Scientists: We Were Silenced By a Collective Pressure Campaign; Other Scientists Told Us To Keep Quiet Or We Might Not Get Funding For Our Research

Funding from Fauci and Collins, they mean.

Speaking to Fox News, scientists from the U.S., Britain, Germany, Israel and Australia have recounted that it was difficult to publish research about the possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic began due to a lab leak, and that they found themselves shunned by other scientists, even when those scientists themselves found the lab-leak theory plausible.

"We got our heads shot from every direction, from people who we now know were actually thinking exactly the same thing, but have chosen to say the opposite," Nikolai Petrovsky, a professor of medicine at Flinders University in Australia, told Fox News Digital.

The scientists speaking to Fox News claimed that others in the field were desperate to protect the scientific community -- and funding -- so they coalesced around the single idea that a lab leak would have hurt their work, and the community. The scientists who supported the theory had research papers rejected, and the media branded them conspiracy theorists.

Lord Matt Ridley, author of the book "Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19," told Fox News that funding was also a motive for silence. "Senior scientists were quietly saying to me, 'We think you're right that it does need to be taken seriously, but we don't say so because the funding agencies might give us a hard time.'"

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There was also a fear that if COVID-19 was the result of this risky gain-of-function research, science itself would be harmed, the scientists explained.

"When they show that science could create something so malicious, this is a very big obstacle for the scientific community because it actually proves that science can do something that could be very violent and wrong," Israeli biotechnologist Ronen Shemesh told Fox News Digital.

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Despite plenty of evidence that a lab leak was highly likely, even established medical journals refused to publish the scientists' work.

Petrovsky -- who with the help of Oracle-- used their super computers to map the virus, thereby showing that it likely came from a lab -- said he received blanket rejections from editors at medical journals who called his work "too hot to handle."

He was also told it would harm relations with China -- a country that has such a huge influence over the medical community and research papers.

"There was a concern about offending China," Petrovsky said. "And obviously, there are a lot of links with China within science, and people didn't want to upset that relationship"

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As the silence continued through 2020, many said it all was political. "They feared this might help former President Donald Trump," Shemesh said.

Video report at the link.

posted by Ace at 05:20 PM

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