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Alex Washburne Profile picture
Alex Washburne
@WashburneAlex
Deaf guy, great listener! Princeton PhD Math/Stats/Bio/Finance Opinions my own 👌🤓
Patrioticats on the prowl Profile picture fche Profile picture Medical Science and Technology #earlytreatments Profile picture Ava Profile picture The Millennial VC Profile picture 20 subscribed
Mar 18 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
"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/
Mar 17 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
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
Feb 22 • 18 tweets • 7 min read
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…
Jan 19 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
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/
Jan 9 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
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/
Jan 9 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
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
Dec 22, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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/
Dec 19, 2023 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
The evidence has accumulated slowly like the rising temperature of a pot of water, and it's easy for folk to be the frog that doesn't notice.

Let's examine the history of zoonotic origin claims/denials, lab origin claims, and rebuttals.

1/ When SARS-CoV-2 first emerged, Daszak, DEFUSE PI's and @JeremyFarrar organized a paper claiming lab origin theories were racist conspiracy theories & didn't list COI's

We later learned Daszak conspired to not author this paper so it "doesn't work in a counterproductive way"

2/ Image
Dec 18, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
What's missing from Loder's assessment here is the systemic pattern of which ideas were publishable and which ideas were not, which scientists were considered experts and which were not.

Lab origin theory was marginalized early on by the people who worked with & funded the labs. As an analogy, Loder's response is similar to dismissing a specific complaint about microaggression by saying that not every slight is a microaggression and just because someone claims it's microaggression doesn't mean it is

@Jim_Edwards covered the real, systemic problem.

2/
Dec 11, 2023 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
I want to briefly apologize to all the people who only know me via Twitter.

I've been using this platform to share knowledge & science about the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

This topic hits me personally because I was on a DARPA PREEMPT team pre-COVID

1/ The most important piece of evidence supporting lab origin theories is a 2018 grant - the DEFUSE grant - proposed to the DARPA PREEMPT call.

The grant proposed to modify bat SARS CoVs in exactly the ways SARS-CoV-2 is modified.



2/documentcloud.org/documents/2106…
Dec 11, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
DEFUSE is the clearest blueprint for how to make a virus like SARS-CoV-2.

However, there is more evidence to suggest Daszak et al. were conducting GOF research in Wuhan, including the DEFUSE team, with involvement from NIAID.

1/ The following authors:

- Daszak
- Baric
- ZhengLi
- Linfa Wang

had never before (to the best of my knowledge) published anything together except for their DEFUSE proposal.

Finding these authors together in 2019 suggests a continuation of that specific collaboration.

2/ Image
Dec 7, 2023 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
As a scientist & citizen, I find it deeply disturbing that we don't have independent investigations & accountability.

EcoHealth appears so deeply connected as if it's above the law and beyond the reach of research ethics.

We are a system of laws, not powerful connections. Let's elaborate the ways in which Daszak has violated research ethics and obstructed investigations.

Daszak lobbied Fauci to overturn the moratorium on gain of function research of concern and knew this would affect his own funding.



2/
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Nov 24, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
The mainstream media rely heavily on academics with key credentials to certify scientific information.

The challenge with the likely lab origin of SARS-Cov-2 is the proliferation of conflicts of interests in the scientists who are supposed to certify scientific info here.

1/ For example, virologists like @profvrr, Christian Drosten, Ron Fouchier and others have centered themselves as "the experts", but they all have a very contentious history advocating in favor of the kinds of risky research believed to have led to SARS-CoV-2.

2/
Sep 30, 2023 • 27 tweets • 5 min read
"Dr. Daszak...

Were you ever - intentionally or unintentionally - involved in research that increased the viral titers in humanized mice, human receptor binding, or other traits indicative of transmissibility, of a potentially pandemic pathogen like a bat SARS CoV?

1/ Were you the PI of the DEFUSE grant?

Is this grant on record the grant that you submitted to DARPA?

Did you disclose the DEFUSE grant to the @WHO when appointed as US emissary in the COVID origins investigation? When appointed at @TheLancet origins investigation?

2/
Sep 30, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
One note for the record:

While Daszak has behaved unethically in his failure to disclose conflicts of interests & his attempts to misinform the world that a lab origin is a "conspiracy theory"

It's possible for SARS-Cov-2 to have been made without Daszak's knowledge.

1/ The Chinese government is notorious for its theft of trade secrets and so the DEFUSE grant even passing through Shi ZhengLi's computer would give the Chinese surveillance state access to this proposal.

One can think of many reasons why the PLA or CCP might want to do DEFUSE.

2/
Sep 27, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The anomalously bad publications & public health policy pushed by some major scientists (e.g. America's Doctor Anthony Fauci, Andersen & Holmes et al) is starting to make sense.

We're getting closer to a more complete history of the COVID-19 pandemic and public health policy. Not only did Fauci send the ghostwritten Proximal Origin paper to the State Department instead of more relevant information on documented GOF work in Wuhan funded by NIAID, but @K_G_Andersen used his position in the National Academy to push this idea to OSTP and beyond.

2/
Jul 27, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Questions for @PeterDaszak

- How many bat samples did you ship to the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
- How long did it typically take from sample collection to sequencing?
- Did you know about RaTG13 before 2020?
- Was an FCS inserted into a bat SARS CoV before DEFUSE?

1/ - Why did you propose inserting FCS's in the DEFUSE grant when the proposal called for the more limited identification of "jump-capable quasispecies"?
- Did you receive @WellcomeTrust funding prior to the pandemic?
- Why did you call a lab origin a "conspiracy theory"?

2/
Jul 24, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
They’re probably doing what they‘ve always done:

Skim headlines, not methods. Support a paper based on the prestige of its authors, not the soundness of its science. Worry about grants.

Proximal Origin is a work of art revealing the banality of scientists in our current system It was academics who justified racism based on measurements of skulls

It was academics who came up with eugenics and seriously entertained it

It was scientists who injected syphilis in people at Tuskegee

It was scientists & researchers who immortalized Henrietta Lacks.

2/
Jul 22, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Holy…

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems @MartinaSisters may have uncovered a scientifically-documented precedent of

PRRAR

or the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site.

It’s been published in cat coronaviruses far from Wuhan. Here’s what I’m seeing

1/ Here’s a 2013 paper collecting feline coronavirus sequences from cats in the US and examining variation in their furin cleavage sites at the S1/S2 junction.

A great collection of FCS variation which includes PRRAR in some samples



2/ ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

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Jul 20, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
🚨🚨 unethical research conduct 🚨🚨

@K_G_Andersen: “just approved this paper for @biorxivpreprint, please keep confidential for now”

@cshperspectives Dr. Andersen used his position as BioRxiv screener to share confidential
MS’s with co-authors @edwardcholmes et al https://t.co/u7anRp4Ipg
Image His sharing of confidential MS’s from other authors provides a precedent to Andersen’s later appearance with Dr. Fauci, offering to use his position as BioRxiv screener to help Bloom withdraw a manuscript finding early sequences that complicate a simple zoonotic origin.

2/
Jul 18, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Drs. Fauci and Collins may have had the biggest COI's in the history of public health policy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fauci admits hearing that a lab origin was highly likely due to gain-of-function research in a lab he & Collins funded.

1/


Image
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Image Then, Fauci & Collins, with the help of @JeremyFarrar, proceed to prompt, edit (read: ghostwrite), and promote the Proximal Origins paper claiming a lab origin is "implausible".

Fauci used his position as head of NIAID to advertise this paper on international TV.

2/
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