Thread by @Ayjchan

I don't think this is good reporting. Sorry @nytimes you had one good article earlier today though.
nytimes.com/2021/06/14/sci…

Because so many experts are deleting their tweets now, people have had no choice but to look at archived pages to see what they said just over a year ago:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200131100945if_/https://twitter.com/aetiology/status/1223108683833339907

3pm Jan 30, 2020.
@SenTomCotton posts this still existing tweet:

https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1222971592403226628

The tweet is degraded as a Trumpian conspiracy theory:

Kristian is called in to take a look and see whether the Covid-19 virus could have possibly leaked from a lab, and he quickly replies on Jan 31, 2020 that the "analyses are completely flawed and wrong. They can safely be ignored."

https://web.archive.org/web/20200201091156/https://twitter.com/aetiology/status/1223310136858443776

But later that same day, in FOIA'ed emails from Fauci, we see that Kristian says that he, Ed Holmes, Bob Garry and Mike "all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory."

Regardless of what Kristian says after that email - what new info changed his mind - we see here that he had dismissed the lab origin hypothesis and then afterwards said that his group of experts thought the virus genome was unnatural in the SAME DAY.

I want to emphasize that this is by no means the fault of the infectious diseases expert who tagged Kristian to get his opinion. She trusted him to assess the lab leak claim. He said it was completely flawed and wrong.

Fast forward to earlier this month, Kristian doesn't just deactivate his account. He first tried to delete his tweets. Going so far as to first try and excuse that his old tweets auto-delete.

https://twitter.com/PrometheusAM/status/1401550451498110981

And it wasn't that all of his old tweets had deleted, because several users tried looking up Kristian's tweets prior to late 2019 and these still existed on twitter.

Kristian then tells @nytimes "I have always seen Twitter as a way to interact with other scientists and the general public to encourage open and transparent dialogue about science."

I'm sorry but none of the above has been encouraging open and transparent dialogue about science.

What we do know is that there was a private call on Feb 1, 2020.

The participants included 3 of the 5 authors of the Proximal Origin correspondence. One recently told TWiV that their first draft was done on Feb 1, 2020.

This meeting was apparently so juicy that the emails following the meeting, spanning several pages of the FOIA'ed emails, are heavily redacted.

What's the point of this?

The meeting participants also included Ron Fouchier, the senior author of one of -the- gain of function papers:
sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/e…

We may never know what Fouchier's notes on the teleconference were...

But we know from @ianbirrell who reached out to the office of Jeremy Farrar that...
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9…

And on March 6, 2020, Kristian writes to Farrar, Fauci, and Collins saying that Proximal Origin has just been accepted @NatureMedicine

"Thank you again for your advice and leadership as we have been working through the SARS-CoV-2 'origins' paper."

I'm getting some helpful corrections:
(1) The analysis Kristian was referring to was not actually @SenTomCotton's but this other one in the same thread. Difficult to tell when I jump between deleted tweets in the same thread on the Wayback Machine.

https://twitter.com/jaimedash/status/1404545924668473352

(2) Sometimes auto-delete apps funk up and they only delete a certain period of tweets.

Best to just deactivate your account if there are old tweets that could cause trouble.

https://twitter.com/StephanEducTech/status/1404548701742415875

(3) Some people are arguing that Bob Garry must've misspoke on TWiV. That the first draft Proximal Origin being completed on Feb 1 must've been an error.

Can anyone who's in touch with Garry ask him to confirm or correct?

I understand why many scientists are afraid to voice their doubts on #originsofcovid

Even when you think it could've leaked from a lab, you're faced with an arena of people yelling about bioweapons, manmade SARS etc.

But the response shouldn't be to say "must've been natural."

If you pull the pendulum too far to one side, you have to expect a reaction of near equal force.

Sometimes the best thing to do is acknowledge when people you hate have a good point. And work on investigating those points together.

Another mistake: the meeting included 4 of the 5 Proximal Origin authors.

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1404544333387288576

Besides Fouchier who had engaged in the influenza gain-of-function studies, another scientist from the same institute in the Netherlands attended this call: Marion Koopmans, who is one of the international experts on the China-WHO joint study.

Together, Fouchier and Koopmans are deputy and head of the Erasmus MC Department of Viroscience.

I do not think that it would be a stretch to say that some of the people who would’ve had the most to lose if Covid-19 were to be connected to gain-of-function research were in attendance at this Feb 1, 2020 call, for which the post-meeting emails were largely redacted.