Thread by @Pinboard

Curious what the largest grain of salt sold at the Wuhan market is, so I can take it with Daszak's tweet. We know frozen anything is not a vector for covid, the paper itself says pangolins weren't sold, and somehow this key research from 2019 fortuitously emerges in June 2021.

https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1401908087557177353

Really—why is Daszak bringing up pangolins here at all? Even this serendipitously discovered paper points out their absence. Leave the pangolins alone.

For my money, this is the best part of the paper. "Hello, fellow merchant. I am an independent observer unconnected with law enforcement. Please provide me with a list of the illegal animals you are selling (and your written consent!) so that I may publish it in two years' time."

Daszak blocked me immediately, so let me screenshot what I was replying to here.

Useful context thread from @BeijingPalmer. This very natural reflex to obfuscate is why I find Daszak's aggressive defensiveness more interesting than the sudden appearance of the Chinese research

https://twitter.com/BeijingPalmer/status/1401934598574067713

So Daszak was instrumental in an earlier effort to shut down inquiry about Covid origins. No wonder the guy instablocks:

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1401813071635501056

To be clear about where I stand: I think it's possible to be genuinely in the dark about how the pandemic started, absent further evidence, and also find these efforts to pre-empt investigation fishy as hell.

I miss the early days of the pandemic, when I could have full faith in the WHO, CDC, Nature, and the Lancet instead of having to feel like a foil-hatted wingnut who has to assemble the real story from random tweets