I don’t know how Covid-19 originated, and neither do any of the people currently publicly discussing the question. What we do know is that the pandemic began in Wuhan, where researchers at an institute in the city were collecting and doing research on SARS-like viruses…
And we know that the institute in question (Wuhan Inst of Virology) has refused to tell @NIH what it did with the money funneled to it by @EcoHealthNYC, and that the WIV took a large database of viral sequences offline and now refuses to share it with anyone…
We also know that the WIV, @EcoHealthNYC, and @Baric_Lab at U North Carolina wanted to genetically engineer SARS-like viruses to make them potentially more infectious to humans, and tried to get grant funds to do that research. We don’t know…
Whether any of the players went on to do those experiments, since Ralph Baric refuses to talk about it, Peter Daszak may or may not know, and Shi Zhengli of WIV prevaricated when asked about it by @sciencemagazine’s @sciencecohen (she told Cohen WIV did not have…
That capability which is almost certainly not true based on a cursory look at the papers the institute has published over the years (and other labs in Wuhan most certainly did have that capability.) Unfortunately, few journalists reported on the attempts to get…
That grant money to make SARS-like viruses more infectious to humans, and no one so far except @BulletinAtomic has reported on @NIH’s decision to cut funding to WIV. In the old days, investigative reporters spotting leads like this would really go for it until they…
Figured it out one way or the other, but that appetite for getting at the truth has been very limited in the case of the Covid pandemic. Now @NSF has awarded EcoHealth and Boston University $1 million to continue to work on pandemic prevention. Are any reporters…
Interested in the question of whether the approach taken by EcoHealth, which failed to prevent the deadliest pandemic known to humankind, is really worth the money? So many questions, so few interested in the answers. #coronavirus
One question that journalists and historians will want to answer in the future is, How did such an obvious possibility—that the pandemic might have been caused by one more in a long series of escapes of infectious agents from labs—get branded as a racist “conspiracy theory?”
Correction: Thanks to colleagues for pointing out that Covid-19 is not the deadliest pandemic in human history. Got carried away, sorry!
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Still waiting for mainstream #media to report that @NIH has cut funding to the Wuhan Inst of Virology for refusing to report on research it did with U.S. taxpayer funds, and endangerment of grant to @EcoHealthNYC which failed to require WIV to mandatorily report.
With this deliberate editorial decision not to cover a major story relevant to the debate over Covid-19 origins, legacy #media and some of our leading science journalists have abandoned all pretense to be even-handed and comprehensive in their coverage of this critical topic.
One excuse, offered by @MoNscience, is the contention that the recent @Worobey/Pekar papers in @ScienceMagazine have resolved the issue in favor of the natural origins/zoonotic transfer hypothesis. But this is not true, and the authors acknowledge that in their papers.
Very glad to see this critique of #Fauci and his very flawed leadership during the pandemic. By uncritically turning him into an icon and a sacred cow, journalists and liberals actually took an “anti-science” stance themselves… nytimes.com/2022/08/30/opi…
Eg: “It was this that became so destructive to trust: the idea that science is a force that demands things of the public yet relieves leaders of accountability.”
“The follow-the-science logic we have lived under during Covid demands wartime sacrifices from the public while rationalizing sloth from leaders and institutions in mobilizing tools to relieve the burden. It became an easy out for bureaucratic turf protection…”
I've held off saying too much about this interview in @guardian with virologist Angela Rasmussen by @lfspinney, because I have great overall respect for Laura as a science journalist and she has been a good friend for a number of years. theguardian.com/world/2022/aug…
But my conscious has been bothering me because the framing and content of this interview is really pretty outrageous. The subhead says that Rasmussen "who has been abused online for defending a ‘natural’ origin" of Covid-19, and in the interview she is allowed...
to talk about the toxic nature of Twitter and how she has been attacked personally: "I’ve had rape and death threats; I’ve had to call the police. I’ve got pretty high self-esteem, but it wears you down." Obviously any such attacks are reprehensible, but they are not...
Chinese and American scientists wanted to genetically engineer a SARS-like virus with a feature that would make it more infectious to humans. That is documented. We don’t know if they did it or not; some will not answer the question, others are not necessarily credible…
Until we do know, discussions of Covid-19 origins are missing a critical piece of information that might support a lab-leak scenario. Likewise, we don’t know when the earliest Covid-19 cases were, so missing critical data that might (or might not) support natural origins.
The odd thing is that scientists and science journalists who support the natural origins scenario are very oddly lacking in curiosity about whether the genetic engineering was actually done. Very odd. We should all want to know all of these things, no matter what…
In an enormous miscarriage of justice, a Peruvian judge has found against anthropologist Marcela Poirier in the defamation suit filed against her by twice confirmed sexual harasser Luis Jaime Castillo Butters. The penalty is a $48K fine and one year, eight months in jail.
The judge also suspended Marcela's lawyer, Brenda Alvarez, from practicing law on the grounds that she supposedly tried to delay the trial. Brenda will immediately appeal, of course. The judge dismissed the testimony of all of Marcela's witnesses, including me...
the reporter who initially investigated allegations of sexual #harassment against Castillo and found them to be well supported (as did the sexual harassment commission of Castillo's university, the @PUCP, and @theNASciences, which ejected him from its ranks.