillover?
Read 12 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
15 Mar
Because we have no idea when SARS2 / COVID-19 actually emerged in Wuhan, and 2019 case numbers may have been drastically under-reported, it's worthwhile to revisit reports of suspected COVID-19 cases in 2019 that were super strange in early 2020: leparisien.fr/international/…
In Wuhan the "Military World Games - nearly 10,000 athletes representing 100 nations - took place from October 18 to 27" 2019.

Spokesperson for "Chinese Foreign Ministry, hinted on Twitter on March 12 that the coronavirus may have been introduced by the US delegation"
Back in early 2020, when I read about this, I thought it was completely out-there - that it was just people who had seasonal flu or common cold and were alarmed by reports of the novel COVID-19 coronavirus.

But now the covid-19 timeline has extended back to possibly Sep 2019...
Read 12 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
14 Mar
In anticipation of some excellent articles on the origins of covid-19 coming out next week, I think it would be useful to cover a few areas of confusion relating to what experts mean by the "origins" of a virus, what counts as lab origins, and what counts as Gain-of-Function.
Over the past months, we've seen reports of SARS2-like viruses discovered across a wide geographic area from Thailand to Japan. Still the closest relatives to SARS2 are viruses from Yunnan, China.

What does this tell us about the origins of SARS2 and how it emerged in Wuhan?
Frankly, it tells us what we've known since the beginning.

That the ancestral origins of SARS2, like other SARS viruses, is in 🦇 and that the hotspot is in Yunnan, China or proximal to Yunnan.

Some experts are very keen to sample SE Asia just across the border from Yunnan...
Read 27 tweets
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
12 Mar
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
Read 5 tweets

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