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Alina Chan Profile picture
@Ayjchan
May 4 • 9 tweets • 3 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
This is the strongest evidence for a raccoon dog #OriginOfCovid?

"Débarre.. who co-authored the first report on the animal sequences says that the latest analysis could never have answered the question of which animal hosts shed the viral material"
nature.com/articles/d4158…
Huanan market map from the Chinese CDC paper.
Most Covid cases were on the west side of the market, which had total retail space >9 NFL fields. But cases did not correlate with sale of wildlife and do not even cluster around the wildlife stalls. Image
We also know from the Chinese CDC data that the areas associated with the raccoon dog stall were aggressively oversampled.

Market had 678 stalls.

About 1 in 6 of the total samples were taken from that 1 raccoon dog stall's areas in the market and warehouse.
They took so many samples from that one stall because they had suspected a wildlife #OriginOfCovid and were looking for the intermediate host.

The Chinese CDC literally announced this in Jan 2020.
It was only in May 2020 that the Chinese CDC director said the market was just a superspreader event. None of the animal samples taken tested positive for the virus. No infected animal was found.
Again, looking at the map of the market, you can see that the virus was widespread across this space >9 NFL fields in size. Even surface samples taken from the east side of the market tested positive for the virus.

Surfaces positive for virus don't cluster by sale of wildlife. Image
All of the data to date are fully consistent with a human superspreader event at that centrally located market.

We already knew potential intermediate hosts could have been there, but till today there is no evidence of any covid+ animal at the market or its supply chain.
There are many ways a sick person could've sparked off a superspreader at the market. It was within short walking distance from a large hospital and just a few blocks from the Wuhan CDC. It was next to a busy metro hub and in a district with high population and elderly density. Image
If the Chinese CDC had descended on a metro station, school, or restaurant in the city at the end of 2019, they probably would've also found virus on the surfaces there.

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
May 6
Listened to a podcast where a disease ecologist said the words "jump" & "spillover" don't accurately describe the way animal pathogens emerge in humans.

I agree. To me, it's like a shots on goal scenario where a pathogen has to take numerous opportunities to cause an outbreak.
This is why I was perturbed by the abrupt appearance of a pandemic-ready SARS-like virus in a city with no history of SARS-like viruses in its people or markets.

Instead it had a unique lab studying how SARS-like viruses jump between species & infect humanized mice & civets.
With world-leading SARS virus hunters based in Wuhan, you'd think that they would know if SARS-like viruses were taking shots on goal in their city center.

Instead they used their own city's population as a negative control for exposure to SARS-like viruses. Zero shots on goal.
Read 6 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
May 5
One thing I learnt from the raccoon dog saga is how easy it is for this group of scientists to schedule meetings with the @WHO SAGO to present analysis based on unavailable/incomplete data which cannot be checked or reproduced by other scientists.

From @TheAtlantic article: Image
@WHO @TheAtlantic The single sample that caused so much hype in the media is indistinguishable from a sample that was cross-contaminated during processing, ie it doesn't tell us if that market surface had both raccoon dog and virus.

See @jbloom_lab analysis:
biorxiv.org/content/10.110… Image
Despite how wobbly this data was, this group of scientists and virologists, including the Proximal Origin authors, ran to @WHO to present their analysis and told the press that the data indicated infected animals at the market.
zenodo.org/record/7754299 Image
Read 6 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
Apr 27
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
Read 7 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
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
Alina Chan Profile picture
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
Alina Chan Profile picture
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

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