Thread by @mbalter

I don’t know how Covid-19 originated, and neither do any of the people currently publicly discussing the question. What we do know is that the pandemic began in Wuhan, where researchers at an institute in the city were collecting and doing research on SARS-like viruses…

And we know that the institute in question (Wuhan Inst of Virology) has refused to tell @NIH what it did with the money funneled to it by @EcoHealthNYC, and that the WIV took a large database of viral sequences offline and now refuses to share it with anyone…

We also know that the WIV, @EcoHealthNYC, and @Baric_Lab at U North Carolina wanted to genetically engineer SARS-like viruses to make them potentially more infectious to humans, and tried to get grant funds to do that research. We don’t know…

Whether any of the players went on to do those experiments, since Ralph Baric refuses to talk about it, Peter Daszak may or may not know, and Shi Zhengli of WIV prevaricated when asked about it by @sciencemagazine’s @sciencecohen (she told Cohen WIV did not have…

That capability which is almost certainly not true based on a cursory look at the papers the institute has published over the years (and other labs in Wuhan most certainly did have that capability.) Unfortunately, few journalists reported on the attempts to get…

That grant money to make SARS-like viruses more infectious to humans, and no one so far except @BulletinAtomic has reported on @NIH’s decision to cut funding to WIV. In the old days, investigative reporters spotting leads like this would really go for it until they…

Figured it out one way or the other, but that appetite for getting at the truth has been very limited in the case of the Covid pandemic. Now @NSF has awarded EcoHealth and Boston University $1 million to continue to work on pandemic prevention. Are any reporters…

Interested in the question of whether the approach taken by EcoHealth, which failed to prevent the deadliest pandemic known to humankind, is really worth the money? So many questions, so few interested in the answers. #coronavirus

One question that journalists and historians will want to answer in the future is, How did such an obvious possibility—that the pandemic might have been caused by one more in a long series of escapes of infectious agents from labs—get branded as a racist “conspiracy theory?”

Correction: Thanks to colleagues for pointing out that Covid-19 is not the deadliest pandemic in human history. Got carried away, sorry!