Former NYT Science Writer: The Lab-Leak Hypothesis Is a Lot Stronger Than I Used to Believe and I Shouldn't Have Dismissed It as a "Conspiracy Theory."

But dismissing things as "conspiracy theories" is how the Ruling Class dispatches with all inconvenient facts and speculations these days, isn't it?

(While meanwhile, incredibly, publishing one conspiracy theory after another themselves!!!)

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The deeper I read into the papers and articles Nick [Wade -- the science reporter who rekindled interest in the lab leak hypothesis last week] cited, the clearer it became how much new information had trickled out in the last year. Not new to the most intense and well-educated followers of this topic, but new to the greater public debate. I include articles like this, this, this, this and this by Yuri Deigin, Rossana Segretto, Milton Leitenberg, Josh Rogin, Nicholson Baker and others.
And more and and more scientists feel misled.

I now agree with Nick's central conclusion: We still do not know the source of this awful pandemic. We may never know. But the argument that it could have leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or a sister lab in Wuhan has become considerably stronger than it was a year ago, when the screaming was so loud that it drowned out serious discussion.

And China's lack of candor is disturbing. It denies access to the institute's lab logs and whatever messages were swapped during its own investigations, took down 2018 statements critical of lab biosecurity protocols, retaliated against Australia for advocating an open investigation and sharply restricted the W.H.O. investigators.

Calls for a better probe are mounting. Last week, 18 biologists, including leading and outspoken experts on this pandemic like the Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch and Yale immunologist Akiko Iwasaki, published a letter in Science calling for a new investigation and demanding that Chinese labs and public health agencies open their records to outside scrutiny.

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Also worrying: the hunt for the spillover theory's ["spillover" is the natural mutation of a virus so that it can jump from animal to man] smoking gun -- a very closely related natural virus in a human or an animal -- has gone on for over a year.
Success would mean big prizes for the discoverer — especially from the Chinese government, which could say "See??"

And yet -- zip. That doesn’t mean it won't be found. But by now we might have expected at least some smoking shell casings.

I wouldn't bother reading the article -- he's a leftwing clown and justifies his ignorant-yet-arrogant dismissal of the theory based on the fact that The Bad Orange Man is Orange and Bad.

Reporters are constantly posing and pretending to be scientists, when, at best, they are merely transcriptionists for scientists.

I cannot take these uneducated buffoons continuing to pretend to have the training and knowledge necessary to reach scientific conclusions based on their own non-existent "expertise."

posted by Ace at 05:18 PM

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