Thread by @MichaelWorobey

So sad to see you of all people, @RichardDawkins, being taken in by and amplifying the antiscientific misinformation and disinformation put out by @mattwridley regarding the origin of #SARSCoV2.
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https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1470475580902682626

If you'd be willing to read some of the scientific literature that would put you in a position to assess whether Matt is balanced and fair-minded, here are a 3 recommendations. (Also, I would encourage you to read Matt's tweets on the subject, and see how balanced they are.)
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Paper # is a stunning study led by Xiao Xiao and Zhaomin Zhou, with our Oxford Zoology colleagues @WildCRU_Ox. It put the lie to the Chinese delegation's assertion in the WHO-China report that no live, illegal wildlife was sold at Huanan Market.
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nature.com/articles/s4159…

This was crucial - it connected (1) the epidemiological evidence that *many* of the earliest COVID cases were people who worked at Huanan Market with (2) animals, such as raccoon dogs, which we know from SARS1 can be the conduit between bats and humans.
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There were just four places in Wuhan that illegal live wildlife including raccoon dogs was sold. One, the ground floor of the western section of Huanan Market (where almost all the Huanan COVID cases in December 2019 worked) is about 150m by 70m.
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It boggles my mind that *any* scientist could ignore, downplay or dismiss just how strongly the combination of points 1 and 2 above point to the Huanan Market as the spot where this virus first jumped to humans.
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It is a soccer field sized area, with perhaps just several hundred workers, in a city of 11 million! Run a quick Chi-squared test on finding 1/3 to 1/2 of the earliest cases among these hundreds of workers, versus the other 11 million inhabitants of the city.
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I haven't read Viral, but I would guess that these points are not adequately addressed. I do follow Matt on twitter, and I do not recall these points being properly addressed. Just the opposite.
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I also follow his co-author, @Ayjchan who has derided and rejected the notion of raccoon dogs being involved in the origin of SARS-CoV-2

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1429120160166785031

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1443277443167576072

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1443277970479661056

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"Where is the mythical accumulating evidence for a natural origin of SARS2?"

"There's a lot of people talking about raccoon dogs and frozen ferret badgers, but they got nothing - absolute zero evidence for a natural origin of SARS2 in Wuhan."
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This is "balanced and fair-minded" like Murdoch-owned Fox News is "Fair and Balanced". Very apt turn of phrase indeed!

Paper #2 is one of my own, a peer-reviewed paper that came out recently in @ScienceMagazine.
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science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

There are two main points: one is that the pattern whereby many of the earliest COVID cases in Wuhan worked at or visited the market is *not* a mirage caused by ascertainment bias.
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Others have dismissed the preponderance of early cases linked to Huanan as the product of biased case finding: maybe everyone was looking really hard for cases linked to this market and ignoring or missing unlinked cases.

Simply not true.
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This pattern was present *before* anyone could possibly have been looking for cases linked to Huanan Market.
Doctors at the hospital that worked out that this was a new viral outbreak identified patients by unusual "ground glass opacities" in CT images of the their lungs.
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They were on the lookout for *any* pneumonia patient with this tell-tale sign. Indeed, the first 3 patients discovered had no link to the market.

So *of course* they were not missing or ignoring cases unlinked to the market.
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Yet 4 of the first 7 patients they discovered, from Dec 27-29, worked at Huanan Market.

At another hospital, 7 patients were also identified as suffering from unexplained pneumonia from Dec 18-28. There, too, 4 of the 7 worked at Huanan Market.
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Notably, the link to Huanan was not known until after the patients were diagnosed.

So at these two hospitals, before it would even have been *possible* to "cherry pick" cases linked to Huanan and ignore others, more than 50% of the first known patients were linked to Huanan.
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While, all things being equal, we would expect to see 0% of cases linked to this one workplace in a city of the size of NYC, we see 33% to more than 50%.

The second main point of the paper is captured in this figure from it:
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The blue dots are home address locations of cases in December that were known *not* to be linked to Huanan Market (didn't work there, didn't visit).

But these, too, cluster around the market quite strongly.
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This is not at all what you should expect if the virus was circulating in the community and then moved to this soccer field-sized market. Rather, it speaks strongly to the likelihood that the pandemic started there then moved into the nearby, then larger, Wuhan community.
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Finally, paper #3, a much abused and misunderstood study led by Joel Wertheim and first-authored by @jepekar, on which I am also an author. This one is relevant to much of the disinformation and misinformation promulgated by Matt and many others.
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science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

We estimated the date of the very first human infection in Wuhan/Hubei (and almost certainly the world).

Within the range of plausible dates, we *never* see anything in September. October at the earliest, more likely November, centered on the second half of the month.
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Yet Matt - I gather from reviews such as the one here - gets some mileage (and I guess sales) from the internet-reared theory that the removal of a database supposedly taken offline on Sept 12 by the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a sinister act.
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newrepublic.com/article/164688…

Has Matt reckoned with the fact that our study conclusively refutes that (very damaging) idea? Does it really strike you as balanced and fair-minded to hide from readers and subscribers relevant findings published in @ScienceMagazine while promoting internet hokum?
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And what is interesting about that paper is that lab leak proponents like Matt are well aware of it, and have misused it to dismiss (incorrectly) the conclusions of my Science Perspective (Paper #2).
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It shows doctors in Wuhan did not notice the earliest cases of COVID until mid-December. And that the earliest onset case became ill on Dec 10. And that there really was a preponderance of early cases linked to the market, and even unlinked cases lived close to Huanan.
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Leak leak proponents have painted themselves into a corner by pointing to Pekar et al (paper #3) to suggest that the China is somehow hiding a plethora of earlier cases and that our paper #3 shows the pandemic was going on for months before all those Huanan cases.
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But have a close look at the paper:
The viral genomes from Wuhan shared a most recent common ancestor only in late November or early December. And the primary (very first) human case was likely infected in the second half of November.
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But here's the real kicker: we were *really* curious about how many infections likely occurred before Dec 1. So we scienced it pretty hard. The median number of people infected in Wuhan by Dec 1 was nine. Nine!
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So what we showed, to those who actually read the paper, along with paper #2, was that THERE IS NO TROVE OF EARLY CASES THAT CHINESE AUTHORITIES ARE HIDING.

Sorry to raise my voice, but it is very frustrating to have hard-won scientific findings distorted in this way.
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You will not hear any of this science from Matt, as he is neither balanced nor fair-minded on this subject. And far from being authoritative, he is some mix of ignorant and disingenuous. In a word, antiscientific.
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His cringeworthy self-promotion needs no assistance from you @RichardDawkins. For someone I know cares deeply about science, it is such a shame that you've been drawn into amplifying a voice that is so antithetical to the science on this subject.
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Great to keep an open mind, for sure. And I have strived to do so on #SARSCoV2 origins, including by proposing and signing this statement in @ScienceMagazine.
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science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

But as I'm pretty sure you have said yourself, you don't want to be so open-minded that your brain falls out.
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