Essential Unanswered Questions re Pandemic Origins

Today, I posted a list of 23 essential questions regarding pandemic origins on Twitter. That thread is linked here and reproduced below.

• We all remain at unnecessary risk until we determine how the #COVID19 pandemic began and address our greatest vulnerabilities. Any serious investigation of this issue must address the following 23 questions.
• 1: Why did the Chinese government either not carry out a full contact tracing to find the COVID19 index case or do so and not share the results?
• 2: Why did the Chinese government in January 2020 knowingly lie to the WHO about human transmission of the SARSCoV2 virus then prevent WHO experts from travelling to Wuhan for over three weeks?
• 3: Why has China’s government so aggressively destroyed biological samples, hidden records, imprisoned citizen journalists and passed a law preventing Chinese scientists from communication about pandemic origins w/o prior government approval?
• 4: What are the implication of the Chinese military takeover of the WIV in January 2020? If the WIV had nothing to do with the #SARSCoV2 outbreak, how can this step be understood?
• 5: Why did the governments represented at the May 2020 World Health Assembly allow the Australian proposal for a full investigation into pandemic origins be deformed into the Chinese-supported resolution calling for a Chinese-controlled joint study of the single natural origins hypothesis w/o full access to the relevant raw data and other resources?
• 6: Why did the @WHO-organized joint study not ask for access to the WIV databases?
• 7: Does anyone believe that limited data handed to members of the @WHO-organized joint study was not highly screened and politicized?
• 8: Why did Peter Ben Embarek knowingly lie when he announced on 2/9/21 that he believed a lab incident origin was “extremely unlikely” and should not be investigated? Has @WHO initiated an internal investigation into his behavior?
• 9: Was Shi Zhengli lying when she told me during the March 2021 Rutgers event that she was aware of all research being carried out at WIV and there had been absolutely no Chinese military involvement with WIV in any way prior to the outbreak?
• 10: What happened between the 2/1/20 experts call with Drs. Fauci and Collins and the first draft of the Proximal Origins paper to make people like Kristian Andersen and Robert Gerry radically shift their perspective in just a few days?
• 11: Why did the authors of the infamous 2/20 @thelancet letter call those raising questions about a possible lab incident origin “conspiracy theorists” while failing to disclose the massive conflicts of interest of some of the authors and the 3/18 DARPA proposal?
• 12: Was there a concerted effort by the leading scientists associated with the 2/1/20 Farrar call, @theLancet 2/20 letter, & the 3/20 Proximal Origins paper to put forward an unsupportable certainty re #COVID19 origins, perhaps with the best of self-perceived intentions?
• 13: Were the authors of the Proximal Origins paper being knowingly misleading when asserting that any engineering of a virus in a lab could be detected through genetic analysis, given that this is clearly not the case? If so, why?
• 14: Why did the Proximal Origins authors ignore passaging, and focus only on pre-determined genomic alterations? Why did they ignore other research-related accidents such as an infected sampler coming back asymptomatic to Wuhan?
• 15: What was the nature of communication between the authors of the 2/20 Lancet letter, the 3/20 Nature Medicine paper, the NIH, Shi Zhengli, and George Gao about how questions re pandemic origins should be addressed?
• 16: If the geospatial analysis of the “market origins” preprints has any value (BIG if), why do the authors not consider the possibility of an accidental leak from the Wuhan CDC across the street from the market?
• 17: How can the authors of the “market origins” preprints argue that China’s government was engaged in a market origins coverup when that was the case Chinese authorities were so aggressively peddling until March 2020?
• 18: What is the motivation of the authors of the Worobey and Pekar preprints (and the @NYTimes) for knowingly overstating the implications of their work to suggest it is determinative re the pandemic origins issue?
• 19: Why have many Western virologists spent more energy suppressing legitimate questions about a possible lab origin than criticizing the massive and ongoing coverup by the Chinese government?
• 20: Shouldn’t everyone agree that we need a comprehensive investigation into all credible pandemic origin hypotheses with full access to all relevant records, samples, and personnel in #China and, as appropriate, beyond? If so, why are so few people fighting for this?
• 21: Why has the bipartisan US national #COVID19 commission not yet been established?
• 22: Is China providing full and unrestricted access to all relevant records, data, and personnel to the WHO SAGO team? If not, will SAGO condemn China’s behavior in its first report?
• 23: If and when the next pandemic breaks out, will we trust we’d done everything possible to understand what went wrong today and address our greatest shortcomings? If not, what are our responsibilities right now?
• This is not an exhaustive list. If you feel I’m missing anything, please feel free to add questions in response to this thread. Please feel free to answer any of the questions if you feel you have something to share. Our collective goal must be to follow the evidence – fearlessly.