Thread by @Ayjchan

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.

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1392585383754543106

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.

Instead, the genome that China already had on Dec 27, 2019 was held back. A separate scientist group was pressured into releasing their genome on Jan 11, 2020.

Human-to-human transmission only acknowledged on Jan 20, 2020.

It took all the way till Nov 2020 to get some clarity on the miners with mysterious pneumonia, and these closest relatives to SARS2 being worked on in the lab for years prior to 2019.
nature.com/articles/s4158…

This level of information sharing cannot be the 21st century standard for outbreak response.

With today’s technologies we can sequence the full genome of a novel virus in 2 days. Search our databases in hours. Send an email to the other side of the world in seconds.

What use is a virus database costing millions and millions of dollars if it disappears at a time when it is most needed?

At this rate you may as well spend those millions on asking scientists to collect Pokémon. Same outcome.