The five key arguments in @Ayjchan's essay, each of which is fully supported by hard evidence:

1. The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located. 2. The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature.

Five telling illlustrations from @Ayjchan's superbly clear essay in the New York Times.

The WHO's track record is not encouraging:

On 14 January 2020, at a time when hospitals in Wuhan were seeing a flood of Covid cases, many of whom had never been near animals in a market and some of whom were in turn infecting healthcare workers, the WHO repeated the Chinese government’s nonsensical insistence that you could normally only catch Covid from an animal, not a person: “it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission. The Taiwanese government had by then urged WHO to rethink this dud advice, but the WHO does not even recognise Taiwan’s existence.

"Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic.'"

A thread based on my Spectator article:

spectator.co.uk/article/virolo… "He is right. There is almost no debate about regulating high-risk virology, whereas the world is in a moral panic about artificial intelligence...In contrast to that still fairly remote risk, the threat the world faces from research on viruses is far more immediate."

Here's what @K_G_Andersen, lead author of Proximal Origin, the paper that led me to mislead colleagues by telling them a lab leak could be ruled out, said while drafting the paper:

“accidental escape is in fact highly likely”; 🧵

wsj.com/articles/the-c… Here's what his 3 of his 4 co-authors said:

Andrew Rambaut: “that we are discussing it shows how plausible it is”;
Robert Garry: “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened”;
Edward Holmes: “no way selection could occur in the market”;

Thorough, detailed reporting by @Arbuthnott into the work of the Wuhan Institute of Virology - with one or two minor errors, eg picture of fruit bats, not horseshoe bats; and in places not enough credit to the work of others.

The most interesting new revelations are: (thread)

https://twitter.com/Arbuthnott/status/1667582815750307840

“They were working with the 9 different Covid variants,” one of the investigators said. They believe one virus at the WIV was an even closer match to Covid-19 than RaTG13. “We are confident they were working on a closer unpublished variant — possibly collected in Mojiang,”

Fourth thread from my @times essay today.

The WIV did not just hoard bat sarbecoviruses; it experimented on them.

thetimes.co.uk/article/fbi-sa… By swapping spike genes between bat viruses they sometimes increased the infectivity of the viruses 10,000-fold in mice with human genes.

Third thread on my @times essay.

An argument against the lab leak is that western scientists trawling through deep sequencing data can sometimes find traces in databases of what other labs are working on; so far nothing on this virus before the outbreak has surfaced. RaTG13’s importance took a knock in 2021 when French scientists working in Laos reported that they had found a bat virus even more closely related to Sars-Cov-2. Called Banal-52, this virus is 96.8 per cent the same as Sars-Cov-2.

nature.com/articles/s4158…

Second thread on the @times essay on what happened in Wuhan.

Viruses v similar to Sars-Cov-2 were found in horseshoe bats in Yunnan and Laos, and more distant relatives in Cambodia, Thailand, E China and Japan. But none near Wuhan, in more than 10,000 bats sampled by Wuhan CDC. When Shi Zhengli first heard about the outbreak, she told a journalist: “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan...Could they have come from our lab?”

Here's some of what I say in my @thetimes essay today. First in a series of threads.

One thing is certain: there is no smoking gun that implicates a lab. No evidence has emerged that this precise virus was in the WIV or any other laboratory in Wuhan before the pandemic began. But then there is no smoking gun that implicates a natural spillover either. No animal infected with this precise virus before the pandemic has been found in a market, a farm or in transit, in Wuhan or anywhere in China.

I asked Chat GPT a few simple questions about furin cleavage sites in sarbecoviruses. This was the result. How many sarbecoviruses have furin cleavage sites?

Pretty well every major organisation, from the World Health Organisation (WHO) to the BBC, the CIA and CNN, refused to take [the lab leak] seriously. Meanwhile, pro-Beijing spin doctors got to work on social media denouncing the lab-leak hypothesis.

.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1… Britain is supposed to be one of the leading biomedical research nations in the world, with strong capabilities in virology and epidemiology. Yet as far as I can tell, none of our great research universities has even tried to get a grant to investigate the possibility of a leak.

All over the world, the largest and rarest eagles and vultures are dying in significant numbers as a result of wind turbines: in Australia, wedge-tailed eagles; in South Africa, Verreaux’s eagles; in Norway, sea eagles; in California, golden eagles.

telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/0… Earlier this year, in a rare exception to a blanket exemption from prosecution granted by the Obama administration, a wind energy company in America was convicted by the federal government of breaking the law by killing at least 136 golden and bald eagles.
justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/e…

Excellent thread by @Ayjchan answering repellent attempts to smear her integrity by @angie_rasmussen.

When Alina and I set out to write Viral, we agreed that the purpose of doing so was to explore all possible origins of Covid-19 and see where the evidence led.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1599898792912105473

That's why we devoted about half the book to examining the evidence for a natural spillover. If that evidence was strong we would have said so. If anything, our vested interest and natural bias, as keen supporters of science, was in that direction.

"The draft of the Proximal Origins paper was wrapped up and posted online ten days later. The colossal embarrassment of discovering that Chinese researchers funded by the NIAID had unleashed the deadly Covid epidemic on the world was averted. What was not to like?"

https://twitter.com/mattwridley/status/1599722332289134592

"The pangolin data that had driven the whole process were a gigantic red herring. Far from being 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV2, the coronavirus found in pangolins was in fact even less similar than RaTG13, a coronavirus sequence the Chinese had already published."

"Based on...publicly available information, it appears reasonable to conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic was, more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident...the hypothesis of a natural zoonotic origin no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt."

https://twitter.com/mattwridley/status/1585915772701999104

The steps in their argument (thread):

"While it is likely that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a bat virus, most likely one found in horseshoe bats...in Southern China or Southeast Asia, it remains unknown how SARS-CoV-2 traveled more than 1,000 miles...before emerging in Wuhan."

The search for Covid-19’s origins continues to be hindered by fear of offending China.

The Lancet Commission is the latest to highlight how seeking the truth has come second to other considerations.

telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/09/1… There has been an attempt to shut down all curiosity about the origin of the pandemic. The media has been flooded with claims that the source of the virus was definitely an infected animal on sale in a market in Wuhan. Yet no such infected animal has been found in the market.

The best way to prove the market hypothesis true is not at this stage to dig up more evidence of a cluster of cases near the market, but to investigate the lab leak as hard as you can so as to falsify it. That's how to combat confirmation bias.

https://twitter.com/ydeigin/status/1554907570590175234

Remember the canonical example of confirmation bias. Peter Wason gave people three numbers - 2, 4, 6 - and asked them to name another triplet that followed the same rule. Most people tried 8, 10, 12 or some other version of adding two.

One of the key features of the scientific method is that confirmation bias is a common problem: people seek out evidence that is compatible with, but does not test, a favoured hypothesis.

Pursuing Popperian falsification is not easy when you are a lonely proponent of an idea. Scientists do this as much as anybody, and there is little point in trying to stop them. They are no more likely to challenge their own theories than most people. But they do challenge each other's theories and that's what makes science so very effective.

Wuhan early cases. Viral is available now: amzn.to/3hfGmyn

Putin told a global economic conference in 2013 that “black stuff comes out of the tap” when you frack near people’s homes, an absurd claim that not even Friends of the Earth would dare make.

thesun.co.uk/news/17948870/… Alexander Medvedev, the general director of Gazprom Export, said the Russian state was “ready to wage its war on shale”.