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Alina Chan Profile picture
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21 Aug, 6 tweets, 3 min read
My hope is that a few decades from now, scientists with less skin in the game can do a retrospective and objective evaluation of the scientific community’s behavior and practices wrt #OriginsOfCovid
If you told me even 1 year ago that a top journal would publish a paper signed by dozens of top scientists, whose central figure used Adobe illustrator to reverse engineer data out of a highly pixelated unverifiable figure with errors produced by the Chinese government…
And that the first and key authors of this paper would be 4 of the 5 Proximal Origin authors who were all convened by Feb 1, 2020 to privately share their fears with other top scientists in the West that the virus was more likely to have come from a lab…
At least one of whom would in 3 days begin to tell other top US scientists that lab engineering could be conclusively ruled out, and eventually rule out lab manipulation altogether by March 2020…
And that another group of virologists would be caught privately fearing a lab origin but publicly denouncing speculation on the matter. And that they were aware one senior scientist in Beijing had already been infected with SARS2 in the lab in early 2020…
I would say that we can no longer rely on top journals and top experts as even a low level predictor of scientific quality.

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
10 Sep
Thorough analysis by ⁦@theintercept⁩ ⁦@fastlerner⁩ ⁦@MaraHvistendahl⁩ ⁦@maiahibbett⁩

“The real question is whether or not research has the potential to create or facilitate the selection of viruses that might infect humans.” theintercept.com/2021/09/09/cov…
“All but two of the scientists consulted agreed that, whatever title it is given, the newly public experiment raised serious concerns about the safety and oversight of federally funded research.”
Although the study describing 4991/RaTG13 for the first time and Latinne et al.’s paper were described as having been funded by the EHA grant, I didn’t see even a glimpse of the 9 Mojiang mine SARSrCoVs throughout the 900+ pages of text, phylogenetic trees and other figures.
Read 4 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
7 Sep
"More than 900 pages of materials related to US.-funded coronavirus research in China were released following a FOIA lawsuit by The Intercept."

Piping hot piece by @fastlerner and @MaraHvistendahl @theintercept
theintercept.com/2021/09/06/new…
@fastlerner @MaraHvistendahl @theintercept “they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten—and they kept records of everyone who got bitten. Does EcoHealth have those records? And if not, how can they possibly rule out a research-related accident?”
@fastlerner @MaraHvistendahl @theintercept
Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
7 Sep
On the new US pandemic preparedness plan...

One of the goals is to: Prevent laboratory accidents and deter bioweapons development.

whitehouse.gov/wp-content/upl…
"There are compelling reasons to expect that the frequency [of outbreaks] will increase.. laboratories around the world handling dangerous pathogens is growing in part as a response to increasing pandemic risk, boosting the likelihood that a contagious pathogen could be released"
The old ways by which infectious diseases emerge have not suddenly disappeared. As the plan notes, there are now increased zoonotic transmissions from animals driven by human population growth, climate change & habitat loss.

But there are also new ways: lab release, bioweapons.
Read 7 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
5 Sep
Going up against experts who believe in a natural origin is tough because their field expertise & seniority are often enough to convince non-scientists of a particular argument.

Many who can’t understand the science put their trust in established experts. This is reasonable.
But what’s even tougher is dealing with the small anti-science crowd that believes in a lab origin and is out to get scientists. As a result even true experts who want an investigation of lab origins are painted with a broad brush as unscientific or even responsible for violence.
If you see anonymous people attacking scientists, regardless of which side, I urge you to ask them to stop or report them. These attacks distract from the scientific issue at hand and make it more difficult to hold scientists and leaders accountable.
Read 10 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
4 Sep
“Altos is luring university professors by offering sports-star salaries of $1 million a year or more, plus equity, as well as freedom from the hassle of applying for grants.”

This is a dream scenario for many scientists. technologyreview.com/2021/09/04/103…
If there’s this much money, please set up a department to reproduce key works in the aging field.

If you quickly show which research are reproducible, you will move the whole field forward by decades. That’s a guaranteed way to save scientists from wasting time chasing deadends.
Non-scientists have no idea how much 🧠⏳💸 (100s of mil) are wasted, redundantly, by scientists worldwide each trying to reproduce top publications.

I can’t think of a surer way to accelerate science than to rapidly reveal which studies are reproducible.
vox.com/future-perfect…
Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
3 Sep
Using covidcg.org to keep tabs on the Delta sublineages in North America.

Orange is AY.4, light blue is AY.3, pink is AY.12, dark blue is AY.25.
This is the cumulative % of sequences that are AY.4 in each country in North America over time (past 3 months). Visualized using the Compare Locations feature on covidcg.org
Similar plots for other Delta sublineages here:
Read 4 tweets

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