Thread by @Ayjchan

Just listened to @joerogan convo with @mtosterholm
Dr Osterholm's expertise in epidemiology shines. I also appreciated how he handled #OriginOfCovid questions like a scientist - being honest when he doesn't know or is relying on the judgment of his peers.
open.spotify.com/episode/5VSukF…

@joerogan @mtosterholm Many of the problems scientists have gotten into during the pandemic have involved trying to send overly simplistic or confident messages to the public when there is still too much unknown or when data has yet to be collected.

The public needs to get used to hearing scientists say that they don't know (yet), or that particular topics are outside of their expertise, or that they have not had time to look into specific issues even if it is within their wheelhouse.

Getting to what @mtosterholm & @joerogan were discussing on #OriginOfCovid, I agree with their points that there isn't any evidence to say whether the origin is natural or research, & that transparency from the Chinese government would've gone a long way to solving this mystery.

@mtosterholm @joerogan The parts I would push back on...

(1) The often cited argument that there has been no (direct) evidence of a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 / Covid-19.

True, however, experts also mostly forget to mention that there has also been no evidence of a market spillover origin of the virus.

(2) It is unsurprising SARS-CoV-2 would emerge naturally in Wuhan, Central China.

This is countered by a decade's worth of research & data on SARS-like viruses. The top experts in this field never thought to look in Wuhan for SARS-like viruses poised to cause a human outbreak.

(3) SARS-CoV-2 spreads very well across numerous mammalian species. So it is unsurprising that it would infect humans through the wildlife trade.

The problem now is that despite multi-year searches across Wuhan, China & SE Asia, no one has reported finding a precursor to SARS2..

.. the only SARS2-like viruses reported so far have predominantly been found in bats more than 1000km from Wuhan (they do not migrate that far) + 3 distant pangolin coronaviruses.

We also know from a 2017 to Nov 2019 study that no bats or pangolins were found in Wuhan markets.

So it is more surprising to me that a virus this stealthy and transmissible across species has managed to cause a pandemic without leaving any detectable trace of its origin, despite occurring in the city with the world's top SARSrCoV experts.

The convo also gets into questions about deleted early SARS-CoV-2 sequences, the missing WIV database, possible early Covid-19 cases at the Wuhan institute + Feb 1 emails discussing lab #OriginOfCovid but @mtosterholm rightly did not comment because he had not looked into these.

If you're interested in a deeper dive on the circumstantial evidence for both natural and lab #OriginOfCovid @mtosterholm and @joerogan I'd be happy to send a copy of VIRAL to you.
harpercollins.com/products/viral…

If you'd like a faster (~1h) and more technical overview, I was also very pleased to have been invited to give a CHIP Landmark Ideas series talk last November on this topic.

Although I am not an old school virologist, I have sufficient expertise + knowledge on this topic to be able to hold my ground and debate virologists on #OriginOfCovid on equal footing. Please see this @AAAS @ScienceMagazine debate that I participated in.
twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Lastly, the story about the EcoHealth+WIV+collab's pipeline for inserting novel cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses was very under-reported, so I recommend reading what virologists said about that research plausibly leading to the creation of SARS2. theintercept.com/2021/09/23/cor…

“The work describes generating full-length bat SARS-related coronaviruses that are thought to pose a risk of human spillover. And that’s the type of work that people could plausibly postulate could have led to a lab-associated origin of SARS-CoV-2” - Jesse Bloom, Fred Hutchinson

“Whether that particular study did or didn’t [lead to the pandemic], it certainly could have. Once you make an unnatural virus, you’re basically setting it up in an unstable evolutionary place... So who knows what will come of it” - Jack Nunberg, Montana Biotechnology Center