Thread by @Ayjchan

Worth 2min🎧 CIA Director and Director of National Intelligence say that the US intelligence community is still gathering info on the two #OriginsofCOVID theories around which components have coalesced: it emerged naturally or it was a laboratory accident.

Already seen some pushback on my What Next podcast interview with @slate @marysdesk

If you think lab leak=conspiracy theory, it should trouble you that top intelligence & experts are devoting an enormous amount of energy to investigating this hypothesis.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1381949543219101697?s=20

This brand new highly expert COVID commission will also rigorously investigate the possibility of a lab leak being the origins of COVID-19.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1382321993597513730

I know a lot of people who are just hearing about the scientific analysis & US intelligence surrounding covid-19 lab origins are experiencing whiplash.

It seemed like only yesterday that a lab leak = conspiracy theory. Why are your favorite journalists now saying it's plausible?

That's because this question is extremely complex. Not something that could've been answered by experts only a couple of months after the detected outbreak, and certainly not by 10 minutes of machine learning.

So much new information has been unearthed over the last year.

A great deal of it was discovered by internet sleuths & later affirmed by scientific experts.

I know people hear internet sleuths and think that the hypothesis must be bonkers.

But once in a while, a small group of internet sleuths do strike gold.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1334868617998032896

And I anticipate that an increasing number of scientific experts will start to publicly state that it is necessary to seriously investigate whether COVID-19 could have emerged due to lab or research activities.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1374008924245012482

So, the advice I've gotten about science communication is to think about the people on the extreme ends and the people in the middle.

Most people are still in the middle about lab leak #OriginsofCOVID i.e., it's the first time they're hearing that it is a plausible scenario...

What the people in the middle need to hear right now is the opinion of trusted experts.

I know this is unfair to the outsiders and internet sleuths who have poured themselves out over the past year, while being ridiculed as conspiracy theorists, losing their reputation.

My hope is that more and more trusted experts will publicly advocate for a clearly credible and transparent investigation into the origins. This will turn the tide and change public opinion.

It's late but still not too late for us to find the origins of COVID-19.

To the internet sleuths and outsiders who have suffered, I hope that you can support these new developments because they are a step in the correct direction. Towards preventing another pandemic of this scale from happening again (soon).

I know that the temptation to tell everyone you know "I told you so" and mock experts is strong.

This problem is already so fraught that it's extremely threatening for top experts to speak up about it.

Please do what you think will help save lives.

You can claim victory.

But for that to happen, a credible investigation has to occur, producing a verdict on what the origins of the virus was.

Scolding experts (who aren't a monolithic group; many of us don't even like each other) won't make this investigation happen.