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Alina Chan Profile picture
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11 Aug, 4 tweets, 2 min read
I don’t want any more experts accidentally spreading the misinformation that WIV was built next to a hotbed of coronaviruses.

Wuhan scientists had to make long trips to South China each year to find SARS-like viruses and bring 1000s of animal and human samples back up to Wuhan.
More misinformation about #OriginsOfCovid being debunked here
How far is Wuhan from the Yunnan mines that were teeming with SARS-like viruses?

About 1,800km by road.
Comparable to New York to Orlando FL, or Portland OR to San Diego.
Comparable to…

Madrid to Amsterdam.
Istanbul to Tel Aviv.
Cape Town to Kruger National Park.
Melbourne to Brisbane.
Pune to Kolkata.

If you wanted to build an institute to frequently and closely study a type of virus found in location A, you would be nuts to choose location B.

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
12 Aug
Did the @WHO international experts get to talk to two obvious whistleblowers, Dr Ai Fen a doctor who treated some of the first known covid cases and the technician who first discovered it was a SARS related coronavirus, when they visited Wuhan?

If not, why?

#OriginsOfCovid
This early study said the first patient developed symptoms Dec 1, no link to the seafood market.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
This @washingtonpost report said the first patient sickened Dec 8, an accountant who lived in Wuchang - the Wuhan district where WIV is located, across the river from the seafood market.

washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pac…
Read 7 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
12 Aug
When SARS2 was detected in Wuhan in 2019, the WIV had been working on the 9 closest related viruses at the time, for several years, collected from a Yunnan mine where 6 people suffered a mysterious pneumonia and half died.

This info should’ve been released to the world on day 1.
Regardless of whether WIV had SARS2 in its possession prior to the outbreak, the whole point of the Predict or Global Virome Project was to immediately inform the world about potentially concerning emerging pathogens.

Yet, their pathogen database disappeared in Sep 2019.
The SARS2 genome they had would’ve shown this virus had a sufficiently different spike from the bat SARSrCoVs in the deadly mine.

Mainly the spike had a unique FCS insertion that other scientists immediately noted as troubling.

Dec 2019 patient data pointed to H2H transmission.
Read 8 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
10 Aug
Am I getting this right that the question is no longer:

Is Covid-19 from a market or a lab?

But even China is asking:

Is Covid-19 from a Chinese or American lab?

The natural spillover hypothesis is definitely off the table now?

globaltimes.cn/page/202108/12…
This Chinese state media article has so many good points:

1. Labs should be investigated by the WHO #OriginsOfCovid

2. Even top labs have (frequent) accidents and may not report it to the authorities

3. Biosafety measures taken in response to lab incidents are not bulletproof
4. A leak can result in 100s of people infected over a period of time when the virus is quietly evolving better human-to-human/animal transmission

5. Some countries have an opaque biosafety/biosecurity system

6. The government doesn’t always know what is happening in its labs
Read 6 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
10 Aug
😂 “I can assure you the worst possible way to position oneself to get NIH grants is to criticize NIH grants. Doing so does not make the NIH your friend.”

Interview of ⁦@R_H_Ebright⁩ by ⁦@thackerpd⁩ disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/a-candid-con…
More context: @R_H_Ebright was responding to an unfortunate conspiracy theory created by the hosts of a podcast who suggested that scientists were criticizing virologists wrt #OriginsOfCovid in order to steal their funding.
The same podcast revealed more erroneous beliefs, easily debunked with science, that were held by the hosts and journalists discussing the #OriginsOfCovid
Read 4 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
9 Aug
On the question of whether covid-19 might’ve come from Europe.

TLDR it didn’t.
Also this is really how peer review should work. Open, honest and fair criticism of preprinted/published work. Now everyone can see what problems each study suffers from and decide for themselves whether they think the conclusions are well supported. Expertise is being shared.
On studies pointing to covid appearing in Europe earlier than Dec 2019, many somehow detect later variants (D614G) rather than the earliest form of SARS2.

This requires a virus endemic to South China/SE Asia to not only be able to time travel but also teleport across continents.
Read 9 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
8 Aug
Question for epidemiologists: in your field, is it acceptable to reverse engineer data out of a figure (left) using Illustrator to generate a nicer version (right) for your paper?

Sources:
who.int/docs/default-s…

zenodo.org/record/5075888…
The original data cannot be accessed, legend is blurred out, the map itself is highly pixelated.

But would it be better to copy the original figure into one's new paper (with attribution) alongside the reverse-engineered figure so that readers are aware of the 'data' quality?
The authors do clarify in their supplementary (but not main text) that data loss occurred during reverse engineering:

"Map data was manually extracted from Fig 17.. using Adobe Illustrator. Because of multiple overlapping points there will be errors in the extraction process."
Read 4 tweets

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