Elite journals under scrutiny over role in Wuhan lab leak debate

We're having the debate again because the was never a deate. Also, this article is welll behind the curve in that emails obtained through a FOI request by mainstream newspapers in the US show colusion between Daszak and Fauci with the former thanking the latter for his brave support in the media. Of course it was Fauci's section of the NIH who channelled money to Wuhan via Daszak's private foundation. The reason that there is now a debate is that the original evidence was buried by the anti-Trump lobby, and that included the so-called scientific press. Also, there was some obvious closing of ranks by scientists who feared that if the public realised what they were playing at with gain of function research, there may be calls to defund all of them. Worse, someone may ask for a list of the potential benefits of the work, beyond the military applications. This work continued to be funded by the NIH, even when it was clear that military scientists from the PLA were involved. Indeed, one of them filed a patent for a SARS-Cov-2 vaccine in February 2020, a remarkable feat considering the official novelty if the infection. It's now time for truly open access and scientific debate, along with scepticism/cynicism of the imprimaturs bestowed by the increasingly politicised "top" journals who still make scientists pay to read their own work.

Second only to the leak of the virus in the first instance, the deliberate cover up by the scientific community with the collusion of the world's media is the most serious scandal of this century. When Daszak and other corrupt scientists dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a "conspriacy theory", why did the media not ask itself: what conspiracy? A conspiracy theory requires the theorist to state that there is a conspiracy. In the case of the lab leak such a conspiracy obviously does not exist. Suggesting that a virus leaked from a lab known to be performing experiments on such viruses is clearly and catagorically a reasonable suggestion, not a conspiracy theory. Alarm bells should have rung among the media. The fact that Daszak, Fauci, as well as, apparently, Jeremy Farrar and Patrick Vallance, rubbished the idea of a lab leak is further and incontrovertible evidence that science is utterly corrupt, highjacked by groupthink, money and politics. I believe almost nothing the scientific establishment says because they are peddling their agendas, not science.

I'm a scientist and so while I agree with what you say, I would defend the ideals of the scientific method and those who practice it rigorously and honestly. What is clear is that truth in any field can't survive politicization and its propaganda, and propaganda rules a lot more than the scientific branch of academia.

Fauci and Daszak both supported gain-of-threat experiments. https://peterdaszak.com

"Magdalena Skipper, editor-in-chief of Nature, said that the Science letter was a “very legitimate call” for further investigation, and that no discussions about the origin of the virus had been “taboo” at Nature. But she said she was “puzzled as to why we’re having [the debate] again in the absence of new evidence”." WHAT DEBATE? Perhaps this explains, in part, why Nature still seems to be singing from the now highly questionable, if not yet fully discredited, Fauci/Daszak hymn sheet? Or is it they are in the CCP's pocket?

Clearly there is malfeasance going on here. But why stop here. I suggest that this probing of origins should not be restricted to probing the laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. Doubts arose about the natural zoonotic origin of MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-1 as well; surely now is the time to re-open them to investigation. And why stop there? There’s HIV, Hendra, Ebola, Nipah and Zika; origins as some form of a conspiracy were quashed for these too. And let’s not forget that SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV are not the only beta-corona viruses found recently to infect humans, there is also HCoV-HKU1, HCoV-NL63, HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-229E. Does anyone find it suspicious that these were identified in humans before SARS-CoV-2? Obviously the Wuhan Institute of Virology was gradually working up to perfecting a more dangerously infective version. Just like they gradually produced new and more infective versions in sequence, alpha to delta. Seriously, though, the basis for much of this, the Nash opinion piece in Bull. Atom. Sci., is seriously flawed. His inadequacies in ALL the science is perhaps forgivable since he is not a viral geneticist, is unfamiliar with molecular genetic techniques, has problems with mathematics and probabilities and misunderstands evolution by natural selection. Not forgivable is his passing off the lack of discovery, in a year and a half, of a firm chain of transmission for SARS-CoV-2 as suspicious; as a science journalist he must know this took a decade and a half to achieve (provisionally) for SARS-CoV-1. Even less forgivable is his dismissal of the paper in Nature Medicine by Andersen et al as mere opinion, not research, because it appeared as a letter. He worked for Nature and he cannot have been unaware that short research articles of wide interest are still called “Letters” in Nature, an antiquated practice several of the longest established science journals still adhere to. This is an intentional attempt to deceive because, understandably, most readers would not know such esoteric details of journal nomenclature, just as they would be unaware of the publication dates of papers of interest, or the details of molecular genetics. But readers should expect the highest standards of truthfulness and competence, and this Nicholas Nash did not supply. But he certainly got what he wanted by being the new darling of the "China dun it" lobby. That this theory has attained significant and indeed saturating airtime is politically driven. Of course it is permitted by the very language of science which almost never absolutely rules something out. But not ruling something “out” does not mean that everything is “in” at equal probability.