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Alina Chan Profile picture
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17 Oct, 13 tweets, 7 min read
Actually, I would use that 99 million dollars to FOIA the **** out of communications among scientists and journal editors outside of China.
Almost every major finding relating to the #OriginOfCovid has come from FOIA'ed or leaked documents, or extremely delayed scientific journal publications or data hidden in the scientific literature and online databases.
We've got the Mojiang mine medical thesis and China CDC director thesis pulled out of a Chinese thesis database by @TheSeeker268
More theses pulled out from WIV by an anonymous source, @TheSeeker268 and @franciscodeasis revealing the history of work done with the 9 closest relatives to SARS2 when it emerged - all at the WIV.
The DEFUSE DARPA EcoHealth x WIV x UNC x Duke-NUS etc. proposal leaked to Drastic showing that WIV was part of an international collaboration with a roadmap in early 2018 for inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-like viruses.
theintercept.com/2021/09/23/cor…
NIH reports from EcoHealth (although missing report for 2019 + 2018 report filed in 2020) FOIA'ed by @theintercept showing WIV/Wuhan scientists were performing gain-of-function research where chimeric virus had ~10,000 higher load in humanized mouse lungs.
theintercept.com/2021/09/09/cov…
@theintercept Emails FOIA'ed by @BuzzFeed showing top experts suspected lab-engineered #OriginOfCovid
documentcloud.org/documents/2079…
@theintercept @BuzzFeed ... and that the influential Proximal Origin article that shut down discussion of a lab #OriginOfCovid was the outcome of that 1 Feb 2020 conversation for which emails are mostly redacted.
@theintercept @BuzzFeed Even the data which would've helped to illuminate a natural #OriginOfCovid was held up inside scientific journals and actually at the WHO, forgotten in a drawer or something, until June of this year. nature.com/articles/s4159…
The 2020/2021 historical precedents tell us that information pertinent to the #OriginOfCovid is outside of China and waiting to be made public.
Gotta say blaming SE Asia is a nice move because there are 11 countries in SE Asia so none of them are directly targeted when a top scientist says they want to spend $99 million investigating the #OriginOfCovid in SE Asia.
As someone who grew up in SE Asia, I find it repellent that the entire region has to take responsibility for a pandemic that started in CENTRAL China.
Honestly, someone please explain the frozen pangolin hypothesis that would lead to SARS2 emerging in SE Asia but starting an outbreak nowhere else except in the exact city where -the- lab collecting SARS-like viruses is based. (And not because SARS-like viruses are found there.)

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
18 Oct
"To chair the task force Sachs initially chose zoologist Peter Daszak, one of the world’s most experienced researchers of bat coronaviruses."

Enough said.
science.org/content/articl…
"The other 11 people on the task force refused to remove Daszak from their ranks, but agreed to make Keusch their chair instead."

Yep. Disband them.
"On 10 September, [Sachs] learned details of an NIH grant to EcoHealth.. following FOIA requests from @theintercept. Keusch and three other task force members are listed as co-investigators. “None of them reported this involvement with the EcoHealth Alliance.."
Read 9 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
18 Oct
Not sure whether to be surprised or not that SAGO is already following in the footsteps of the first China-WHO joint #OriginOfCovid study.

See our letter from the Paris Group published in the @WSJ this March describing limitations of the joint study:
wsj.com/articles/who-i…
@WSJ Team selection process did not adequately screen for reasonably perceived conflicts of interest.

Skills represented are predominantly focused on zoonosis. Can this team properly investigate a lab leak?

Team does not have access to records/data.
s.wsj.net/public/resourc…
@WSJ "At least one international team member had expressed a strong conviction towards the pure zoonosis hypothesis before joining the investigation - when hardly any data about the SARS-CoV-2 virus were available - and was dismissive of the lab-related origins."
Read 8 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
17 Oct
Starting ~27:30min mark, UK chief scientific advisor Patrick Vallance discusses the 1 Feb 2020 phone call with his US counterpart and leading experts, which he says produced the Proximal Origin @NatureMedicine correspondence by Andersen et al.
bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0…
He describes his role at this meeting as a bystander and says that’s why none of the emails can be shared- because they’re not his emails.

So the public cannot see the emails informing both US and UK scientific heads as well as the most influential #OriginOfCovid publication.
I also want to know that those emails are indeed as boring as some scientists have asserted. Let’s see them and we can all re-focus our energies on more productive venues of investigation. But for now, it looks like the scientists at that meeting don’t intend to be transparent.
Read 15 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
16 Oct
I have to say that if Chinese scientists have been hiding evidence of a natural spillover #OriginOfCovid for months and months instead of immediately sharing such evidence to rule out a lab origin, I’m going to be quite irate.
ici.radio-canada.ca/recit-numeriqu…
“This lack of evidence is disturbing, especially in comparison with past pandemics. In the case of MERS, the intermediate host, the dromedary, was identified nine months after the onset of the pandemic.

Daniel Lucey: “As soon as we started looking, we found”.”
“In the case of the first SARS, finding this intermediate host was even faster: “In March 2003, we had confirmation that we were dealing with a coronavirus. And in May, we had already found many animal species carrying similar viruses in the markets of Guangdong”
Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
14 Oct
"a flawed argument for the lab leak idea can’t be taken as evidence against it"

I have the same stance for both natural & lab origins. No matter how many ridiculous arguments are made for either hypothesis, they are plausible & worthy of investigation.
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Thank you @fayeflam for pointing out "the fact that the bats harboring the most closely related virus to SARS-CoV-2 live far from Wuhan, where the pandemic was first identified. And the Wuhan Institute of Virology houses the world’s biggest collection of bat coronaviruses."
"The Wuhan Institute of Virology hasn’t done enough to show it’s been operating safely, and that’s a reasonable argument in favor of continued probing into the possible lab origin of the virus. It’s important to keep the focus on that, and not on the uninformed speculation"
Read 4 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
9 Oct
"The difference between the early days of HIV science and today is the vertiginous firepower virologists now have due to phenomenal advances.. Genomes can be synthesized.. Virologists like me have been doing this since the 1980s with ever increasing ease."
dailymail.co.uk/debate/article…
"EcoHealth proposed surgically precise modifications that would push these viral chimeras even further down the road towards what must bluntly be called a coronavirus admirably suited to infecting humans.

And we can all agree that SARS-CoV-2 is a macabre success story."
"What we do not know – and badly need to know – is whether this proposal was submitted elsewhere, financed and performed.

Bear in mind the proposal was written in 2018, 18 months before the outbreak in Wuhan."
Read 5 tweets

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