"Determining the origin of..SARS-CoV-2..should have nothing to do with politics. It is a forensic question, one that requires thorough investigation of all possible theories"

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
"But a fatally flawed investigation by the World Health Organization and Chinese officials and experts only muddies the waters, and it places the WHO further at odds with the U.S. government and the Biden administration."
"The Chinese government received the report in advance and had tightly controlled the investigators’ visit to Wuhan, where the outbreak originated and where labs hold the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses."
"Even before..report was issued,..Biden administration publicly questioned its objectivity and credibility. 'We’ve got real concerns about..methodology and..process that went into that report, including the fact that..Beijing..helped..write it'" Secretary of State..Blinken said"
"US intelligence, confirmed by Blinken’s..State Department, alleges..WIV was conducting undisclosed research on bat coronaviruses, had secret research projects with..Chinese military, and failed to disclose..several lab workers got sick with covid-like symptoms in autumn 2019."
"The Biden administration is not claiming the lab-accident theory is correct, but it is calling for China to disclose more information about the labs."

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More from @R_H_Ebright

30 Mar
Relman: "I would call it..superficial, skewed and incomplete..I'm struck by the fact that there are very few primary data..on which we can judge the kinds of assessments that are made, in some cases quite, quite enthusiastically"

pbs.org/newshour/show/…
Relman: "We can't simply dismiss one idea as very unlikely and hold another as very likely, when, in both cases, we have no direct evidence.
Secretary of State Blinken: "We have got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing..helped to write it."
Read 4 tweets
18 Mar
Bats, Panthers, and the Utterly Plausible Lab-Leak Hypothesis undark.org/2021/03/18/utt… via @undarkmag
"Let’s say, for instance that a Florida panther rampaged through the South Bronx, injuring many people. It would be immediately reasonable to wonder: How could that possibly happen? Florida panthers don’t live anywhere near the Bronx and aren’t normally so ferocious."
"WIV is around 10 miles from the site of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, whereas the natural coronavirus variants that most closely resemble SARS-CoV-2 come from a region in South West China more than 900 miles away."
Read 6 tweets
18 Mar
House Energy & Commerce Committee Minority Leaders Call for NIH Assistance on a Complete Investigation into COVID-19 Origins in China 
republicans-energycommerce.house.gov/news/covid-ori… via @HouseCommerce
Full text of letter to NIH Director Collins:

republicans-energycommerce.house.gov/wp-content/upl…
"Please provide all information..NIH has about laboratory accidents and/or biosafety practices at..WIV"

"Please provide all information..NIH has..about communications and events at..WIV from August 2019 to..present"
Read 11 tweets
17 Mar
"David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University, says a lab leak was never the subject of a 'fair and dispassionate discussion of the facts as we know them.'"

Lab Leak: A Scientific Debate Mired in Politics — and Unresolved
undark.org/2021/03/17/lab…
"Relman agrees that in the absence of conclusive evidence, the message on origins should be 'we don’t know.'..[H]e found himself increasingly disheartened by those who..had seized on a spillover scenario, despite 'an amazing absence of data.'"
"[L]ab-release dangers are growing as well. The risk increases in proportion with the number of labs handling bioweapons and potential pandemic pathogens (more than 1,500 globally in 2010)..many of them, like the Wuhan lab, located in urban areas close to international airports."
Read 5 tweets
17 Mar
Taiwan: 0.4 per million (10 deaths)
China: 3 per million (4,636 deaths)
Singapore: 5 per million (30 deaths)
Hong Kong: 27 per million (203 deaths)
South Korea: 33 per million (1,678 deaths)
Japan: 60 per million (7,584 deaths)

US: 1,700 per million (549,145 deaths; +2K daily)
New Zealand: 5 per million (26 deaths)
Australia: 35 per million (909 deaths)
..
UK: 1,800 per million (125,690 deaths)
Nations that successfully suppressed outbreak include both small and large, both island and non-island, and both autocratic and democratic.

Sole relevant parameter for success or failure is whether government took prompt resolute action (success) or whether it did not (failure).
Read 5 tweets
16 Mar
How the West Lost COVID

How did so many rich, but sociopath-led, countries get it so wrong? How did others get it so right?
nymag.com/intelligencer/…
"[T]he UK was consumed with Brexit..The US had Trump..As the pandemic progressed, both [sociopath-led] countries flipped from denial to capitulation, choosing to treat almost any caseload plateau as an opportunity to relax, no matter how high..ongoing spread it represented."
"For decades, the richest nations of the world had told themselves a [lie] in which wealth and medical superiority offered, if not total immunity from disease, then certainly a guarantee against pandemics, regarded as a premodern residue of the underdeveloped world."
Read 10 tweets

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