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The Seeker Profile picture
The Seeker
@TheSeeker268
I am.
kiddphunk Profile picture Kahteei Profile picture giovanni dall'olio 🇮🇹🇪🇺🇺🇦 Profile picture fche Profile picture Ava Profile picture 33 subscribed
Jun 20, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
WSJ has confirmed the names of the sick Wuhan researchers. This is perhaps the most important additional clue that has come to light. This also fits with all the other insights we have.

I’ll just try to put some perspective. Ben Hu was part of the original DEFUSE proposal, and they planned to incorporate furin cleavage sites into SARS-like coronaviruses.

I think everyone knows this by now.
Jun 19, 2023 • 27 tweets • 7 min read
So I’ve been away for a while and probably for the first time, I think I’m behind the curve in the #OriginsofCOVID debate.

Some recent happenings led me back. Before I venture onto that, here’s a lil rundown, a repeat of sorts, of what I have been carrying with me all this time. It’s late 2019 and hospitals in Wuhan were overflowing with patients having SARS-like symptoms. Strict measures were put in place to restrict the flow of information.

In early 2020, news started trickling out of China - and I distinctly remember watching it with horror.
Apr 17, 2022 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
One of the deeply under appreciated aspects of #OriginofCovid is that, according to EcoHealth docs, in 2018, WIV had over 180 viral strains that could bridge the gap between SARS2 and RaTG13/BANAL. Over 125 viral strains in the spike range of SARS2 (and could evade mAb/vaccines). ImageImage And thousands of samples from where the nearest relatives were found.

Add to this, the extensive US and Chinese state-funded projects in the 2018-19 timeframe, with the same kind of work (with live viruses in BSL-2 & -3) that could’ve led to SARS2.
ImageImageImageImage
Apr 9, 2022 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
So a number of other people have been saying the same thing—that they learnt of the Wuhan outbreak in early/mid-December 2019. See some examples below. JP Prasad, who runs Alberta's supply procurement system "heard disturbing news about a 'strange flu' in Wuhan, in early December", and began stocking up on masks and equipments.
edmontonjournal.com/opinion/column…
Mar 18, 2022 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
#OriginOfCovid: Summary of what is known thus far..

- The precursor of SARS2 likely originated in bats in Yunnan/SE Asia.
- There is a direct and documented pathway from the regions where bats harbour these viruses to Wuhan, via WIV. Other ways of getting to Wuhan are possible. - Wuhan Institute of Virology was the closest place where closely related viruses existed.
- We don’t know where the first cases occurred but it was first identified at the Huanan market after it came to the attention of the doctors in Wuhan in late December 2019.
Mar 11, 2022 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Daszak examines his own coronavirus research in Wuhan, and issues a clean bill of health for himself. You’ll just have to read it…
theintercept.com/2022/03/11/cov… Daszak: humanized mice experiments weren't conducted by us.

So EcoHealth helped WIV import ans successfully breed humanized mice in 2018 and we are supposed to believe that they didn’t do that work although it was already funded by NIH? ImageImage
Mar 10, 2022 • 36 tweets • 8 min read
A key question about COVID's origin has been: how it got to Wuhan? At this stage, nobody knows for sure, but let's explore the two competing scenarios:

1) SARS2 was brought to the Wuhan market.
2) SARS2 was brought to the Wuhan lab.

This is important, so follow me... /🧵 Scenario #1: SARS2 was brought to the Wuhan market

Assuming this to be true, then there were two separate spillovers. First, it spilled over from bats to an intermediate host. Next, it spilled over from the intermediate host to humans.
Feb 27, 2022 • 20 tweets • 5 min read
Building on their previous papers, authors here present a new statistical analysis — as bulletproof science.

The data is good and layered, but the conclusions are based on indirect and questionable arguments. It is unpersuasive to me. Let me explain the reasons I say this. 🧵 The authors’ basic argument is: most of the (known) cases from Dec clustered around the market. There were raccoon dogs at the market (western section). There were +ve environment samples in that section. Therefore the virus jumped at the market. I don’t fundamentally buy that.
Feb 25, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I still find it so strange that certain scientists knew about plans to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses, but they didn't bother to disclose their grant proposal. I still find it very odd how almost no one told us that bat samples from SE Asia, including Laos, were being sent to Wuhan.
Feb 23, 2022 • 54 tweets • 21 min read
🦠 Global Virome Project MegaThread

Before starting, let one thing be clear: none of the following is enough to say SARS2 emerged from a lab, andno second-guessing their motives please.

But it is important to lay the facts as it is, so follow me here – and stay until the end. A little history: GVP was born in Aug 2016, in Bellagio, Italy, as an international effort to identify all zoonotic viruses with pandemic potential. It was spearheaded by EcoHealth Alliance.

They called it: "The Beginning of the End of the Pandemic Era”
globalviromeproject.org/our-history
Feb 19, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Many scientists "live in their own science-centric bubbles..sheltered from often sizeable cross-sections of citizens that feel disconnected from the scientific community."

I won't name names here, but I'm surprised how many scientists don't get this.
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… "The societal balance of power for scientific information has shifted away from legacy media, government agencies, and the scientific community. Now, social media platforms are the central gatekeeper of information and communication about science."
Feb 19, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
An incredibly moving post from @lukeshe33565277 who spent 5 years in China and worked just a few kms away from Mojiang mine - the site which was discovered by accident because researchers were tracking the source of a mysterious SARS-like outbreak in 2012. lilliputpress.ie/uncategorized/… "Too many indicators cluster about the lab and its sample collecting in the tropical south [...] The lab’s databanks are taken offline. The research withheld. The moves to sever communication look so obvious: they have a smell of absurdity that you recognize, having lived there."
Feb 18, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The question isn't how the virus got from bats to humans. The question is how did it travel from its reservoir - Yunnan/SE Asia - to Wuhan. One path is long and convoluted via some unidentified wildlife trade. Put it another way, a highly contagious virus traveled from its reservoir, singling out the one city where viruses of the same clade were being studied, and without leaving any trail of infection along the way.
Feb 16, 2022 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
Honestly no idea how a supposedly reasonable scientist can make such absurdist claims. Follow me for a moment - a short🧵. The author claims that there is an "apparent preponderance of hospitalized COVID-19 cases associated with this market" and uses it as the foundation to make the broadest possible assertion that there is "compelling evidence that community transmission started at the market."
Feb 12, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
So in 2014, Ron & Drosten - who were at the Feb 1 conference call with Fauci, Collins, Farrar & Andersen et al., and pushed back against lab origin - signed a statement saying they "are confident that biomedical research on potentially dangerous pathogens can be performed safely" I think this definitely qualifies as conflict of interest.

And come on, let's be real. Shi Zhengli and Daszak did their experiments with live viruses in a BSL-2 rated laboratory.
Feb 12, 2022 • 23 tweets • 8 min read
It is wildly disingenuous to try and place the wet market theory on an equal footing with the lab theory. Let me run a thread on this. 
A brief background: 80,000 animal samples were tested across China (including animals from Huanan market suppliers) and all were negative for SARS2. 

More than 2,000 samples from the Huanan market (including alive or frozen animals) were tested by CCDC and all were negative.
Feb 9, 2022 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
New @techreview piece from @janeqiuchina lets "Shi and her team tell their side of the story on the record" – which is good, but it will take more than words from people who have every reason to sweep the matter under the rug if it came from the lab.
technologyreview.com/2022/02/09/104… "Gao said his lab never analyzed the miners’ antibody status, and that Huang’s statement—possibly based on the false-positive results, which Shi discussed at an internal meeting in 2012—was erroneous."

Gao seems to have changed his mind. I wonder why.
Feb 8, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This is a very big deal if true: Hungarian scientists find "maybe one of the earliest" SARS2 variant from a contaminated sample in Shanghai, and they posit that it was likely generated from cell lines or animal models frequently used at WIV.
researchsquare.com/article/rs-133… h/t @vattay WIV used the services of Sangon Biotech (the same firm in Shanghai) to synthesize genes.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
Feb 2, 2022 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
It doesn't successfully counter anything. Let me explain in a brief 🧵:

1/ So first up, we are just supposed to casually ignore the staggering coincidence that the virus showed up in the same city where world's leading center for such viruses is located (in contrast to SARS1). 2/ From a purely mathematical point of view, it is very unlikely that the outbreak starts in the vicinity of a lab where experiments with novel SARS-like coronaviruses (of the same clade) were being carried out, and it still has nothing to do with the lab.
Feb 2, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I just want to know what "science" was conducted in those emails, that:

1. They had to be redacted.
2. They threw off such sound considerations with such confidence. 3. Whether they were guided by realpolitik, solidarity, their own interests, or other non-factual reasons. I like a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone, but I don't imply a conspiracy when self-preservation might be the answer.

We now know it was never a pure question of science. It was political from the start. See it in their own words here:
Jan 24, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Garry now: "Chinese researchers wouldn’t have used a virus so different from SARS1."

Garry then: "You were doing GoF research you would NOT use an existing close of SARS..These viruses are already human pathogens. What you would do is close a bat virus that had not yet emerged." Image I'm sorry but the toothpaste is out of the tube.