Thread by @alexandrosM

I've been researching the origins of the Lancet letter, published Feb 19, 2020 for a while.

I'll lay out the timeline I have in this 🧵, mostly to clarify my own thinking as I'm getting lost in various threads.

A good starting question is "when did Peter Daszak get looped in?"

He claims to have learned about it in "late December 2019" but something tells me he heard through ProMED like most others did.

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1409005229723422720?s=20&t=DNsuf-ZjMHt8GbjkkLebZA

On Jan 14, 2020, Daszak and Ralph Baric seem to have been pulled into a call to help NIH craft their response to the coronavirus outbreak.

On Jan 27, both Baric and Daszak were mentioned to Fauci in a briefing about the expertise available to NIH on coronaviruses. Emphasis on EcoHealth: usrtk.org/wp-content/upl…

On Jan 31, Fauci was sent this article, which he forwarded to Jeremy Farrar and Kristian Andersen as "relevant to the current discussion" implying that there was a prior ongoing conversation.
science.org/content/articl…

Andersen, of course, responded with the famous email about the genome of the virus being inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory, which triggered the Feb 1 meetings etc. But Daszak was not involved in those.

By "Feb 1 meetings, etc", I mean the meeting where there was clearly a big debate about whether there was or wasn't lab involvement with the virus:

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1404374268201209862?s=20&t=8ge67wcsFmKqEk_B2yWYDQ

Daszak gets pulled into the record in response to this letter from the white house, which notes concern about the indian preprint which notes the HIV inserts.

https://twitter.com/gdemaneuf/status/1567618769681522688?s=20&t=8ge67wcsFmKqEk_B2yWYDQ

Note the people that Andrew Pope pulled together to respond to the White House's (OSTP) request:

https://twitter.com/OddMan59903018/status/1402483509005008896?s=20&t=8ge67wcsFmKqEk_B2yWYDQ

We have:

(1) Kristian Andersen and Trevor Bedford, of the group that was working with Jeremy Farrar.

(2) Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Stanley Perlman of the group that would write the Lancet letter

(3) Tom Inglesby and Gigi Gronvall.. of the JHU group that organized Event 201

There is only one person that seems unconnected, who is geneticist Aravinda Chakravarti, the only one who seems to push a bit harder:

https://twitter.com/OddMan59903018/status/1404869607475777540?s=20&t=jNXxa9-wf6w9XBjM3qjT6A

Actually, when Pope says "your thoughtful participation yesterday", he means this slightly larger meeting:

https://twitter.com/CharlesRixey/status/1498617497045676034?s=20&t=YqmSZ3UKkbwHh9MXXOX-0A

Including all 5 "proximal origins" authors + bedford from Farrar's group, Baric / Daszak / Perlman who would coordinate the Lancet letter, and 4 leads of organizations, of which the one that stands out is one AF.

By Feb 6, Daszak forwarded the first version of the Lancet letter, which he seems to have co-written with William Karesh, to his first batch of prospective co-signers: usrtk.org/wp-content/upl…

He then follows up to Baric with an email titled:

'No need for you to sign the "Statement" Ralph!!'

The content is a masterclass in double-speak, including the epic "so we maximize an independent voice".

There's a lot to note here. For one, Daszak refers to a conversation with Linfa Wang the previous night.

If it was decided the previous night that Baric, Wang, and Daszak would not sign, why was Baric in the email that was sent a few hours prior? Perhaps to signal to the others?

Second, what is their "collaboration" cited? Probably the DEFUSE proposal we learned about later, or the bat surveillance project mentioned upthread in the briefing Fauci got.

In any case, by that night it seems Jeremy Farrar was on board, and Daszak included a new list of names with the ones not seen before, likely contributed by Farrar.

By the next day, a lot more names were added, and this email even tells us who suggested which name.
peterdaszak.com/daszakletter.p…

But! Waitaminute! I think I found the start of the Farrar-Fauci thread. Let's go all the way back to Jan 23, 2020:
s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2104…

By the "happy new year!"s we can see that this is the start of the conversation.

They are talking about this WHO statement: who.int/news/item/23-0…

You see, Farrar and Fauci were both members of the "Global Pandemic Monitoring Board", a "joint venture" of the WHO and the World Bank. Let's see who else was on this board at the time: web.archive.org/web/2020031815…

Well, if it isn't... everybody.

George Fu Gao -- Head of Chinese CDC
Chris Elias -- Gates Foundation
Victor Dzau -- Head of US National Academy of Medicine
And, of course, Fauci and Farrar.

As it so happens, the GPMB met on January 27th, and made this statement: gpmb.org/news/news/item…

Then, on Jan 30, Fauci talked with Farrar on the phone. Patrick Vallance, UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser, was there too.

You see, Farrar and Vallance were hot off the Jan 28 SAGE meeting in the UK, the second one relating to the coronavirus. Who else was there? Oh... everybody else.
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

So when Fauci sent Farrar the article on Jan 31, the two had had a number of interactions over the previous week.

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1589772125262721026?s=20&t=k7XBVIl1wjiWmjs2uYWq7g

OK, back to mid-February and Daszak. If you want to follow Farrar's thread even earlier, start here:

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1404374212907700228?s=20&t=-_mNO01UfnEkfYJcM_wzQQ

So, on Feb 7, Daszak had most of the names for the Lancet letter. The few extra names are generally easy to connect with the initial group. But.. do you know what else he did around that time?

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1589817661466509312?s=20&t=YMrpm-mKgCIg-5-mTe0l4Q

Some time between Feb 3 and Feb 8, Fauci and Daszak appeared on the podcast of Newt Gingrich to talk about the new coronavirus and discredit any notion of a lab leak.

Yes, you're reading this right.

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1402690738501029892?s=20&t=YMrpm-mKgCIg-5-mTe0l4Q

Here's a bit of what they said:

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1402696836977074176?s=20&t=en77N1Fgg2XLAwhbx5vZNQ

Please excuse a short parenthesis here, but Gingrich is a damn hypocrite. Here's how he presented the podcast at the time:
foxnews.com/opinion/corona…
"Despite conspiracy theories about biological weapons, the virus almost certainly came from animal populations, perhaps food markets"

And this is what he said less than 4 months later:

https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/1398739422238154753?s=20&t=en77N1Fgg2XLAwhbx5vZNQ

And so the Lancet letter was born, a few short days later. Here is my analysis of the authors a year and a half ago:

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1401813071635501056?s=20&t=en77N1Fgg2XLAwhbx5vZNQ

This is the first tweet written about it on Feb 18 (not 19 as stated on the Lancet website). You'll never guess by who:

https://twitter.com/JeremyFarrar/status/1229827527226556416

Next up, many heroes of our story dive into their next adventure, Remdesivir, which was already administered to the first official US case on January 25th. But that's a tale for another thread.

OK, this puppy is done, though I'm sure I'll have a postscript or two or six. 😁