Please read from start to finish. Great article by @jamesbmeigs
“It would be tempting to cheer on a populist uprising against elite expertise and institutions. But.. majority of scientists, health-care institutions.. did vital heroic during the pandemic.” commentarymagazine.com/articles/james…
As a scientist, I’m surrounded by scientists all the time so I often forget that most people do not have a scientist friend or family member in their lives.
You don’t get to see that scientists are people too, we get taken by surprise by pandemics, we have things we don’t know..
.. we have feelings.
Many of the scientists I know have been working to the point of burnout over the past year in response to the pandemic.
This is different from the actually very few (a handful of) scientists who bear some responsibility on the topic of the #OriginsOfCovid
If you talk to a scientist friend, they can go to town on all the problems we face in science today. There’s a lot wrong with academia & healthcare.
Despite all these problems, we still know that science is essential for society to function. That’s why many of us are scientists.
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Another miracle today. AFAIK this is the first @nytimes article to give the #OriginsOfCovid lab leak hypothesis fair consideration without the veneer of “but my expert friends said it was natural.”
Striking similarities between the 2 searches for the origin of an outbreak proximal to a lab likely working on similar (if not the same) infectious agent that caused the outbreak.
Hopefully we don’t need to wait decades to find the origin of Covid-19.
The most important takeaway from the story of the 1979 anthrax lab leak is that it did not involve a giant conspiracy - just the usual cover up you'd expect from an authoritarian state.
People, each with little bits of information, being silenced or too fearful to come forward.
On the #OriginsOfCovid I told @denisechow@NBCNews "I know a lot of people want to have a smoking gun. It's more like breadcrumbs everywhere, and they're not always leading in one direction. It's like the whole floor is covered in breadcrumbs." nbcnews.com/science/scienc…
I've recently been tagged in many threads with people arguing which is more likely: a natural or a lab origin of Covid-19.
This wasn't possible last year.
People (including scientists) arguing that a lab leak could be likely or even more likely were attacked as unscientific.
I think it's not very useful to speculate whether natural or lab origins are more likely. But. I think it's a good sign that the public and scientists are now able to talk about it without fearing excessive censure from their friends and colleagues.
@NatureNV I know it's very troubling that the one place a SARS-like pandemic-level pathogen emerges is the one place in China where there is a giant repository of SARS-like viruses collected from across China.
But it's irresponsible to play it down by saying "but China has coronaviruses!"
@NatureNV To study these SARS-like viruses with potential to spill into humans, the Wuhan lab had to send dozens of its personnel into remote caves and villages in South China to specifically mine for these viruses and bring 10,000s of animal and human samples ~1000 miles back to Wuhan.
For people who need a crash course in how the animal (zoonotic) origin of the first SARS virus was found, please read this short review written by Linfa Wang, Shi Zhengli, Peter Daszak and colleagues in 2006:
Note that they had not yet found the ancestral bat reservoir a long way away in Yunnan province (only published in 2017).
But it was clear SARS1-like viruses were circulating widely in the animal trading community (animals & humans) in Guangdong province where SARS broke out.
For SARS2, it’s the reverse.
When it broke out in Wuhan, we already knew where it’s ancestral reservoir was very likely to be. A virus genome matching 96% was already under study in a Wuhan lab. Collected from a mine after miners had sickened with a SARS-like pneumonia.
Also, to correct Stephen, Wuhan is not a place where SARS2-like viruses are known to circulate in bats or spillover into people.
The Wuhan institute of virology existed prior to 2003 SARS. A lab there pivoted to SARS research after the 2003 epidemic, and spent close to 2 decades ferrying 10,000s of potential SARS samples (animal and human) from more than 1000 miles away up into the Wuhan lab.