Alina Chan Profile picture
Apr 27 7 tweets 4 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
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. Image
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. Image
@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.
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. Image

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More from @Ayjchan

Apr 23
There are so many parties sitting on unique fragments of info relevant to #OriginOfCovid

There should have been a systematic investigation in 2020 to collect these fragments and piece them together to form a better picture of how the pandemic began.
nytimes.com/2023/04/23/wor…
Part of the problem is censorship from the Chinese gov, which caused evidence & samples relating to early cases to be hidden or destroyed.

But another part of the problem is the journals & databases that didn't come forward with these manuscripts - whether retracted or rejected.
As a result, the window of time in which the virus is estimated to have first infected a human person is still as wide as September to November 2019.

E.g. the raccoon dog proponents say the first infection was only on Nov 18, 2019.
Read 7 tweets
Apr 4
@SherylNYT the genetic evidence of close relatives to the pandemic virus found in nature does not discern between the market and the lab, because both were drawing viruses from the same areas in South China and SE Asia and bringing these up into Wuhan.
@SherylNYT The Wuhan scientists were looking for novel SARS-like viruses & other coronaviruses in the wildlife trade.

In 2016, Peter Daszak of EcoHealth wrote to NIH saying they had to venture into 7 SE Asian countries as the Chinese wildlife trade was dwindling.
Based on the scientific literature, it's clear that the Wuhan scientists were collecting viruses in Laos before the pandemic, with and without their EcoHealth partners.
Read 7 tweets
Apr 4
If we're going to spend an inordinate amount of time talking about raccoon dogs, I believe an equal amount of time and energy should be devoted to tracking down all info outside of China related to the 2018 Wuhan-US defuse proposal.
In this proposal that scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology & US collaborators sent to DARPA in early 2018, they said they were looking for rare furin cleavage sites to put in live SARS-like viruses in the lab. They were synthesizing entire genomes & producing viruses.
They said they would test these genetically modified "low-risk" SARS-like viruses, i.e., not SARS1-like viruses, to see how the cleavage site insertions affected the virus' ability to grow in human airway cells.
Read 5 tweets
Apr 4
You can choose whether or not to believe that the Chinese CDC is sharing their full data from the Huanan market.

Regardless, the data they provided, due to bias, sparsity & lateness of sampling, does not indicate a non-human animal source of the virus at Huanan.

#OriginOfCovid
Comparing the Chinese CDC paper and Worobey/Proximal Origin et al. papers in Science that used the same data, the former makes few assertions while the latter went on @nytimes breaking news with claims of "dispositive" and "incontrovertible" evidence for a market #OriginOfCovid
@nytimes My question is, will there now be a comparable media frenzy reporting on the Chinese CDC's analysis that the available evidence doesn't tell us how the virus got into the market?
Read 6 tweets
Apr 3
Of 1380 samples collected from the Huanan market by the Chinese CDC investigators, ~220 were from the raccoon dog stall and its associated warehouse space.

That means ~16% of the sampling targeted that wildlife stall.
chinaxiv.org/abs/202303.103…
This data supports the CCDC's statement that "samples analyzed in the current study were somehow biased, and wildlife-related vendors and early case-related vendors were prioritized for sample collection"

fyi @acritschristoph
Notably, the CCDC paper mentioned that "among the 60 SARS-CoV-2 PCR-positive samples for RNA-seq analysis, 39 samples tested negative by NGS (no SARS-CoV-2 reads at all) (65.0%)".

However, their data do not tell us which samples were false positives.
Read 7 tweets
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

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