Share this page!

The Seeker Profile picture
Twitter logo
8 Apr, 23 tweets, 9 min read
UPDATED🧵: A lot of new facts have emerged since I last did a thread on a possible lab escape of Covid-19, so I'm compiling some of the latest findings on the subject.

*All these are factual information which makes an unfettered investigation paramount*
A quick recap: It starts with an outbreak of severe unexplained pneumonia cases in 2012, which saw six miners hospitalized. Three of them died, and the cause for their illness was suspected to be due to "SARS-like CoV". The symptoms were almost indistinguishable from COVID-19.
In the past few months, it has been covered in most of the major media outlets, but here is the original post from May last year: (This thread is a goldmine )
From a 2016 PhD thesis supervised by Gao Fu, it became known that four of the miners had SARS positive antibodies. The author recommended a long-term sampling of the mine.

Note: The assay could be cross-reactive to different SARS-like CoVs.
The PhD thesis also gave us the coordinates of the mine, placing it in Danaoshan village.

Thanks to meticulous efforts by @franciscodeasis & @Drinkwater5Reed, we now have the precise location of the mine.

WIV went on a years-long investigation into the same mine, on the lookout for what afflicted the miners.

This is the best, and the only scholarly work on the subject. A must-read, if you haven't already:
frontiersin.org/articles/10.33… by @MonaRahalkar and @BahulikarRahul
In a nutshell: They haven't been forthcoming about their trips to the mine, the motive behind their trips, & all the CoVs they sampled. The project under which they sampled the mine (2013FY113500) was under review in Sep 2019, & the project database has been conveniently deleted.
2/ Many journalists have since tried to visit the mine, but were blocked under one pretext or another.

Nothing to see here, and don't even look...
3/ On PREDICT, GVP & CVP: This is important because there was a renewed effort in 2018 to survey coronaviruses in South China, and find the viruses that could pass to humans.

The thing to note here, is that no data is available since the project started.
4/ On WIV Project Grants: This is vitally important because these are the specific research projects that WIV was actually doing prior to the outbreak:

- Determine the cross-species transmissibility of SARS-like coronaviruses between different hosts.
- Experiment "two new" SARS-like coronaviruses on humanized mice with hACE2 receptors.
- Explore the mechanism of how bat coronaviruses acquire the ability to leap from one species to another.
5/ On WIV Tenders: This is rarely discussed, and unless you've been following us, you've probably never heard of it -- critical WIV bio-safety installations were being upgraded/renovated in 2019, so something getting past the lab doesn't seem "unlikely".
6/ WIV disinfectant patent to reduce metal corrosion and prevent leakage:

More WIV patents, in this well-researched piece by @interne41914499


Why are these important? Well, you don't go finding solutions unless there's a problem.
7/ WIV had animals that are known coronavirus reservoirs: bats, rabbits, rats, mutant mice and ferrets.

So there you have a likely intermediate host, and the pathway that the virus could have taken before jumping to "patient zero".
8/ And there are a lot of legit questions about the GD pangolin CoV that still has not been answered more than a year after being published.
9/ CAS Special Project 1: This is particularly noteworthy given that many of the WIV projects are thematically associated with this project, and can be explained in this context.

The project description is very interesting really:
10/ CAS Special Project 4: This would explain why WIV was doing the work in the first place -- Vaccines!

Read on...
In sum, whether or not the virus spilled over from WIV, there is an enormous information void surrounding these projects, and not only that but Chinese authorities and their western collaborators have gone to great lengths to prevent any further inquiry.
And I cannot emphasize this enough...
So whether you think lab origin is likely or not (it's a matter of opinion and IMO it's a reasonable and a better-supported theory, and I'm not even going into the genomic arguments), but these are uncontested facts, and it needs to be investigated thoroughly and honestly.
Bottom line: These are the specific research that was being done, review the records for these projects, examine lab operations, have direct access to the lab personnel, notebooks, tender documents, databases, stored virus samples and sequences, and resample the Mojiang mine.
Bonus: Timeline of Wuhan Institute of Virology projects and tenders (2018-2020)

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with The Seeker

The Seeker Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @TheSeeker268

The Seeker Profile picture
9 Apr
"WIV was classified as a “secret institute”, so its audits were only available to specially authorised employees...“We signed a privacy agreement with the Wuhan institute so documents relating to lab audits cannot usually be shared with third parties”"
archive.is/ECbSC
"Koblentz said the search should include an independent audit of all labs in Wuhan working on bat coronaviruses and researching Sars, given the deaths and global disruption caused by the pandemic, and most importantly the threat of a repeat."
"Koblentz, the biosecurity specialist, said it was unusual for (WIV) database to be taken offline and never restored, as cybersecurity breaches were usually fixed after companies or government agencies detected a hacking attack."
Read 6 tweets
The Seeker Profile picture
1 Apr
"That would mean China bears some accountability for the outbreak.. that would also mean the U.S. govt had a big role in supporting the research that resulted in the pandemic.. If Redfield is right, the current response plan could greatly increase..the risk of another pandemic."
"We must begin a difficult, uncomfortable conversation about this investigation’s scope and the vast implications if the theory is true..the entire genre of research..known as gain-of-function research.., needs to be thoroughly reexamined." says @R_H_Ebright.
"The very fact that it could have been of laboratory origin, even if that cannot be substantiated, means we need to understand that there is risk in this research that may have triggered the current pandemic and surely could trigger a future pandemic,” said @R_H_Ebright.
Read 4 tweets
The Seeker Profile picture
30 Mar
Nothing to back it up, leaving aside that it contradicts two thesis by Chinese doctors and scientists on this subject. () It's just a trust me and we aren't going to look into it.
Only after the sequence identity of RaTG13 with BatCoV/4991, and the miners pneumonia connection was pointed out several times, Shi and her team confirmed this nine months later in an addendum to their original @nature article.
SARS-CoV-2 is thus related to a coronavirus that caused six cases of SARS-like pneumonia in miners, as early as in 2012, and from which samples were collected and stored in the institute in Wuhan.
Read 5 tweets
The Seeker Profile picture
30 Mar
What is certain is that bats and other animals, were and are kept in the Wuhan labs, and that they have one of the world's most extensive collections of bat coronaviruses.
It is also certain that WIV received funding from the NIH to study and work specifically on SARSr-CoVs collected from South China, and which had the potential to jump over to humans.
It is also proven that one of the WHO team member orchestrated statements and and carried out maneuvers to distort the search for what really happened. So there's that.
Read 5 tweets
The Seeker Profile picture
29 Mar
This is an excellent dissection of the faulty reasoning in the 'Proximal Origin' paper, and they lay out the reasons why lab spillover of Covid-19 remains a possibility and should not be excluded.

Too many points to note, so just read the whole thing!
zmescience.com/other/pieces/h…
Some choice quotes: "The authors only prove the receptor-binding domain of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is not ideal for binding to human ACE2 receptors. This doesn’t tell us anything about whether the virus was actually manipulated, or for which purpose."
They don't "take into consideration more recent literature — new techniques to engineer coronaviruses have emerged after 2014 – or even the possibility that unpublished techniques could have been used to engineer SARS-CoV-2."
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
Read 9 tweets
The Seeker Profile picture
29 Mar
Daszak: We met with them. We said, "Do you audit the lab?" And they said, "Annually." "Did it you audit it after the outbreak?" "Yes." "Was anything found?" "No." "Do you test your staff?" "Yes."

Oh well, ok that settles it then.
cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-…
Daszak: "We didn't see any evidence of any false reporting or cover-up in the work that we did in China."

No waaay...

False reporting or cover-up in China??????? It's not like there are plenty of motive on their part to cover it up!!!!

No Waaaaayyy....
"If the virus originated in animals, one of the mysteries has been: how did it travel the thousand miles from the bat caves in southern China to Wuhan?"

Nothing to see here. Not a damn thing. Image
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @TheSeeker268 has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @TheSeeker268!

Read all threads by @TheSeeker268