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Alex Washburne Profile picture
@WashburneAlex
Dec 22, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
I had the privilege of explaining the reasons for a lab origin to a literal 5th grader the other day. The argument went as follows.

Suppose you found a giraffe in the streets of San Diego - do you think that's a wild giraffe?

1/
Furthermore, suppose the giraffe was glowing green like a jellyfish, a weird trait we've never seen before in a giraffe.

What if we found a proposal from 1 year earlier where scientists proposed to make a glowing-green giraffe in San Diego?

2/
Imagine if giraffes at the San Diego zoo had ear tags and you looked closer at the giraffe to find an unusual hole in both ears that is in the exact size & location we've documented in other zoo giraffes, and we can show these holes are anomalous in wild giraffes.

3/
When we put all of this info together - a proposal to make a weird organism, the location of emergence of exactly that organism, the unusual traits of the organism, the weird marks consistent with organisms made by these same people - it's clear this is not a wild giraffe

4/
DEFUSE proposed in 2018 to insert an FCS in a bat SARS-CoV reverse genetics system in Wuhan.

A bat SARS-CoV (giraffe) emerged in Wuhan (San Diego) with an FCS (green-glow) and the restriction map of a reverse genetics system (ear piercings consistent with ear tags).

5/5

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More from @WashburneAlex

Alex Washburne Profile picture
Mar 18
"Safety" cannot alone be justification for abridged liberties as many arguments over the use of government powers concern tradeoffs between safety and liberty.

Can we citizens never propose policies that advance liberty, even if they are less safe?

1/
Can I be censored for speaking up against public health recommendations that I think are ridiculous?

Is it okay for me to be shadowbanned for expressing my values to drink 3 beers a day instead of the "safe" recommendation of <1 glass of wine a day?

2/
Another point of Murthy v. Missouri concerns who gets to define "safety" to begin with.

As a scientist & statistician estimating risk, can I be censored if my estimates of risk are less than those used by the government?

Whose definitions of safety/risk are primary?

3/
Read 17 tweets
Alex Washburne Profile picture
Mar 17
There's a lot of toxic self-marginalization being used to bypass hard discussions on the probable lab origin of SARS-CoV-2

Providing no evidence of misogynistic behavior, scientists are pulling the woman card to play victim at the expense of critical conversations on biosafety. Image
A more critical and wholistic conversation about lab origin dialogue would focus on the Queen Bee behavior of self-declared "ad hominatrix" Angela Rasmussen and the way she curses and undermines women of color & folk of diverse backgrounds with different paradigmatic perspectives
When I sought to contextualize social scientific systems supporting risky work as banal, with appropriate context given to Hannah Arendt, many Jewish zoonotic-origin people claiming such an effort to draw comparison (through "banality", not "evil") was anti-semitic.
Read 10 tweets
Alex Washburne Profile picture
Feb 22
I wanted to add some clarity and transparency here by providing some first-person perspective on how @eLife handled our manuscript.

BLUF: eLife accepted our paper, fired its editor for expressing his long-held views, and then refused to publish our paper without good cause.

🧵
The paper is our paper documenting the anomalous BsaI/BsmBI map of SARS-CoV-2 and providing the important context that this map is consistent with how people made viruses in a lab pre-COVID.



2/biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
Our preprint received a high volume of public attention. We paid close attention to the feedback we received from the thousands of people who read our MS, and made slight modifications to our discussion section pointing to future work



3/
Read 18 tweets
Alex Washburne Profile picture
Jan 19
SARS-CoV-2 was most likely synthesized in a lab.

We predicted SARS-CoV-2 was assembled in six fragments with BsaI + BsmBI.

@emilyakopp found drafts the proposal to insert a furin cleavage site in a sarbecovirus ALSO proposed to assemble 6 fragments... and ordered BsmBI.

1/
Here's some key context - our thread found the BsaI/BsmBI "cutting/pasting" sites in SARS-CoV-2 to be anomalous among wild CoVs

and exactly what we'd expect from a virus synthesized by Ralph Baric's methods (ZhengLi in Wuhan was a student of Baric)



2/
The DEFUSE proposal is a research proposal that aimed to insert a furin cleavage site in a bat SARS coronavirus in Wuhan.

It was submitted in 2018, there had never been a SARS COV with an FCS in 1K years of evolutionary time until SARS2 showed up with an FCS in 2019.

3/
Read 11 tweets
Alex Washburne Profile picture
Jan 9
Fauci is lying, and I don't say that lightly.

I've treated this piecemeal, but now I'm going to make a thread.

Under any definition of gain of function research of concern (GOFROC), Fauci funded it.

1/
Fauci's main efforts to change definitions are either:

1) bat SARS coronaviruses are not "potentially pandemic pathogens"

or

2) It's not "GOFROC" if you're enhancing potentially pandemic pathogens to make a vaccine.

2/
Let's get super specific.

The NIH/NIAID grant in question, "Understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence" funded work on bat SARS-CoVs from 2018-2019 at a time when DEFUSE collaborators were all on the grant.



3/ nih.gov/sites/default/…
Image
Read 11 tweets
Alex Washburne Profile picture
Jan 9
If you think we've had a full investigation into SARS-CoV-2 origins...

think again.

If it weren't for independent sleuths & investigative journalists, we wouldn't have DEFUSE, the blueprint for SARS2, the October 2019 emails of NIAID on a call with DEFUSE authors & more...

1/
Image
Dr. Fauci and NIAID have not been transparent about the nature of research on that call.

David Morens, a program officer at NIAID, was using gmail to coordinate with gain of function allies but we don't know if Morens violated other laws besides federal records

2/ Image
Fauci hasn't disclosed what he discussed with his deputy, Hugh Auchincloss, when he heard SARS-CoV-2 might have come from a lab and demanded Hugh do urgent work.

3/ Image
Read 7 tweets

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