Thread by @Ayjchan

Getting a bit weary of debunking articles trying to debunk information surrounding the lab leak hypothesis.

This @snopes article does a good job debunking some straw men but I think makes some critical errors.
snopes.com/news/2021/07/1…

In my opinion, it starts off on the wrong foot.

Some powerful scientists indeed unfairly rejected the notion that SARS2 came from a lab as a conspiracy theory. And internet sleuths did uncover damning info pointing to a possible lab origin of SARS2. usrtk.org/biohazards-blo…

This is not a good look for scientists and I reject that scientists as a whole are judged based on these Lancet letters.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1415365563283431424

What happened imo is that, in 2020, very few scientists were publicly working on lab origin hypotheses, and this vacuum was filled by internet sleuths and independent analysts/scientists who were largely outsiders to virology.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1382746872272551939

Their determination and ingenuity led to actual scientific contributions and measurable outcomes.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1334875696552882176

Take a more reputable person's word for it - published in @nytimes by @zeynep

"the same group of internet sleuths that linked RaTG13 to the mine also uncovered that a genomic database maintained by the Wuhan Institute of Virology..."
nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opi…

Did the internet sleuths get everything 100% right? Of course not, they're not prophets.

Did they often veer off into unsubstantiated speculation and easily "debunkable" hypotheses? Yes, and so did powerful scientists.

Never forget.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1360397010336182276

On to the straw men.

Snopes wants to reassure us that one of the viruses at the WIV, RaTG13, is not the direct ancestor of SARS2.

Great, thanks.

Do you have access to their missing database with more than 22,000 pathogen samples?

Apparently, no one has access to this missing database and the experts sent to Wuhan to trace the #OriginsOfCovid also did not ask for it.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1416500650439897089

Next, Snopes tries to explain that the renaming of 4991 to RaTG13 is innocent.

The renaming alone wasn't what concerned me. The sample was not attributed to its original WIV publication, which also did not mention the miners. You had to sleuth it out...
minervanett.no/alina-chan-cor…

To avoid any more of what Snopes calls "innuendo", let me repeat what many others have been bluntly saying for months.

This lack of urgency, accuracy, and transparency in reporting on the closest relatives of SARS2 linked to mysterious SARS-like cases is unacceptable.

"Such an occurrence would be evidence of a bat-borne virus similar to SARS-CoV-2 evolving to infect humans without any laboratory intervention."

It is also evidence of labs bringing these viruses back to densely populated cities.

Snopes please fact check yourself:
"researchers proposed a different kind of virus they identified in the same mine as the miners’ cause of death"

False. In @ScienceMagazine the investigator "says, MojV is “more likely a curiosity.”"
sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/n…

@ScienceMagazine Next, addressing the FCS, please see the section on it in my @Medium article:

The FCS may have evolved naturally or it may have been inserted by scientists. The genomic sequence alone cannot definitively support or rule out either hypothesis.
ayjchan.medium.com/a-response-to-…

On Baltimore's walking back of his "smoking gun" quote:

"When I first saw the sequence of the furin cleavage site—as I've said, other beta coronaviruses don't have that site—it seemed to me a reasonable hypothesis that somebody had put it in there."
caltech.edu/about/news/the…

Then, the Snopes article says intermediate hosts were identified quickly for SARS and MERS, but maybe there's no intermediate host for SARS2 to be found. So maybe SARS2 went from bats to humans directly, but how to account for the distance between bats in Yunnan and Wuhan?

The author speculates that some "feign ignorance about both how pandemics begin and how COVID-19 works" when they suggest that it is suspicious that SARS2 emerged in Wuhan, far away from where its closest relatives are found in Yunnan caves.

I address this in my @medium post by comparing the origin stories of SARS1 vs SARS2, revealing zero evidence that Wuhan animal sellers had been frequently exposed to SARSrCoVs or that natural spillovers of SARSrCoVs would be expected in Wuhan.
ayjchan.medium.com/a-response-to-…

Without any evidence that SARSrCoVs are frequently circulating in the Wuhan population/animal trading community, the assertion is that the one and only time we detected a SARSrCoV in Wuhan people, it was a powerful pandemic virus.

I'm not going to speculate if anyone is feigning ignorance. We need to consider that Wuhan, a place where SARSrCoVs are unlikely to emerge in humans, turned out to be the place where the pandemic SARSrCoV emerges. No signs of other failed SARSrCoVs trying their luck in Wuhan.

Snopes article concludes by saying the most prominent lab leak pieces ("speculative, underdeveloped, or scientifically confused “what-ifs” posed in a series of self-referential blog posts") have presented little evidence to justify a shift in opinion favoring lab origins.

I suspect having the president of the USA ask for an intelligence report on the #OriginsOfCovid, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident, might have something to do with shifting public opinion.
whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…

Some resources for Snopes if you plan to continue debunking info around the lab leak hypothesis.

Please start here:

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1413654989222735874

Check out some of these articles or podcasts - yes, these are stunningly self-referential:

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1395351720906137604

A non-self-referencing recommendation:
usatoday.com/in-depth/opini…

Another non-self-referencing recommendation:
nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opi…