🚨 Covid Commission Planning Group (Covid CPG) "to prepare the way for a National Covid Commission that can seize this once-in-a-century opportunity to help America—and the world—begin to heal and safeguard our common future from new existential threats." millercenter.org/covidcpg
Covid CPG's 9 task forces include:
1 Origins and prevention
2 Assessment of the danger
3 National readiness
4 Communities at risk
5 State and local readiness
6 Caring for the sick
7 Diagnostics, therapeutics & vaccines
8 Stories of Covid
9 Solving data issues
"The Covid CPG effort is rooted in the belief that the scope of a future commission’s work must be national and international... A nonpartisan National Covid Commission could unite Americans to call upon their knowledge and practical skills across and beyond political parties."
"The Planning Group is directed by Philip Zelikow, who was executive director of the 9/11 Commission" and includes a team of leading experts from Johns Hopkins, as well as veteran investigators and experts drawn from across several disciplines as senior advisers.
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The story of the quest for the origins of COVID-19 cannot be told without also telling the stories of the internet sleuths & outsiders who discovered clues and hidden stories of the viruses closely related to SARS2, Yunnan miners sick with pneumonia & a missing pathogen database.
We've seen a series of recent articles by stellar journalists chronicling the year+ of painstaking work by internet sleuths.
There have been lots of mistakes made and public conflicts with virologists on twitter... but their contribution is undeniable. cnet.com/features/how-t…
See this wonderful piece by @emmecola from December 2020:
"there are many other people, out of the spotlight, who deserve credit. They have been working tirelessly... they share and discuss their findings and, more importantly, they make discoveries." mygenomix.medium.com/the-origin-of-…
Worth 2min🎧 CIA Director and Director of National Intelligence say that the US intelligence community is still gathering info on the two #OriginsofCOVID theories around which components have coalesced: it emerged naturally or it was a laboratory accident.
Already seen some pushback on my What Next podcast interview with @Slate@marysdesk
If you think lab leak=conspiracy theory, it should trouble you that top intelligence & experts are devoting an enormous amount of energy to investigating this hypothesis.
Several scientists are reasonably curious about what the issues are with most prominent papers describing the same Guangdong pangolin CoV that shares a very similar spike RBD with SARS2.
If you're deeply curious about this, you should send an email to @Nature asking them to publish the authors' original response to the manuscript @shingheizhan and I submitted to them last May. We also recommend asking to see the peer reviewer comments. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
Honestly, it's taking a lot of my will power not to just post these publicly so everyone can take a good look.
Statement by the Governments of Australia, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, the Republic of Korea, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America on #OriginsofCOVID 🇦🇺🇨🇦🇨🇿🇩🇰🇪🇪🇮🇱🇯🇵🇱🇻🇱🇹🇳🇴🇰🇷🇸🇮🇬🇧🇺🇸 state.gov/joint-statemen…
“Asked by about the (China-WHO) report, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said Tuesday it lacked crucial data, and represents a “partial and incomplete picture.””
By some error, the annexes to the full report by the China-WHO origins joint study team are still missing. This made it impossible for the press to ask questions about some potentially critical information stuck in the supplementary document (~200 pages).
“If SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab, the result would likely be a global crackdown on all high-risk biosafety labs, says Chan.” qz.com/1986084/why-do…
Journalists need to do due diligence. When you interview a scientist, have you checked whether they could stand to lose $millions, possibly even the ability to retain employees if it were determined that COVID-19 emerged due to research activities?