A review of VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 by a scientist or journalist who has placed all their bets on a natural #OriginOfCovid:

"I have not read the book, but I already know it is antiscientific & hateful. How dare they not discuss my favorite niche hypothesis!"
"How could prominent scientists dare to enjoy VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 by Alina Chan and @mattwridley! All of my friends who could lose their careers and reputations if Covid came from a lab told me that this book sux!!"

amzn.to/3m85kDl
"Surely Alina Chan and @mattwridley must be stretching the facts if their book insists that both natural and lab #OriginOfCovid hypotheses remain plausible and deserve full investigation. My scientist friends who said a lab leak was a conspiracy theory can't be wrong."
@mattwridley From virologists who tore through VIRAL: The Search for the Origin Of Covid-19 but could not find a single error...

"People who read this god awful book will see so much evidence pointing at a lab #OriginOfCovid There must be something wrong in the book but I can't find it."
Even better one:

"There are so many errors in this book that I cannot even identify a single important one to tweet about right now. I'm busy writing up a long analytical piece about it. Promise I'm not making excuses! I'll post it soon through the proper channels."

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More from @Ayjchan

15 Dec
Watch the UK Science and Technology Committee live sessions on reproducibility and research integrity:
parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/7a…
At the moment, Dr Jessica Butler, University of Aberdeen and Dr Ben Goldacre, University of Oxford are discussing ways to update our 150-year-old scientific publishing system.
Butler says scientists are entirely judged by the number of publications in a small number of prominent journals. Your funding maps to your publications in top journals. So scientists are incentivized to please these top journals/editors. This may not lead to the best science.
Read 6 tweets
14 Dec
10 points on #OriginOfCovid

Both natural & lab origins plausible, say US intelligence and scientists. Top virologists say genetic engineered origin is reasonable. 1/10
Existing genetic and epidemiological data are consistent with a superspreader event at Huanan Seafood Market but no direct evidence of an original animal source. Typical evidence of SARS-like viruses circulating in Wuhan animal trade community not found. 2/10
Totality of SARS2-like viruses in animal trade across China and SE Asia = only 3 pangolin viruses. No bats or pangolins sold in Wuhan markets. China tested 80,000 animal samples, no sign of SARS2. 3/10
Read 11 tweets
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 21 tweets
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
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
11 Dec
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
Read 6 tweets

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