Thread by @Ayjchan

I think it's in poor form for @ScienceAdvances to have published this latest piece by EcoHealth/Daszak et al. without asking them to elaborate on how exactly they will work on improving the safety + transparency of virus discovery work.
h/t @TheSeeker268
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

@ScienceAdvances @TheSeeker268 "... for viral discovery, we chose to use the proposed budget of the Global Virome Project, a decade-long project that seeks to identify 70% of the unknown potentially zoonotic viruses in wildlife globally. It has an estimated budget of $120 million to $340 million per year."

@ScienceAdvances @TheSeeker268 I'd really like to know if any of the peer reviewers challenged this claim in the paper:

"Humanity needs a global viral discovery project if we are to prevent future pandemics."

How did all the virus discovery work in the past decade help to prevent pandemics?

"In relation to primary prevention, this library would help target where activities should be focused geographically."

But SARS2 popped up in Central China, not South China or SE Asia where the scientists thought there was a risk of SARSrCoV spillover after all their research.

"Identifying rare and potentially more virulent viruses will require more extensive sampling of host populations"

Do any of these scientists understand that this current pandemic might've emerged exactly because of this type of research?

This is the only line in the entire paper that expresses some awareness of the enormous mistake made in past virus hunting work:

"As with the genomes of newly found viruses, the information obtained must be made nonproprietary and available to scientists from all nations"

Me: the mission was to collect all the viruses in the wild and use it to help prevent pandemics.. this is a pandemic. So why didn't they share that database with other scientists so they could figure out how dangerous this virus, where did it come from?
transcripts.cnn.com/show/csr/date/…

GUPTA: What is the status of that database now? Have you been able now then as a member of this WHO team or in any capacity to look at that data?

DASZAK: No.

GUPTA: That sounds concerning, Peter, if it is as serious and we're trying to be as thorough as possible...

Their strategy seems to be asking for even more money without demonstrating any benefits, without acknowledging the glaring problems in their plan, and without demonstrating accountability for past behavior.

Some people, including scientists surprisingly, see peer-reviewed articles as guaranteed high quality scientific content.

If you've been in research for some years, you understand that peer review can only go so far. Many papers like the one above make it through peer review.

Problem is that then scientists and journalists feel more confident about citing the peer-reviewed article above as justification for more money for virus hunting.

There's even going to be a book by Jane Qiu about The Virus Hunters next year.
books.google.com/books/about/Th…

Even if you think this pandemic that has killed millions only had a 1% chance of starting due to virus hunting work, @ScienceAdvances should at least solicit a paper describing the risks of research-related outbreaks and steps to make virus discovery more transparent and safe.

@ScienceAdvances I'm interested to see if any natural origin proponents raise issues with this paper and call for safer and more transparent virus hunting + manipulation in laboratories around the world.

If they consider a lab #OriginOfCovid possible, they should advocate for safer virus work.

@ScienceAdvances Some prominent natural #OriginOfCovid proponents already said in 2018 that virus hunting is "of little practical value when it comes to understanding and mitigating the emergence of disease."

But they didn't write about the risks of virus hunting.

nature.com/articles/d4158…

Now that we know virus hunting is of little practical value for predicting & preventing outbreaks, AND could also lead to catastrophic outbreaks, shouldn't there be more peer-reviewed articles evaluating the risks vs benefits and proposing new rules + oversight structures?