An unexpected & welcome piece by @KelseyTuoc@voxdotcom on media failures in 2020:
"But lab origins weren’t a conspiracy theory — they were a credible scientific hypothesis, at a moment when we knew very little, for how Covid-19 could have originated" vox.com/future-perfect…
Disturbingly, 2+ years into the pandemic, some top journalists at influential media outlets have yet to learn lessons and hone their craft for reporting on developing Covid-19 stories. archive.ph/SmvK5
It would be so refreshing if some scientists would just apologize for suppressing the lab #OriginOfCovid hypothesis for non-scientific reasons. Instead we're getting treated to Proximal Origin 2.0 preprints about "dispositive evidence" of a natural origin. vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/t…
Both the 2020 Proximal Origin paper and the new 2022 preprints were immediately circulated inside the US government and publicly by influential figures as "evidence" of a natural #OriginOfCovid - trying to shut the door on lab origin hypotheses prior to a real investigation.
If the leaders & others circulating these manuscripts from the Proximal Origin authors and friends to "close the case" on #OriginOfCovid *still* don't understand their role in propagating biased and likely conflicted "research", they might be incredibly naive and malleable.
Please, just 3 simple steps to understand if the study you're circulating is robust and actually data-driven.
Journalists can and should ask these questions of the scientists they're quoting:
Does the data exist? How was it collected? Are there potential biases?
Is the data reproducible or accessible?
Who provided/collected this data? Are they conflicted?
Do science journalism fellows and students receive instruction in how to determine whether the science/research they're reporting is well substantiated? Do they also get taught how to handle conflicts of interest?
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After Ian Lipkin sent this email to a co-author on Proximal Origin, their manuscript was posted on Virological 5 days later - arguing against an adaptation through culture #OriginOfCovid scenario.
We now know the Wuhan Institute of Virology had access to SARS2-like viruses (+ we don't know what 180 unique SARS-like viruses they had found by 2018). They also had the intent to engineer novel cleavage sites into SARSrCoVs.
The Proximal Origin authors wrote: "Identifying the immediate non-human animal source and obtaining virus sequences from it would be the most definitive way of revealing virus origins."
Well, it's now 2 years later and no original animal source or SARS2 variant has been found.
The Proximal Origin authors need to make up their minds about the adaptation of SARS2 to humans.
2020 Proximal Origin paper says virus is pre-adapted/optimized to human.
2021 Critical Review says this has no validity.
2022 Pekar preprint says pre-adaptation to human is likely.
You're changing your mind each year about whether to champion or condemn the pre-adaptation of the pandemic virus to humans so as to fit your current favorite hypothesis.
In Proximal Origin, you wrote "the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2" and wondered whether the adaptation had happened in animals (pre-adaptation) or human.
Very detailed piece by @KelseyTuoc@voxdotcom on the rising risk of lab-based outbreaks and why pandemic prevention research can inadvertently cause pandemics or be harnessed by bioterrorists. vox.com/22937531/virus…
@KelseyTuoc@voxdotcom “Advances in synthetic biology and biotechnology make it easier than ever before to make pathogens more lethal and transmissible... which increases the risk of deliberate or accidental releases of dangerous pathogens,” Lieberman told the bipartisan Commission on Biodefense.
The same workflow of serial passaging natural viruses through cells or animals of various species, then popping in novel features that could enhance the infectiousness and deadliness of that virus, can be proposed as a pandemic prevention research project or a bioweapons project.
@TheLancet@emilyakopp It is sorrowful to see FOIAs reveal virologist after virologist privately debating a lab #OriginOfCovid while publicly condemning any suggestion of an unnatural origin as a conspiracy theory.
Why can't we admit that even the most talented & charming scientists can make mistakes?
@TheLancet@emilyakopp This is where one esteemed infectious diseases expert (also recently passed away) says, in an email, that being a brilliant and charming scientist does not rule out the possibility of an accidental infection in the lab.
"If the Chinese scientists wanted to delete their sequences from the database, which NIH policy entitled them to do, it was unethical.. to analyze them further" -Kristian Andersen
K. Andersen "was a screener at the preprint server, which gave him access to papers that weren’t yet public. He then offered to either entirely delete the preprint or revise it “in a way that would leave no record that this had been done.”"
Starting to sound like a mafia movie.
Is threatening other scientists to delete or revise their preprints considered appropriate behavior for a @biorxivpreprint screener? @cshperspectives
I don't understand why some scientists insist that the 2 earliest lineages of SARS2 - only 2 mutations difference - had to have come from 2 separate spillovers from animals.
We've seen how easy it is for the virus to pick up mutations while transmitting among people.
The scientific reporting has gotten as bad as @NPR reporting that "these variants, one of which went on to spread all around the world, couldn't have actually evolved in people." npr.org/2022/02/28/108…
How do these scientists and journalists think today's numerous variants with dozens of mutations evolved?
Did each variant require a separate natural spillover from animals to human beings?