New from @bellingcat: We figured out that whole Navalny poisoning thing. An FSB team trailed him since 2017 -- including to Tomsk in 2020 -- that included Novichok, chemical weapons experts.

We worked with investigative partners @CNN (https://t.co/OqHbuglzDQ), @the_ins_ru (https://t.co/LIknsacbkH), and @derspiegel on this investigation. More to come!
Let's meet the crew!

Stanislav Makshakov, who coordinated the whole operation. He reports to General Kirill Vasilyev, director of the FSB Criminalistics Institute.
Oleg Tayakin, cover name Oleg “Tarasov”. A senior member of the FSB squad, typically coordinating other officers and operating primarily out of the central office at Akademika Vargi 2a. He worked as a surgeon before joining the FSB’s Criminalistics Institute.
Alexey Alexandrov, cover name “Alexey Frolov”. Graduated medical school in Moscow in 2006, worked as an emergency & military doctor doctor before joining the FSB in 2013. He was present at both 2020 poisonings, one suspected by Navalny + wife in Kaliningrad and the other in Tomsk
Dr. Ivan Osipov, cover name Ivan “Spiridonov”. Medical doctor by training. His social media presence disappeared in 2012, which is likely when he joined FSB.
Konstantin Kudryavtsev, cover name Konstantin “Sokolov”. Served at a chemical warfare military unit in Shikhany. Graduated Russia’s Military Chemical-Biological Defense Academy before joining the FSB’s Criminalistics Institute.
Alexey Krivoschekov, worked at the Ministry of Defense prior to joining the FSB in or around 2008.
Mikhail Shvets, cover name Mikhail “Stepanov”. His registered address is at 116 Trubetskaya St, Balashikha – the address of FSB’s Center for Special Operations. Telephone metadata shows that he splits his time between working at the special operations base and the Vargi 2a lab.
Vladimir Panyaev, served in FSB’s border service, then co-founded a company selling anti-bacterial lamps. Likely coincidentally, lives in the same apartment building as Navalny. After the Tomsk poisoning, his address registration was changed to that of the FSB HQ, Lubyanka 1.
We detailed our methodology in how we found all these people and conducted the investigation here: https://t.co/KYlVYdFiz5

More from Science

1. I find it remarkable that some medics and scientists aren’t raising their voices to make children as safe as possible. The comment about children being less infectious than adults is unsupported by evidence.


2. @c_drosten has talked about this extensively and @dgurdasani1 and @DrZoeHyde have repeatedly pointed out flaws in the studies which have purported to show this. Now for the other assertion: children are very rarely ill with COVID19.

3. Children seem to suffer less with acute illness, but we have no idea of the long-term impact of infection. We do know #LongCovid affects some children. @LongCovidKids now speaks for 1,500 children struggling with a wide range of long-term symptoms.

4. 1,500 children whose parents found a small campaign group. How many more are out there? We don’t know. ONS data suggests there might be many, but the issue hasn’t been studied sufficiently well or long enough for a definitive answer.

5. Some people have talked about #COVID19 being this generation’s Polio. According to US CDC, Polio resulted in inapparent infection in more than 99% of people. Severe disease occurred in a tiny fraction of those infected. Source:
@mugecevik is an excellent scientist and a responsible professional. She likely read the paper more carefully than most. She grasped some of its strengths and weaknesses that are not apparent from a cursory glance. Below, I will mention a few points some may have missed.
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The paper does NOT evaluate the effect of school closures. Instead it conflates all ‘educational settings' into a single category, which includes universities.
2/

The paper primarily evaluates data from March and April 2020. The article is not particularly clear about this limitation, but the information can be found in the hefty supplementary material.
3/


The authors applied four different regression methods (some fancier than others) to the same data. The outcomes of the different regression models are correlated (enough to reach statistical significance), but they vary a lot. (heat map on the right below).
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The effect of individual interventions is extremely difficult to disentangle as the authors stress themselves. There is a very large number of interventions considered and the model was run on 49 countries and 26 US States (and not >200 countries).
5/

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