Alina Chan Profile picture
21 Mar, 10 tweets, 3 min read
Got a clue for the #OriginsofCOVID #PopsicleOrigins hypothesis:
At the 15:00 min mark Peter Daszak says they’ve got really good cold chain from remote sampling sites back to the labs - at least 16,000 bat samples collected.

Finally found a source of the myth going around that 3% of people in Yunnan have SARS antibodies and millions of people are getting bat viruses each year. This is a miscommunication. See the actual paper only surveying people living close to caves where SARS detected...
In contrast to the interview, the paper says “2.7% seropositivity for the high risk group of residents living in close proximity to bat colonies suggests that spillover is a relatively rare event” albeit some sero(+) could’ve faded in this high risk group.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
Have to keep pointing this out. In the same study, they tested hundreds of people from Wuhan city as a negative control - zero had SARSrCoV antibodies.

The folks saying Wuhan is a SARS spillover zone might want to consider that they’re accidentally spreading misinformation.
“As a control, we also collected 240 serum samples from random blood donors in 2015 in Wuhan, Hubei Province more than 1000 km away from Jinning (Fig. 1A) and where inhabitants have a much lower likelihood of contact with bats due to its urban setting.”
Once they broadened the survey to people living a tad further out, but still proximal to caves where SARSrCoVs had been found, still in rural populations in South China, that SARS sero(+) dropped to 0.6%. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
This September 2019 paper by the WIV and Ecohealth: "The low seroprevalence observed in this study suggests that bat coronavirus spillover is a rare event."

They're still talking about rural residents in South China living close to bat caves where SARS viruses had been found.
Somehow the paper still concludes "this represents a clear and present danger to our biosafety and public health."

This claim cites 3 papers studying recombinant SARS viruses.
Ok 1:07:00 mark we get to the good part. Daszak says "there is no evidence that it escaped from a lab.. this is a classic conspiracy theory" and that this ultimately resulted in the loss of their funding from the US government.

There. He said lab escape is a conspiracy theory.
Now, based on this TWIV interview of Daszak in the summer of 2020, I'm going to start a thread getting into the TWIV interview released today.

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More from @Ayjchan

22 Mar
I kind of expected this day to come, but still surprised that it actually arrived.

I'm going to do a quick FAQ🧵 for the public (both scientists & non-scientists) who are just hearing about the possibility of COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 having emerged from lab or research activities.
Is it racist to ask whether COVID-19 emerged from a lab or from the wildlife trade in China? No.

Have racist people asked the question above? Yes.
More importantly, will people call you a racist if you ask whether COVID-19 emerged from a lab or from the wildlife trade in China?

Unfortunately, yes, it is quite likely they will call you a racist and more.

And yes, even if you're Asian, you could be called a race traitor.
Read 12 tweets
22 Mar
Thank you to experts independently calling for proper investigation of possible lab origins of COVID-19. Not an exclusive list, alphabetically by surname:
@jbloom_lab @canardbruno @DecrolyE @R_H_Ebright @DFisman @FilippaLentzos @mlipsitch @ras_nielsen @vaxine_news @DavidRelman
Sincere thanks to @jbloom_lab who has taken a lot of heat recently for raising the lab leak hypothesis and for defending me, a “conspiracy peddler” according to some scientists.
Also many thanks to @canardbruno and @DecrolyE who have been publicly discussing the lab leak hypothesis and were among the first to point out the unique furin cleavage site and why it is concerning that it was missed in the WIV’s first papers on COVID-19.
Read 11 tweets
21 Mar
Going to do a serious thread on the new TWIV episode released today because it raises so many commonly held opinions on why #laborigins #labescape of COVID-19 was (extremely) unlikely.

Start ~27:20 min mark...
microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-734/
I'm very, very glad that TWIV gets the obvious strawman out of the way immediately.

Very few experts - I can't think of any off the top of my head - are claiming that SARS2 was completely, magically designed from no similar virus in nature.
At the ~32:47 min mark, TWIV says "the dialogue has slowly shifted from it was made in a lab.. now it escaped.. How do we deal with that?"

I was surprised because in their June 2020 podcast, their guest says lab escape is a classic conspiracy theory.
Read 18 tweets
17 Mar
Chatted with @schmidtwriting for his new @undarkmag article on the traps and dangers of advocating for an investigation into potential lab origins of covid-19. #laborigins #OriginsofCOVID
I think this piece by Charles @schmidtwriting was particularly well written because of how balanced it is. There were parts that I didn't like and had to grapple with. A lot has happened in the last year since I started looking into the evidence surrounding the #OriginsofCOVID
It comes at a time when the WHO-China team is expected to release their full report in the coming week(s). And @JamieMetzl and ~two dozen scientists (me too!) have posted a letter in the @WSJ pointing out major major flaws in the WHO-China not-an-investigation joint mission.
Read 22 tweets
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
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

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