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Alina Chan Profile picture
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21 Jul, 9 tweets, 3 min read
I want to counter the specific idea that the US was secretly outsourcing and funding gain-of-function research while it had been "banned" in the US.

The work was not banned; similar work was and continues to be funded and done by the US & other countries.
I hope that what both sides can agree on is that the existing accountability and transparency mechanisms of these international programs have much room for improvement.

What types of experiments are being done? By who? Where? When? What biosafety level?

Research does not need to be gain-of-function (whichever definition you're using) in order to constitute a risk of a lab-based outbreak.
The issue is that past & current international research programs depend a lot on trust.

"“You have to operate from trust,” said.. former global director.. U.S.-funded early-warning project.. hunting for sources of Ebola, SARS and other diseases."
wsj.com/articles/bat-s…
But due to too much trust, there is now a shocking lack of access to information about what work was done abroad and the vast pathogen databases built from years of virus hunting.
We have to find productive ways to move forward on this discussion to result in real policies and informed strategies to prevent future outbreaks and better track risky pathogen research worldwide.
Risky interactions between human beings and the natural world continue to proliferate. Risky pathogen research continues to be funded and conducted globally.

These are not going to wait until people on twitter decide who "won" yesterday's exchange.

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
22 Jul
New book by the director of Wellcome Trust. @ianbirrell notes that it does not describe the story of the Daszak-orchestrated Lancet letter to "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin".
#OriginsOfCovid
unherd.com/2021/07/how-sc…
@ianbirrell The book reveals how several top experts in virology and infectious diseases had initially pegged the lab leak hypothesis as the most likely scenario. Ed Holmes was “80% sure this thing had come out of a lab”. Kristian Andersen 60-70%; Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry not far behind.
Even after the Feb 1 call among international experts, Jeremy Farrar said “On a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release I am honestly at 50... My guess is this will remain grey unless there is access to the Wuhan lab — and I suspect that is unlikely.”
Read 10 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
20 Jul
Just listened to this terrific podcast interview on the #OriginsOfCovid of @KatherineEban @VanityFair by @PeterAttiaMD

Like Eban says, it's one of these stories where you feel like you can't even make this stuff up.
peterattiamd.com/katherineeban2/
@KatherineEban @VanityFair @PeterAttiaMD There's a good discussion in the podcast about the difficulty of finding out who are the few people who know the origin of the virus (have evidence of it) and why finding a whistleblower may take decades or maybe even never. Related story:
I agree with @KatherineEban that the most credible sources on the #OriginsOfCovid are those that are asking for a proper investigation of plausible hypotheses, not the people on either side who insist that the virus is almost certainly natural or almost certainly from a lab.
Read 10 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
20 Jul
Very heated exchange on gain-of-function and #OriginsOfCovid between Rand Paul and Tony Fauci ~50min into today's hearing "The Path Forward: A Federal Perspective on the COVID-19 Response"
An old thread by me that explains why Paul and Fauci are talking past each other on this point of whether NIH funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan:
This is a more recent thread again by me on how the federal definition of GOFROC leaves a lot of wiggle room for interpretation and why, even among scientists, it can be very difficult to agree on what is GOF using the federal definitions.
Read 6 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
20 Jul
New information or clarifications relevant to the #OriginsOfCovid continue to come to light on a regular basis.

In the short time between when I spoke with @NPR @FoodieScience and today, @washingtonpost published their discovery that China @who report suffered editing errors…
Unfortunately one of the known errors impacts the map of early covid cases in Dec 2019- this data is inconsistent with what was reported in Wuhan and yet underlies the first figure of the critical review by Holmes et al.
This is very problematic because a map with errors is influencing the judgment of scientists who have no access to primary data.
Read 16 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
19 Jul
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.
Read 28 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
18 Jul
A very insightful piece on vaccine hesitancy:
"most vaccine skepticism, if by that we mean reluctance, is not based on conspiracy theorizing — it’s based on risk-benefit calculations"
nationalreview.com/2021/07/convin…
"People find acts of God easier to accept than mistakes of their own volition. So they may find it easier to accept the risks of facing COVID in nature, which they did not choose to get, than the unknown risks of a vaccine that they did consciously choose to take."
I think one major public health/sci comm mistake was emphasizing sterilizing immunity: vaccination = Never getting infected and Never transmitting virus to others.

When the point of being vaccinated = not developing severe covid, reaching herd immunity.
globalnews.ca/news/8003930/i…
Read 5 tweets

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