Thread by @Ayjchan

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.”

Yet, by Feb 4, Andersen had told another group of experts “the data conclusively show that neither (engineering for basic research or nefarious reasons) was done”.

Garry said in an interview that Proximal Origin (Andersen, Rambaut, Lipkin, Holmes, Garry) had been drafted Feb 1.

The earliest version of Proximal Origin I can still find was archived on Feb 17, 2020.

"this analysis provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus."
archive.is/cZwkG

Virological, Proximal Origin:
"Although genomic evidence does not support the idea that SARS-CoV-2 is a laboratory construct, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here"

Although by the time it had been accepted by Nature Medicine on March 6, the strength of the statement had leveled up to:
"we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
nature.com/articles/s4159…

What this means is that even after the Feb 1 call, some of the top experts still thought a lab leak was at least as likely as a natural spillover.

But by Feb 4, at least one had concluded no engineering, and by mid-Feb, calling the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory.

In @ianbirrell's words: "So far from having “many sleepless nights”, these scientists seem to have changed their minds amazingly fast and reached fresh conclusions."
unherd.com/2021/07/how-sc…

What happened in the 3-4 days between Feb 1 and Feb 4, 2020?

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1416404349878632450

We can start with what happened at the Feb 1 call with 4 of the 5 Proximal Origin authors.

Full list of expert attendees here:

Do any regular journalists find this situation just a tiny bit curious and worth following up on?

In Farrar's book, at the time, Andersen "cautioned that just because it happened in nature did not rule out unnatural origins", fearing he might be “the person who proved this new virus came from a lab”.

3 days later, it's all consistent with natural evolution.

May we please see the Feb 4, 2020 draft of Proximal Origin?