The soft corruption behind the Proximal Origin letter must be investigated and the authors and their handlers held accountable.

How else will you deter scientists from hiding the involvement of powerful funders in their papers and their "scientific" conclusions?

https://twitter.com/mbeisen/status/1922311187230031976

Jeremy Farrar, the scientist who orchestrated the Proximal Origin letter was not named as an author or acknowledged. He was the director of the Wellcome Trust and had funded one of the authors.

Farrar is now @WHO chief scientist.

https://x.com/Ayjchan/status/1902056288265367989

The executive order signed on Monday was not a ban or moratorium on risky pathogen research with the potential to cause pandemics.

It was a charge for OSTP and other agency heads to come up with a new policy & strategy for governing and tracking such research in under 180 days. I do not see any wording in the executive order asking scientists to pause their research if it falls under the definition of dangerous gain-of-function.
whitehouse.gov/presidential-a…

Regarding the possibility that Covid may have spread at the Oct 2019 Wuhan military games, my main question is why noone across multiple countries had the presence of mind to collect & store samples from patients till tests were available.

There should be changes going forward. According to Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness: "Service members were not tested... as testing was not available at this early stage of the pandemic."
freebeacon.com/wp-content/upl…

I encourage experts who have insisted on a natural origin of Covid-19 to gracefully change their public stance instead of doubling down on the threadbare evidence for the wet market hypothesis.

You could acknowledge that you initially trusted your colleagues in China/US to tell the truth. But time and time again over the past 5 years, it has been shown that they withheld critical evidence from you and the public:
1⃣The 2018 Defuse proposal
2⃣Low biosafety standards for experiments where live viruses are produced and used in human cell infection studies
3⃣Risky pathogen experiments and surprising gain of function
4⃣Missing pathogen sample database, viruses discovered after 2015 largely not shared with US collaborators
5⃣Closest virus relative that we know of was collected from a mine where people died from suspected SARS-like virus infection

The studies published last month where Wuhan scientists experimented with potentially dangerous pathogens at low biosafety opened your eyes to the level of reckless ambition in their research.

Given these betrayals, it is fully within reason to retract your trust and re-evaluate all the available evidence. Those of you who have access to intelligence could say that the non-public evidence has cast a new light on the public evidence and strengthens the case for a lab origin of Covid-19.

This is better than continuing to argue that you somehow know all the viruses in the Wuhan lab's collection and somehow know they didn't follow through on their 2018 plans to put furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses and study these at low biosafety exactly like they said they would. For those experts who haven't even looked at the Defuse proposal and its drafts, the Wuhan-US scientists clearly said they were interested in furin cleavage sites at the spike S1/S2 junction, and would insert these into novel SARS-like viruses in the lab (not closely related to the 2003 SARS virus as that would be dangerous). They would test the ability of these SARS-like viruses with inserted cleavage sites to infect human cells and cause pathogenesis in vivo.

The Wuhan lab was regularly synthesizing novel coronavirus genomes without leaving any sign of lab manipulation. They used a protocol with trypsin-supplemented media to retain cleavage sites in the viruses. They did much of the work, including infection experiments in human cells, at BSL-2. Their US collaborator Ralph Baric has repeatedly criticized them for doing the work at low biosafety.

h/t @emilyakopp for FOIA'ing the Defuse proposal drafts.

According to Zeit Online, German Chancellery consulted with US Director of National Intelligence in 2023, who said there was nothing to the lab leak hypothesis.

They doubted "Eierköpfe" (egghead) scientists in intelligence knew better than leading virologists around the world.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1899828081075896802

In the US, something similar was happening where scientists in intelligence agencies also assessed a likely lab origin of Covid but were sidelined.

"The dominant view within the intelligence community was clear when... the director of national intelligence, and a couple of her senior analysts, briefed Biden... concluded with “low confidence” that Covid-19 had emerged when the virus leapt from an animal to a human."
wsj.com/politics/natio…

German intelligence now assesses a 80-95% likelihood of a lab origin of Covid-19.
Links:
nzz.ch/international/…

I am not 100% convinced Covid came from a lab. I still think there is a small chance the virus emerged in Wuhan without the help of research activities. However, this would mean:

1⃣ The Wuhan-US scientists' entire framework about the spillover risks of SARS-like viruses, building on research and data collected over more than a decade, was incorrect.

2⃣ A highly transmissible, super stealthy virus well adapted for causing uncontrollable outbreaks in multiple animal species left zero trace of its origin in the wildlife or fur farms of China/SE Asia after emerging in only Wuhan out of 1000s of other populous cities.

3⃣ Out of all possible viruses to cause a pandemic and all times for a pandemic to occur, it was an unprecedented SARS-like virus with a novel furin cleavage site, matching the description of a 2018 US-Wuhan research proposal, emerging in Wuhan where scientists worked with such viruses at low biosafety, less than 2 years after said proposal was drafted.

It's not impossible that leading experts were completely mistaken about the exceedingly low odds of such viruses emerging in Wuhan.

It's not impossible that, in 2019, nature churned out a virus matching the scientists' 2018 research plans and that virus emerged in only Wuhan of all places.

But you'd have to be very motivated to believe Covid-19 emerged naturally. We are unlikely to reach 100% certainty unless a whistleblower appears or the Chinese authorities one day assess that it is in their interest to share the truth.

I am still hopeful that this will happen one day. I believe in human courage.

Top journals have the power to set global biosafety standards.

It's a problem that they do not see this as their moral responsibility. By publishing & celebrating risky research done at questionable biosafety, they incentivize the 'work fast break things' model of research.

https://twitter.com/emilyakopp/status/1898031837403922539

I've given up on journals taking the initiative to be responsible members of the scientific community.

It is up to the U.S. government to tell them to behave responsibly or do business elsewhere.

Dear @NSAGov I've just google searched several human transmissible viruses with the aim of understanding how many are not governed by the Federal Select Agents Program and can be used in gain-of-function research by privately funded groups.

I am not doing anything nefarious 🙏 @NSAGov The answer is there are a lot of human transmissible viruses that are not governed by the Federal Select Agents Program and can be used in gain-of-function research by privately funded groups.

Leading science organizations and journals appear to be utterly tone deaf.

Up till last month, the National Academies kept Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance as head of their forum on microbial threats. Nature journal continues to play the mouthpiece of the Proximal Origin authors & friends.

There appears to be zero introspection that they created/are part of a system that incentivizes risky research including the work in Wuhan that likely caused the pandemic.

Just this month, another top journal published 2 studies where MERS-like viruses were used in human cell infection studies at low biosafety (BSL-2) in Wuhan. The journal did not attach notices of concern to either paper.

Are we just waiting for another outbreak of ambiguous origin to occur? And will we endure more years of "it was the pangolins/bats/raccoon dogs/name your favorite intermediate host?" @CellCellPress when you publish papers that handle animal pathogens with unclear (human) pandemic potential at low biosafety, you signal to the rest of the scientific community that this is totally fine and will be celebrated in the best scientific journals.

There is speculation that US funded collaborations with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to keep an eye on virus research there.

The problem is that, when a pandemic happened, the middleman did not produce intelligence but also actively suppressed the lab leak theory.

https://twitter.com/chiproytx/status/1886851958629163382

When the SARS-CoV-2 sequence was released in Jan 2020, EcoHealth could've said
1⃣They planned to put furin cleavage sites in SARS-like viruses
2⃣In 2013, the Wuhan lab discovered a new lineage of SARS-like viruses that the covid virus belongs to
3⃣Work was done at low biosafety

No punches pulled piece on #OriginOfCovid by @ianbirrell

"The pandemic revealed the arrogant and contemptuous behaviour of leading scientific figures, aided by prominent academic journals, patsy journalists and weak politicians."
unherd.com/2025/01/chinas… @ianbirrell I suggest one correction @ianbirrell please replace 'despite' with 'because of':

WHO "hired Sir Jeremy Farrar, despite the former Wellcome Trust boss’s exposure as a central player in... branding any suggestions Covid could have come from a laboratory as conspiracy theory."

5 years ago, the authors of Proximal Origin wondered where the pandemic virus had been transmitting *intensely* so that it gained a furin cleavage site and passed it on.

One said, "No way the selection could occur in the market. Too low a density of mammals." #OriginOfCovid Until today, there has been no reported sign of intense transmission of the virus in animals prior to the detected outbreak in Wuhan.

Investigators, including one Proximal Origin author, searched fur farms in China - no sign of any SARS-like virus.
nature.com/articles/s4158…

"5% chance that H5N1 starts a sustained pandemic in humans in the next year. 50% chance that H5N1 starts a sustained pandemic in humans in the next twenty years..."

I invite @slatestarcodex to estimate the chances of a lab-based flu pandemic by 2025!
astralcodexten.com/p/h5n1-much-mo… @slatestarcodex For consideration, only 4 projects have been flagged by NIH for HHS review since 2017.

One project, funded till 2020, proposed creating ferret transmissible H5N1.

One project, proposed in 2024, was not funded by NIH so no info was made public.
aspr.hhs.gov/S3/Pages/Resea…

Peter Daszak, who partnered with the Wuhan lab that likely caused the pandemic and is being debarred by HHS, continues to chair @NASEM_Health's forum on microbial threats.

Daszak's forum is hosting @theNASEM workshop on the future emergence of pathogens.
nationalacademies.org/event/43921_01… @NASEM_Health @theNASEM The event disclaimer and website make no mention of Daszak's involvement in this event or any conflicts of interest.

In 2020, leading virologists deceived a @nytimes journalist, resulting in NYT dropping the lab leak hypothesis.

Years later, these virologists continue to deny their perfidy while attacking experts like @sigridbratlie who call out their deception.
telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/0… @nytimes @sigridbratlie At the @USFHealth Covid meeting, natural #OriginOfCovid proponents exalted one of these virologists.

Thankfully @ewinsberg read out the slack messages of these virologists which completely contrasted with their public stance.

I gave a 15min talk on a likely laboratory #OriginOfCovid at @USFHealth's @HdxAcademy meeting on hotly debated Covid topics earlier this month. The exchange with natural origin proponents and Q&A are worth watching. The recording is available now: digitalcommons.usf.edu/usfcovid/2024/… @USFHealth @HdxAcademy The meeting covered other topics including lockdowns, vaccines, and public health messaging. I left the meeting with my mind changed on one topic - a sign of high quality scientific exchanges on issues that remain unresolved.

National Academy of Sciences president @Marcia4Science says "NAS stands ready, as it always has, to advise the incoming administration."

How does @theNASciences plan to advise the new gov on #OriginOfCovid and research that can start pandemics?
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… @Marcia4Science @theNASciences In Feb 2020, @theNASEM convened 3 of the most highly conflicted experts to advise the US gov on #OriginOfCovid

They were Peter Daszak & Ralph Baric who collaborated with the Wuhan lab, and Kristian Andersen who published Proximal Origin. nationalacademies.org/news/2020/02/n…

Accidentally swore and got bleeped on my live interview with On Point @MeghnaWBUR while discussing why lab #OriginOfCovid must be investigated and why scientists must not lie or obfuscate the truth for political reasons.
wbur.org/onpoint/2024/0… @MeghnaWBUR Meghna did an excellent job putting the arguments of natural #OriginOfCovid proponents to me so I could refute them directly in the interview.

The scientific evidence does not support a double spillover of the virus at the Wuhan market.

https://x.com/Ayjchan/status/1819432932643062064

I respect Dr Fauci's decades of service in gov. Being in charge during a pandemic is no small challenge & no one can lead for so long without making mistakes. However, it needs to be said that Dr Fauci has not surrounded himself with wise & honest people regarding #OriginOfCovid

https://twitter.com/CBSMornings/status/1803170823324172336

These are the virologists & experts he trusted on #OriginOfCovid

In their private messages in early 2020, they mocked other virologists for not being able to predict their own lab leaks & misled a @nytimes journalist asking about a potential lab origin.

https://x.com/Ayjchan/status/1682074078914527255

Dr Bob Garry admitted we don't know what viruses were studied in Wuhan labs. The papers he cited in support of natural #OriginOfCovid have been thoroughly refuted (see below).

My response to Garry's testimony was submitted into record. Key points ⬇️
hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/origi… A research-related #OriginOfCovid is plausible and even considered more likely by some experts and US intelligence agencies.
goodjudgment.com/wp-content/upl…