Thread by @Ayjchan

Must watch. ⁦@jonstewart⁩ and ⁦@StephenAtHome⁩ discuss the lab leak hypothesis on ⁦@colbertlateshow⁩

Also, to correct Stephen, Wuhan is not a place where SARS2-like viruses are known to circulate in bats or spillover into people.

The Wuhan institute of virology existed prior to 2003 SARS. A lab there pivoted to SARS research after the 2003 epidemic, and spent close to 2 decades ferrying 10,000s of potential SARS samples (animal and human) from more than 1000 miles away up into the Wuhan lab.

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1400159531129311239

During the course of these virus hunting expeditions, the lab even used the Wuhan human population as a negative (no SARS virus) control.

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1373750997349249028

Prior to covid-19, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other Wuhan labs had collectively sampled 1000s of bats in Hubei province where Wuhan is located. They never saw any SARS2-related virus or even any SARS-related virus that could use the hACE2 entry receptor.

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1348367971945762817

But wildlife trade in China is immense. That’s why we need to dig deeper into exactly what animals were sold in Wuhan in 2019. The existing info is deeply incomplete. The China-WHO team was told that the seafood market had no live mammals. A recent paper said there were 2017-19.

At the very least we now have stronger evidence that no bats or pangolins were being sold in Wuhan 2017-2019, from a scientist who had been diligently checking in even with vendors of illegally trafficked animals.

The pangolin hypothesis is essentially dead.

Late last year @AP reported that one of the top scientists in the SARS field - in fact, the scientist who had suggested and then gone on to discover SARS-like viruses in bats - said the search for these coronaviruses in pangolins did not appear “scientifically driven.”

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1344470534008971265

Hi @washingtonpost @AaronBlake please amend your piece!

See thread above, Wuhan is not a place where SARS viruses are spilling over from nature. The institute was not built there to study local SARS viruses. It imported these viruses from South China.

washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…

Whoever is feeding this misinformation to the media, please stop.

The closest SARS1 & SARS2 relatives were in south China, where labs mined for the viruses, brought back to labs.

WIV in Wuhan was one of the most prolific, accumulating a missing database of 22,000 virus entries.

Some people get confused when they hear SARS2-like viruses continue to be discovered in south China, more than 1000 miles from Wuhan.

This shouldn’t be surprising. It is consistent with both natural and lab origin scenarios.

Question is how the virus got from S China to Wuhan.

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1371184652002721793

At first people thought the virus had come from the Huanan seafood market but evidence has been building over time showing that the virus had been circulating prior to being introduced into the market.

Zero animal samples from the market or tested suppliers were positive.

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1365421589328707585

Minor correction on WIV database:
"数据库涵盖课题组长期积累的样本和病毒病原数据，以及国外权威机构公开发布的相关数据，共计22257条"
Samples & viral pathogen data accumulated by the group for a long time, as well as data by foreign institutions, total 22257.

archive.is/jPPkB#selectio…

This old thread might be useful to media people just getting into the lab leak hypothesis:

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1394327675884511239

It’s actually ridiculously easy for SARS-related viruses to leak from labs. Especially if you’re working with live viruses at low BSL2 biosafety levels like the WIV was. SARS classic even leaked from a BSL4 one time.

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1368183528463212550

Even top virologists who initially took the must-be-natural stance have changed their minds after hearing that these SARS-like viruses were being experimented with at BSL2.

Your protection is literally just gloves.

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1394710561347313670

Imagine working with SARS2, an airborne virus, and your only protection is gloves.

And believe it or not, lots of scientists have the habit of blowing out their gloves so they can reuse it later.

I saw someone (not at my workplace) re-inflate their gloves recently for reuse and I was like why even bother having gloves… your mouth has now touched whatever might’ve spattered on your hands or wrists.