Thread by @JamieMetzl

Because I am mentioned six times in the first few pages of the Morens email dump, I wanted to provide some personal history re the #COVID19 origins issue in the thread below. 🧵

Here is the full PDF of the just-released Morens communications. In his exchange with Peter Daszak on April 21, 2021, Morens and Daszak lament the “hellhounds” raising questions about a possible #COVID19 research related origin, referencing @R_H_Ebright @DavidRelman @mlipsitch and me. oversight.house.gov/wp-content/upl…

Morens and Daszak also express their fear of a bipartisan 9/11-style commission examining #COVID-19 origins and the US response to the outbreak. This is an idea I proposed in an August 2020 @thehill editorial. I was also in close touch with the office of Senator Menendez, then Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, promoting the idea. thehill.com/opinion/white-…

I am a Democrat who believes that carrying out a bipartisan (and nonpartisan) investigation into pandemic origins is essential. That’s why I’ve been working with congresspeople from both parties on this for years. My closest collaborator has been @RogerMarshallMD. I worked with the Senator to organize a bipartisan private briefing for Senators in August 2021 and provided input to draft legislation he promoted with @SenGillibrand. marshall.senate.gov/newsroom/press…

In his communication with Morens, Peter Daszak says, “They are also getting pressured from Jamie Metzl who's working with the internet conspiracy networks actively to promote their ‘Research’.” This is a reference to the work I had been doing since early 2020 raising questions about COVID-19 origins. To explain this reference and its implications, some background is required…

In late January 2020, I read a paper in @TheLancet written Chinese scientists showing that over a third of the early cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection were from people who’d had no exposure to the Huanan seafood market. This made it pretty clear the market was most likely not where the spillover happened but a place where the infection spread. Here’s my Twitter thread from two days ago explaining why my initial intuition was correct.

https://x.com/JamieMetzl/status/1792935939804631154

I was stunned when I read the Daszak et al February 2020 Lancet letter stating “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” How could they possibly have known whether the spillover had occurred in the wild or as a result of a research-related incident? It was pretty clear to me then, as it is now, that this was scientific propaganda and thuggery designed to promote the more convenient (and desirable) theory of natural origins and protect longstanding scientific collaborations with China. This was an outrageous and unacceptable violation of the scientific method. thelancet.com/journals/lance…

In February 2020, I started speaking out and doing media interviews on the COVID-19 origins issue. On April 16, 2020, I launched my website, which immediately garnered a great deal of media and other attention. I published an editorial in @Newsweek referencing pandemic origins. White House officials also shared my site internally and with foreign interlocutors. jamiemetzl.com/origins-of-sar…

Here’s my April 16, 2020 @CNN interview on #COVID19 origins.

In August 2020, I published this piece in @WSJopinion. wsj.com/articles/how-t…

When I started speaking publicly about COVID-19 origins, I felt quite alone. Over the course of 2020, however, I began to connect with others across the globe who were asking similar questions. That’s how I met people like @Ayjchan, @gdemaneuf, @R_H_Ebright @DavidRelman and others. Some very senior French academics were also raising similar issues. In November 2020, they put together what became unofficially known as the “Paris group” of experts. We held very professional monthly colloquia examining evidence re COVID-19 origins. This community, along with the more edgy DRASTIC, played an essential role in following the evidence and preventing the false narrative of confirmed zoonosis from becoming the norm. The professionalism of our gatherings contrasts sharply with the frat house misogyny of the Proximal Origin authors we’ve now read in their private slack channel.

All of us were stunned by the outrageous February 9, 2021 @WHO-China joint commission press event in Wuhan where the international experts were essentially coopted by the Chinese government and called the research-related origin hypothesis “extremely unlikely” and not worthy of further investigation while declaring the preposterous frozen food hypothesis worthy of examination. (It later turned out that our worst fears of cooptation were confirmed.) bmj.com/content/374/bm…

After the Wuhan press event, I reached out to my contacts at the highest levels of the WHO expressing my concern that confirming the Chinese propaganda from the Wuhan presser would pose an existential threat to the WHO. I was pleased when @DrTedros asserted a few days later, correctly, that all origin hypotheses needed to be explored. I’ve said it many times, but I believe Dr. Tedros is one of the great unsung heroes of the COVID-19 origins conversation. Without his leadership, the unsupported zoonosis propaganda could have effectively snuffed out the essential consideration of all credible origin hypotheses. reuters.com/business/healt…

At the same time, I suggested to our “Paris group” that we put together an open letter on pandemic origins. I was the lead drafter of this letter, working very closely with @Biol4Ever and @gdemaneuf. All of the signatories worked very hard on this document, actively collaborating through a joint Google doc. We released the letter on March 4, 2021. It ran first in the Wall Steet Journal and was then picked up by most major media across the globe. This was the first communication by a group of experts raising the possibility of the research-related origin and calling for a full scientific and forensic investigation. This open letter was the game changer in the public dialogue, in my view, along with important journalist pieces by the two Nicholases -- @nicholsonbaker8 and Wade. s.wsj.net/public/resourc…

This open letter was what Daszak and Morens were referring to when they said “They are also getting pressured from Jamie Metzl who's working with the internet conspiracy networks actively to promote their ‘Research’.” I should note that our open letter was the work of many experts, including many high-level and credentialed scientists. Calling our group “internet conspiracy networks” makes clear how desperate these guys were to stick to their preferred narrative. They weren’t even willing to consider that a large group of experts who had worked carefully and collectively on an important and referenced open letter might even have a perspective worthy of consideration. This raises an essential, meta point re the way the entire natural origins crew behaved, particularly in those early days.

After our “Paris group” open letter was published, the Relman et al May 2021 @ScienceMagazine letter and the important @LesleyRStahl @60Minutes piece helped break down the manufactured "consensus" the natural origins propagandists had so aggressively promoted. The leak of the DEFUSE proposal in September 2021 was also critical, even if it didn’t get nearly the attention it deserved. prod.vodvideo.cbsnews.com/cbsnews/vr/mp4…

Others may feel differently, but it’s my view that this close-nit community of natural origin advocates were so wedded to their priors they could not imagine even the possibility that the work they had carried out for decades to prevent pandemics -- with the best of intentions -- might possibly have contributed to the worst pandemic in a century. The right answer then was that we don’t know how the pandemic started but natural origins and a research-related origin are both distinct possibilities deserving the fullest possible investigation. People like Andrew Rambaut recognized this, but consciously decided to prioritize personal preferences and politics over the scientific method.

I believe that the big story of #COVID19 origins runs through China. Certainly, we must look at US-China collaborations, but it seems most likely that China took inspiration and know-how from those collaborations as part of its efforts to leapfrog over the USA in science and technology leadership. It’s a similar story to the CRISPR babies saga, in that sense. I was on the WHO expert advisory committee on human genome editing and have a long and deep relationship with China, so that dynamic was relatively easy to spot for me. Many scientists with no knowledge of China weren’t able to imagine that even a well-meaning scientist operating in China dealing with a sensitive topic is not the same as their Swiss counterpart. who.int/publications/i…

By all means we should ask tough questions of our own government in the United States. Kudos to @RepBradWenstrup and @COVIDSelect for leading that charge. It was my great honor to serve as the lead witness in the inaugural hearing. I look forward to Dr. Fauci’s testimony on June 3. oversight.house.gov/wp-content/upl…

Here’s my @kilmeade @foxandfriends interview from this morning re the Morens testimony. video.foxnews.com/v/6353523516112

My new book, Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform our Lives, Work, and World, will be released on June 11. The book is not about COVID-19 origins but I devote a number of pages both to this topic and the implications of US-China science and technology competition more generally. I also lay out some ideas for how we can build a safer future for all. superconvergencebook.com