Thread by @acritschristoph

There has been much recent misinformation about COVID-19 origins that we can now debunk.

A thread on 2 topics:
A. How the ODNI report debunks multiple lab origins rumors.
B. Where these inaccurate media reports originated, and why we knew they were wrong.
dni.gov/files/ODNI/doc…

Overview of ODNI report:
1. No evidence for genetic engineering (virologists agree!)
2. Rumors of sick researchers at the WIV are uninformative of COVID-19 origins, and previously reported details are wrong.
3. The virus was not at the WIV before late Dec 2019 outbreak.

Part A:
ODNI states there is no evidence of a "biosafety incident" at the WIV, and a biosafety training in 2019 was completely routine. This directly debunks a GOP report and reporting by ProPublica on this topic, which suffered from a myriad of issues.
https://t.co/kvECQH4COh

https://twitter.com/zhihuachen/status/1586271619684896769

Now, we can get to the recent media circus and conspiracy speculation over sick researchers.

The ODNI report does two things: (a) debunks specific claims made by the sources this information was leaked by, and (b) firmly concludes this rumor is not informative of origins.

There are hundreds of scientists working at the WIV, it is an institution comparable to Scripps or Fred Hutch here in the US. It is of course not a surprise that a few people there were sick in the fall!
But let's get into the specific claims made this report debunks:

The rumor that the researchers were hospitalized for COVID-19 symptoms is directly debunked. This misinformation was reported by a variety of sources, just a few examples:
@JCalvertST
@KatherineEban https://t.co/EBDe9vdF8C https://t.co/xwheV9aMq2thetimes.co.uk/article/inside…
vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/t…

The further rumor that the researchers were severely ill, or that their symptoms were indicative of COVID-19, is directly debunked by this work.


Presumably, the rumor that the wife of a researcher died (see Times above) is also debunked by this section. https://t.co/g2SGFACve9wsj.com/articles/intel…

The rumor that there were "three" researchers working in the lab of Shi Zheng-li or on coronaviruses fails to be confirmed. Indeed, all it says is that some researchers had "historically conducted research into animal respiratory viruses", which sounds like anyone at WIV.

Hopefully, the list of inaccuracies above can convince folks that the "anonymous" (see below) sources for these claims, the reporters relying on them, and the twitter personalities boosting them, are just not trustworthy on this topic.

Now, let's get into part (B): where do these lab leak rumors come from? And how did we know that the recent media speculation was all but certainly going to be wrong?

The claim that members of Shi's lab went to the hospital with COVID-19-like symptoms in 2019 started from a 2021 Trump administration State Department "fact sheet", put out days before the administration left. 2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-act…

This report was not the work of super-spies with top secret intel: instead, it was the concoction of a few ex-Trump officials at the State Department: David Asher, Miles Yu, maybe one or two others (a right-wing think-tank kind of crowd).

The sick lab workers claim, in the way that lies do, grew slowly since then:
"several researchers" became "three". Soon, they worked "in the coronavirus lab". Next, they had "loss and smell and ground glass opacities". They even said one's wife died!

https://twitter.com/flodebarre/status/1671602048331022336

Remember, the report directly debunks many specific claims from these sources. It tells us symptoms were not severe, not indicative of COVID-19, and they were not hospitalized. There is no indication that they were in Shi's lab, could be any of the 100s of scientists at WIV.

So, ex-Trump officials went around last month trying to sell a new story to reporters: that they had the names of three members of Shi's lab who were sick. They sent their same story to dozens of journalists to find one to fool. But they made a mistake...

https://twitter.com/antonioregalado/status/1671177509650542600

Two scientists they named, Ben Hu and Yan Zhu are in Shi's lab. They are authors on the first paper on SARS-CoV-2:

(Yes, they actually want you to believe that Ben Hu's research killed his wife and weeks later he wrote a pretend paper about the virus)nature.com/articles/s4158…

The final name they gave was "Yu Ping" (Yu is her surname) a Masters student co-advised by Shi. She graduated in summer 2019, and submitted her thesis in June, see below. She is on one paper with Shi, published in Apr 2019. Her work was computational.
drive.google.com/drive/folders/…

Unlikely that Yu was in Shi's lab in Nov 2019 after graduation. Her last paper with the lab was Apr 2019.

But her thesis (in Chinese) was shared in 2021 by Twitter conspiracy theorists as proof that Shi's lab was hiding... something. (note: the thesis was published publicly)

So they named (and the media parroted): "Ben Hu, Yan Zhu, Yu Ping".
But there is a strange inconsistency. The first two names are written the western way: family name second. The third the Chinese way: family name first. Why report the names inconsistently? h/t @zhihuachen

But that gave it all away. The reason why the name orders were inconsistent is because Asher and crew got Ben Hu's and Yan Zhu's names from their paper, but Ping Yu's name from the chinese copy of her thesis shared through conspiracy circles, so her ordering is the Chinese way.

Multiple lab-leak fanatic journalists (e.g. @zeynep) parroting these claims repeated the same three names over with this inconsistency, a game of telephone that appears to lead back to an origin in conspiracy tweets (and an awkward lack of basic fact checking).

So, to recap: this claim was about a co-advised computational student who graduated in June 2019, we only know this from ex-Trump grifters confirmed lying about other facts, they can't even get her name straight, and it seems like they just ripped it from conspiracy tweets.

Remember, the reporters above didn't just get the facts wrong: the articles above really seemed to purposefully try to confuse readers by obscuring that their "sources" were just a couple of ex-government Trump officials, who they laundered the opinions of uncritically

And take the time to note how the usual lab origins twitter fanatics needed nothing more than anonymous unsupported claims to basically proclaim victory last week for their otherwise still completely baseless hypothesis...

In science, you ask for evidence. Even if it wasn't kinda obvious that the three names were a fabrication, they'd still have to present *methods and evidence* for it. Where would the data come from? What was the source?

The current major push from conspiracy theorists is now that the US government is also hiding "proof" of COVID-19 laboratory origins from the public. China, the virology community, and now the US gov: the conspiracy grows!

It will grow and grow. There will always be an explanation why they find nothing. There will always be an explanation for how the conspiracy could twist around the data and the facts, so "you can't prove it didn't happen".

your choice is whether to follow them down that road

In an ideal world journalists would be covering the points above, and more, for all of us. But truth is in our world there are few to no incentives to speak out about this stuff- there's little upside and those who have tried in the past get viciously attacked.

And we end up in a position where half the world, especially the most qualified people, find the news like above is so ridiculous, tiring, and endless, that it isn't worth responding to, and where the other half takes each "bombshell article" completely seriously.

All you can do is speak out a bit about it, but in the end it's hopeless - twitter is a right wight platform where conspiracy theories dominate! But hope a little bit can help.

@PatrickSSte The Huanan Market.