Thread by @Ayjchan

Another miracle today. AFAIK this is the first @nytimes article to give the #OriginsOfCovid lab leak hypothesis fair consideration without the veneer of “but my expert friends said it was natural.”

nytimes.com/2021/06/20/wor…

Striking similarities between the 2 searches for the origin of an outbreak proximal to a lab likely working on similar (if not the same) infectious agent that caused the outbreak.

Hopefully we don’t need to wait decades to find the origin of Covid-19.

The most important takeaway from the story of the 1979 anthrax lab leak is that it did not involve a giant conspiracy - just the usual cover up you'd expect from an authoritarian state.

People, each with little bits of information, being silenced or too fearful to come forward.

And a whole lot of people, including top American scientists, accepting what they're told by parties who have every interest to deny a lab leak.

In 1979, it was contaminated bone meal.

In 2019, it was frozen ferret badgers and pangolins.

With these situations, rarely does a single individual know the full story from leak to outbreak.

You have the patients and doctors who only see the outbreak side. They have suspicions and rumors based on the lab's location, but no hard proof that the outbreak came from a lab...

And you have the clean-up crew, people who are disinfecting the supposed source, eg a meat plant or market - they never see signs of animal infection.

"in a Communist state, he had no choice but to go along with the charade.. [they] spent months seizing and testing meat."

Then the journalists and investigators.

Journalists being told to stay on message.

Investigators only getting access to data or information that supports the desired narrative of the government.

As some of the quotes in the article imply, sometimes the reason why journalists or experts accept a story at face value can be out of fear of a war starting.

It makes them want to pick the route that is least likely to inflame geopolitical tensions.

When governments, journalists, scientists and editors control - not in a conspiracy, but each deciding what's good for the public - what info reaches the public, it can lead to crazy hypotheses, eg frozen ferret badgers #PopsicleOrigins sounding plausible.

https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1361512267267866628

This is super problematic because timing matters. A lot.

Some journalists are now writing that the evidence hasn't changed for lab leak. I'd say that the evidence has trickled out so slowly over the past year that you didn't even notice that you're up to your knees in water.

Please consider how the public (and many scientists actually) would've reacted if we knew all of the things that we know now, mostly due to the efforts of internet sleuths and outsiders btw.

My estimate of the likelihood of a lab leak has changed quite a bit since early 2020.

I want to be super super clear about this. The majority of scientists simply have not had the time or means to read up deeply on all the circumstantial evidence surrounding #OriginsOfCovid

Many have worked themselves near to death last year fighting the pandemic.

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1406246766924767236

Many top scientists today are very clear in communicating that we need to collect more evidence instead of continuing to guesstimate (1) scientific consensus and (2) the % likelihoods of each #OriginsOfCovid scenario.

What’s the point of asking about scientific consensus right now?

Reporter: So we got no evidence of an animal origin and also no evidence of a lab origin. Please spend 15 min on Google and then tell me your best guess!

Scientist: So… you’re going to get us all in trouble.

Even as someone who has been looking into the #OriginsOfCovid for more than a year, as a scientist, I’m still hesitant to come up with a publicly recorded best guess in the absence of stronger evidence.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1398406399655350283

So every time I see a respected scientist saying in the public record “most likely it was natural” or “all the evidence points to natural spillover” - I’m just thinking whether they have a strategy for walking back that statement if devastating evidence to the contrary emerges.

As a kid I used to ride the pirate ship obsessively at a local theme park. When possible, I would sit at either end of the ship.

The further up you went (on either side), the more horrific the swing back down. And you could see it.

I felt the same way when some scientists were calling the lab leak a conspiracy theory, extremely unlikely, or barely possible such that you wanted to but could not rule it out.

The ship was way way too high on one end and would eventually swing all the way to the other extreme.

Now, we are on the other extreme end, lots of people, even some of the scientists who initially condemned the lab leak hypothesis, are now “convinced” that covid-19 must’ve come from a lab.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1396867751050891267