Thread by @AntGDuarte

@stgoldst Following on @CNN's poor coverage of the debate around COVID-19's origins, @npwcnn also fails to do justice to the amount of "coincidences" that definitely point to a lab scenario.

Illustrated thread.

1/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn The piece starts with three "massive coincidences":

1) A bat coronavirus (CoV) started an outbreak on the doorstep of a lab (in the Wuhan Institute of Virology or WIV) that specializes on bat CoV research, the lab where SARS-CoV-2's closest known relative was sequenced.

2/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn 2) Three of the lab's staff fell ill and were hospitalized with respiratory symptoms just before the outbreak

3) The Wuhan CDC lab moved in early December 2019 to a location near the Huanan Market, a market where some early COVID-19 cases were later traced to.

3/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn So what are the significant coincidences overlooked by @npwcnn?

To find them we need to look a little bit deeper into the context.

4/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn The research carried out by the WIV bat virus group involved sampling bats and collecting bat viruses across China (and elsewhere), then bringing them to the lab in Wuhan where their potential to cause human disease was experimentally assessed.

5/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn This was done for natural viruses, but also for artificially built ones (made by combining parts of natural viruses), via innoculation in different types of cell culture and also on live animals (e.g. mice genetically modified to mimick human tissues).

6/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn Most of this work was conducted in low safety BSL-2 conditions (equivalent to a standard dentist office) and the risks associated with it were highlighted in the widely reported 2018 diplomatic cables (another coincidence).

7/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn SARS-CoV-2's closest known relative was collected in 2013 by WIV scientists in a mine near a town called Tongguanzhen in Mojiang County (Yunnan province, China), about 1,800 kms away from Wuhan.

8/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn The Mojiang mine wasn't just sampled by chance: WIV scientists conducted at least 7 sampling expeditions there between 2012 and 2015 in the course of an investigation into a cluster of severe pneumonia cases that in 2012 had caused the death of 3 out of 6 infected miners.

9/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn They all worked in that mine & their symptoms were similar to COVID-19's. Although the cause of those pneumonias was never conclusively stated, contemporary assessments pointed to a viral etiology & specifically to the bats that infested the mine. Ain't that a coincidence!

10/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn Not surprisingly, samples taken from these miners were found to be positive for bat CoV-related antibodies, tests that were done at the WIV (minor coincidence :).

11/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn Accordingly teams that sampled the mine were led by virologists who published papers in virology journals. Another coincidence: in 2016 WIV authors published a paper reporting results from their mine expeditions in 2012/2013. Results from 2014/2015 sampling were withheld.

12/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn Coincidentally, the closest known relative that WIV scientists admittingly knew before the outbreak was reported in a way that obfuscated its connection to the Mojiang mine: up to 2019, that virus was mentioned in several WIV publications as BtCoV/4991 or Ra4991.

13/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn But in the crucial Feb. 2020 Nature paper where WIV scientists reported the 96% similarity between a bat virus and the one causing COVID-19, they gave the bat virus a new name (RaTG13) and omitted both its previous ID, and the miners backstory.

14/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn Of course, someone still reading might ask: if they wanted to cover this up why didn't they simply remain silent about this close relative?

15/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn Here's why: they'd published a short but highly conserved section of 4991's genome in 2016 & this sequence is 98.7% identical to SARS-CoV-2's homologous section (meaning they're really close relatives). Since that sequence was publicly available, it had to be acknowledged.

16/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn Besides 4991 (aka RaTG13), it was recently confirmed that WIV scientists knew beforehand at least 8 other bat CoVs closely related to SARS-CoV-2, all collected from bats in the said Mojiang mine.

17/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn Until recently these 8 CoVs had not been reported in any WIV paper (they were notably omitted in Zhou et al. Feb. 2020). But they show up along Ra4991 under the heading "Lineage 4" in a recently found WIV master's thesis, supervised by Zhengli Shi & submitted in June 2019.

18/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn Adding to the coincidences, several WIV researchers published a paper summarizing the findings of Ping Yu's master's thesis. This paper (Yu et al. 2019) includes a very similar figure that surprisingly doesn't mention this new lineage of close relatives of SARS-CoV-2.

19/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn Another coincidence was noted by some in early 2020: how did a novel SARS-related CoV start a pandemic in a metropolis, hundreds of miles from any bat caves, right in the middle of a country that excels in SARS-related virology, SARS epidemiology & general social control?

20/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn How did this bat coronavirus come out of the blue, without an identifiable intermediate host, devoid of previously known relatives, despite 15 years of extensive bat sampling?

Turns out this was an illusory coincidence stemming from, let's call it, asymmetric information.

21/🧵

@stgoldst @CNN @npwcnn Now we know that SARS-CoV-2, the "novel coronavirus", was a complete novelty only to outsiders.

For WIV insiders, SARS-CoV-2 was just another member of Lineage 4, of which at least 9 close relatives had been known for years, linked to a prior outbreak not unlike COVID-19.

🧵/🧵