The world can investigate and find strong evidence for the #OriginOfCovid even if China is not being cooperative.
There is a huge amount of information, communications, and documentation outside of China that describes the type of SARSrCoV research that was happening in Wuhan.
There were literally US doctors in Wuhan in late 2019 who were among the first to hear about the novel outbreak of respiratory disease, and for some reason there has not been a public systematic interview of them.
Many significant findings pointing to a likely lab #OriginOfCovid were only revealed in September/October of this year after documents were leaked or successfully FOIA'ed.
None of the above required the cooperation of the Chinese gov.
Instead, they point to a vast trove of communications & documents sitting outside of China, even in the US, that can help us better understand whether SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan due to research activities.
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On whether the unique furin cleavage site, which makes SARS-CoV-2 the pandemic pathogen that it is, was genetically engineered, please see the comments of unassailable virologists.
No sensible scientist is saying that the furin cleavage site could not possibly have evolved naturally in SARS-CoV-2.
We're saying that it is also reasonable to hypothesize that scientists might've inserted it in a lab. They had a pipeline for this as early as March 2018.
For a deeper dive into why it's so challenging to know whether the furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 arose naturally, please see our peer-reviewed manuscript at @MolBioEvol academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-ar…
Whether or not the book is a bestseller, I feel that we have achieved what we set out to do. Share with the world key #OriginOfCovid findings, evidence & stories to galvanize worldwide calls for a credible investigation of both natural and lab origin hypotheses. @mattwridley
I became infamous for writing that SARS-CoV-2 might have adapted for human infection and transmission in a lab, alongside other plausible natural scenarios.
But top experts had also been saying the same thing, just without pointing out that the virus might've come from a lab.
I was actually annoyed when @antonioregalado pointed this out to me earlier this year. That even the Proximal Origin authors had discussed how was it that SARS-CoV-2 had (pre-)adapted for humans.
@antonioregalado Some ask, why are we seeing new variants if SARS2 was well adapted for humans in Dec 2019?
Because viruses don't stop evolving. If we had run the well adapted SARS1 through 300 million people across every race and health condition, we would've also been overrun with variants.
When did @mattyglesias "bully the media into entertaining the lab leak hypothesis"?
Liberal journalists, can you please remind your peers that the media should address a lab #OriginOfCovid because it is considered plausible by prominent virologists + US intelligence community?
@mattyglesias Has the word "bully" changed to mean something else this month?
Have any journalists been bullied into entertaining the lab leak hypothesis?
@mattyglesias From the office of the Director of National Intelligence.
"All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident." dni.gov/files/ODNI/doc…
Scientists & journalists, join me in calling for transparency.
Ask @EcoHealthNYC to release all data, records, documents & communications relating to the transfer of 1000s of pathogen samples from SE Asian countries, including Laos, to Wuhan.
Ask them to show us the exchanges leading up to their early 2018 DEFUSE proposal where they laid out a road map for inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-like viruses.
"A female researcher was bitten by a lab mouse while running experiments on COVID before testing positive for the virus" taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4371212