1/ A little Sunday morning thread on Covid-19 origins, inspired in part by Peter Daszak’s appearance before Congress this past week. We’ve learned a lot over the past four years about the context in which SARS-CoV-2 first appeared. This is thanks not, for the most part…
2/ to the work of intrepid mainstream #media journalists (especially mainstream science reporters), but rather almost entirely to the work of independent journalists and other investigators who have dug deeply into the question with skillful employment of FOIA requests,…
3/ lawsuits, and confidential sources, including within China itself. Most mainstream journalists accepted the default hypothesis put forward by the most outspoken virologists and their colleagues, a small mostly self-proclaimed group of “experts,” that because previous…
4/ recent pandemics (such as SARS1) had arisen via zoonotic spillovers, zoonosis was rightly the default assumption against which all lab origin hypotheses had to mount overwhelming evidence to gain traction. This led to a situation where the default zoonosis hypothesis…
5/ and its advocates were not required to mount much evidence for their own position. When they did come up with something plausible, such as the Worobey/Pekar Science papers of 2022, these advocates pulled up the drawbridge and would not allow critics of the papers…
6/ to be widely heard (that continues today.) But honesty would have required that the undisputed facts that the pandemic arose in Wuhan, the city with a famous coronavirus lab doing genetic engineering of SARS-like viruses under insufficient security levels, be put on the…
7/ same level of plausibility as the zoonosis hypothesis. Instead, of course, Daszak and others with clear conflicts of interest were allowed to brand the lab origin idea a “conspiracy theory” and mainstream reporters (including nearly all mainstream science journalists)…
8/ quickly turned into not just biased reporters but actually hardened propagandists for that position (these reporters included many who had done stellar work on earlier subjects, and even questioned conventional wisdom on many occasions.) Since the Worobey/Pekar papers…
9/ zoonosis proponents have failed to come up with any convincing evidence to further their hypothesis; even worse, a number of peer reviewed papers now challenge Worobey/Pekar, even though widespread knowledge of their details has been actively suppressed by the same…
10/ mainstream journalists and publications who touted Worobey/Pekar as basically ending the discussion (following the lead, of course, of the authors of those papers.) The worst offenders in this suppression were the two leading science journals in the world, Science…
11/ and Nature. We are now at a point where a constellation of evidence, circumstantial on both sides of the debate, strongly favors the lab leak hypothesis, and to some extent renders that the obvious explanation. The fact that the pile-on against Daszak at this…
12/ week’s Congressional hearing was from both Republications and Democrats made it impossible for even the most biased outlets, eg @ScienceMagazine, to continue to claim that the lab origin idea was a Republican talking point, at least for the moment. One can hope…
13/ that we have arrived at a turning point where the kind of serious investigations many have advocated for years might finally get under way. In the meantime, serious journalists and investigators will continue to chip away at the question, until we get some final answers.
14/ On that point, we should be very suspicious of those who say we may never know the answer, because that has become an alternative talking point for those who do not really want to know, or don’t want us to know. Nothing I have said in this thread is new or original…
15/ but I hope it might help some who are still thinking this through. Have a good Sunday.
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