I have asked @Ayjchan to prove that pre-pandemic EVALI samples in the US were not caused by COVID as she is sure that SARS2 did not originate from a lab in the US. NIH concluded that EVALI may have been caused by a virus. Waiting for her answer.
And BTW I am not saying that the US created SARS2 alone and "unleashed" it to Wuhan, as she suggests. If SARS2 has a lab origin it is likely the product of a collaboration and the World Military Games in Wuhan could easily explain a cluster of cases there.
First, EVALI started only few months before the COVID pandemic, not years before. Second, she pretends to ignore the possible role of the World Military Games to create the cluster of cases in Wuhan.
This means she can't prove that the pre-pandemic EVALI cases were not caused by COVID. An origin from a lab in the US is therefore absolutely possible, also based on phylogenetic analyses and it should be investigated with the same effort done in China.
Accidents in labs manipulating CoV, deletion of sequences and databases, cover up that tried to discredit a lab origin as conspiracy theory, involvement of USAID and UNC in Defuse and lack of a proper investigation makes clear that we should not downplay this hypothesis.
I have investigated with the rest of Drastic for two years the possibility that SARS2 originated from a lab leak in China and I still think it should be investigated. Considering the information above I also think that an investigation of US labs should not be hampered
This is my analysis where I showed that EVALI samples should be analysed for SARS2 antibody because of the largely overlapping pathology with COVID and the timing of the EVALI epidemic that was just before COVID.
There are several studies that point to an undetected circulation in several countries before the cluster of cases in Wuhan. The need to be validated and extended. gh.bmj.com/content/7/3/e0…
If we want to know the #OriginOfCovid we need to keep an open mind and follow all lines of investigation without biases. An open and transparent investigation in both China and the US with access to lab records and analysis of pre-pandemic samples is urgently needed.
Wow! An unbiased article which asks transparency also about research activities in the US that may be involved in SARS2’s origin!
By Neil L. Harrison and Jeffrey D. Sachs 👏👏👏 pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…
“Yet a US-based investigation need not wait—there is much to learn from the US institutions that were extensively involved in research that may have contributed to, or documented the emergence of, the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”
“Participating US institutions include the EHA, the University of North Carolina (UNC), the University of California at Davis (UCD), the NIH, and the USAID.”
Where and when SARS2 originated in the US? WA1 was not the first introduction in the US (19.01.20), as described in this paper nejm.org/doi/10.1056/ne… because SARS2 in the Washington State was already more evolved than WA1, having two additional mutations
This *first* WA1 case in the US travelled back from China, but WA1 has not been found associated to the Huanan market. WA1 matches the deleted sequences retrieved by Bloom
because the husband (who did not travel to China like the wife) was infected with a variant that already evolved specific mutations not found in China.
"Records show that during the five years before the pandemic began, at least six UNC researchers were required to undergo medical monitoring following four incidents where they were potentially exposed to what the NIH now confirms were types of lab-created SARS coronaviruses."
@itsmercadante What’s happening to Andersen & co.? It was not enough that they tried to stop any investigation into the possibility of a lab accident at the beginning of the pandemic.
@itsmercadante They continue after 2 years to push for a natural origin using partial dataset and ignore other data that point to an earlier origin than in the market.
Here my commets on the two preprints.
@itsmercadante@MichaelWorobey already in this article avoided a complete dataset from USA that would have set the timing of the start of the pandemic one month before than described in his article.
There is a “correlation between the number of individuals who travelled to the event and the number of COVID-19 cases in the country to which they returned” ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
"They deliberated in secret. They used burner phones. They spoke only to their trusted colleagues. This went on for more than a month from late January 2020 to early March."
"Whether this virus originated as a lab leak or not in this case is not so much the issue; there is no question that Farrar, Collins, Fauci, and company all believed that it was likely and even probable, and they spent their time and energies plotting the spin."
"Maybe their time should have been about telling the truth as they knew it? Explaining how to deal rationally with the coming virus? Helping people who are vulnerable protect themselves while explaining to everyone else that there is no point in panicking?"