#COVIDORIGINS

What exactly was EcoHealth Alliance trying to do with engineered bat coronaviruses? A rejected DARPA DEFUSE grant proposal gives some insights and is worth revisiting.

In 2013, WIV researchers, led by Shi Zheng-Li (now regarded as "batwoman") isolated and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1. Until WIV1 was isolated, no viruses since SARS-CoV-1 were found to use human ACE2 to enter cells.

2. Recombination work on WIV1 would be performed to create enhanced human ACE2-binding viruses, and these infectious clones were studied in animals with humanized ACE2… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

#COVIDORIGINS and censorship of scientific discourse 🤫🧵

I asked ChatGPT4 to write an argument debunking and an argument supporting the “Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2” publication, then comparing the strengths and inconsistencies of both arguments. theintercept.com/2023/01/19/cov…… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Prompt 1: Write an argument debunking the “Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2” article.

It’s a new year. With a new year come new resolutions. How are you resolving to virtue signal on Twitter this year? Some tips 🧵 1. Make sure to tell everyone your goals. You may not reach them, or keep going past January, but everyone will think you’re inspiring and cool if you share them.

Interesting to see Twitter throttling my posts. I cannot get more than 1000 views for the last two threads I posted. Many of my prior posts would receive 100,000s or 1M+ views.

On February 19, 2020, there were 500 cases of COVID globally outside of China's 50,000.

After an initial outbreak and lockdown in Wuhan, China, the media and governments did not sound the alarm.

This led to 15-25+ million excess deaths worldwide. Here is a thread on how: 1. Failed containment. We did too little, too late.

Scenario modeling for a hypothetical monkeypox outbreak in May 2022 was conducted in March 2021 by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and predicted hundreds of millions of deaths by the end of 2023 without intervention: drive.google.com/file/d/1SWjZVh… In the hypothetical scenario where monkeypox emerged in May 2022, 70 million cases and 1.3 million deaths occur by January of 2023.

The potential for “AI” and even low-budget bad actors with niche knowledge to individually create biological and chemical weapons is probably the greatest existential risk to humanity over the next 25+ years. Need major defense infrastructure advancements.
theverge.com/2022/3/17/2298… Yes, nuclear weapons are terrifying, but less likely to be used. Nuclear weapons leave a trail and make the attacker vulnerable to counterattacks.

BREAKING ☢️: the #Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant is stable — the fuel rods are inserted and the plant is reduced in capacity, the plant cannot go ballistic, it is contained and has several redundancies, and no damage has happened to the reactor or its containment or control systems. The nuclear reactor’s design is far different from Chernobyl, in that it reduces its power output proportionally with increased heat, as opposed to Chernobyl generating more energy as heat increases.

Bacterial immunity to viruses is incredible. We have so much more to learn and unlock to master not only genome engineering with CRISPR-Cas systems, but also the next generation of gene editing and modulating tools as well as replicating adaptive, genomic immunity.

https://twitter.com/SorekLab/status/1489591025710555143

What is bacterial adaptive immunity? When phages (viruses that infect bacteria) insert their genetic materials into bacteria, bacteria use a host of evolved genetic immunity techniques to fend off invaders.

SARS-BLOCK peptides docking with the ACE2 receptor Using the original SARS-CoV-1 structure and the new sequence of SARS-CoV-2, we were able to design and simulate efficacious peptide inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2 binding to the ACE2 receptor in 5 hours in February of 2020. These peptides effectively block the virus that causes COVID.

@Ligandal is honored to be featured on @CrisprMedicine's list of Companies to Follow in 2022!

There are many companies that have various gene editing materials, and a small subset of companies that specialize in delivery of the gene editing, gene-reprogramming instructions. See the full list here!
crisprmedicinenews.com/companies/

How does light exposure affect circadian rhythms and sleep cycles? This review article provides an analysis of many studies exploring the effects of different wavelengths and durations of light exposure on sleep. I was curious about blue vs. red-orange:

tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… “Appleman et al. (2013) conducted a 12-day study where 21 subjects, randomly divided into two groups, received either short-wavelength (blue, peak 476 nm) light for 2h in the morning and light filtered (<535 nm) with orange-tinted glasses for 3h in the evening (advance group)…”

EXPONENTIAL THINKING

…and why it is so important to understand with pandemics…

🧵 Some basic math on exponents:
y = x(r^n)
d = x(r^n)/c

If r is # of people infected per case (R0)
x is starting # of cases
n is number of exponential infection increases
1/c is fraction of cases leading to death

Then y is cases at time point n and d is deaths at time point n.

@EricTopol how are we doing with this now?

https://twitter.com/erictopol/status/1256309479139762177

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1397045320014462984?s=20

We can do better. I am an optimistic realist. I believe in our capacity to harness technology to improve the world and offset almost any kind of problem. The progress of scientific innovation is stunning and there is much to be grateful for. However, it is not a time to pat ourselves on the back.

Here is a comparison of actual Walgreens stock with what happens when you try to buy a rapid test for COVID. Impossible to do with @Uber, @Postmates, or @Instacart. Thousands of extra tests could be delivered in San Francisco if delivery services updated their catalogues. Actual catalogue (<500 Abbott tests available in all of San Francisco Walgreens)

Spent several hours today attempting to get a rapid test. Tried Instacart, which failed, then went to Walgreens, Safeway, called two CVSes, checked online catalogues and attempted to see in-store inventories at each pharmacy, and finally was able to schedule a test at a clinic. The test is tomorrow, and I have to walk to the clinic again, at which point the results will take 48-72 hours to turn around.

Eagerly awaiting 2022’s global COVID policy… happy holidays y’all! Hopefully, this year:
1) rapid tests can be received by every US household free of cost and same-day / next-day
2) we can update vaccines beyond the wildtype, Wuhan sequence
3) “COVID is airborne” is understood globally and accepted by WHO
4) better therapeutics
5) better masks

@postmates, @ubereats, @instacart, @uber and @lyft could make a major impact on the pandemic by working with @walgreens, @cvspharmacy, and others to deliver rapid antigen tests to people’s doors. Shocked how difficult it is to get a rapid Ag test delivered in San Francisco. Biden’s 500 million rapid tests won’t be available until mid January. By that point in time omicron will already have done most of its damage in populated cities and tens of thousands of people will be dead in the US.

I am concerned about sub-threshold neutralizing antibodies tied to disease enhancing antibodies leading to greater persistence of COVID. Those with long COVID are canaries in the coalmine and we should be directing far more attention to the pathogenesis underlying these cases. For example, we know omicron is ~40x less potently neutralized by antibodies against the original SARS-CoV-2 strain, which we based our vaccines off. So our strategy is a booster to boost levels 25x, breaking past this threshold.

There weren't any SARS-CoV-2 omicron variant spike protein structures online, so I simulated it and docked its binding to ACE2, Vir antibodies, and Regeneron antibodies. Considering publishing but done just for fun at the moment. Please cite if you want to publish with this. PDB files of omicron spike available here: ligandal.com/uploads/5/7/9/…