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Alina Chan Profile picture
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8 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Stories of Covid-19 whistleblower doctors, journalists & scientists - disappeared, imprisoned, penalized, maltreated, slandered as rumormongers - doesn't inspire confidence that the world will get a timely alert the next time a mysterious outbreak appears.
cnn.com/interactive/20…
These reports are old, but the problem persists.

How can global pandemic response be rapid if there are countries where alerting your hospital colleagues to a novel outbreak and telling them to wear protective equipment results in punishment?
theguardian.com/world/2020/mar…
I don't think it is a misstatement to say doctors were being brutally silenced when they blew the whistle on the earliest Covid-19 cases. Several lost their lives in this process after being forced to sign confessions and returning to fight the outbreak.
Jinyintan Hospital director: on 27 Dec 2019 the sequence of the virus had been shared with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

"我们把基因序列拿了过来，找到中科院武汉病毒研究所，当天晚上病毒所就比对出来了。当时是27号晚上大概10点多。"

archive.is/JccJU h/t @franciscodeasis

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
11 Jan
Peter Daszak asked for US-funded virus data to be withheld, FOIAed by @USRightToKnow

"It's extremely important that we don't have these sequences as part of our PREDICT release.. Having them as part of PREDICT will being very unwelcome attention"
usrtk.org/wp-content/upl… Image
@USRightToKnow Only way to know if some of these virus sequences are completely new and still not public is for NCBI database or PREDICT to release the data.
@USRightToKnow The FOIA process is so protracted that we're only seeing April 2020 emails in Jan 2022. And there are many, many more FOIAs and appeals against redactions still ongoing for emails from 2020.

See the longer list of FOIAs by the @USRightToKnow here:
usrtk.org/biohazards-blo…
Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
6 Jan
The balance of evidence for a natural vs lab #OriginOfCovid is different from that of Omicron.

In the case of Omicron, many known plausible natural sources of the novel variant.

In the case of the original SARS-CoV-2, only postulated natural sources, no direct evidence found.
The case for a wet market #OriginOfCovid remains dimly lit. Lack of access to data describing what potential intermediate hosts were even sold at Huanan market in late 2019. Lack of access to early case data and exposures to potential sources of the virus.
Sorry to disappoint some natural origin diehards, but not all people who think a lab #OriginOfCovid is plausible are going to think Omicron likely came from a lab.

You have to evaluate the evidence and circumstances specific to each emergence.
Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
4 Jan
I'm aware of the @newrepublic review of our book VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. I don't have much to say about it because it isn't a review of VIRAL. It was an opinion on #OriginOfCovid dressed up as a book review.

See article by @thackerpd
disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/get-the-hell…
In order to formulate a response in defense of the book, there must be facts-based criticisms of the book's content, which do not exist in the @newrepublic review.

So how should I respond to a negative review that goes after the same old strawmen not represented in the book?
@newrepublic One scientific scenario I can compare this to is when you get a peer reviewer who clearly has a vendetta against a particular hypothesis. Instead of critiquing the data in the paper, goes after old arguments by other scientists, recommending rejection of the manuscript at hand.
Read 4 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
30 Dec 21
Would also be useful to color the states to indicate average age of population and BMI @nytimes

Also, deaths are counted since Apr 2021 but vaccination rate is as of Dec 2021, so would be useful to shift timeframe a few months later since some states were slower to vaccinate.
@nytimes To be clear, the Covid-19 vaccines approved in the US have protective effect against severe outcomes (although still awaiting Omicron data).

As a low risk category person, I was only fully vaccinated by June 2021 (2 shots Moderna + 2 weeks after 2nd shot).
Overlaying average age and BMI (e.g., age = size of dot; BMI = color of dot), and shifting the date range later to when most people got their vaccines, would help to show the effects of the vaccines vs other factors that contribute to Covid-19 deaths.
Read 4 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
30 Dec 21
One common #OriginOfCovid misunderstanding is that early Covid-19 cases were linked to market stalls selling wildlife.

There's actually no data to support the claim, and the data provided by the China-@WHO joint study, whether you trust it or not, contradicts the claim.
@WHO Although some cite the China-WHO joint study report in support of the claim above, the report actually contradicts their interpretation:

Page 45: "no clear clustering with one specific part of the market was apparent as cases were widely distributed"
who.int/publications/i…
It's also important to note that even though "most cases were associated with the western side of the market", we're talking about a market the size of more than 9 NFL football fields combined.

You're saying most cases were in 4.5 football fields.
Read 18 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
29 Dec 21
What we know from recent papers + data deposited into NCBI by the Wuhan Institute of Virology / EcoHealth Alliance just before the pandemic is that by 2016 they were actively sampling bat viruses in Yunnan and North Laos, where the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 have been found.
There are 2 things we don't know.

1. What other viruses and locations were sampled between 2016-start of pandemic. Their collaborators across 7 SE Asia countries, including Laos, wouldn't tell @theintercept @fastlerner

theintercept.com/2021/12/28/cov…
Although much of this work was funded by US sources such as USAID (PREDICT) and NIH/NIAID.

EcoHealth even told NIH in 2016 that they were going to transfer pathogen samples from the wildlife trade directly from 7 SE Asia countries to Wuhan.
Read 20 tweets

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