Greg Tucker-Kellogg Profile picture
Dad scientist. Biology prof in Singapore post biotech industry career. Musician on the side. Occasional tweets in Chinese. (he/him)
Jun 3, 2024 8 tweets 2 min read
This is certainly *not* a bombshell, but it provides a good way of telling whether someone has any idea how the NIH works with intellectual property (in the quoted tweet, the answer to that question is "no".) A short explainer: 🧵1/ Why are NIH scientists getting royalties from pharma companies? Because they, as researchers, make inventions or discoveries that the NIH licenses to pharma companies. The NIH can't keep its discoveries as trade secrets, so what gets licensed is only what gets patented. 2/
Jan 14, 2024 22 tweets 6 min read
A few days ago @dr_barrett, @Owensmith62Owen and I published a letter to @IntJCanc in response to a paper by @michalmolcho et al. I'm not a sociologist, but Molcho appears to have done a lot of important work on the impact of social inequalities, esp. in adolescent health. 🧵 1/ In their paper, Molcho et al look at a potentially important question: do social inequalities (sex and deprivation in Ireland, specifically) result in different "treatment receipt" for childhood cancers? 2/
Aug 16, 2023 14 tweets 3 min read
Two 2022 @CureusInc papers were hailed by some as the most overwhelming positive results from observational studies of ivermectin for Covid-19.

We show that the results from both studies can be entirely explained by untreated statistical artefacts 🧵1/

medrxiv.org/content/10.110… The papers were based on a citywide registry in Itajaí, Santa Catarina, Brazil. The city started a program in early July 2020 that allowed residents to receive ivermectin for use on two consecutive days every 15 days at 0.2 mg/kg. Initially, a lot of people signed up. 2/
Jun 20, 2023 21 tweets 22 min read
@scotub @MJnanostretch @PatrickSSte @Biorealism OK, I'll give it an honest effort. But if MJ continues his childish belittling, I'll block him and suggest you do the same in the interest of real dialogue.

The early A and B lineages are distinguished by mutations at two sites. A is T/C at those sites, and B is C/T. @scotub @MJnanostretch @PatrickSSte @Biorealism The haplotype in B is seen in previously sequenced related bat coronaviruses, and also in early cases at the market. There are also a small number of early cases that show C/C or T/T haplotypes, but those are very infrequent, and it was unclear how to interpret them.
Mar 22, 2023 5 tweets 4 min read
In the last day *alone*, you've hyped false allegations against @acritschristoph et al, repeated and amplified falsehoods about a table in their paper, hyped absolute *nonsense* about genomic DNA depletion, and made (and deleted) false accusations against @angie_rasmussen @acritschristoph @angie_rasmussen Receipts: part 1. Hyping false allegations against @acritschristoph et al. (Note: GISAID withdrew its statement, issued a revised statement without accusations, and restored access to the authors after the authors documented their communications) ImageImageImage
Mar 21, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
🚨🚨READERS OF GAO ET AL 🚨🚨

"...and human nucleic acid was removed using an enrichment kit to improve the sensitivity of viral RNA detection."

This is almost surely generic gDNA depletion. Nobody's doing hsDNA subtractive hybridisation on environmental swab samples for NGS. It's really astonishing how many scientists adopted a literal interpretation of that line from Gao et al because they wanted to use it against @acritschristoph et al's new report. I mean, COME ON
Mar 21, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
Those who find that Gao et al make a compelling case for human introduction of the virus to the market rely heavily on arguments summarised in Figure 4 (4B below). You can't find those arguments compelling and also discard the new analysis of susceptible wildlife as "nothing new" In fact, as @PeaseRoland points out for Figure 4B and I mentioned for FIgure 4A, there are reasons to be cautious in accepting Gao et al's interpretations of their own figure.

But at any rate, the new results really are interesting, so let's turn to those.
Mar 18, 2023 7 tweets 3 min read
I want to expand on this point about the environmental sampling because people seem to have missed how central this (now putatively falsified) assertion is to the lab leak argument. 🧵 I'll start with a counterpoint by @WashburneAlex: finding evidence of SARS-CoV-2 susceptible animals proves nothing about viral spillover. Good point, Alex; alone, it does not.
Mar 18, 2023 9 tweets 2 min read
About the new findings (shown at SAGO meeting on Tuesday) from analysis of environmental sequencing data at Wuhan HSM. What can we say from news reports of a presentation at a meeting we didn't attend? ("We" here being most of us). Not as much as we'd like, but not nothing 🧵 First, I'll start with an agreement with lab-leakers: the news reports are FAR too breathless for something that's not available for public and scientific scrutiny. There *is* something that's essential to report and important for our understanding of what happened, though.
Sep 16, 2022 10 tweets 5 min read
The Lancet Commission Report's treatment of Covid origins is the opposite of what it pretends to be: it calls for inquiry, but actively contributes to disinformation.

The @Commissioncovid report ironically COVERS UP inquiry into Covid origins 1/10 The most important and substantive investigations into Covid origins in the last year are the @ScienceMagazine papers by Pekar et al (2022) and Worobey et al (2022), as well as the Gao et al preprint. According to @Commissioncovid, these never happened. 2/