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.

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

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

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:

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

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

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: who.int/director-gener…

Notably, the remarks rely heavily on this Guardian article by Adam Kucharski: 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, Factcheck.org posts a "scicheck": factcheck.org/2020/02/basele…

On March 17th, another cornerstone is released: "The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2". While it does declare one potential conflict of interest, it's about Garry being co-founder of a company that develops countermeasures to emerging viruses. nature.com/articles/s4159…

Holmes and Lipkin declare none. It's notable that while the Lancet letter and the "Origins" clearly had a lot of the same people involved, no shared authors are listed, "maximizing the independent voice" to borrow a phrase from Daszak.

Back to the Fauci emails, on March 3rd, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) springs to action. GPMB, a joint effort by the WHO and the World Bank, describes itself as "an independent monitoring and accountability body to ensure preparedness for global health crises"

You've seen enough names by now, but it's important to examine who is on this board: apps.who.int/gpmb/board.html

You probably recognize some old friends: Jeremy Farrar, Anthony Fauci, George F. Gao.

Co-chair Elhadj As Sy is on the Board of Governors of the Wellcome Trust.

Another member is Victor J. Dzau, President of the US National Academy of Medicine (NAM). On April 27, Dzau hosted a panel with Fauci, Farrar, and Gao on the response to the pandemic, bringing Gao back into the fold, with any responsibility off the table. nationalacademies.org/news/2020/04/n…

On April 30th, one more piece: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a statement that Intel agencies "concur with the wide scientific consensus that COVID-19 was not manmade or genetically modified" though it did allow for a leak.

https://twitter.com/odnigov/status/1255868108356681728?lang=en

While it is important that a leak without modification was explicitly carved out as a hypothesis, it is important to notice how we got this far in 4 months. Very few of the relevant scientists had any part of the conversation, and their conflicts of interest were not surfaced.

By June 9th, the masks were off: Peter Daszak would write yet another piece for the Guardian as part of his extensive public relations campaign, and, surprisingly, the mild-mannered Jeremy Farrar would retweet enthusiastically:

https://twitter.com/JeremyFarrar/status/1270354946295246848?s=20

It would take almost another year, and continual sticking out of their necks by @ydeigin @Rossana38510044 @Ayjchan @R_H_Ebright @BretWeinstein @HeatherEHeying, the DRASTIC group, and many more, to keep the Lab Leak Hypothesis alive, continue the research as the evidence faded.

If you ask me what I think after seeing all this, I will answer that on one level we still don't know. On another level however, knowing that a certain class of people believes they can manipulate science and public opinion without it backfiring...

...I can believe they thought they could do the same with another complex system, a coronavirus and its interaction with various hosts. If it did happen, even with the best of intentions, it's important to understand that the consequences are more than the millions of deaths.

This affair, and the insistence to control how it was understood using shame and intimidation, undermines the very essence of scientific inquiry, and should the public's trust in science deteriorate further, the responsibility is on those who put appearance over substance.

Richard Feynman's conclusion to his report on the shuttle Challenger accident should give us all pause:

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

Thank you for reading this far, it's definitely been a journey. As always, please keep in mind I'm simply putting pieces together, making as little inference as possible. If there are any inaccuracies, please let me know and I will append any corrections to this thread.

PS. For the inevitable characterizations of me being a "conspiracy theorist", please use the more scientifically-appropriate term "conspiracy hypothesist". Doesn't quite roll off the tongue, but science has its drawbacks.

@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.

PPS. For someone so important, I've not been able to find basic information on Farrar, such as who his PhD supervisor was, or which department it was in. If anyone has any links, please let me know.

PS3. Interesting fact not relevant to the thread: When W. Ian Lipkin got Covid in New York, he refused to go to the hospital, instead self-treating with Hydroxychloroquine at home. What?

PS4. I hate to have to write this, but I see quite a few comments being about how all this is a plot by the CCP and whatnot. You might not be reading the same things as me, because what I see is a beautiful act of international collaboration. Universal human flaws on display.

What's more, it's impossible for these flaws not to emerge. Our systems select for them. It's not about one person, one party, one country, or one continent. Unless we find better ways to make organizations, we'll be stuck in groundhog day until we finally blow ourselves up.

One more piece: Farrar had a call with a group of money managers Jan 31: “In the 20 or 30 years I’ve been involved in emerging infections, I’ve never seen anything that has been as fast or as rapidly moving and dynamic as this”
fnlondon.com/articles/the-e… (from WSJ but paywall)

And another: @SharriMarkson claims Daszak briefed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI on February 3rd. About 10 minutes in, here: skynews.com.au/details/_62586…
These are the same people that ruled out any modification in the lab on April 30.

The Feb 3 date is critical because it fits with the narrative shift, and also hints at why Daszak may have been invited to the NASEM meeting a few days later.

A piece that doesn't yet fit is the Wellcome investments in pharma. I know the numbers look big for everyday people, but a 2m investment here or a 2b investment there doesn't move the needle at those levels. There may be something, but we need more pieces.

https://twitter.com/BillyBostickson/status/1404016522855546886?s=19