March 2020: "you know what a scientific statement is and you know what a political statement is. We had no problem distinguishing between the two."
May 2020: “You can never definitively say that what China is telling us is correct.” khn.org/news/article/w…
Sorry, 2021 for both - I've lost track of time during the pandemic!
Someone might want to reach out to Donald G McNeil Jr: "Peter Daszak.. whom I have known for years; I know both are dedicated to saving lives, and they have always told me the truth — or what they honestly believed to be the truth at the time" donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-…
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Author @StartsWithABang is worried conspiracy theories could threaten scientific autonomy of select scientists whose work can have catastrophic impact. And rightly points out that we live in a world where gov cannot be depended upon to effectively respond to emerging pathogens.
For instance, the country that is potentially the source of a lab escaped pathogen may not tell other countries what was done with virus X in the lab. And other countries, even after seeing videos of mass death, may think their country is magically immune to pandemics.
There’s a new committee formed by highly respected scientists who are laying the groundwork for a national commission on covid-19. One of its focuses is the origins of covid-19.
"“These spillovers take years,” Gray says. “It’s not like in the movies. They go through different steps to infect humans.” So far indications are that the chimeric virus has not evolved to transmit efficiently between people." sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/t…
To find these steps for SARS2, I'd say that getting access to blood samples banked in Chinese cities prior to Dec 2019 is important.
Granting international experts access to the caves and regions in Yunnan, China where SARS2's closest relatives were found is also important.
It's already very surprising that the Chinese government has -still- not performed these basic checks to find the source of SARS2 / COVID-19 and determine when it first emerged in Wuhan. cnn.com/2021/02/21/chi…
I’m putting together a primer pack of must-read layperson articles for anyone who’s just getting into the topic of whether SARS-CoV-2 could have come from a lab in Wuhan.
"As a citizen of the U.S. whose voting power is supposed to be used to ensure its government acts properly, I found all of a sudden that the question of the virus’s origin had to matter to me."
"if the virus “did indeed escape from the Wuhan institute, then the NIH will find itself in the terrible position of having funded a disastrous experiment that led to death of more than 3 million worldwide... the more I thought about it, the more disturbed I was."
"One of the claims that I think Wade’s article proves beyond a reasonable doubt is that our understanding of COVID’s origins has been compromised by the involvement of a man named Peter Daszak." 🤣