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Alina Chan Profile picture
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11 Dec, 6 tweets, 3 min read
Half of the earnings from our #OriginOfCovid book are going to charity.

If you want to help us make VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 a bestseller, please consider buying it within the next 24 hours.

Thank you!

Amazon: amzn.to/3m85kDl
You can find independent local bookstores that sell our book here:

US
harpercollins.com/products/viral…

UK
harpercollins.co.uk/products/viral…
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
@mattwridley If the book does become a bestseller, it will increase its exposure internationally. More people will read about why it is plausible that SARS-CoV-2 emerged due to research activities, and hopefully join in efforts to push for more transparent and safe pathogen research.
@mattwridley We anticipated that our book would not make some govs, scientists & journalists happy. We saw a fierce pushback in the media even before the book was released on Nov 16. Some popular media told us that they're fearful of being associated with the lab #OriginOfCovid controversy.
However, I am optimistic that the #OriginOfCovid will ultimately be found. Maybe it will be in the next few years or maybe only after a few decades. There's too much out there for the origin to stay hidden forever.

And I believe that our book will stand the test of time.

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
13 Dec
Scientists cannot accurately predict whether recombinant viruses created in the lab will be more transmissible or deadly compared to the parent (natural) virus.

The documents that drove this point home for me were FOIA'ed by @theintercept and only released in Sep/Oct 2021.
@theintercept I had read the 2015 publication where a novel SARS-like spike was inserted into 🐁-adapted SARS1.

The authors said there was a "gain in pathogenesis" if you compared different studies. But if you looked at their study (fig 1), there's no observable GOF.

nature.com/articles/nm.39…
In a 2017 study where chimeric SARS-like viruses were created, there was also no observable GOF when the viruses were used to infect human cells (fig 7 and 8).

journals.plos.org/plospathogens/…
Read 10 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
13 Dec
“If the lab worker is confirmed to have been infected at her workplace, then this will add credibility to the lab leak theory” - Yanzhong Huang, a Chinese public health expert at the Washington-based think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations.
taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4374287
Taiwan continues to do an outstanding job identifying ways in which SARS-CoV-2 could've infected a scientist at one of their BSL3 labs and went undetected for weeks.

taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4374289
Important to note that *if* SARS-CoV-2 had been experimented with in a lab before it emerged in Wuhan in 2019, it would not have been as easy to detect lab-acquired infections or community spread.

The scientists would've also been very surprised to see that a virus had escaped.
Read 12 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
12 Dec
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.

#OriginOfCovid
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…
Read 11 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
11 Dec
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.
Read 6 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
11 Dec
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.

Read 4 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
11 Dec
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…
Read 5 tweets

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