The #OriginOfCovid saga has shown that some scientists have their priorities all messed up.
Early 2020, prominent scientists condemned the lab origin hypothesis as a conspiracy theory & some claimed they knew this virus was not genetically modified. Mostly everyone fell in line.
Later, the China-World Health Organization joint expert panel said this virus could've emerged in Wuhan from frozen meat #PopsicleOrigins
Instead of calling out the China-WHO joint study, several evolutionary biologists and virologists jumped in to support this hypothesis.
Over the past year and a half, we've seen time and again that scientists from the EcoHealth Alliance and Wuhan Institute of Virology were withholding key information about the origin of some of the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 and experiments done in the lab...
Culminating in the recent release of FOIA'ed and leaked documents describing a range of risky pathogen experiments including but not limited to making chimera using human pathogen MERS virus and plans for inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-like viruses.
In parallel, emails were being FOIA'ed showing that a key group of scientists in the US and Europe who had publicly dismissed a lab #OriginOfCovid had been freaking out behind the scenes about a genetically engineered origin of the virus.
Most recently, the media has gone crazy mis-reporting that patient zero has been found using the beautiful mind of a US scientist.
Who was it? A shrimp vendor who only developed symptoms on 11 Dec 2019.
I've seen near zero pushback from top scientists on this misinformation.
I sometimes try to imagine if the experts had actually responded correctly.
What if in early 2020, they had just come out publicly and said, ok, this virus might have come from the market or from a lab accident, but don't panic, we will investigate both plausible hypotheses.
The pandemic would've unfolded in a completely different manner.
But because of the withholding of key info, shutting down the lab hypothesis, we are here today with no investigation, no dispositive evidence for either natural or lab #OriginOfCovid
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