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Alina Chan Profile picture
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15 Dec, 8 tweets, 4 min read
Why I lean towards a lab #OriginOfCovid

1. The bulk of circumstantial evidence points towards an accidental research-related emergence of SARS2 in Wuhan.

2. A natural origin has been investigated more thoroughly than a lab origin, yet no dispositive evidence has been found.
Personally, I struggled with whether a lab origin was more likely or not for most of 2020 and 2021.

What changed things for me was the DEFUSE EcoHealth Alliance, Wuhan Institute of Virology et al. proposal that leaked in Sep 2021.
I don't know if the US Intelligence Community had access to this research proposal when they made their August 2021 assessment on the #OriginOfCovid

If they were not aware of the DEFUSE proposal, I highly recommend re-doing the assessment.
Many of these statements from top virologists who were already worried about a genetically engineered origin of SARS2 were made before DEFUSE leaked online.

It would be worthwhile to go back to these experts and get their updated opinion:
If the EcoHealth Alliance wanted to clear their name, they could make public all communications, data and documents relating to SARS-like virus research.

But time and again, their president has had to backtrack on his declarations of conspiracy theory.
How did they come to propose inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-like viruses? Had they found a SARS-like virus with such a cleavage site?

This is knowable.
Maybe the FBI, which assessed a lab #OriginOfCovid with moderate confidence, can ask the EcoHealth Alliance to share their data, communications and documents pertaining to SARS-like virus research and cleavage site detection and insertion.

nytimes.com/2021/10/29/us/…
If you're hardcore and you want to see a 1-hour breakdown of all the key data and findings surrounding #OriginOfCovid, I was very pleased to be invited to give a talk on this topic a month ago:

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
18 Dec
An addendum to the Proximal Origin letter published in @NatureMedicine is long overdue. I still see people citing this paper with little awareness of how this letter came to be and problems with both its origin and content.
nature.com/articles/s4159…
The addendum should clearly explain and address the following 3 issues:

1. Proximal Origin was the product of a private meeting in Feb 2020 among Western leaders in research/funding. Phone call Feb 1. First draft of Proximal Origin Feb 4.

Experts who provided (redacted) feedback on the manuscript were not acknowledged in the @NatureMedicine letter. The only expert thanked for contributing to discussions is M. Farzan.

Read 26 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
18 Dec
To expand on a point in my recent @StatedClearly interview:

"Science cannot be embodied by one person or even a group of people... It’s not something where a pandemic happens and only virologists can have the answer."

A prime example is #COVIDisAirborne science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
@StatedClearly That SARS-CoV-2 spreads through the air is perhaps one of the top 3 most important facts that needed & still needs to be acknowledged to limit covid spread.

It would've saved potentially millions of lives if this simple fact had been clearly explained to the world in early 2020.
Yet, it took until August 2021, more than a year and a half post-covid for a review on this topic to be published in a prominent scientific journal.

Of the 7 authors, only 1 is a virologist. The majority are aerosol or bioengineering experts.
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Read 12 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
17 Dec
A strawman argument from natural #OriginOfCovid proponents is that scientists would've engineered a textbook cleavage site into novel SARS-like viruses in the lab.

But, if you read their research proposal, the scientists said they would engineer in rare, novel cleavage sites.
The scientists had a pipeline in early 2018 for detecting never-seen-before cleavage sites in rare SARSrCoVs & engineering these into SARSrCoVs in the lab.

There's no reason why novel cleavage sites should look like the ones in our textbooks.
The purpose of their work was to understand the biology of novel cleavage sites observed in rare SARS-like viruses they had encountered.

The purpose was not to engineer in the most textbook version of cleavage sites into their SARS-like viruses.

Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
16 Dec
Lots of buzz about the new preprint about rare furin cleavage sites in the spikes of European bat SARS-like viruses. Difficult to say much until the spike sequences obtained within this study are deposited in GenBank and released.
biorxiv.org/content/10.110… Image
It is likely that scientists on the other side of the world had encountered similar rare furin cleavage sites in the SARS-like viruses they had found, which led them to write the following in the 2018 DEFUSE proposal:
"We will also review deep sequence data for low abundant high risk SARSr-CoV that encode functional proteolytic cleavage sites, and if so, introduce these changes into the appropriate high abundant, low risk parental strain."
Read 11 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
16 Dec
Some journalists are waving the discovery of close virus relatives to SARS-CoV-2 in Laos as evidence the virus is natural.

But the lead author of that paper actually said he thinks it's possible the virus was genetically altered in a lab. h/t @gdemaneuf
www-huffingtonpost-fr.translate.goog/entry/origines… Image
And he's in great company! Several top virologists have expressed that a genetically engineered origin of SARS-CoV-2 is plausible and should be investigated.
We know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had access to bat pathogen samples in Laos, from the emails and research reports FOIA'ed and from their very own data deposited in NCBI.
Read 9 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
16 Dec
I see that the media has started to do its telephone-game thing of slowly exaggerating reality with each successive report.

I did not say that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered. I said that it is reasonable to hypothesize and investigate if it was genetically engineered.
I've even seen some media reporting that I've found evidence of a lab #OriginOfCovid

This is similar to what happened when @MichaelWorobey published his @ScienceMagazine letter, which became reported as a US scientist finding evidence of patient zero at the seafood market.
The context of my statement has not been reported. The @CommonsSTC asked its witnesses to provide a % likelihood estimate for natural vs lab #OriginOfCovid

Richard Horton went first and said he favored the @WHO view that lab origin is extremely unlikely.
Read 9 tweets

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