Interview with a scientist associated with "The Lancet."

https://www.currentaffairs.org...zHDWDp4TDFg5L2WMlSkY

Interesting article.

This is important:

quote:

What I’m calling for is not the conclusion. I’m calling for the investigation. Finally, after two and a half years of this, it’s time to fess up that it might have come out of a lab and here’s the data that we need to know to find out whether it did.

Yup. That was the part that stood out most for me as well.

I'm sorry.

I know this is an article about a very important scientific speculation and all (It's being very long, I confess I couldn't get more than half way through).

However, having happened upon this early part of their thinking (which I don't have a clue about understanding in actual fact), I can't unthink it. [Bolding mine]

quote:

And the particular virus that causes COVID-19, called SARS-Cov-2, is notable because it has a piece of its genetic makeup that makes the virus more dangerous. And that piece of the genome is called the “furin cleavage site.”

Somehow in connection to the recent death of screen goddess Raquel Welch, I found myself not only reading about her, but other contemporaneous voluptuous goddesses (at least two of whom are still living; AKA Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren).

One difference between them and Raquel, is their impressive cleavages were Furrin. (American Welch's possibly greatest cleavage OTOH was native grown).

Hence, my reading of furin cleavage site.

:groan:

And the article isn't *that* long.

I found it to be very much worth my time.

"Well, the funny thing is those scientists who are saying that said the same thing on February 4, 2020, before they had done any research at all. And they published the same statement in March 2020, before they had any facts at all. So they’re creating a narrative. And they’re denying the alternative hypothesis without looking closely at it. That’s the basic point."

"We know that at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the scientists there had been trained by American scientists to use advanced bioengineering methodologies. And in particular, we have scientists in North Carolina, Texas, and so forth who do this kind of research, believe in it, argue for it, and say that they don’t want any regulations on it and so on. And they were in close contact with Wuhan Institute of Virology, and they were part of a joint research group that was stitched together by something called EcoHealth Alliance. And EcoHealth Alliance was the kind of marriage maker between the American scientists and the Chinese scientists. That was the vehicle for funding from the U.S. government, especially from the National Institutes of Health, and especially from Tony Fauci’s unit, the NIAID. There were years of grants, there were grant proposals. We don’t know exactly what was done. But we have enough reason to know that we should be asking exactly what was done. And we know definitively that from the beginning, NIH has been running from telling us what has been done. They’re not telling us the truth, that they had reason to fear from the start that this came out of a lab. And that to this day, they have reason to suspect it, but they’re not talking."

"The most interesting things that I got as chair of the Lancet commission came from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits and whistleblower leaks from inside the U.S. government. Isn’t that terrible? NIH was actually asked at one point: give us your research program on SARS-like viruses. And you know what they did? They released the cover page and redacted 290 pages. They gave us a cover page and 290 blank pages! That’s NIH, for heaven’s sake. That’s not some corporation. That is the U.S. government charged with keeping us healthy."

(Question:
"A shocking thing to me was that the head of the EcoHealth Alliance was on the World Health Organization team that actually investigated the origins of COVID and concluded that it wasn’t the lab.")

"Well, more than that: I appointed him—this was Peter Daszak—I appointed him to chair the task force of the pandemic commission that I was running for the Lancet. And he headed a task force on the origins. I thought, naively at the beginning, “Well, here’s a guy who is so connected, he would know.” And then I realized he was not telling me the truth. And it took me some months, but the more I saw it, the more I resented it.

And so I told him, “Look, you have to leave.” And then the other scientists in that task force attacked me for being anti-scientific. And I asked them: “What are your connections with all of this?” They didn’t tell me. Then when the Freedom of Information Act released some of these documents that NIH had been hiding from the public, I saw that people that were attacking me were also part of this thing. So I disbanded that whole task force. So my own experience was to witness close up how they’re not talking. And they’re trying to keep our eyes on something else. And away from even asking the questions that we’re talking about."

"There are at least two reasons why they might be doing what they’re doing. One is, as you say, the implications are huge. Imagine if this came out of a lab. And we have, by some estimates, about 18 million dead worldwide from this. That’s not the official count. But that’s the estimated excess mortality from COVID. Well, the implications of that—the ethical, the moral, the geopolitical—everything is enormous.

But there’s a second matter that is really important, too. One thing that is rather clear to me is that there is so much dangerous research underway right now under the umbrella of biodefense or other things that we don’t know about, that is not being properly controlled. This is for sure. And that’s happening around the world. And governments say “don’t poke your nose into that.” That’s our business, not your business. But it’s actually our business. It’s our business to understand what is going on with this. This is not to be kept secret. We don’t trust you."

This is an excellent interview.

I think everyone should read it.

Thanks, piqué.

quote:

I think everyone should read it

Agree. Maybe I should have made the thread title sexier.

THere's a great book by Matt Ridley which does a good job laying out the evidence on both sides.

I think it was unfortunate that scientists with great personal interest at stake were allowed to stigmatize even the discussion of the topic, and that was met uncritically by the press. Worse really, the press acted as enforcer in many cases.

quote:

Originally posted by piqué:

Agree. Maybe I should have made the thread title sexier.

I think Amanda can fix that for you.

quote:

Originally posted by QuirtEvans:

i dunno who wrote that. but i really like it. that's also what journalism is *supposed* to be, btw.

@pique - it was Derek Thompson in The Atlantic.

It’s an interesting line, for sure. But it never even had much of a chance to be relevant here. From very early days powerful interests were able to stigmatize the question itself, such that most scientific and media institutions avoided it in the first place.

That's absurd, of course it is relevant here. The key point is the very first sentence: "Do not trust people who, in their handling of complex questions with imperfect data, manufacture simplistic answers with perfect confidence." And then: "Trust people who change their mind when the evidence changes."

You develop an opinion on the probable origin of the virus based on the information that you have. You obtain new and additional information, that affects the probabilities, you revise your opinion to take the new information into account. "If you want to stay right in this space, you have to be curious enough to potentially prove yourself wrong."

It's the basic issue of keeping an open mind versus having a fixed and unchangeable view of the facts, regardless of later-developed evidence. And that's just as true in investigative journalism as it is in science.

Fair enough. I guess I was focusing on the talk about finding the study, etc. The early stigmatization of the question largely kept institutions away from studying it in the first place.