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Alina Chan Profile picture
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May 20 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
I did a mini thread in Feb on why I do not find the ENaC hypothesis compelling, particularly one that involves a UNC specialist telling a Wuhan scientist to use the furin cleavage site from ENaC in their SARS-like viruses.
It's possible a Wuhan scientist independently chanced upon the FCS in ENaC and thought it might be a good insertion for SARS-like viruses, but it's just as likely they saw other cleavage sites (RRAR) in novel viral sequences and used that as inspiration.
It would be more striking to me if the match including the entire FCS insertion "PRRA" or if the rest of the match "RSVAS" (5 out of 8 matching letters) didn't already exist in many of SARS2's close relatives.
In a more niche ENaC hypothesis - the 1st one pitched to me months ago - WIV shares its SARS2 sequence with UNC, UNC ENaC specialist advises insertion of ENaC FCS.

This is less believable to me because it would mean US scientists covered up direct proof of a lab #OriginOfCovid
Baric and UNC aren't doing themselves any favors refusing to comment on these questions.

They also failed to disclose their involvement in the Defuse proposal, which laid out a plan for inserting cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses.
theintercept.com/2022/05/19/cov…
However, as I said previously, it's one thing to sit on your suspicions and another to sit on direct evidence of a lab #OriginOfCovid

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
May 22
I know people are exhausted by COVID-19, but I highly recommend "In the Same Breath", a superbly produced @HBO documentary by @wangnanfu revealing the scale of the outbreak in Wuhan, then New York & how difficult it was for people to share their stories.
hbo.com/movies/in-the-…
@HBO @wangnanfu One thing that surprised Wang (and me) was a case where a 31-year-old patient admitted to hospital in Nov 2019 was said to have caught Covid-19 in hospital and was ill through December, Jan, Feb, before passing in Mar 2020.

There is surely more to learn about the earliest cases.
Also painful to watch was the mirror reflection of the outbreaks in Wuhan and New York - healthcare workers were misinformed by the authorities about how the virus spreads, not given resources to protect themselves, and censured by their employers for "spreading rumors".
Read 4 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
May 21
How can we determine whether scientific journals are opening their gates to #OriginOfCovid debate by publishing articles that aren't biased towards only a natural origin?

The public has embraced the debate, but I don't think our scientific journals have.
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
There have been some notable exceptions in top scientific journals, e.g., @PNASNews Nov 2020, David Relman: To stop the next pandemic, we need to unravel the origins of COVID-19
pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…
Bloom et al. @ScienceMagazine Investigate the origins of COVID-19
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Read 8 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
May 20
I'm noticing a recent uptick in people tweeting about Covid-19 having been created in the US by collaborators of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Please think through this carefully. You're saying the Chinese have proof the US created this virus and unleashed it on Wuhan...
... and though the Chinese gov has been desperate to shift the #OriginOfCovid outside of China - desperate enough to inculcate its people with the idea that the virus can spread through frozen 🐟 and the 📬 - they refuse to use the proof that the virus was made in the US.
Your hypothesis is, despite possessing proof that the virus originated in a US lab, the Chinese state media engaged in a disinformation campaign last year that went nowhere... even making up a Swiss scientist to complain about the #OriginOfcovid inquiry.
bbc.com/news/world-asi…
Read 6 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
May 19
Not sure @PeterHotez read the @PNAS letter carefully.

"SARS-CoV-2 is, to date, the only identified member of the subgenus sarbecovirus that contains an FCS, although these are present in other coronaviruses"
@PeterHotez @pnas "We do know that the insertion of such FCS sequences into SARS-like viruses was a specific goal of work proposed by the EHA-WIV-UNC partnership within a 2018 grant proposal (“DEFUSE”)"
@PeterHotez @pnas "We do not assert that laboratory manipulation was involved in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, although it is apparent that it could have been. However, we do assert that there has been no independent and transparent scientific scrutiny to date..."
Read 6 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
May 19
From the @TheLancet COVID-19 commission chair:

"EHA-WIV-UNC was involved in the collection of a large number of so-far undocumented SARS-like viruses.. manipulation within.. (BSL)-2.. raising concerns that an airborne virus might have infected a.. worker"
pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…
@TheLancet Hey @shingheizhan our peer-reviewed @MolBioEvol figure is cited in the letter!
@TheLancet There are 2 components to the Harrison & Sachs letter.

1. There are parties in the US that have repeatedly resisted sharing information relevant to #OriginOfCovid and they should be compelled to cooperate in a formal, ideally bipartisan, US-based investigation.
Read 9 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
May 19
Some scientists are a bit confused. Just because *globally* there are more than 180 SARSrCoV sequences published, doesn't mean that the 180+ SARSrCoV sequences from the Wuhan/EcoHealth scientists have all been accounted for.
Unless you mean to say that when the EcoHealth and Wuhan scientists wrote a research proposal with the line ">180 bat SARSr-CoV strains sequenced in our prior work and not yet examined for spillover potential", they actually meant the global research community's "prior work".
If the above is true, I would say that that's a very sly way of claiming credit for work you didn't do to get more funding.

I don't think the EcoHealth/Wuhan scientists would claim all known SARSrCoV sequences globally as part of their prior work.
Read 4 tweets

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