Thread by @alexandrosM

Holy shit, I just noticed the subtitle of this image. OK folks, we have to get to the bottom of the whole "variants emerged due to vaccine trials" claim. Has anyone chased this down, other than the original correlation GISAID images?

@EduEngineer has done fantastic work here, though it would be worth narrowing the claims in time and place further. roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/variant-roul…

And part 2 is also excellent. roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/variant-roul…

This seems to be the original source. I'm being reminded of @everybodyshook encouraging us to look at contemporaneous sources. ft.com/content/e50128…

This part of the article is fascinating because it demonstrates that the manufacturers did indeed know stopping transmission was not going to be attainable, but also that even for their less ambitious goals, they don't seem to have met the bar that they'd set for themselves.

Oh wow, chasing down the "milken institute" source from that map, I think I found the source, and it's gold... covid-19tracker.milkeninstitute.org/#home

For instance I followed the path down to the astrazeneca trial in India, and the 14 sites are right there... 🤯 ctri.nic.in/Clinicaltrials…

Anyone know how we can find the precise locations for the initial emergence/identification of the delta variant? "India" is a big place.

OK, with a bit of help from @PettetJordan, I've found a good source. Could do with better, but this is a good start. lemonde.fr/planete/articl…

And as we know from the dataset above, 8 of the 14 test sites for the AstraZeneca/CoviShield trial were in the state of Maharashtra. 2 of those specifically in or around Nagpur.

I understand skepticism of Delta emergence being linked to vaccine trials. India is 1/6th world's population. It's far more specific though. Maharashtra has just over 100m people and 8 AZ trial sites, Nagpur just over 3 million and 2 trial sites around it, and timing matches too.

Food for thought.

https://twitter.com/colepram/status/1443213309671522317?s=19

So, the paper from the study appears to be this one. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

I'm not really sure what the mechanism would be for emergence of Delta out of 24 infections in the vaccinated cohorts. If anyone knows more and can read the study above to flesh out this line of thought, it would be much appreciated.

Well, that answers *that*.

https://twitter.com/joshuaabooker/status/1443370205179219968?s=19

And some computer modeling of how that might work, to go with it. Thanks @JoomiKim1. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/artic…

So, in Bedford's video, he talks about "within host evolution during infection" and has two possible explanations for how might that have happened.
1. Partially immune people getting infected
2. Immunocompromised people getting infected

https://twitter.com/raphaels7/status/1440335507095838732?s=20

Now, where might we find partially immune, immunocompromised people, in Nagpur, sometime before October 2020?

Oh! the AZ vaccine decreased some types of white blood cells in the period after vaccination. So people in those trials were both partly immune and had part of their immune system suppressed. Ideal environment for "within host evolution during infection"? dw.com/en/covid-19-di…

Another pair of intriguing blogposts that fit thematically like a glove. anandamide.substack.com/p/directed-evo…

anandamide.substack.com/p/directed-evo…

Fascinating. August is still in the trial period, but ideally we can find the location of that first sample.

https://twitter.com/jessems/status/1444160057156022273?s=19