Thread by @TheSeeker268

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*

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1313858771064512517?s=20

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 )

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1262459039297961989?s=20

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.

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1270359698898923529?s=20

The PhD thesis also gave us the coordinates of the mine, placing it in Danaoshan village.

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1266142181208870912?s=20

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

https://twitter.com/franciscodeasis/status/1336113930951938050?s=20

https://twitter.com/Drinkwater5Reed/status/1359999692734685193?s=20

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...

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1370208214113951745?s=20

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.

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1346153194011783168?s=20

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.

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1346963950445883396?s=20

- Experiment "two new" SARS-like coronaviruses on humanized mice with hACE2 receptors.

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1346963625676656643?s=20

- Explore the mechanism of how bat coronaviruses acquire the ability to leap from one species to another.

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1352050159400738816?s=20

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".

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1327017764133879810?s=20

6/ WIV disinfectant patent to reduce metal corrosion and prevent leakage:

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1368258467085967362?s=20

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

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1357066230176301056?s=20

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".

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1359347268986433536?s=20

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.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1351648915230175235?s=20

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:

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1363218267863539712?s=20

10/ CAS Special Project 4: This would explain why WIV was doing the work in the first place -- Vaccines!

Read on...

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1370499818011824129?s=20

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...

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1378475866540269569?s=20

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)

I'll also add this to the thread

https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1392575191763472388?s=20