Thread by @Ayjchan

Most interesting part of the @nytimes interview is when @dwallacewells asks Dr Anthony Fauci if it weighs on him at all that the pandemic possibly started in a lab doing the type of research he promoted for years. #OriginOfCovid

nytimes.com/interactive/20…

@nytimes @dwallacewells Dr Fauci responded that he sleeps fine and the suggestion that he needs to worry that NIH funded research that started the pandemic is troublesome to him.

Impressed @dwallacewells called out Dr Fauci #OriginOfCovid

At this part, I would've wanted to ask whether Dr Fauci was briefed on the defuse proposal by Ralph Baric in 2020 and what he thinks of the striking match between the proposed engineered viruses and the pandemic virus.

@dwallacewells In 2020, I wasn't inclined to the engineered virus hypothesis. But after the 2018 defuse proposal surfaced with furin cleavage site gain-of-function experiments in undefined SARS-like viruses, my stance is the coincidence is too striking to be ignored.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1587100299063431176

To borrow some wording from the interview, "I want to highlight the difference between possible and probable... as a scientist, I could not ignore the accumulation of evidence favoring one versus the other."

It's possible that a rare furin cleavage site naturally evolved in a SARS-like virus along its ~1000km journey to Wuhan.

Or maybe the Wuhan scientists did what they said they would do in 2018: put rare furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses they collected from ~1000km away.

We should be doing everything we can to extract the communications & documents relating to their 2018 proposal to put novel, human-specific furin cleavage sites into low risk (strains not similar to 2003 SARS human pathogen) SARS-like viruses & growing them in human airway cells.