Thread by @Ayjchan

Opinion by @YanzhongHuang raises concerns about a self-fulfilling bioweapons prophecy (escalating global biodefense research), but I disagree that "reviving" the lab leak hypothesis made a full and transparent #OriginsOfCovid investigation less likely.
thebulletin.org/2021/07/after-…

@YanzhongHuang Many scientists waited to see what the @WHO could do in their joint study with China.

Afterwards, the team leader said "You need to do a formal audit, and that’s far beyond what our team is mandated to do or has the tools and capabilities to do"
sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/p…

@YanzhongHuang @WHO "WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said getting access to raw data had been a challenge for the international team that traveled to China earlier this year to investigate the source of COVID-19."
apnews.com/article/joe-bi…

We became aware that there were several important "unintended" "editing errors" in the China-WHO joint study report relating to the earliest Wuhan cases in Wuhan.

washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pac…

All this happened even after @WHO gave China complete control over who was in the international team, what the terms of reference (study plan) was, and the team's every movement in China. The full report had to be signed off by all members including the Chinese half of the team.

In my opinion, this approach has not been very successful at shedding light on the #originsofcovid - early cases, market, or lab.

A recent study even revealed that the China-WHO joint study had missed important information on what animals were sold at the Huanan Seafood Market.

What is likely to result in more transparency is a facts-based investigation outside of China to build as clear a picture as possible about what info we have relating to plausible hypotheses, both natural & lab-based.

After that we know what the remaining gaps of knowledge are.

Witnessing the outcomes of the China-WHO study, I don't think that pushing for an investigation of natural & lab origins in any way hurt the chances of a transparent investigation with China.

My impression is that there were zero chances of such an investigation happening.

I don't buy the appeasement approach in this context where the discovery of evidence of a lab accident would have an unprecedentedly negative impact on the party you are trying to appease.

You're trying to appease someone into producing evidence that their accident resulted in millions dead, hundreds of millions sickened, tens of trillions lost.

What would have been much better, in my opinion, is if scientists and leaders worldwide had been able to raise the lab origin hypothesis much earlier in 2020, without immediately going to the extremes of condemning it as a conspiracy theory or a deliberate release/bioweapon.

That would have been more conducive to a fair, swift, and potentially lifesaving conversation about how to react to a pandemic that might have lab origins.

Instead it started an escalating mudslinging competition with increasingly high stakes.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1406674954150678543