Share this page!

Alina Chan Profile picture
Twitter logo
18 Dec, 5 tweets, 4 min read
Hi @richardhorton1 @TheLancet the live virus recombinant SARSrCoV work was done at BSL2 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

"they defended what they believed were rigorous administrative and supervisory systems in China's high-level biosafety settings"
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
@richardhorton1 @TheLancet If you believe performing infection experiments with live novel, recombinant SARS-like viruses at BSL2 equates to rigorous, high-level biosafety settings, please see this lab leak of SARS2 from a BSL3, infecting a fully vaccinated worker in her 20s. taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4372853
"Were those who believed that evidence was growing in favour of a lab leak now winning the argument? Was this really the end of the story? Of course not."

Agreed. @richardhorton1 Join efforts to call for a credible international investigation into #OriginOfCovid
@richardhorton1 One of the first steps should be to compel the US-based EcoHealth Alliance to release all documents, data, and communications relating to SARS-like virus work and anything regarding the detection and/or engineering of cleavage sites into viruses.
@richardhorton1 We're clearly going to need a lot of external help with this, since @richardhorton1 you told us at the @CommonsSTC meeting that it took more than a year to convince Peter Daszak to declare that he actually had conflicts of interest wrt #OriginOfCovid

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Alina Chan

Alina Chan Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
19 Dec
Many scientists have known for a long time that the logic in Proximal Origin is fundamentally flawed.

David Relman published a counter response in PNAS in Nov 2020.

How one genetically engineers a virus depends on what sequences are in their toolkit.
pnas.org/content/117/47…
Yet 4 of the 5 Proximal Origin authors continue to push this flawed logic in their recent @CellCellPress review on #OriginOfCovid

"There is no logical reason why an engineered virus would utilize such a suboptimal furin cleavage site"

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34480864/
In short, these scientists speculated that what we see in SARS-CoV-2 is not how a scientist would logically engineer a novel S1/S2 FCS into a SARSr-CoV and they contended that there is no evidence of research at the WIV that artificially inserted complete FCSs into coronaviruses.
Read 9 tweets
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 30 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…
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

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @Ayjchan has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @Ayjchan!

Read all threads by @Ayjchan

:(