Spending a Saturday morning going through the EcoHealth x NIH emails FOIA'ed by the White Coat Waste.

Interesting email from Peter Daszak in 2016:
scribd.com/document/53702…
Essentially, the local wildlife trade was dwindling in South China (back in 2016), forcing Wuhan scientists to travel to or seek novel pathogen samples from 7 neighboring countries.
In 2016, they proposed collecting about 2,300 of these high risk pathogen host animal samples in China and SE Asia.

May we see the full data and databases resulting from these studies for which testing was partially funded by the NIH or NIAID?
Another possibly important point, all the human pathogen surveillance work had been shifted to Wuhan University for the last half of the 2014-2019 EcoHealth-WIV grant. Meaning that thousands of samples from high risk human populations would've been sent also to Wuhan.
Pages 224-225. Since it's approaching 5 years now (from 2016), according to protocol, the original data and electronic files describing high-risk human samples will begin to be permanently deleted.
Went to read @gdemaneuf’s earlier thread on the same emails and realized that most of these samples from high risk animals in SE Asia must mostly be unpublished because the latest EcoHealth-WIV batch of data only described viruses sampled up to 2015.
August 2020 EcoHealth-WIV publication:

“our study collected and analyzed samples solely from China”

“Bat oral and rectal swabs and fecal pellets were collected from 2010 to 2015 in numerous Chinese provinces”

nature.com/articles/s4146…
I find it very unlikely that the EcoHealth Alliance was acting as an undercover intelligence collecting agency. Unless somehow the sheer amount of incompetence and gaslighting we’ve witnessed is their cover.

No pathogen database. Key information, documents, and emails withheld.
These FOIA’ed communications reveal an extremely relaxed approach to ensuring accessibility to samples and data.

Let’s send all of the thousands of pathogen samples from 8 countries to Wuhan! They won’t get tested anywhere else so no one will know what was even sent to China.
For this reason, I also don’t have the view that EcoHealth was an organization bent on DURC or bioweapons. The communications suggest their trust in the WIV was complete. The level of insight and oversight could hardly be lower.

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More from @Ayjchan

8 Nov
To the scientists or journalists criticizing the pedigree of the organizations or reporters FOIA'ing communications involving the EcoHealth Alliance...
I wish I could say the scientific establishment pulled its weight in tracking the #OriginOfCovid (rather than obscuring it) but the reality turned out to be much more interesting.

This task fell to independent scientists, analysts and sleuths.
I honestly feel that at least half of my efforts looking into the #OriginOfCovid has been spent combatting the (hopefully unintentional) misinformation spread by reputable scientists and science journalists.
Read 9 tweets
7 Nov
So Wuhan scientists had collected and tested thousands of high risk animal and human samples from the wildlife trade spanning 8 countries in the years leading up to the pandemic.

They never reported finding a single SARS2-like virus in the wildlife trade.
Remember that this was pre-pandemic so there shouldn’t have been strong reasons to conceal the discovery of novel SARSrCoVs in the wildlife animals or traders sampled.
There are 2 options:

1. Despite this search, they found absolutely zero SARS2-like viruses or any SARSrCoV with a novel cleavage site across the wildlife trade, meaning that the only animals reportedly found with SARS2-like viruses (no cleavage site) are bats and pangolins.
Read 10 tweets
6 Nov
It is imperative that EcoHealth make public all detailed information relating to the thousands of high-risk animal and human samples shipped up into Wuhan from 8 different countries between 2016-2020.

Otherwise, its international partners from 7 countries should have these data.
Each of the partners in the 7 countries must have records of when Wuhan scientists visited for virus sampling and how many and what samples they sent up to Wuhan (even if they didn't test the samples for pathogens locally).
A point of reflection here.

Despite these wide-scale, international endeavors, the entirety of SARS-CoV-2-related viruses detected in the wildlife trade have, to this day, only been reported in pangolins.
Read 6 tweets
6 Nov
Some experts have been misinformed that it took years to find the intermediate host of SARS1. Actually only took 2 months once the virus was isolated to find several infected animals at a market.

It has been ~2 years since SARS2 was detected - no intermediate host to be seen.
It is not normal that in 2019, with all of our greatly advanced tech, in a city housing the world's greatest expertise for tracking SARSrCoV outbreaks, it has been so challenging to find the proximal origin or intermediate host of SARS-CoV-2.
And we know that when SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan, the local institute of virology had been actively working with at least 9 of the closest virus relatives to SARS-CoV-2 - all collected from a South China mine where 6 miners had sickened with a mysterious pneumonia, half died.
Read 10 tweets
6 Nov
I regret to inform some that the photo of Vancouver above with 6 rainbows going in all directions is doctored. This type of rainbow phenomenon can’t happen.

The city is genuinely one of the most beautiful places to live though :)
But here is a photo of a real rainbowy rare weather phenomenon… “fire rainbows” seen in Iceland.
Read 4 tweets
5 Nov
A thread from Feb this year. We cannot afford to set a dangerous precedent showing that there is no way to hold accountable labs engaged in risky research that can accidentally lead to massive loss of life or bad actors intentionally creating bioweapons.
Yes, we need to immediately overhaul existing frameworks and oversight concerning risky pathogen research.

But we also need to show that the world has the will and capabilities to investigate mysterious pandemics.

Another of my threads from Dec 2020:
"Even some scientists who favor the natural origins theory argue for a fuller investigation because they believe it would set a precedent... Forgoing the inquiry would send a dangerous signal: Accountability isn’t guaranteed."
latimes.com/world-nation/s…
Read 5 tweets

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