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Amy Maxmen, PhD

23 May, 10 tweets, 5 min read

🌎Here is the most important #lableak question:

Where will mounting US demands for an investigation of Chinese labs lead?

Foreign policy experts see few potential gains, and HUGE losses.

@DavidRelman

In a letter to Science, @DavidRelman & other earnest scientists request all primary data from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Eg. the specs of the antibody tests used to test all staff at the lab, number of tests & proof of the result.

science.sciencemag.org/content/372/65…

The letter lends credence to demands from Congress, Fox News, Pompeo. Will the demands convince China to fork over its lab notebooks, re-test Wuhan scientists, etc?

Why? Even US & EU threats of sanctions haven’t curbed China’s abuse of Uighurs. China sanctioned back.

Republican calls for a lab investigation now include investigations into #Fauci. So he supports a lab investigation – BUT he told me this: “There is considerable speculation currently going on regarding the origin, such that it would be important to bring this matter to closure.”

Meaning, US demands are driving this issue forward. Demands may take main stage at the World Health Assembly, the G7, the G20 summit.

So what happens to the many other pandemic-related actions & reforms that are supposed to be been discussed? These require broad consensus.

One issue is ABSOLUTELY URGENT. It's so important to get vaccines around the world, along with oxygen & PPE. That requires more than bilateral donations. It requires a consensus among countries on issues like patent waivers, licensing, pricing schemes.

nytimes.com/interactive/20…

@TomBollyky

It’s important to seize the moment to make outbreak-related reforms, like setting new standards on sharing data. This happens thru agreements, not US-driven demand

@TomBollyky: “The geopolitics of global health security—which have always been difficult—will become even more so."

A real possibility is that the lab-investigation demands will escalate tensions between US & China, even more! Working in solidarity to curb the pandemic & prevent the next one will become less likely.

Consider, the Cold War.

But maybe with enough shouting, a lab investigation moves forward. It will be hard to find evidence of a lab leak. There will be gaps & room for doubt. And animal origin studies take time. It took 14 yrs to fully nail down bats>civets>humans for SARS 2003. nature.com/articles/d4158…

And while a lab-leak debate overwhelms the media & politics, tidal waves of COVID will crash on low/middle-income countries. New strains of SARSCoV2 could evolve in the next few yrs. SARS-3?

Powerful countries would be wise to concentrate on preventing that.

(story to follow)

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More from @amymaxmen

Amy Maxmen, PhD

@amymaxmen

28 Apr

@Arrianna_Planey

I spent 8 months investigating how exploitation, poverty & discrimination drove COVID—and why scientists haven’t really addressed these issues, despite studying them for 150 years.

“Where is the urgency?” asks @Arrianna_Planey.

My latest #longform + 🧵 nature.com/immersive/d415…

In October, I went to Cali's San Joaquin Valley as it surged with COVID.

Many people impacted by the virus were immigrants who worked at farms & in meat plants. They felt their work was of value to society but not their lives. Low wages, no protection & blatant discrimination.

What I heard from agriculture workers reminded me of an investigation by Rudolf Virchow, 1848:

“The plutocracy…did not recognize Upper Silesians as human beings, but only as tools.” His radical solution was that “the worker must have part in the yield of the whole.”

Read 19 tweets

Amy Maxmen, PhD

@amymaxmen

6 Apr

Media: Stop freaking people out with scary variant headlines! They're frazzled & we want the public to know when a variant *ACTUALLY* escapes vaccines regularly.

Questions to ask when you see a press release 🧵:
-Why do scientists think it's deadlier, etc?
("Double mutant"👇🏼🙄)

@staciakwyman

-If scientists think a variant is contagious because cases are up, ask about the correlation. At UC Berkeley, @staciakwyman found that outbreaks on campus were from parties, not B117.

-Behavioral reasons for surges are less newsy than Scary Mutant, but people can change behavior

-If scientists think variants evade an immune response because of studies in petri dishes or in mice, put that in the headline. eg biorxiv.org/content/10.110… This isn't the same as finding that vaccinated people get COVID.

Read 5 tweets

Amy Maxmen, PhD

@amymaxmen

30 Mar

@DrTedros

I read this 320-page investigation into COVID origins so you don't have to!

The undercurrent here is that the market-origin hypothesis is back.

The flashpoint is that even @DrTedros isn't happy that his team didn't have more access to the Wuhan lab.
nature.com/articles/d4158…

The team dug deep into data to figure out when the outbreak started spreading in earnest: Conclusion is December 2019.

They spent a lot of time on data from the Huanan market, finding that people w/Covid had visited the same stalls where positive samples were found.

They also went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology & asked a ton of questions. The list of rumors they confronted there are listed in the Appendix. eg

Read 7 tweets

Amy Maxmen, PhD

@amymaxmen

10 Feb

So many stories on reaching vaccine herd immunity! But there's a massive dilemma. Here's a 🧵on what I mean...

About 50 countries have fewer than one nurse per 1000 people. Israel has 6x that rate. UK has 10x. US has 15x. Belgium has 20x. Guess which countries want it all?

Have you seen what 1 nurse/1000 looks like?

Picture people hurt in car accidents who die by the road when wounds could have been stemmed; women dying in childbirth; untreated diabetes; children dying from infected wounds, burns, stomachs. A lack of healthcare is palpable.

What do most countries few nurses have in common?

Many are former colonies, where colonizers subsidized just enough medical care to ensure that people were healthy enough for labor, but they didn't invest in national health systems. Slave traders did less.

Read 8 tweets

Amy Maxmen, PhD

@amymaxmen

24 Jan

@rkhamsi

There's a persistent myth that pathogens become less deadly over time.

@rkhamsi & @dylanhmorris just reminded me of this since people are apparently acting assured that SARS2 can't become more deadly? Psh.

Short 🧵of history beginning w/hopes of an end to infectious disease

According to Frank Snowden's "Epidemics & Society", 'eradicationists' of the 60s & 70s foretold the end of infectious disease. We had some cures, and they said the bugs become less deadly over time. But like evolutionary psychologists(dis!), they didn't study evolutionary biology

If they had, they'd realize that evolution doesn't have directionality. Anyways, time proved them wrong. eg New strains of dengue evolved, and a second infection with a new strain can be deadly. The HIV epidemic showed that unknown viruses emerge from nature fairly regularly.

Read 4 tweets

Amy Maxmen, PhD

@amymaxmen

15 Jan

@PublicHealth

Azar just released a delusional, alternative history of Covid testing in the US. I’m mad because our testing failures allowed this outbreak to blow-up. We can’t fix our system if we ignore where it is broken. I suspect @PublicHealth agrees.

My fact-check on remarks @HHSGov 🧵

@JohnsHopkins

“It is indisputable that the United States has built the most extensive testing system and strategy of any major country,” says Azar.

False. Several countries have had percent positivity ~1% whereas US has never been below 5% and is >10% today. Refs KCDC & USA @JohnsHopkins

"The federal government got out of the way of test development in safe and sensible ways,” says Azar.

False. In Feb, CDC & FDA blocked labs from testing as the disease spread exponentially. I broke this story👇🏼& wrote more like it as the year wore on. nature.com/articles/d4158…

Read 12 tweets

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