They called it conspiracy theory. But Alina Chan tweeted her life with the idea that the virus was coming from a lab.

The obvious problem with the laboratory escape theory, however, is that there is no concrete evidence of this. Chan doesn’t have a specific view of how the accident could have happened — a student fell ill in a bat cave, wondering if the secret investigation into infecting mice with a new virus had gone awry. After reading Chan’s publications, I noticed that many of his claims are not even at all in direct evidence; more often, they revolve around its lack. It tends to indicate things that Chinese researchers have not done or said, important data that they have not quickly revealed, an infected market animal that they have never found, or a database that is no longer online. It clearly suggests that there is a cover, and therefore a conspiracy to hide the truth.

Pre-molded

Last February, when leading scientists met to study the genome of the virus, they published two letters. One, a year Lancet, he completely ruled out the possibility of a laboratory accident as a “conspiracy theory” (among its authors was the scientist who funded the research at the Wuhan laboratory). The other “Nearby origin”Letter in the book Nature Medicine, edited by Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Andersen and his colleagues studied the genome of the virus and argued for why it was very likely to be a natural event, proving that it was similar to others found in nature.

The 30,000 genetic letters in that genome remain the most common study of the origin of the virus. Coronaviruses frequently exchange parts, a phenomenon called recombination. Andersen found that all components of the virus were previously seen in samples collected from animals over the years. He thought it could cause evolution. The Wuhan Institute was making genetically engineered bat viruses for scientific experiments, but the SARS-CoV-2 genome did not match the favorite “chassis” viruses used in those experiments, and showed no other obvious signs of engineering.

According to the analytics company Clarivate, the Nature Medicine letter was the 55th most notable article of 2020, with more than 1,300 citations in journals. Email records would later show that starting in January 2020, the letter included high-level messages and conference calls among the authors of the letters, including Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; senior virologists; and the head of Wellcome Trust, the UK’s leading funding body for pharmaceutical research. Initially, the authors were concerned that the virus was suspicious and gathered around a scientific study that supports the natural cause. Initially one of their goals was to dispel rumors that the virus was the result of a bio-weapon or poorly engineered, but they went further by writing, “We don’t think a kind of lab-based scenario is credible.”

Working from his home in Massachusetts, Chan soon found a way to revive the theory of laboratory accidents by looking for differences with SARS, a similar virus that broke out in 2002, but only caused about 8,000 illnesses. With Shing Zhan, a bioinformatics specialist at the University of British Columbia, Chan studied the first human cases and saw that the new virus did not mutate as quickly as SARS. If it were an animal virus in a market, it would show signs of its genomes adapting more quickly to its new human hosts. He prepared a study arguing that the virus was “pre-adapted” to humans and offered some theories as to why. Perhaps it has spread unnoticed to other parts of China. Or maybe, he thought, he was growing up somewhere in a lab, maybe multiplying it in human cells or transgenic mice by transgenic mice that had humans inserted into their genes.

The possibility that an unengineered virus could be “adapted to humans while it was being studied in the laboratory” should be considered, which may or may not be difficult.

On May 2, 2020, Chan published a preprint paper, along with Deverman and Zhan, on the bioRxiv website to quickly report results that have not yet been reviewed by other scientists. “Our observations suggest that by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission,” they wrote. The Broad Institute communications department outlined how Chan should compose a “tweetorial,” a painted chain of publications that present an intensive scientific publication, with people. He published first tweetorial the next day.

For journalists who suspected China of manipulating the virus, the thread — and its descendants — were dynamite. Here was a scientist from America’s largest gene center who was explaining that the official story might have been wrong. “Coronavirus was NOT from animals in the Wuhan market,” shouted a headline in the Daily Mail during Chan’s first escape in a public interview.

Although his report was a success with the media, what the Daily Mail described as Chan’s “reference paper” has not yet been formally accepted by a scientific journal. Chan says it increased the chances of the lab’s origins because of censorship. Eisen of UC Davis believes, however, that Chan’s hopes for how the 19 covid virus should behave are conjectures. He doesn’t think we’ve found enough occurrences with enough molecular detail to know what’s normal. And, he warns, covid-19 has continued to change and adapt.

“My colleagues said, ‘This is a conspiracy, don’t worry. No, I’m going to treat this like any other paper,'” says Eisen, who took the time to study the manuscript. “I find it interesting what he tried to do, but the conclusions don’t convince me, and I think the inferences are wrong. I recommend it for the post. but that is science. “

Wrong or correct, however, the word used by Chan – “pre-molded” – shakes the backs of people like author Nicholson Baker. “We were dealing with an exceptionally good disease, outside the door, chewing human air,” says Baker, who came in contact with Chan to find out more. A few months later, in January of this year, Baker would publish a lengthy report in the year New York Magazine saying he would become convinced by a lab accident. He mentioned several sources, including Chan.

Pangolin problem

Chan didn’t end up hitting holes in the story of natural origin. He then took four articles published quickly in early 2020, two of them in Nature, describing viruses in pangolins — endangered scale-covered mammals that are sometimes eaten as food in China — that bore similarities to SARS-CoV-2. If researchers found all the components of the pandemic virus, especially in wild animals illegally trafficked as food, the case could be spilled from nature, given the way coronaviruses exchange parts. The pangolin papers published in a row in early 2020 were promising. The authors of “Proximal Origins” offered these similar viruses as “strong” and “parsimonious” evidence of their natural occurrence.

Chan and Zhan noticed that all the papers described the same set of animals, although some did not accept the overlap. One re-labeled the data and that looked like a novel. For Chan, that wasn’t just bad work or scientific behavior. He believed that there could be “coordination” between the authors on all of these articles, some of which had previously been published together. He created the hashtag # Pangolinpapers, reminiscent of the Panama Papers, documents that revealed secret financial relationships at sea.

Perhaps, he thought, the researchers were whitewashing the data as if nature was swimming with similar viruses.

Chan began sending emails to authors and journals to get the raw data they needed to better analyze what they had done. Making this data available is usually a condition for publication, but it can still be difficult to obtain. After months of calling for a pile of stones, Chan finally lost his composure and threw an accusation from the browser. “I need scientists + editors who directly or indirectly cover serious integrity issues in research on some key SARS-2-like viruses to stop and think for a while,” he posted on Twitter. “If your actions hide the origins of SARS2, you are playing a hand in the deaths of millions of people.”

Eddie Holmes, a renowned Australian virologist and author of one of these articles (as well as “Proximal Origins”), called the tweet “one of the most despicable things I’ve read on the subject of origin.” He felt accused, but wondered what he had been accused of his role Pangolin has taken due account of data sources. Holmes opened a complicated timeline for Chan’s publication dates and links between past authors. The dense network of arrows and connections on the board bore a striking resemblance to the obsessive cork board covered with red ropes and pins.