Now that the U.S. Department of Energy has joined FBI in concluding that the coronavirus likely leaked from a lab, it’s worth remembering that the media, en masse, condemned the lab leak theory as a “debunked conspiracy theory,” and Facebook censored people who dared suggest it
We still don’t know where the virus came from. WSJ says DOE “made its judgment with ‘low confidence.’” Four other agencies say it had natural origins and two are undecided
But that was the case in 2020 when journalists and Facebook pretended they knew
wsj.com/articles/covid…
It’s clear that the scientists who claimed in Lancet, on Feb 19, 2020, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” were misrepresenting their unfounded opinion as a scientific fact.
It’s also clear that the low level of public trust in the media is well-founded. Journalists behaved like activists. They blindly trusted activist-scientists, went far beyond what the evidence showed, and morally condemned anyone who even suggested we consider the alternative… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Since 2016 there has been a pressure campaign by the US government and NGOs to “fight on-line misinformation.” The result was the widespread censorship of accurate information.
public.substack.com/p/under-white-…
The lab leak theory was never outlandish. Scientists in 2015 openly worried one would create a pandemic
“An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus … has triggered debate over whether engineering viruses with pandemic potential is worth the risks”
“[V]irologists question whether the information gleaned… justifies the potential risk… the researchers have created a novel virus that “grows remarkably well” in human cells. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory”
nature.com/articles/natur…
“The virus left none of the traces that outbreaks usually create: no infected market animals or wildlife, no chains of early cases in travelers to the city, no smouldering epidemic in a rural area, no rapid adaptation of the virus to its new amazon.com/Viral-Search-C…… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Humility is a virtue. Until recently scientists thought volcanoes made dinosaurs extinct. Now the vast majority believe it was a massive asteroid.
nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-a…
Editor-in-chief of Scientific American
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