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Alina Chan Profile picture
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Jul 1 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
There's no way this devastating pandemic started as a result of virus hunting and/or gain-of-function research, say experts who advocated for, funded, or collaborated on virus hunting and/or gain-of-function research.
usrtk.org/biohazards-blo…
Till today, the journal @NatureMedicine that published the Proximal Origin correspondence refuses to correct the piece to disclose the potential conflicts of interest and participation of experts who are well known gain-of-function proponents.
@NatureMedicine No acknowledgment of ideas taken from gain-of-function proponents and inserted into Proximal Origin.
@NatureMedicine Most of the attendees of the Feb 1 call & experts (NIH & Wellcome Trust leaders) who advised the drafting of the Proximal Origin letter go unacknowledged.

I guess this text only serves to point out that the authors of Proximal Origin were funded by the NIH & Wellcome Trust.
A group of virologists were convened by leaders who control their funding to debate #OriginOfCovid They left the meeting thinking a lab origin more or as likely as a natural origin.

~2 weeks later, they publish Proximal Origin arguing against lab origin.
FYI This is from @Nature's policy on competing interests.
nature.com/nature-portfol…
From @Nature's own 2018 editorial:

"What makes a conflict of interest in science?.. an influence that can cloud a researcher’s objectivity.. that influence can be money. But there are other.. such as institutional loyalty, personal beliefs and ambition."
nature.com/articles/d4158…
FYI the lead author of Proximal Origin considers these undeclared competing interests and contributors to the work as "fictional".
Ok, the people (funders) who decide whether your work gets funded aka whether you can keep running a lab convene the authors, participate in the discussions leading up to the manuscript, advise the manuscript, and promote it in the media. And all this is not necessary to declare?
What if we applied this standard to other funders e.g. companies that are selling drugs or other products?

They pay for your livelihood, organize you to publish on topics of interest to them, advise the drafting of the papers, and promote it as if they didn't have a hand in it.

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
Jul 2
"Even as the very real chance remains that the search for new viruses led to this [pandemic], scientists hoping to prevent viral outbreaks continue to seek out new bat coronaviruses and other potential pandemic pathogens around the world."
theintercept.com/2022/07/02/vir…
Reeder carries a card in her wallet she hopes medical professionals will read should she herself wind up in the emergency room with a mysterious infectious disease someday... ‘Attention medical personnel: I study wildlife disease. Here’s all the things you should test me for...’
Reeder describes herself and other researchers in her field as “a little bit like cowboys and cowgirls... When I first started this work, nobody was wearing PPE... I thought we were good if I didn’t have my coffee cup on the same table when I was doing dissections.”
Read 4 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
Jul 2
Some virologists have to stop daring each other to do risky experiments to prove each other wrong.
noemamag.com/the-routes-of-…
The evidence doesn't need to be that perfect, ok?
If you're a scientist, you should understand the psychological effect of telling another scientist that they're wrong unless they can do X, Y, and Z. It's quite likely that many of the scientists will go on and do XYZ and maybe even more to prove that they're right.
Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
Jul 1
Stuart, the phrase you're looking for is "gain-of-function".

You're asking why the scientists didn't select for/serial passage a natural SARSr-CoV (that already infects human cells) so it spreads among mammals via the air.

I'm glad they did not do that.
As it is, they already serially passaged this close relative to SARS-CoV-2 in humanized mice, and thankfully found that it didn't become more virulent or develop a preference for respiratory transmission in mammals. Image
In contrast, this 2018 paper describes a more distant SARSr-CoV derived from the guts of bats that was inoculated into the brains of suckling rats - revealing a surprising preference for replication in the lungs.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
Read 10 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
Jun 26
Some people say that if only every country had acted in a timely and correct manner, the excess death toll of this pandemic wouldn't be in the millions.

We cannot count on every country acting in a timely and correct manner every time a new pandemic pathogen emerges...
1st there doesn't seem to be any pandemic treaty in place to make sure that information about emerging pathogens is shared in a timely manner with global parties.

Under these circumstances, key info about transmission, symptoms, genome etc. could be withheld for weeks to months.
2nd most countries are not pandemic ready and I'm not optimistic enough to believe they will mostly be pandemic ready for the next pathogen with as yet unknown abilities. Overly rigid pandemic response plans can actually make things worse.
Read 6 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
Jun 25
The doublethink in virus discovery.

"Give us billions to collect and study millions of viruses that could cause the next pandemic."

"Don't restrict our funding because none of these viruses or our experiments could plausibly lead to an outbreak in animals or people."
Before the pandemic: "We need millions of dollars to build a virus database to predict pandemics and inform pandemic response."

After the pandemic: "There's nothing useful in this virus database. We don't need to look in here!"
Even the extent of viruses discovered and work done seems to have shrunken tremendously after the pandemic started...
Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
Jun 23
Most people can agree that US tax dollars should not be sent to China to do gain-of-function research.

The problem is that the researchers/middlemen engaging in said research can get around the existing definitions and there doesn't seem to be any mechanism of accountability...
Reminder that Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, which sent US tax dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for chimeric SARSrCoV and human pathogen MERS research, was able to privately negotiate a way out of being restricted by the GOF definition.
theintercept.com/2021/11/03/cor…
Even after breaching their own negotiated definition of what would be considered gain-of-function, the EcoHealth Alliance + Wuhan Institute of Virology pitched extending their chimeric virus work to human pathogen MERS virus.
theintercept.com/2021/10/21/vir…
Read 9 tweets

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