Maybe you heard somewhere that the COVID-19 pandemic started with a lab leak? NO! That is NOT what the evidence shows. It was not a goddamn lab leak. I’ve had enough. Here is what the evidence shows: it was zoonotic spillover at the market rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/five-reaso...

Lab Leakers: "SARS-CoV-2 can't infect bats, so it must have been made in a lab". Science: "Let's do the experiment". SARS-CoV-2 behaves exactly like one would expect in a reservoir species - low-level infection, no overt disease, etc. Elegant study from Sato Lab: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Fifty years ago tomorrow, a seminal paper in immunology was published that revolutionized research and medical treatments. The paper, titled “Continuous cultures of fused cells secreting antibody of predefined specificity” demonstrated that cells could be generated that propagate indefinitely...

Our understanding of the origin of COVID-19 is increasingly being polluted by conspiracy theories. Many, presented in OpEds in places like the NYT, WaPo, and WSJ. It's time to drop the nonsense and refocus on the science - it's long overdue and the data is in. edition.cnn.com/2025/07/31/h...

You’ve been badly misled over COVID origins theconversation.com/how-conspira...

More than 3yrs down the line this has held up surprisingly well, very much because of @lewan.bsky.social prescience borne from climategate and previous clashes with USRTK What we couldn’t predict was how the conspiracists would destroy US biomed science www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

"The story of the negative impact on the future of infectious disease research will only become part of public discourse if scientists speak up loudly" A must read. One Hundred Days, Incalculable Loses @jidjournal.bsky.social Emily Erbelding, MD - NIAID/DMD academic.oup.com/jid/advance-...

English version of my review of Bratlies book: A book filled with contradictions, cherry-picking of data, conspiratorial arguments, and serious accusations that undermine trust in research and contribute to making the world less safe in the face of the next pandemic. tjomlid.com/a-critical-r...

Wildlife trade acts as a vast global network of unregulated natural laboratories,with ample opportunities for viruses to circulate & evolve to become more dangerous We can either turn a blind eye or try to understand & mitigate the risks My latest in @nature.com 1/ www.nature.com/articles/d41...

It's notable that @zey.bsky.social is reading people who think our article is too dangerous to even link to, so here it is: academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Four years ago, Jesse Bloom announced the recovery of SARS-CoV-2 sequences and suggested they could come from very early COVID-19 patients. Zach Hensel and I found out that Bloom's claim relied on the deliberate omission of a January 30, 2020 collection date contradicting his narrative. 🧪 #PopGen

“In 1900, 30 percent of all deaths in the United States occurred among children younger than 5, mostly because of preventable infectious diseases. By the end of the century, that number was just 1.4 percent.” #VaccinesWork #VaccinesSaveLives #ACIP

I strongly recommend fine documentary “A Shot in the Arm” on vaccine hesitancy & its (often well-paid) promoters, incl RFK, Jr. www.pbs.org/video/shot-i... Watch whole thing, but especially: 34:32-onward RFK, Jr 43:45-50:27 Samoa deaths: he denies/evades involvement, video records contradict.

Moving forward, there are already other - and better and, hey, transparent - initiatives as it comes to sharing critical data: NCBI, of course, which should be used by _all_ tax-payer funded research, but also @pathoplexus.org, which should become the replacement for GISAID - and I'm sure it will.

“… peer-reviewed literature is dominated by articles supporting a zoonotic origin” while lab leak papers “are rare, fringe, and mutually incompatible with each other.” Correct. And it’s not because one side is “censored”. It’s because one side has zero evidence. www.factcheck.org/2025/05/trum...

“The Neo-Anti-Vaxxers Are in Power Now - A new cadre of officials might deal in evidence more than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does, but they still question the worth of vaccines.”

This highlights the central problem with so many of those who want to believe the lab leak narrative: they latch on to the big picture - there's a lab in Wuhan working on bat viruses - but don't grasp the details which show that a lab leak is far less likely than a zoonotic event. Detail is key.

My comments with @marykekatos.bsky.social ABC News abcnews.go.com/Health/safet...

My comments with @rollcall.com rollcall.com/2025/05/22/f...

My comments @newsweek.com www.newsweek.com/rfk-maha-chi...

Proximal Origin wasn’t a coverup. It was Kristian et al’s scientific opinion based on limited data (but held up well). Scientists have a right to freely express their opinions, on Slack & in papers. This isn’t “bad behavior.” It was scientists collaboratively examining the evidence. IOW, their jobs

This is one of the biggest challenges of the modern information environment: learning to distinguish between bad faith criticism designed to destroy things and good faith criticism meant to make things better.

The New York Times disinformation machine continues to roll.

My comments @npr.org today www.npr.org/sections/sho...

My comments with @reportergoodman.bsky.social @cnn.com www.cnn.com/2025/05/20/h...

I always take the opportunity to hang out with @kavehmd.bsky.social , because I get to meet other awesome people like @katiegoldin.bsky.social. A really fun conversation about animal hosts! 👇🏻

One of the central tenets of those arguing a laboratory based origin of SC2 has been the distance between the bats and the site of emergence. They have always ignored the original SARS outbreak which did the same thing.

New acting director at NIAID is familiar face to flu researchers. www.science.org/content/arti...

Call your member of Congress today. 5calls.org/issue/nation...

New preprint from Luke Snell from GSTT, Suzanne Pickering in my lab and Rui Galao, my colleague at KCL. Here we examine in detail the evolution of the SARS CoV-2 spike in persistent infections, and essentially catch a potential variant in the act of developing. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

So this interview lasted 2 hours so this “you’re scaring me” part might seem like an overreaction or fearmongering to someone without that context. There’s a lot of evidence to support my hypothesis that a potential H5N1 pandemic would be worse than COVID.

There have been many lab leak articles in the media recently, but none had actual new data In a new preprint, @zachhensel.bsky.social and I analyze early COVID-19 cases sequence data that have been overlooked so far. These new data continue to point to a natural origin ▫️1/7 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Excited to share this new paper led by PhD student Cinthia Pietromonaco, exploring age estimation in bats, with a focus on Australian flying foxes. doi.org/10.1071/WR24... 🦇 Turns out, that we don't all mean the same thing when we use the term "adult" or "juvenile". Why should we care? 1/

A recent critique by Angus McCowan (i.e., "Nod") claims that the quantitative support for multiple SARS-CoV-2 introductions in our Pekar et al. 2022 is an “artifact” of "imbalanced" hypothesis testing. Let’s take a closer look at why this argument doesn’t hold up. 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2502.20076

My latest column: Trump's CIA revives a lie about COVID origins www.latimes.com/business/sto...

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/o... “…Given the lack of appropriate guardrails that would normally prevent an anti-vaccine activist, science denialist and conspiracy theorist from heading the country’s most important public health agency, it’s a dangerous time to be a child in the United States.”

Who appointed the ICTV or its members and gave them authority? Taxonomy should facilitate clear and accurate communications. For many viral Families constantly changing names (not just binomials) have consistently created confusion - and been largely ignored by workers in the field.

Report from Friedrich Loeffler Institute: Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) confirmed in a water buffalo in Brandenburg, Germany. FMD is a highly contagious viral disease of cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. Many zoo and wild animals can also contract FMD. 1/3 www.fli.de/en/news/shor...

Detailed case description of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 infection in a 13-year-old girl in British Columbia, Canada, with a history of mild asthma and body-mass index greater than 35 (severe obesity). 1/5 www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

I had a nice, if foreboding, sense-of-impending doom-filled chat with Matt Stieb @nymag.com about my concerns with the current H5N1 situation. Human H5N1 cases on the rise, infected cows and birds everywhere, while seasonal flu is surging—really not loving how it's going nymag.com/intelligence...

USPS stamp from 1999 honouring Jonas Salk and commemorating the development of the Salk Polio vaccine.

Five years ago (Tuesday 31 Dec 2019), the news of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan was out. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission published a bulletin confirming the outbreak. Less information than was already available at the time was shared: ▫️1/ web.archive.org/web/20200131...

For those interested, my lecture for the University of Sydney Infectious Diseases Institute “The global expansion of H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza” is available here on YouTube. It is from May 2024, but is still pertinent. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImFD...

This lecture is strongly recommended.

Five years ago (Saturday 28 Dec 2019), the first sequence of a new coronavirus infecting humans was submitted to the US repository Genbank by scientists based in Beijing. The submission was missing details and was automatically rejected 3 days later.▫️1/ d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/Ford_H2_316_...

We are pleased to be able to make our scientific contribution to the understanding of H5N1 viruses. In a study that will be published soon @Emerging infectious diseases, we investigated restriction of clade 2.3.4.4b H5N1 viruses by the human innate immune factor MxA. wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/...

As suspected given the context, the child in Alameda county in California was infected by #H5N1 viruses belonging to the dairy cattle clade. Was it via milk, human-to-human transmission, or something else? The infection source seems still unknown. Tree from gisaid.org

Wish I could have attended the conference "Preparing for the Next Pandemic: Evolution, Pathogenesis and Virology of Coronaviruses" in Japan - several interesting results! www.nature.com/articles/d41... www.nature.com/articles/d41...