Thread by @alexandrosM

Who killed the lab leak hypothesis?

Jeremy Farrar got news of the outbreak early, he hand-picked experts to advise world leaders, and made sure institutions spoke as one: "There was no leak, the virus emerged naturally".

On 2019's last day, the head of China's CDC called him...

As he described to Alan Rusbridger, "an old friend" called George Fu Gao, now head of China's CDC, called him to tell him of a cluster of lung infections in a city in China, and that they knew it wasn't SARS.

George Gao and Jeremy Farrar go way back. They did their PhDs in Oxford in the early 90's, where they stayed until about 2004. They both had funding by the Wellcome Trust, which Farrar now leads.

Besides working on SARS, they have published on Avian flu: scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&…

The same day as that call, Farrar tweeted that the news was worrying, but he trusted the chinese CDC.

On January 10th, he tweeted again, warning investigators and journals about "clear responsibilities" of withholding information

https://twitter.com/JeremyFarrar/status/1212068354606981120?s=20

https://twitter.com/JeremyFarrar/status/1215647022893670401

About 12 hours later, the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was released by Eddie Holmes, who got the "ok" from Professor Zhang Yongzhen, whose team had done the sequencing. It's unclear what was said on the phone, but it worked:

time.com/5882918/zhang-…

https://twitter.com/edwardcholmes/status/1215802670176276482

While we don't know if Farrar's tweet and the release were linked, we know Farrar and Holmes go a long way back: Holmes was in Oxford from the early nineties until 2004, had significant Wellcome funding, and they've published many papers together since: scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&…

Holmes goes even further back with Gao: They've been publishing together for 25 years, and Holmes is even a Guest Professor at China's CDC in Beijing since 2014.



scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&…
sydney.edu.au/AcademicProfil…

In the released emails of Anthony Fauci, Jeremy Farrar appears on the first available day, January 31 2020, in the infamous back-and-forth where Kristian Andersen wrote "Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory".

The group of Eddie (Holmes), Bob (Garry), Mike (Farzan) is part of an expert group Fauci would later describe as led by Farrar. In Fauci's words, "This is not my are of expertise, so I have backed off and am leaving it all to Jeremy".

Andersen, Holmes, Garry, as well as Wellcome-funded Andrew Rambaut, and W. Ian Lipkin, would go on to write the Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 in Nature, which concluded that "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."

Interestingly, in a recent statement to the Daily Mail, Farrar's office said that he convened the five researchers but stepped back once the researchers were introduced.

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9…

The 5th author, W. Ian Lipkin, is director of the Columbia Center for Infection and Immunity, Special Advisor to the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology since 2003, with a 2016 Science and Technology Cooperation Awakrd, and a PRC 70th anniversary medal awarded Jan 7 2020.

Something of a maverick, Lipkin has been praised by Fauci, whose NIAID org Lipkin is part of, for his skill in finding viruses in 2011. Late Jan 2020, Lipkin was in China, after having heard about the outbreak in mid-December, and contacting George Fu Gao. rollingstone.com/politics/polit…

According to author Robert (Bob) Garry, the draft of the "origins" paper was complete on February 1, 2020, as mentioned in the "This Week In Virology" podcast released on May 29 2021.

The same day, February 1, there was a teleconference, arranged by Farrar, where the work of Andersen, Holmes and presumably the other authors of the Origins paper was presented for discussion to an incredibly auspicious group. Science leaders from US, UK, Netherlands, and Germany

Fauci (head of NIAID) and Collins (head of NIH) represented the US. Farrar, Ferguson, and Schreier were the top 3 at Wellcome Trust. Patrick Vallance is the Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Gov't. Fouchier and Koopmans from Netherlands, Drosten and Pohlmann from Germany.

Vallance, Farrar, Ferguson and Rambaut, were all part of SAGE, the UK Government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. Rambaut, alongside Andersen, Holmes and Garry would co-author the Nature Medicine paper "Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2".

After the call, Farrar, Fauci, and Collins have a debrief, and discuss a followup with WHO Director-General Tedros. Collins writes "Hi Jeremy ... thank you for your leadership on this critical and sensitive issue" and Fauci concurs: "We really appreciate what you are doing here".

The group exchanged additional emails, and on February 2, Farrar was indicating that he was waiting for the WHO (Tedros and Bernhard) to make a decision on something very soon.

On February 4th, Farrar forwards a summary of the work, with a note from Holmes that he did not mention other anomalies "as this will make us look like loons". Farrar closes: "Pushing WHO again today".

By February 5, everyone seems alligned. Farrar reports to Fauci and Collins that the WHO "have listened and acted". They discussed names for a WHO group to look into the origins and evolution of the virus, which is likely this group: who.int/health-topics/…

Also, on Feb. 3, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) to “convene meeting of experts… to address the unknowns... respond to both the outbreak and any resulting misinformation.”

It's unclear how the experts were picked, because the conflicts were deep. Peter Daszak was directly involved with funding, and has extensive publishing history with Wuhan Institute of Virology, as does Ralph Baric. Stanley Perlman is a long-term collaborator of Baric.

Trevor Bedford has long prior publishing history with Rambaut and Andersen, who were in the Feb 1 meeting, was part of their public conversation, and seemed to be using similar arguments to them. Andersen was also part of this group. The remaining experts don't seem conflicted.

After discussion, the first draft of their response includes this footnote: “[possibly add brief explanation that this does not preclude an unintentional release from a laboratory studying the evolution of related coronaviruses].”. Somehow the final version does not mention this.

@Ayjchan has far deeper analysis of this document and the process that led to its creation if you care to dive deeper:

The most important point, however, is that the lack of clarity on a lab leak being possible allowed Daszak to misrepresent the document.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1338773229662564353?s=20

The infamous Lancet letter that came out on February 19th, orchestrated by Daszak, signed by Farrar and several Wellcome-linked experts, rife with undeclared conflicts of interest, built up on a misreading of the NASEM document.

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

It also referred to these remarks by the Director-General of the WHO:

Notably, the remarks rely heavily on this Guardian article by Adam Kucharski: who.int/director-gener…
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Kucharski is the author of a book that was just coming out at the time, "The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread – and Why They Stop", published by The Wellcome Collection. His research since 2017 is also funded by a Wellcome Trust fellowship. Not proof, but evidence.

Intriguingly, on February 9th, a podcast by Newt Gingrich was released, in which he interviewed both Fauci and Daszak, and the issue of conspiracy theories was high on the list. Incredibly, Daszak also predicted the virous would be gone in a year.

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1402690738501029892

It is clear that after Feb 4, the message is clear and unambiguous, and all voices are coordinated: any implication of lab leak, while not explicitly ruled out, is implied to be a conspiracy theory. On Feb 7, posts a "scicheck": Factcheck.org
factcheck.org/2020/02/basele…

@R_H_Ebright does this match the facts as you know them? I've seen your tweets all along this path, you may be the person best placed to sanity check this chain.