That recent letter from the Committee on Energy and Commerce to Collins is really worth reading

Some very interesting revelations about four highly relevant letters between NIH and EcoHealth discussing EcoHealth’s research proposal.

republicans-energycommerce.house.gov/wp-content/upl…
Letters which have not been made public (why?) but for which HHS arranged an 'in camera' review of printed copies by a bipartisan Committee, at HHS headquarters on Oct 5 and monitored by HHS staff.

See particularly pages 6 and 7:
What they show is how easily EHA argued that their research objectives did not constitute GoF, against the initial concerns of the NIH.
They got way with it on rather specious grounds.
No proper risk evaluation, instead a focus on arbitrary definitions which used and abused give an easy free pass.

(Thanks God, nuclear power stations are not managed with such casuistic principles - or we would all be long gone).
Anyway EHA was able to proceed.

Just to be safe - or to sound like it at least - NIH added that 1 log clause.
Clause which was then just ignored.

Neither EHA nor the NIH paid attention to it when despite all the windy reassurances of EHA, spike experiments with SHC014 produced more than 3 logs of comparative growth (x1000, well beyond the limit of x10).
The whole thing then degenerated into a comedy, with EHA filling with 2 years of delay that year 5 report that briefly mentioned the 3 logs experiments.

And then adding that they had tried to report it on time in 2019 but that NIH systems did not work.
Fauci has previously stated that:

"the benefits of such experiments [--] outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky."
But it may be time to remind him of what he wrote next to that statement, because it seems that it has totally forgotten about it:
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/artic…

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More from @gdemaneuf

4 Nov
People are starting to talk about the likely real death toll for Covid-19, centered around 12 mln.

Detailed estimates have been available for months.

But, by and large, the media tend to stick to the 5 mln number which is way below actual.

fb.watch/935ITt8kS-/
Why stick to the 5 mln when it is very clear that there is dramatic underreporting in many countries, especially developing ones?

Is it because people prefer to report a very wrong number that is supposedly precise, instead of fairly spread estimate that is way more correct?
Thus effectively gaining an illusory precision at the cost of a massive bias..

Or because it comes from country officials. Effectively trading critical thought for some official backing.

The role of media is to question numbers, no to go for the blatantly wrong & easy solution.
Read 6 tweets
31 Oct
Some interesting differences on the WIV portal, showing how web.archive.org can be harnessed:

Removal of many international links on the 22 Mar 2021:
web.archive.org/web/diff/20210…
'Projects' and 'Achievements' entries removed on 2 Sep 2020.
web.archive.org/web/diff/20200…
Easy to do from the 'Changes' page on web.archive.org:
web.archive.org/web/changes/ht…
Read 5 tweets
30 Oct
Let's get a few things clear about this declassified ODNI assessment (ODNI: Office of the Director of National Intelligence) :
washingtonpost.com/national-secur…
First as is written on page 2:
"This assessment is based on information through August 2021."

In other words it does NOT include any information that has come up since the summary assessment of 26th Aug 21.
dni.gov/index.php/news…
In particular it does not include the DEFUSE revelations (especially about the FCS).

Or the latest revelations that show that GoF on BatCoVs was indeed happening within the WIV.

It is based on data frozen in time - nothing new since the summary report: dni.gov/index.php/news…
Read 16 tweets
29 Oct
@BiophysicsFL @stuartjdneil @Ayjchan @TheSeeker268 @R_H_Ebright @breakfast_dogs The BSL-4 was not studying BatCoVs, this was instead done in various institutions at BSL-2 and BSL-3, so the location argument - while being essentially correct - is a bit misleading.
@BiophysicsFL @stuartjdneil @Ayjchan @TheSeeker268 @R_H_Ebright @breakfast_dogs Also the historical argument which considers a zoonosis 1000x more probable (a priori) than a lab leak is incorrect.

It’s only over the last 15 years that BatCoVs have been extensively studied, and there were 6 primary cases of LAIs including one with community outbreak.
@BiophysicsFL @stuartjdneil @Ayjchan @TheSeeker268 @R_H_Ebright @breakfast_dogs Not counting that outbreak because it was not a pandemic is based on another wrong generalisation: it’s only during the last few years that China was looking at enhanced pathogenicity of BatCoVs at scale using passaging or by building chimeras (you can date that to 2017).
Read 9 tweets
29 Oct
There is quite a bit of confusion as to what was by EHA reported and when.

So let me try to clarify this.
wsj.com/articles/coron…
Issue #1: the WIV1-SHC014 experiment.

The NIH tries to call it 'limited' and 'unexpected'.
[I won't go trough the details but it is not much unexepected as far as I can tell - it's a fully possible result that was being tested for here.]
That was part of year 5 reporting - officially submitted on the 3rd August 2021 according to the records.
Read 11 tweets
23 Oct
A very good article by Simon Wain-Hobson in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper of reference in Germany:

faz.net/aktuell/wissen…
"Nothing goes right all the time. So it is in research labs. Despite sophisticated safety installations and strict rules in virology labs accidents and leaks happen. Indeed, they are underreported."
"The virologists doing this work said it would help them predict the next pandemic virus. Armed with this insight, they claimed it would be possible to develop preventive vaccines and drugs that could be frozen and stored."

"Sadly, it’s a pipedream."
Read 7 tweets

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