Alina Chan Profile picture
Jun 3 8 tweets 3 min read
To the virologists complaining about the qualifications of scientists who spent the last 2.5 years fighting the narrative that a lab #OriginOfCovid is a conspiracy theory...

Which one of your card-carrying peers intended to tell the world a lab origin is plausible and when?
Because we're seeing lots and lots of FOIA'ed emails among card-carrying virologists worrying about a lab #OriginOfCovid but zero sign of any one of them stepping up to tell the public.
From where I'm standing, you and your peers didn't have the courage to tell the public the truth. Yet you viciously attacked anyone who risked their reputation to challenge the false "scientific consensus" on #OriginOfCovid, dismissing their expertise & smearing their character.
I'm willing to submit to criticism from the card-carrying virologists who risked their necks in 2020 to call for a thorough investigation of a lab #OriginOfCovid

Not the ones who privately freaked out about a lab leak but publicly wrote that lab origin is a conspiracy theory.
And especially not the virologists whose FOIA'ed emails consist of pages and pages of redactions or whose tweets abruptly "auto-delete" in the thousands.

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More from @Ayjchan

Jun 2
I'm not surprised scientists think a natural #OriginOfCovid is plausible. I'm one of them.

I'm surprised by the certainty some scientists profess to have while turning on & viciously degrading their peers who suggest a lab origin.

Twitter hath no fury like a virologist scorned.
I expect that as the number of experts (and reporters) who insist that a natural #OriginOfCovid is (almost) certain dwindles, these scientist-on-scientist attacks with name-calling and smears will get increasingly vicious.
If experts who are (almost) certain of a natural #OriginOfCovid refuse to come to scientific exchanges on the topic being held in a neutral space, that is 💯 on them.

If you're certain of your expertise, it shouldn't worry you that "epistemic trespassers" are allowed to speak.
Read 5 tweets
Jun 1
One recurring argument I hear from virologists trying to debunk lab #OriginOfCovid is that their colleagues are such incurable gossips that they could not possibly hold back information on novel viruses discovered and cutting edge experiments being conducted...
... and that this applies even to labs engaged in classified research where scientists and students have to regularly sign confidentiality pledges and sometimes seal their research reports for 20 years. washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pac…
If this Global Virology Gossip Network is so effective, can anyone produce the virus database at the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Or tell us what experiments were done after they co-submitted a proposal to insert novel cleavage sites into undefined SARS-like viruses?
Read 7 tweets
May 22
Suggestion for scientists and science communicators/journalists:

When the available evidence to support/rule out a particular hypothesis is little to none, let's stop saying "there is no evidence for X" and instead say "we are still gathering evidence to know whether X is true".
Watching #InTheSameBreath @HBO documentary drove home the damage that can be caused by experts making statements like there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission or masks protecting against Covid etc.

Could have been avoided if experts said we're still looking into this.
Saying that there is "no evidence" for something implies that a search for evidence has been conducted and turned up nothing.

In many cases, investigators are still in the process of searching for evidence. A premature assertion of "no evidence" would mislead the public.
Read 4 tweets
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
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
May 20
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.
Read 6 tweets

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