Alina Chan Profile picture
14 Apr, 13 tweets, 5 min read
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.
This brand new highly expert COVID commission will also rigorously investigate the possibility of a lab leak being the origins of COVID-19.
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.
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.
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.

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More from @Ayjchan

15 Apr
The story of the quest for the origins of COVID-19 cannot be told without also telling the stories of the internet sleuths & outsiders who discovered clues and hidden stories of the viruses closely related to SARS2, Yunnan miners sick with pneumonia & a missing pathogen database.
We've seen a series of recent articles by stellar journalists chronicling the year+ of painstaking work by internet sleuths.

There have been lots of mistakes made and public conflicts with virologists on twitter... but their contribution is undeniable.
cnet.com/features/how-t…
See this wonderful piece by @emmecola from December 2020:

"there are many other people, out of the spotlight, who deserve credit. They have been working tirelessly... they share and discuss their findings and, more importantly, they make discoveries."
mygenomix.medium.com/the-origin-of-…
Read 26 tweets
14 Apr
🚨 Covid Commission Planning Group (Covid CPG) "to prepare the way for a National Covid Commission that can seize this once-in-a-century opportunity to help America—and the world—begin to heal and safeguard our common future from new existential threats."
millercenter.org/covidcpg
Covid CPG's 9 task forces include:
1 Origins and prevention
2 Assessment of the danger
3 National readiness
4 Communities at risk
5 State and local readiness
6 Caring for the sick
7 Diagnostics, therapeutics & vaccines
8 Stories of Covid
9 Solving data issues
"The Covid CPG effort is rooted in the belief that the scope of a future commission’s work must be national and international... A nonpartisan National Covid Commission could unite Americans to call upon their knowledge and practical skills across and beyond political parties."
Read 4 tweets
2 Apr
Several scientists are reasonably curious about what the issues are with most prominent papers describing the same Guangdong pangolin CoV that shares a very similar spike RBD with SARS2.

On Nov 11, @Nature put an editor's note on one of these papers... nature.com/articles/s4158…
If you're deeply curious about this, you should send an email to @Nature asking them to publish the authors' original response to the manuscript @shingheizhan and I submitted to them last May. We also recommend asking to see the peer reviewer comments. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
Honestly, it's taking a lot of my will power not to just post these publicly so everyone can take a good look.
Read 21 tweets
30 Mar
Statement by the Governments of Australia, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, the Republic of Korea, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America on #OriginsofCOVID 🇦🇺🇨🇦🇨🇿🇩🇰🇪🇪🇮🇱🇯🇵🇱🇻🇱🇹🇳🇴🇰🇷🇸🇮🇬🇧🇺🇸
state.gov/joint-statemen…
“Asked by about the (China-WHO) report, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said Tuesday it lacked crucial data, and represents a “partial and incomplete picture.””

🌋 article by @emilyrauhala

washingtonpost.com/world/who-wuha…
“Secretary of State Antony Blinken, expressed concern about content and framing of the report, saying Beijing “helped to write it.””
Read 13 tweets
30 Mar
The @WHO clarified today that the China-WHO origins of covid-19 team did not extensively assess the lab leak hypothesis.

And that WHO is ready to deploy future missions involving specialist experts to investigate a lab leak.

who.int/director-gener…
By some error, the annexes to the full report by the China-WHO origins joint study team are still missing. This made it impossible for the press to ask questions about some potentially critical information stuck in the supplementary document (~200 pages).

who.int/health-topics/…
What might be stashed away in these annexes?

First of all, the team membership.

We still do not know who the 17 Chinese national members on the China-WHO team are.

That's ~50% of the team whose names and affiliations we still don't know, months after the study was set up.
Read 9 tweets
27 Mar
“If SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab, the result would likely be a global crackdown on all high-risk biosafety labs, says Chan.”
qz.com/1986084/why-do…
Journalists need to do due diligence. When you interview a scientist, have you checked whether they could stand to lose $millions, possibly even the ability to retain employees if it were determined that COVID-19 emerged due to research activities?
There's a common perception that scientists are somehow anointed saints and have no conflicts of interest that could lead them to temptation.

Getting your PhD doesn't free you from the temptations of mankind.
Read 7 tweets

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