Important perspective by @michaelzlin on the new Merck pill that works by mutagenizing SARS-CoV-2:

"The FDA and Merck have essentially engaged the public in a gamble.. They are betting.. there won’t be even one case of a lucky hit that creates a more capable or evasive virus."
@michaelzlin His free-to-read thread providing more detail is here:
I have not heard a single scientist friend or colleague say they have good feelings about this Merck pill.

I also worry that it will be given to people for whom there may be adverse effects, e.g., women who don't know they're pregnant, couples who are conceiving.
The Merck treatment consists of a 5-day, 40-pill course. If patients don't finish the course, they risk passing SARS2 mutants to others.

This gives me a headache seeing how people already abuse antibiotics even in the face of the known threat of mounting antibiotic resistance.
The Merck pill study results are also inconsistent:
"In the first group, participants’ rate of hospitalization or death dropped by half if they took molnupiravir rather than a placebo. But in the second group, there was almost no difference in outcome.."
nature.com/articles/d4158…
Seeing as how we still have antibody treatments and the Pfizer pill which works much better (89% prevention of hospitalization) & through a different mechanism, is there a need to gamble with the Merck pill?

Maybe only if hospitals are overwhelmed and out of better options.

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More from @Ayjchan

27 Dec
Omicron (orange line; BA.1) dominating in every continent.

Visualized on the homepage of covidcg.org @CovidCg Image
@CovidCg New % of sequences shared by each country each week that are Omicron.

Visualized using the Compare Locations feature on covidcg.org Image
@CovidCg For US states, new % of sequences shared by each state each week that are Omicron.

Visualized using the Compare Locations feature on covidcg.org Image
Read 4 tweets
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
18 Dec
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
Read 5 tweets
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
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
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

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