Thread by @shellenberger

Now that the U.S. Department of Energy has joined FBI in concluding that the coronavirus likely leaked from a lab, it’s worth remembering that the media, en masse, condemned the lab leak theory as a “debunked conspiracy theory,” and Facebook censored people who dared suggest it

We still don’t know where the virus came from. WSJ says DOE “made its judg­ment with ‘low con­fidence.’” Four other agencies say it had natural origins and two are undecided

But that was the case in 2020 when journalists and Facebook pretended they knew

wsj.com/articles/covid…

It’s clear that the scientists who claimed in Lancet, on Feb 19, 2020, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” were misrepresenting their unfounded opinion as a scientific fact.

It’s also clear that the low level of public trust in the media is well-founded. Journalists behaved like activists. They blindly trusted activist-scientists, went far beyond what the evidence showed, and morally condemned anyone who even suggested we consider the alternative… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Since 2016 there has been a pressure campaign by the US government and NGOs to “fight on-line misinformation.” The result was the widespread censorship of accurate information.

public.substack.com/p/under-white-…

The lab leak theory was never outlandish. Scientists in 2015 openly worried one would create a pandemic

“An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus … has triggered debate over whether engineering viruses with pandemic potential is worth the risks”

“[V]irologists question whether the information gleaned… justifies the potential risk… the researchers have created a novel virus that “grows remarkably well” in human cells. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory”

nature.com/articles/natur…

“The virus left none of the traces that outbreaks usually create: no infected market animals or wildlife, no chains of early cases in travelers to the city, no smouldering epidemic in a rural area, no rapid adaptation of the virus to its new amazon.com/Viral-Search-C…… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Humility is a virtue. Until recently scientists thought volcanoes made dinosaurs extinct. Now the vast majority believe it was a massive asteroid.

nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-a…

Editor-in-chief of Scientific American