Alina Chan Profile picture
Mar 28 4 tweets 1 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
Never thought I'd see experts and journalists insisting that a lab-acquired infection is not a lab leak but a zoonosis.

At this point, how can anyone in the public understand what these experts actually mean when they say an outbreak started from zoonotic spillover?
If evidence turns up that a precursor of the pandemic virus was being worked with in a Wuhan lab - without evidence of genetic engineering - are these experts going to say "See, we were right. It was a zoonotic spillover!"
If scientists get infected in the lab and it spreads out into their city, are they going to tell their biosafety officer, "There wasn't a lab leak. Zoonosis happened."
I can't believe the natural #OriginOfCovid strategy now is "when I said a lab leak was a conspiracy theory in 2020, I didn't realize this included natural viruses infecting people in the lab."

Maybe you should've clarified your statements better in 2020 then.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Alina Chan

Alina Chan Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @Ayjchan

Mar 29
It is well established that bats were kept at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that Dr Shi Zhengli's lab worked with live bats. This was covered in @zeynep @nytimes piece in 2021.

People claiming that this is disinformation need to be fact checked.
nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opi…
@zeynep @nytimes From an archived interview:
"The research team caught a few bats from the wild to be used as experimental animals.. During the Spring Festival this year, the students all went home on vacation, and Teacher Shi silently undertook the task of raising bats."
archive.is/DmL4g
The surprising thing to me is that this work with live bats had already been ongoing in 2009. A whole decade before Covid-19.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 29
Because when you don't have bats in your lab, you file patents on bat cages and bat breeding.
In 2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology also said that they were generating primary or immortalized cells from bats for use in their lab experiments.
nature.com/articles/s4158… Image
Read 4 tweets
Mar 28
One thing that any respectable #OriginOfCovid investigation or commission must do is to build a consensus on the known and suspected earliest cases in China and overseas. We cannot move forward until we have this clarified.
This requires a systematic analysis of the news coverage and scientific articles describing early cases in China and elsewhere, as well as interviews of foreign doctors and others who were visiting Wuhan in late 2019.
It's impossible to reach a high confidence assessment on #OriginOfCovid with a window as wide as the first human infection happening any time between September and mid-November 2019.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 28
This is what the Chinese CDC manuscript said about their environmental samples. "No animals were concluded."

This doesn't mean they didn't find animal genetic material. It would be shocking for a wet market to not have animal genetic material. Image
I stand by the point that you cannot use abundance of animal/human genetic material in environmental samples to infer host. In the case of the market, it is clear that the one species traversing the entire market was human. All sequences of the virus were of the human outbreak.
By the time the Chinese CDC went to sample the market in January 2020, the outbreak was widespread in the city and the virus had already left the bounds of Wuhan.

The virus had certainly spread throughout the market: "All the four sewerage wells in the market tested positive."
Read 4 tweets
Mar 27
Desperation is inferring the existence of an infected animal at the market from the presence of animal genetic material at the market, which had been plastered with virus across its >9 NFL field-sized retail space.

#OriginOfCovid
The presence of animal genetic material sampled from surfaces at the Wuhan market in Jan 2020 doesn't tell us:

1. If there were live animals in Nov/Dec 2019.

2. How many there were, if present.

3. If the animals were infected with the virus.
Considering that it is a surface and not an animal that is being sampled, contaminating genetic material cannot be used to determine the host that shed the virus.

There is nothing in the sequencing data that says the virus came from a human or a raccoon dog.
Read 12 tweets
Mar 21
Another serious case of the Proximal Origin authors not carefully reading the methods section of the Chinese CDC's paper whose data they used in their #OriginOfCovid analysis.

Samples were processed in a way such that human genetic material was removed.
assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-13703…
But Proximal Origin authors interpreted this decrease in human genetic material as evidence of animals infected with the virus.

"the amount of animal genetic material was greater than the amount of human genetic material, consistent with... animal infections"
I'm not saying that I believe all data available to #OriginOfCovid has been shared.

But if you're going to use the data provided by the Chinese CDC, you should at least pay attention to the methods by which they collected that data.
Read 5 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(