"Sam, I actually started on the same foot as you. So I was more interested in how the virus was causing disease in people before I read that it was not mutating much. And that's when the alarm went off that this might have come from a lab ..." - @Ayjchan samharris.org/podcasts/makin…
"We are going to talk about the origins of COVID, but in the background, and perhaps explicitly, we're also talking about the political corruption of science ..." - #SamHarris @MakingSenseHQ
"I very quickly learned that I could rule out a lab leak as plausible on the basis of arguments that were being put in what seemed to be authoritative scientific papers. I then later came to question that and thought that those papers were premature." - @mattwridley
"And then I came across a paper by @Ayjchan and two of her colleagues, which said that this virus had experienced no burst of rapid evolutionary change on first entering the human species in 2019. Which is surprising because [...] most viruses do that – they have to evolve ...
... pretty fast to suit the new host. And she also tipped me off that the Chinese had now ruled out that it began in the market. George Gao, the head of the [CDC] in Beijing, had announced that he thought the market was a superspreader event, not an origin event." - @mattwridley
"I don't think I've been on CNN. I think they canceled last minute also. [...] A lot of these more popular news media would reach out, saying they want to interview us on the book, and then a few days right before they would say, 'Oh, we can't touch this topic. ...
... Our scientific editor is against it,' [...]. So there has been, I think, some self-censorship on the part of news reporters on this topic." - @Ayjchan
"It's worth mentioning that we've had a lot of encouragement from scientists privately. An awful lot of people saying to us, 'Keep going. You're on the right track.' But in public very few of them are prepared to put their heads above the parapet.
And when I pressed, for example, the Royal Society in London and also the Academy of Medical Sciences to hold a debate on the origin of a pandemic that's killing north of 10 million people, I was told the topic is too controversial. And we found something similar in the US.
[...] The question of sort of opening it up to a proper conversation is just not acceptable within conventional science. And this is odd because the public generally thinks it came from a lab [...]. Whereas the scientific establishment likes to say that the vast majority ...
... of scientists think it didn't come out of a lab. If that's true – if [...] they know the public are, as it were, wrong on this topic – then they ought to be all the more willing to come out and debate it and knock down the theory that it came out of a lab.
And for me, it's very odd that we haven't been able to have a very open wide-ranging conversation in much of the media about this over the last two or three years." - @mattwridley
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