Thread by @BillyBostickson

Interesting revelations about the "can of worms" Definitely worth a read, but a completely false history of #DRASTIC
Obviously @KatherineEban was misinformed
Best quote was from @dasher8090
Good to see Thomas DiNanno's numantine struggle at the heart of US bureaucracy recognised

https://twitter.com/KatherineEban/status/1400403612325515266

https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1400479498861166592

What a difference a year makes vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/w…

“The DRASTIC people are doing better research than the U.S. government,” says David Asher, a former senior investigator under contract to the State Department.

The question is: Why?

"Can of Worms"
DiNanno wrote that staff from 2 bureaus, his own & the Bureau of International Security & Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”

"Death Threats"
former CDC director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,”

“The story of why parts of the U.S. government were not as curious as many of us think they should have been is a hugely important one.”

Park Life
officials.. were advised by Christopher Park, the director of the State Department’s Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, not to say anything that would point to the U.S. government’s own role in gain-of-function research

Park Life 2
"Park, who in 2017 had been involved in lifting a U.S. government moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research, was not the only official to warn the State Department investigators against digging in sensitive places"

Cover Up
As the group probed the lab-leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box,” said 4 former State Department officials. The admonitions “smelled like a cover-up,” said DiNanno, “ I wasn’t going to be part of it.”

Matthew Pottinger
"Pottinger purposefully kept the team small, because there were so many people within the government “wholly discounting the possibility of a lab leak, who were predisposed that it was impossible”

In addition, many leading experts had either received or approved funding for gain-of-function research. Their “conflicted” status, said Pottinger, “played a profound role in muddying the waters and contaminating the shot at having an impartial inquiry.”

Transgenic Mice

U.S. government virologists flagged one study submitted in April 2020.

11 of its 23 coauthors worked for the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the PLA medical research institute:

Mouse Model of SARS-CoV-2 Infection & Pathogenesis

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32485164/

Transgenic Mice (2)
Using CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2.
It became clear that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started.

Transgenic Mice (3)
The NSC officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese military been running viruses through humanized mouse models, to see which might be infectious to humans?

Back to the Cover Up
the NSC investigators began reaching out to other agencies. That’s when the hammer came down. “We were dismissed,” said Anthony Ruggiero, the NSC’s senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense. “The response was very negative.”

The Cover Up intensifies
Now the officials were beginning to suspect that someone was actually hiding materials supportive of a lab-leak explanation. “Why did my contractor have to pore through documents?” DiNanno wondered.

Eyeballing the Lawrence Livermore National Lab

"Their suspicion intensified when Department of Energy officials overseeing the Lawrence Livermore lab unsuccessfully tried to block the State Department investigators from talking to the report’s authors."

cryptome.org/eyeball/llnl/l…

Chris Ford
The "Acting" undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security seemed so hostile to their probe that they viewed him as a blinkered functionary bent on whitewashing China’s malfeasance.
Which he denied of course....

#DRASTIC Our Monkey in Havana?

"We asked for the reporting behind the statements that were made. It took forever. Then you’d read the report, it would have this reference to a tweet and a date. It was not something you could go back and find”

Red Team (1)
"The State Department team convened a panel of experts to confidentially “red team” the lab-leak hypothesis. The panel took place on the evening of January 7. By then, Ford had announced his plan to resign"

Red Team (2)
Twenty-nine people logged on to a secure State Department video call that lasted three hours.

The scientific experts included:

Ralph Baric
Alina Chan
David Relman

Chris Ford's summary:
downloads.vanityfair.com/lab-leak-theor…
Thomas DiNanno's counterblast:
downloads.vanityfair.com/lab-leak-theor…

Le Duc drank too much beer?
"Shi was a regular, along with Ralph Baric from UNC. “She’s a charming person, completely fluent in English & French,” said LeDuc. “This is how science works. You get everyone together, they share their data, go out and have a beer.”

Another Vanity Fair Gem
"But a former national security official who reviewed U.S. classified materials told Vanity Fair that inside the WIV, military and civilian researchers are “doing animal research in the same fricking space.”

While that, in and of itself, does not prove a lab leak, Shi’s alleged lies about it are “absolutely material,” “It speaks to the honesty and credibility of the WIV that they kept this secret…. You have a web of lies, coercion, and disinformation that is killing people.”

Interesting review of the bureaucratic battle which has not been mentioned much previously.

Good to see #DRASTIC getting some limelight.

Very few people know the full story of what we do, who we help & how we do it.

One day that story will be written

unroll @threadreaderapp