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Alex Washburne Profile picture
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Mar 3 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
Let's examine this thread, looking at tone & substance.

@WendyOrent, an anthropologist, says that "evolutionary theory ... is not your strong point"

Actually, evolution is indeed my strong point e.g.
nature.com/articles/s4156…

esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ec…

biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

1/
"You wouldn't expect super-spreading right off the bat... because an animal virus coming directly into a new species is unlikely to be well-adapted"

Lab-origin theories believe *gain-of-function* work improved transmissibility in vitro.



2/
"It takes time to evolve the superspreading events we saw later"

Why can an animal in the wet market be a superspreader, especially a new, intermediate host (pangolin, civet, whatever), but not a human?

Also, we saw HH superspreading instantly


3/
"As Vincent Ranciello said," (appeal to authority) "no virus has jumped out of a bat ready to go"

Just to be clear:

Lab-origin theories believe SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab, not a bat.



4/
"You want to argue with Dr. Ranciello? That would be fun"

Okay, tough guy 🙄. No need to be a toxic bro here.

I would be happy to discuss the science & reasoning with Dr. Ranciello on #TWiV



5/5
"Why are lab leakers so dim-witted..."

"Basic, indisputable fact: 2 lineages"

We wrote the whole paper above on why 2 lineages is NBD. Also, many possible intermediate sequences exist so may not be 2 lineages.

i.e. disputable fact.

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More from @WashburneAlex

Alex Washburne Profile picture
Mar 5
Can the existence of two large lineages at the base of the SARS-CoV-2 shine light on the origin of SARS-CoV-2, as claimed in Pekar et al.?

Spoiler alert:
A contradiction at the heart of Pekar et al:

They claim 2 large lineages imply 2 spillover events from an intermediate reservoir, yet we find 0 PCR+ animals

We haven't documented animal-human (A-H) superspreading. We have documented H-H superspreading in conditions like HSM

2/
Pekar et al. rely on the assumption that an intermediate host can A-->H superspread (despite no evidence of this), that this superspreading can ONLY occur in the A-->H direction and not A-->A otherwise there would be many infected animals & an animal trade outbreak

3/
Read 4 tweets
Alex Washburne Profile picture
Mar 3
A fun stroll down memory lane

@VBruttel @tony_vandongen and I found SARS-CoV-2 is consistent with infectious clones:



We kindly responded to attacks claiming we were frauds & agents of misinformation.

1/
We nonetheless read lines between ad hominem attacks to understand the reasoning of people who disagreed.

Some of them made interesting points that are best seen as minor revisions or interesting topics of future research, not refutation of our work

alexwasburne.substack.com/p/the-syntheti…

2/
At the heart of a lab leak is a lab and researchers with networks of colleagues

The prime suspects' colleagues (@PeterDaszak) have called lab-origin theories "conspiracy theories" without disclosing their proposal to make a virus just like SARS-COV-2

thelancet.com/journals/lance…

3/
Read 10 tweets
Alex Washburne Profile picture
Mar 1
This article is a *perfect* example of socioscientific inefficiencies that can be used to find arbitrage opportunities betting against effectively whoever is reading @NPR & sources like it

Here's why

1/
There's a lot of evidence suggesting a lab origin, there are many scientists who believe many things, yet NPR presents primarily the perspective of the most Twitter-famous & paradigmatically entrenched researcher, saying that they reflect "the evidence".

2/
There is a lot of evidence suggesting that the papers quoted by @angie_rasmussen are critically flawed.

It's not just a matter of opinion: the papers make strong mathematical & statistical assumptions that don't hold and are easily disproven, e.g.

biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

3/
Read 9 tweets
Alex Washburne Profile picture
Feb 28
Strongly suspect this is the case, based on patterns of management consultations throughout COVID.

Many managers think that hiring the most famous names will get them the most solid answers.

Instead, that may get you the most entrenched paradigms most distant from novel data.
For one clear example:

I sat in on a call in February 2020 as some of the world's largest banks & money managers listened to a small set of epi's tell them what would happen.

The scientists told them yesterday's headlines of science, not the tectonic movements & trends below.
Hearing the presentation & the Q&A, I was able to get fairly high confidence that most money managers' opinions on outbreak trajectories followed key headlines from a small-n of sources.

Where these sources were wrong/incomplete, I found arbitrage throughout the pandemic.
Read 4 tweets
Alex Washburne Profile picture
Feb 27
Scientists who examined the evidence and came to believe SARS-CoV-2 arose from a lab were ostracized, called "conspiracy theorists", "creationists", and more.

Despite the onslaught of abusive toxicity, we all kept accumulating evidence & doing good science. It hasn't been easy.
It hasn't been easy for members of the public to say the obvious & be called "conspiracy theorists" by scientists, to have most-likely truth labelled "misinformation" by people who failed to disclose their on conflict of interest of working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It hasn't been easy for investigative reporters who stumble upon a lead, work carefully to present it responsibly, and have scientists call most-likely truth "confected nonsense" or "poppycock".

That toxicity from zoonotic origin scientists has undermined science.
Read 13 tweets
Alex Washburne Profile picture
Feb 27
Dr. David Relman had a solid point regarding the latest news about the DOE assessing SARS-CoV-2 most likely came from a lab: this isn't over.

Some thoughts on what we learned today, and what we can do next

wsj.com/articles/covid…

1/
One crucial detail we learned today:

The researchers in the WIV who fell ill with influenza-like illness were not random workers - they were coronavirus researchers.

That increases the odds that the ill WIV researchers were infected with a coronavirus being studied.

2/
It's worth noting that the DOE oversees our national labs.

Our national labs are *stacked* with some of the brightest, straightest-shooting scientists I've ever met. If their assessment went the other way from undisclosed intel, I would take that very seriously.

3/
Read 20 tweets

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