The #OriginOfCovid saga has shown that some scientists have their priorities all messed up.
Early 2020, prominent scientists condemned the lab origin hypothesis as a conspiracy theory & some claimed they knew this virus was not genetically modified. Mostly everyone fell in line.
Later, the China-World Health Organization joint expert panel said this virus could've emerged in Wuhan from frozen meat #PopsicleOrigins
Instead of calling out the China-WHO joint study, several evolutionary biologists and virologists jumped in to support this hypothesis.
Over the past year and a half, we've seen time and again that scientists from the EcoHealth Alliance and Wuhan Institute of Virology were withholding key information about the origin of some of the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 and experiments done in the lab...
Culminating in the recent release of FOIA'ed and leaked documents describing a range of risky pathogen experiments including but not limited to making chimera using human pathogen MERS virus and plans for inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-like viruses.
In parallel, emails were being FOIA'ed showing that a key group of scientists in the US and Europe who had publicly dismissed a lab #OriginOfCovid had been freaking out behind the scenes about a genetically engineered origin of the virus.
Most recently, the media has gone crazy mis-reporting that patient zero has been found using the beautiful mind of a US scientist.
Who was it? A shrimp vendor who only developed symptoms on 11 Dec 2019.
I've seen near zero pushback from top scientists on this misinformation.
I sometimes try to imagine if the experts had actually responded correctly.
What if in early 2020, they had just come out publicly and said, ok, this virus might have come from the market or from a lab accident, but don't panic, we will investigate both plausible hypotheses.
The pandemic would've unfolded in a completely different manner.
But because of the withholding of key info, shutting down the lab hypothesis, we are here today with no investigation, no dispositive evidence for either natural or lab #OriginOfCovid
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Editors at scientific journals, you can do something to stop risky pathogen research - form a pact to collectively refuse to publish research where pathogen sequences have been kept private for more than 2 years and where chimera of known/novel pathogens have been created.
If you refuse to publish this type of risky pathogen work, scientists will hesitate to spend their millions on research that they cannot publish in journals or present at conferences in order to advance their careers.
Accordingly, any scientist asked to peer review such a paper must be able to report it to an external party. I wish that the Cambridge working group or a similar organization was active so that they could receive and manage whistleblower reports.
“Authoritative, meticulously researched, critically reasoned, chilling… The authors hold back nothing in evaluating the countless research papers, news reports, eyewitness reports and historically significant events.”
“I've been following Alina on Twitter for the past many months of the virus. I'm not sure how she found her way to Matt Ridley, but I'm glad she did. The combination is powerful, and the story is mesmerizing.”
This is like trying to guess the shape of an iceberg when you can only see what's above the surface.
Where are the November case data? We know that by December there had been a superspreader event at the seafood market and cases numbered in the hundreds. nytimes.com/2021/11/18/hea…
How is it possible that basic contact tracing wasn't done?
China showed us again and again throughout the pandemic how fast and effectively they could contact trace the h*ll out of any new Covid-19 case. Most recently locking down an entire Disneyland.
The @WHO spokesperson even said the errors in the China-WHO joint report on #OriginOfCovid were not important because “the current first known patient is most probably not the first case.” washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pac…
To the folks saying (or hoping) “don’t worry, I’m sure labs around the world are conducting research more safely now.”
Where is the evidence of this happening? How do we know that people approving and conducting risky experiments have turned over a new leaf?
See this letter to Congress by dozens of US scientific orgs:
“We urge you to reject attempts to impose restrictions on federally funded research or the operations of federal science agencies based on premature conclusions about how the pandemic emerged.”
We @mattwridley would not be surprised if this book makes us unwelcome in some countries.
Our book lays bare the type of pathogen research that was ongoing prior to the pandemic, the frequency and risks of lab leaks, and a case for both natural and lab #OriginOfCovid scenarios.
Rescuing the lab origin hypothesis from being condemned by experts as a conspiracy theory demanded the ingenuity and determination of numerous scientists, journalists and sleuths whose stories are described in our book.