The Brownstone institute is a fracking-billionaire funded anti-science #disinformation outlet

I just highlight some passages to show that the #lableak conspiracy myth would always have happened, no matter where COVID first broke out

If not the WIV, then 🔽

A master thread:
1/
Many amplifiers, including some science journalists, believe that a legitimate scientific uncertainty & geographic coincidence underneath the #originofcovid controversy is the root cause and driver for the conspiracy myth.

This is false
Yes, the inital uncertainties were real
2/
but no matter where the virus initially broke out, there would always be some lab or some scientists that could be made to associate with.

All pandemics were followed by #conspiracy theories about their origins. The 1918 flu was blamed on the Germans and their aspirin, ffs.

3/
These 'coincidences' do not matter scientifically, they are not the reasons why these #conspiracy myths exist & they can not be used to justify or legitimize them continuing to persist.

Any world-shaking event will have some apparently unexplicable coincidences found post-hoc
4/
The reasons are manifold, but the largest junk comes down to our #cognitive processes, first our flaws to understand "survivorship bias", and second, a behavior called "anomaly hunting".

These two processes often cause us to misunderstand the real nature of the 'coincidence'
5/
For example, every year, scientific studies suggest we have tens of thousands of CoV spillover into humans. Yet most of these viruses can not cause human to human transmission, and even of those few which do, 99,8% of them die out by themselves because they happen in villages.
6/
Only situations where CoVs get the change to jump multiple time in immune-naive & host-dense cities is there a chance of a self-sustaining outbreak; therefore, SARS-CoV-2 would have only taken of in a dense city with multiple spillovers (this is what the science now shows, btw)
7
Dense cities like Wuhan however have research institutes, and many of them. As we have seen above, if not for the WIV, there are many other virology labs to chose from. Hospitals, Universities, Agricultural institutes, Wuhan CDC and other public health institutions etc..
8/
The #anomaly that the WIV worked on CoVs is to a certain extend artificial, because it is post-hoc.
It is being sold as this super-weird coincidence, when in fact, other anomalies could have been made up to sound just as damning.

Consider the Sino-German hospital lab above
9/
affiliated with the (now famous) virologist C. Drosten, who in 2003 identified the first SARS virus.
You think this anomaly (now pushed by the above disinformation outlet) would not just as easily have been milked for a slightly different #lableak myth?
10/
(Drosten was also part of the 'Fauci teleconference', so there we go again)

Or consider a different #anomaly, for example how the Wuhan CDC moved into new offices somewhat near the Huanan market in Dez 2019.

If the WIV was not there, you bet they'd be taken more to task.
11/
Imagine the political ties the Wuhan CDC has with the Chinese communist party...even more anomalies to exploit.
It would be an endless #conspiratorial zergfest of who-is-who & secret bioweapons & Chinese schemes etc...

My point is:
There are never shortages of anomalies.
12/
Me even mentioning the few anomalies above will prompt some conspiratorially-prone #believers to 'exploring' alternative conspiracy myths; not realizing that all these are mutually exclusive scenarios when it comes to the #originofcovid.

You can't have them all be true.
13/
Anomaly hunting & survivorship bias might be understandable human processes, but they do not magically #legitimize an hypothesis that has zero scientific #evidence, especially when an alternative hypothesis has a lot of supportive evidence that directly contradicts it
14/
So TL;DR:
Journalists and other #amplifiers would do well to understand their role in creating a #false #equivalency between #baseless speculations juiced up by anomalies or biases versus reporting actual #scientific evidence and theories.

/end

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More from @PhilippMarkolin

Dec 25
Alina Chan is not a friend of a GOP witch hunt into US virologists. She knows it will not yield any evidence. Albeit related to her endless mudslinging, she fears it will eventually backfire & vindicate her targets... quite cynically, she'd rather prefer to abuse uncertainty.
For her strategic goals, it is much better to manipulate the public with endless speculative tantrums and artificial uncertainty than see virologists being not found guilty in congressional hearings.
The simple fact is that she made a big bet being a vocal contrarian and now...
all that awaits her is the public waking up to her nonsense and a fall from grace (she has already fallen out from professional circles because of her conspiracy mongering ofc)
To stay in the public limelight, she much rather sees the origins uncertainty never resolve, or go...
Read 5 tweets
Dec 23
Special Christmas episode everybody.

We sat down with Professor Edward Holmes to put him to task about his evolutionary research, his role in finding the #origins investigations, proximal origins, collaborations with China, and much, much more.

FIND OUT WHY IT IS ALWAYS EDDIE
Some context:

Prof. Holmes is involved in many scientific papers related to origins research; studying how RNA viruses (including HIV, Ebola, SARS, Hantavirus etc) jump species boundaries for many years, and working with Chinese scientists since 2012, he was perfectly...

2/
positioned to contribute to the rush for more understanding when Covid started; among his many scientific achievements, he was the first to get the SARS-CoV-2 genome published, he was involved in studies finding SC2 relatives in the wild, he has been at the Huanan market in...
3/
Read 6 tweets
Dec 11
Inventing conflicts of interest for scientists is a tactic from vested interest to discredit domain experts

Dr. Chan, a non expert, is profiting directly from book sales (& knock on gains from profile boosts) by #discrediting scientific experts

Tell us again how does CoI work?
There is no need to write a sensationalist & false book with a lifelong anti-science attack dog, climate change contrarian and AIDS conspiracists to smear scientists that reach conclusions one might disagree with, one can just publish papers to advance another point of view.
The problem is of course that alternative views based on speculation, not evidence, are not credible.
The only play contrarians like Dr. Chan have to bridge that credibility gap is not to improve hers, but trying to drag domain experts through the mud with mostly made up BS.
Read 4 tweets
Nov 24
I've written a bit about this Musk Twitter thing from a system's perspective, and this here 🔽 is a clear signal for what I deem one of the likely outcomes.

System disintegration into smaller subsystems.

Twitter will become smaller, weaker & probably align itself with
1/
other ecosystems to hold info power.

If you are in the EU (+adjacent), expect Twitter to be gone sooner rather than later and live with an alternative that will be more European and less global.

If you are in the US (+adjacent), expect Twitter to stay but transform.
2/
For the US, @davetroy has laid out some suggestions (which I do not fully endorse but can see going in that direction) how a Musk Twitter might look like & be used to further the interests of a very specific network and thought ecosystem.

For the EU, Twitter competitors will
3/
Read 7 tweets
Nov 24
First, kudos to the Chinese authors doing this work & a shoutout to @edwardcholmes also involved

I already flagged this Wang et al. preprint yesterday but it is worth explaining its significance to both the #origins discussion and the related pandemic #prevention discussion

A🧵
First: Origins

One thing that goes often down in all the noise surrounding #lableak is the fact that SARS-CoV-2, and actually all CoVs, possess #mosaic genomes.

This is because CoVs evolve not only through mutation but also through exchanging genetic elements with other CoVs
2/
This exchange is called '#recombination'.

One can imagine CoV genomes like colorful Lego brick walls, and recombination as taking one brick from a different virus and putting it in the wall of another; changing the color while keeping roughly the function.
3/ Image
Read 18 tweets
Nov 23
Maybe another word on the '#unredacted Fauci emails', now that it is clear that there were no cover-ups or suppression of #lableak, but just neutral #scientific discussion.

Observe how lableak advocates will run their #disinformation playbook, we've seen this before.

A 🧵

1/
Everytime new contradictory information (to the lableak conspiracy myth) comes out, there is an increase in #activity by lableak advocates.

We've seen this with the BANAL sequences in LAOS that proved that the RBD domain of SARS-CoV-2 was not 'manmade'
2/
We've seen this in response to 2 scientific papers that establish the Huanan market as the center & start of the pandemic.

(Worth re-reading this thread too)


3/
Read 15 tweets

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