the coronavirus originre written by a guerrilla Twitter group

San Francisco CA

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The group, known as Drastic, has investigated, corrected, uncovered and agitated in a quest to uncover the pandemic's starting point. The Seeker poured a strong cup of chai and lit a cigarette. He was onto something. Alternating between a smartphone and a laptop, the former science teacher from the northeast Indian city of Bhubaneswar punched keywords into the search bar of CNKI, one of China's foremost databases of scientific papers. Coronavirus, SARS, horseshoe bat, Yunnan. It was May 18, 2020. At the time, the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, had infected fewer than 5 million people worldwide. Scientists were still attempting to unravel many of its mysteries. Chief among them was where, exactly, the virus had come from. The Seeker, too, was hooked on that mystery. After a lot of trial and error, the Seeker stumbled upon exactly what he was looking for: a master's thesis written by a Chinese doctor. The document contained an account of six cases of "severe pneumonia caused by unknown viruses" in workers who had been cleaning an abandoned copper mine in Yunnan, China, in 2012. The patients' symptoms seemed eerily similar to those of COVID-19. Three of the patients, it said, died from the mystery illness. The Yunnan mine and its resident bats, the Seeker knew, had been sampled by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He'd uncovered a missing puzzle piece: an association between the closest known relative of the coronavirus and research conducted at the institute in Wuhan, China. "Finding it, at that moment, felt big," the Seeker, says, "like a homicide detective solving a cold case." Minutes after reading the abstract, he posted his find to Twitter, in a long tweet thread tagging members of a loosely defined group known as Drastic, a "Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19." The master's thesis had the potential to rewrite the origin story of the pandemic. A majority of scientists and experts agree that the coronavirus emerged after jumping from a wild animal to humans somewhere in or around Wuhan, where the first cases appeared in 2019. The pathogen is believed to have lived most of its life inside a bat, before acquiring genetic mutations, potentially through another species, and infecting humans. But an alternative theory posits that the pandemic began after SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, potentially the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A joint study by the World Health Organization and Chinese scientists in January and February 2021 considered this scenario "extremely unlikely." From the earliest days in the pandemic, it was represented as a conspiracy theory built on misinformation and fear. But Drastic, and an increasing number of scientists, are convinced it requires further investigation. In searching for the complete and naked truth surrounding the origins of COVID-19, this motley group of strangers has challenged the prevailing theories of the virus' beginnings by picking apart inconsistencies and trading data in the highly polarized theater of Twitter. This unorthodox approach has seen them branded by scientists and researchers as maniacs, thugs and conspiracy theorists. They've also been accused of racism, and their scientific credentials have been questioned. On Twitter, where access to world-renowned scientists is just a click away, members of Drastic have targeted virologists and epidemiologists who refuse to engage with the lab leak theory, and they've even falsely accused some of working for the Chinese Communist Party. As a result, some scientists have understandably dismissed Drastic's findings and investigation out of hand. But over the past year the group's discoveries have proven too important to ignore. A loose thread Two months before the Seeker's discovery, Rossana Segreto stumbled upon her own revelation. Segreto, a microbiologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, had been growing skeptical about the coronavirus origin story from "very early on" in the pandemic. She'd quickly come around to the idea the virus may have leaked from a lab. In March 2020, Segreto noticed an inconsistency in one of the papers on SARS-CoV-2's potential origins, published in Nature on Feb. 3, 2020. The research was led by Zhengli Shi, a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Shi has a long history working with bat coronaviruses, earning her the infamous title of China's "Bat woman." Her Nature paper was big news because it described, for the first time, the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2: RaTG13, a bat coronavirus collected by her team. The research showed RaTG13's genetic fingerprint was 96.2% similar to that of SARS-CoV-2. It didn't show where RaTG13 was discovered. “The trouble with investigating the origins of COVID-19 is often not what is said, but what is unsaid. ” Just two days later, another paper described an even closer match for SARS-CoV-2. It was dubbed "BtCov/4991." The paper showed 4991 had been discovered by Shi's group in an abandoned mineshaft in Yunnan, in 2013, and brought back to the virology institute in Wuhan. However, unlike RaTG13, 4991 wasn't a whole genetic fingerprint, it was just a leftover fragment of one. Segreto wondered if it matched any other viruses known to science. She turned to an online tool called BLAST, which functions like a search engine to match genetic fingerprints of discovered viruses. When she ran 4991 through the tool in March 2020, it returned a 100% match with RaTG13. The 4991 fragment was actually just a small piece of RaTG13. They were the same virus. The WIV had not documented the name change, which obscured where RaTG13 was originally discovered (an addendum was added to the paper by Shi's team on Nov. 17, 2020, nine months after it was published). "I was so surprised," Segreto says. It was a critical moment, made all the more startling when the Seeker discovered the master's thesis (a translation was later provided by Independent Science News). Taking the two pieces together, Drastic was able to link RaTG13 to the mineshaft in Yunnan, 1,000 miles southeast of Wuhan, where workers fell ill in 2012 from a COVID-like disease. The lack of transparency from the Wuhan Institute of Virology prompted another Drastic member, Monali Rahalkar from India's Agharkar Research Institute, to publish a list of questions surrounding the miners' illnesses in October 2020. Many remain unanswered. "The researchers at the WIV state that they have not closer virus to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13, and RaTG13 is clearly not the source of SARS-CoV-2 (it's far too distant). To me, these statements ring true because they would have very likely already published the sequence of any such virus if it had existed, particularly a virus that they would then do more work on. As such, the miners story tells us nothing about the emergence of SARS-CoV-2," according to Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney. As for their illness, experts at the Wuhan Institute of Virology retested blood samples from the sick miners, finding there was no evidence they were infected by a coronavirus. Instead, those experts suggest the miners may have suffered from a fungal infection. According to the Seeker's thesis find, which includes the opinion of China's foremost SARS expert, this is simply untrue. Whether the miners' story can reveal more about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 is still to be explored, but the issues around transparency from researchers at the WIV has left a dangling thread Drastic continues to tug. Old threads When Yuri Deigin first heard the lab leak hypothesis in January 2020, he thought it was all "bullshit conspiracy theory." He wanted to smash those conspiracy theories with "cold, hard scientific facts." So he started doing a little digging on some of the laboratories in Wuhan. "Once I actually started reading up on what kind of research they were doing, I was worried that, you know, this could have been a lab leak," he says. Deigin, a Russian-born scientist working on developing drugs to combat aging, published an article on Russian blog site Habr and on Facebook about a month before the Seeker found the master's thesis. In it, he questioned whether SARS-CoV-2 could have escaped from a lab. Prominent Russian biologists immediately discredited the work, suggesting he was pushing forward "crazy narratives." When he posted a version in English on Medium, vocal virologists working on the coronavirus in the West mostly ignored it or disparaged it. One compared it to a racist manifesto. But Drastic took notice. Deigin began convening with the group via Twitter. It was one of the few platforms where discussions on lab leaks were occurring. Facebook had flagged such pieces as "false information" in February and "it was impossible to post anything on Reddit and not have it taken down," Deigin says. (The COVID-19 subreddit is still removing lab leak content from Drastic members because "the authors are not scientists outright, or not in relevant fields.") The COVID19 subreddit removed Drastic content because it does not class the group as "reputable authors with relevant expertise." Reddit In collaboration with Segreto, Deigin published a piece in open access journal BioEssays on Nov. 17, 2020 stating that "researchers have the responsibility to consider all possible causes for SARS‐CoV‐2 emergence." The piece discusses another loose thread Drastic has investigated for months: the modification and deletion of a 10-year-old database of viruses maintained by Shi's team at the WIV, taken offline in September 2019, allegedly to protect against hacking attempts. Shi told the BBC that the database contains no new information and that all the work regarding bat coronaviruses found by the Institute has been published. But Deigin, other Drastic members and a growing number of scientists are calling for the database's contents to be made public. Deigin sees himself as something of an outsider and says investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2 hasn't threatened his professional life. It's a different story for Segreto. Her family is "not happy" about all the time she dedicates to the theory, she says, and some of her colleagues are concerned it could ruin the image of their university. But Segreto says she's motivated by trying to prevent the next pandemic. "I hope my daughter will understand me one day," she says. Anonymous threads Spend long enough in the Twitterverse looking into the lab origins debate, and you'll start to see a few familiar profiles. The most prolific appears to be helmed by a one-eyed, cartoon lab monkey: Twitter user @ Billy Bostickson . Bostickson, whose profile picture shows the aforementioned monocular primate, says they have been using a pseudonym for 10 years for professional reasons in "a country with vicious state subversion laws." Since February, they've been working 15-hour days, spending a majority of their time neck-deep in SARS-CoV-2 research. "I feel burnt out," they recently tweeted. Bostickson conceived and named Drastic, was one of the first people to bring members together in early 2020, and often collates the team's findings and outstanding questions in extensive Twitter threads. Before 2020, Bostickson says they hardly knew how to even compose a thread on the site, but the social media network has become invaluable. "Twitter serves as a very intuitive searchable database," they say. Since early 2020, Drastic has swelled to 28 members. While Bostickson and others have organized the group and built a website, there's no overarching, obvious hierarchy. Members work in subgroups on specific questions related to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 but there are "very few rules," according to Gilles Demaneuf, a New Zealand-based data scientist who is part of the group. "I think the only rule we have is to respect people, and we're not pressing people to tell us who they are," he notes. About half of the members prefer to remain anonymous, citing safety concerns, fear of losing their jobs and a constant stream of hacking attempts, according to Demaneuf. Drastic is only interested in telling the public enough about themselves to convince people they're "not a bunch of wackos hiding behind the internet," he says. “Even as Drastic has rattled cages and unearthed a trail of obfuscation, their heavy-handed approach hasn't always been received positively.” But working under pseudonyms has allowed for mudslinging and vitriol to fly. "It's nasty because people hide behind anonymity," says Mary-Louise McLaws, an epidemiologist from the University of New South Wales and WHO adviser. You don't have to search for very long to run into Drastic members clashing with prominent virologists. Many members have been blocked by those who have vocally supported a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. There have been ugly incidents on Twitter, further complicating genuine debate around the origins question. Segreto, for instance, was falsely accused of attacking Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Georgetown Center for Global Health Science and Security, though this was denied by her former head of department. Rasmussen has stated Segreto has participated in attacks against her online, calling the conduct hurtful and upsetting. Holmes, the virologist at the University of Sydney, has collaborated closely with researchers in China and co-authored a highly cited Nature Medicine paper supporting the natural origin theory in March 2020. Bostickson has dubbed him a "Chinese puppet," and others have erroneously suggested that Holmes, with researchers working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology including Shi Zhengli, conspired to keep the origins of the pandemic a secret. Holmes has blocked many Drastic members on Twitter because member's tweets have descended into personal attacks. He vehemently denies Bostickson's baseless claims. Members of a WHO-China mission to study the origins of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan earlier this year have also come under fire. Much of the venom has been aimed at Peter Daszak, president of nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, a New York nonprofit that has helped fund research into coronaviruses in China. Daszak's close association with the WIV and its staff was perceived as a conflict of interest during the WHO-China study, and he has been a lightning rod for criticism. "Daszak needs to be charged with crimes against humanity," one Drastic member wrote. The abrasive attacks have, at times, overshadowed the team's work. "While I admire their tenacity, they are very much on the edge from a scientific perspective," says Nikolai Petrovsky, a vaccine developer at Flinders University in Australia. "They definitely have a role, but more as detectives sifting through the evidence than as scientific co