SCOOP: three scientists who signed the original Lancet letter dismissing the lab leak dropped their names from a follow-up statement this week.

Asked whether they’d changed their minds about the likelihood of a lab leak, one of them replied: "NO COMMENT!" freebeacon.com/coronavirus/3-…
The new statement reasserts that there is no "scientifically validated evidence" to suggest COVID-19 escaped from a lab, and is signed by the same scientists who dismissed the lab leak in a February 2020 statement. Except for 3: William Karesh, Peter Palese, and Bernard Roizman.
Karesh is the executive vice president for health policy at EcoHealth Alliance, the group that was funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab with grants from the National Institutes for Health. EcoHealth's president, Peter Daszak, organized the original statement.
Karesh, Palese, and Roizman are all absent from the new statement, though Daszak signed both. Asked whether he'd changed his mind about the likelihood of a lab leak, Palese replied: "NO COMMENT!" Karesh and Roizman did not respond to inquiries.
The missing signatures reflect the widening cracks in the scientific consensus about COVID-19's origins. Once dismissed as a far-right conspiracy theory, the lab-leak hypothesis became mainstream in May when former NYT science reporter Nicholas Wade defended it at length.
Following Wade's piece, Nobel Prize-winning virologist David Baltimore said a lab leak was a serious hypothesis he "wouldn't rule out," while other biologists maintained that the scientific evidence supporting it was very weak.
The debate only grew more intense in June with the publication of Anthony Fauci's emails, which seemed to indicate that he and other government scientists had taken the lab leak seriously behind closed doors. The new Lancet statement responds directly to these developments.
The authors of the new Lancet statement write that "it is time to turn down the heat of the rhetoric and turn up the light of scientific inquiry," saying "allegations and conjecture are of no help." But the February 2020 statement had contained several allegations of its own.
"We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," the original statement read. "Conspiracy theories…create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus."

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More from @aaronsibarium

29 Jun
On paper, there should be little pushback to transgender activism in the UK, where people have been arrested for misgendering others online. Yet critics of trans activism are now mainstream across the pond. Why?

Socialized medicine and feminist wine moms.freebeacon.com/culture/in-the…
British law and culture seem tailor-made to crush dissent on trans issues. Britain has no 1st Amendment and no religious right. In 2018, the Church of England adopted a policy of "unconditional affirmation of trans people," instructing clergy to use parishioners' preferred names.
Yet Britain has seen a flowering of feminist organizations opposed to the excesses of trans activism. And British courts are becoming more skeptical of hate speech claims; some have reinterpreted Britain's anti-discrimination laws to protect skepticism of trans-identity.
Read 31 tweets
30 Mar
SCOOP: Biden's COVID team appears to have entertained a test-and-trace app that would have let businesses deny service to patrons based on their health data.

It also would have divided users into three color-coded categories—just like China did last year.freebeacon.com/coronavirus/co…
The app was pioneered by the University of Illinois, which apparently tried to sell Biden on scaling up the school's contact tracing system. It records test results and Bluetooth data to determine who has been exposed to the virus—and "links building access" to that information. Image
The system resembles the one being used in China, where a mandatory app gives each user a "health status"—green, yellow, or red—that dictates access to public spaces. The University of Illinois app likewise divides users into three categories: yellow, orange, and red. Image
Read 8 tweets

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