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Alina Chan Profile picture
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8 Nov, 9 tweets, 5 min read
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.
In one case, a journalist at the @washingtonpost completely gave up on making a connection between Wuhan and SARS-like viruses and made this bizarre statement in his piece that people in Wuhan are doing things with bats.
@washingtonpost Here is the offending piece that I haven't seen any top experts try to correct.

"... this ignores the history of the area and what Wuhan does with bats, which isn’t exactly comparable to Austin"

What do you imagine Wuhan is doing with bats? @AaronBlake
washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…
Contrast this to words from the world's no. 1 expert on novel SARSr-CoVs.

“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” scientificamerican.com/article/how-ch…
"Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir."
"If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”"
Every time I see top experts spreading misinformation about the #OriginOfCovid it does feel like a "dagger in the heart" as virologist Bob Garry puts it.

It's so awkward watching top experts trying to hawk a #MultiMarket or #PopsicleOrigins hypothesis...
nature.com/articles/d4158…

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
8 Nov
From the mother of the imprisoned citizen journalist, Zhang Zhan who reported on Wuhan in early 2020: “She will be in huge danger if they don’t release her on medical parole. I cried for several hours straight after I got out [from the call].” washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
“Authorities were force-feeding [Zhang] through a feeding tube and restraining her hands 24 hours a day.”

“Citizen journalists Chen Qiushi and Wuhan resident Fang Bin who, like Zhang, reported on the disease from Wuhan early last year, have been missing”

cbsnews.com/news/china-cov…
Because when a country has done the most impressive job of responding to and containing an outbreak, citizen journalists and people archiving the news must be imprisoned and subjected to inhumane treatment.
Read 7 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
8 Nov
Would it be accurate to say that when a new SARSrCoV with roots in S China/SE Asia with a new FCS emerged in Wuhan, EcoHealth knew 1000s samples had been sent over years frm S China/SE Asia to Wuhan scientists who had planned to detect new FCSs for engineering into new SARSrCoVs?
And the organization decided not to say anything about this knowledge until their emails and documents were either leaked or successfully FOIA’ed from recipients almost 2 years post-outbreak?
Based on this knowledge, it’s more than reasonable to think SARS2 might’ve leaked from a lab.

But EcoHealth president & friends insisted on calling lab leak a conspiracy theory.

Doesn’t that mean you think that you + your research collaborators are all pandemic conspirators?
Read 6 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
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 11 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
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
Alina Chan Profile picture
6 Nov
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?
Read 10 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
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

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