Thread by @Ayjchan

Please no one ever ask me again why it's important to find the origins of a pandemic...

"... governments and scientists agree that deciphering the creation story is key to reducing the risk of future pandemics."

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Unfortunately, the author @jwgale goes straight to HIV from the 1920s...

How many people do you know who were alive in the 1920s?

We cannot keep talking about how things were done literally 100 years ago.

When SARS1 broke out ~2 decades ago, Guangdong CDC contact traced "clusters of cases in six other municipalities from November 2002 to mid-January 2003. On February 3, 2003, province-wide mandatory case reporting of atypical pneumonia.. instituted..."
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

In contrast, for SARS2, there was almost zero interest in contact tracing to find earlier clusters or the intermediate hosts.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1365421589328707585

The article fairly points out that the WHO-China team is half constituted by researchers from China.

Although it is unknown if their report will ever be released and how scientists will respond to it.

"Other groups, including an expert panel convened by the medical journal The Lancet called the Covid-19 Commission, are also probing the virus’s origins."

I think you should have pointed out that Peter Daszak is leading this origins study by the Lancet...

What this means:

THERE IS NO (publicly known) CREDIBLE INVESTIGATION OF THE #OriginsOfCOVID

wsj.com/articles/the-w…

Scroll to point 6. What role did the market play?

ZERO animal samples positive.

Any of the few environmental samples positive (genetic evidence) pointed to human introduction of the virus to the market.

Epidemiological evidence pointed to outbreak preceding the market cluster.

Furthermore, if you look at SARS1, the animal traders were the people with a good level of immunity against SARS viruses. Even though only 2 animal traders were ever diagnosed with SARS1 in the clinic, a whopping 20-40% of animal traders had antibodies against SARS viruses...

In contrast, for SARS2, the market animal traders were the among the first to get hit. Suggesting that there wasn't a good % with immunity.

I've also seen this suggestion repeated among people who should know better: "it’s possible that not enough samples were taken."

Do you believe that China would be lazy enough to not collect enough samples to trace a dangerous pathogen that emerged in one of their top cities?

I guess China decided to wait for these amazing 17 international experts to show up to tell them how to investigate the origins of a dangerous pathogen that was first detected in China.

Point 10. "The WHO mission said further research should involve tracing these products to their source and testing other animals there, as well as their surroundings and people living nearby."

China left this as homework assignment for the WHO-China team. 1+ year after outbreak.

On point 12, the article does good in pointing out that "Chinese authorities refused to make available raw data on the (suspected early COVID) cases because of patient privacy concerns" but doesn't challenge whether this is a plausible situation 1 year post-covid.

Scientists: Should we ask donors if we can check their 2019 samples for COVID? So we can find out when this all really started and if there are possible sources leading to future outbreaks?

Other scientists: Nah.

Point 13. "The WHO team is still pressing Chinese officials to conduct exhaustive tests on stored blood-donation samples from Wuhan in 2019, which might indicate whether the virus was present there earlier."

WHO independent experts: Can you please check it though?

Please don't call them the WHO mission scientists. This is a WHO-organized half Chinese half independent expert team.

I don't know if the @WHO actually endorses their proposal:

What is the hypothesis here? That a magical unique bat virus travelled from the glorious land of SE Asia all the way to Central China, outside the SARS spillover zone, without leaving any traces along the way (presumably frozen), and this single virus won the pandemic lottery?

This is like: (Wo)Man plays lottery in country where (s)he isn't a citizen for the very first time, miraculously wins $100M prize, must be transferred to country of residence without incurring any transfer fees.

In case it’s unclear to anyone. I’m waiting for the WHO-China report.

Seasons 7-8 never happened.