Thread by @MichaelWorobey

I feel I must reply to a comment from @DavidRelman in a recent @nytimes article on a piece of mine in @ScienceMagazine on why a careful analysis of the earliest known cases in Wuhan indicate that the pandemic started at the Huanan Market.

“It is based on fragmentary information and to a large degree, hearsay,” David A. Relman, a professor of microbiology at Stanford University, said... “In general, there is no way of verifying much of what he describes, and then concludes.”

Here is the article, for those who would like to test David's dismissals against what I actually present in the piece. I do hope you'll do so.

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

I am concerned about anti-scientific comments like this that reflect a desire to downplay, denigrate, or dismiss evidence that doesn't suit the desires of advocates of a particular hypothesis (in David's case, the lab leak hypothesis).

There is enough of this sort of "I'll-believe-what-I-want-to-believe-in-the-face-of-all-evidence-to-the-contrary" going around these days for it not to leak further into scientific discourse.

More concerning is a strain of bias, also present in other leading proponents of lab leak scenarios such as @Ayjchan, where first-hand comments by Chinese doctors, scientists and, apparently COVID-19 patients, are easily and dismissed as lies or, here, "hearsay".

The strength of my article is that it draws on firsthand accounts - including audio/video recordings - of doctors, hospital administrators and patients like Zhang Jixian, Xia Wenguang, Wei Guixian, Chen Honggang, Ai Fen and Yuan Yufeng.

To deride and dismiss the accounts of these individuals as hearsay is beyond disrespectful.

It begs the question, why?

Zhang Jixian, at Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, for example, single-handedly worked out on Dec 27 that this was likely a new viral disease, human to human transmissible, with asymptomatic (lack of) presentation.

Is her account of these discoveries, and the soon-to-follow insight that most cases in her hospital were workers at Huanan Market, hearsay?

Are the recorded voices of early patients like Chen Honggang and Wei Jixian not vivid and real enough to be counted by @DavidRelman as non-hearsay evidence?

“In general, there is no way of verifying much of what he describes, and then concludes.”

There is a way: it just involves not dismissing the voices of the frontline workers and COVID patients in Wuhan as dishonest or hopelessly unreliable in recounting their own experiences.

Here is the NYTimes article:

nytimes.com/2021/11/18/hea…

Oh for the ability to edit! It was not in that NYTimes article. It was in this article by @JoelAchenbach
in @washingtonpost:

washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11…