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Alina Chan Profile picture
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26 Mar, 5 tweets, 3 min read
Omg
It was a lucky guess. I didn’t know about this @NewDay @CNN @drsanjaygupta interview of the ex @CDCDirector

But more important than ever for scientists and science communicators to explain what a lab leak means in a non-alarmist way to the public.
Before people start to think I’m part of some conspiracy... What I did know about was this - I suspect some stunning revelations to come this Sunday on @60Minutes

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
24 Mar
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.
Read 22 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
23 Mar
I have a hunch that the lab leak hypothesis is going to really go mainstream this week.

So I hope that science communicators will take it up on themselves to help the public process this information in a rational and non-alarmist way.
I’m hoping that most of the discussion going forward will be about how we can mitigate the risk of lab pathogen pandemics and quickly trace the origins of future outbreaks.

As opposed to “look at all the racists and conspiracists who said covid-19 came from a lab.”
If scientists & science communicators don’t fulfil this essential role of explaining how pandemics can emerge from various types of research activities, it’s a guarantee that less informed people will.

You can’t not do the work and then complain less qualified people did it.
Read 6 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
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
Alina Chan Profile picture
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 14 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
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
Alina Chan Profile picture
21 Mar
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…
Read 10 tweets

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