I am leaving @BiosafetyNow. I always knew there was some professional risk to me speaking out, but my advocacy has now become a liability that I can no longer ignore. 1/5 Going forward I will also be unavailable for public comment on the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the ramifications for science, and the risks of future lab-generated pandemics. 2/5

Kristian Andersen is making false statements to counter the claim that DEFUSE is a blueprint for SARS-CoV-2. He calls this assessment of DEFUSE a "conspiracy theory" in order to silence those of us who disagree with him. 1/ Contrary to what Andersen says, DEFUSE does *not* say that changes will be made only to S2' and not to S1/S2. DEFUSE does not even use the terms S2' or S1/S2. Rather, DEFUSE lumps both of these into one term: "proteolytic cleavage sites in S2". 2/

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began, a small group of prominent virologists has carried out a systematic campaign of public intimidation to silence other scientists, reporters, and members of the public who question them. I have never seen anything like it. 1/6 Many of those carrying out this intimidation campaign are key authors on the primary scientific publications promoting a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. That these scientists are working so hard to silence critics of their own research should be a major scandal within science. 2/6

Fauci repeatedly minimizes and misleads in response to David Wallace-Well's questions about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. 🧵 1/n

nytimes.com/interactive/20… "Both A and B came from the market. A and B weren’t anyplace else early on." This statement is false. Pekar et al. report many isolates of the A lineage far from the market, and only 1 isolate of lineage A in the market. 2/n

We wasted a news cycle on this!?

Highlights of the Crits-Christoph et al. preprint 🧵
zenodo.org/record/7754299 Crits-Christoph et al. find no statistical association between SARS-CoV-2 RNA and raccoon dog DNA/RNA. Or between SARS-CoV-2 RNA and the DNA/RNA fromofany other animal. Why? Because *all* samples analyzed are SARS-CoV-2 positive, regardless of what animal/human DNA is in them.

We at @BiosafetyNow urge media outlets to correct misleading articles about raccoon dogs and the origins of COVID-19.
biosafetynow.org/press-release-… On Thursday, March 16, The Atlantic published an article titled “The strongest evidence yet that an animal started the pandemic” [1]. Similar stories in other influential publications soon followed...

“Skeptics will likely be eager to poke holes in the team’s new findings…” Then perhaps it would make sense to ask a skeptic and report what they say.

https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/1636486931184844802

First of all, it would be nice to see an actual preprint. It’s hard for anyone to assess whether what these folks are saying makes sense unless it’s written down.

The papers by Worobey et al. and Pekar et al. in @ScienceMagazine have a strange preface--written by the journal, not the authors--titled "Pandemic epicenter". It's weird, troubling, and wrong. It should be removed. 🧵 "As 2019 turned into 2020, a coronavirus spilled over from wild animals into people,...." This ignores the fact that many scientists still believe zoonosis has not been proven. It also implies, strangely, that zoonosis was proven even *before* these papers were published.