I don’t know why this thread has got taken over by the discussion of Covid Origins. Can’t anyone reopen the About the origin of SARS-CoV-2 thread? or some other thread where it would more naturally fit.
Moderator help @Dan_Eastwood
Anyway, here are some stellar scientific practices and procedures put in place by the main controllers of the narrative.
Francis Collins’s email,
Hi Tony and Cliff,
See (https://gbdeclaration.org/) This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the
Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention — and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike
Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. I
don’t see anything like that on line vet - is it underway?
Francis
And here is a bit I copied months ago from a website called Haaretz. You may not be able to access the article anymore, or at least without paying. I can’t anyway. It is about the transparency an openness afforded Bret Weinstein.
Recently he received a warning from YouTube that it might remove his channels and block the podcast ׁ(his program is both a YouTube show and an Apple podcast). In their shows, Weinstein and his wife frequently discuss controversial issues – for example, the likelihood that the coronavirus originated in a leak from someone in a laboratory in China. That theory, which until not long ago was identified with conspiracy theorists from the zany right, was censored for months by Facebook and Google. Recently, however, the wind started to blow from a different direction on this subject. In early May the science writer Nicholas Wade published an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in which he argued that crucial evidence points to the Wuhan lab as the source of the virus. Later that month the Biden administration announced that it was investigating whether the coronavirus had leaked from the lab. What tipped the scales in the public debate was the declaration by the television comic Jon Stewart (appearing on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”) – a standard-bearer for many on the American left – that he believes without any doubt that the coronavirus emerged from the Chinese lab. In an instant the “wacky conspiracy theory,” which had been suppressed by media companies, became an almost consensual working assumption.
“We were demonized publicly for a year or more for saying the obvious,” Weinstein says, “which was that the evidence such as it is, all points to the lab and there’s no evidence that points to a natural origin so far. For pointing that out, we were portrayed as conspiracy theorists.”
By whom?
“Many media outlets, news organizations, so-called ‘fact checkers,’ social media platforms and thousands of individual people. All those who made this point that the lab leak was a possibility, were portrayed as conspiracy theorists. Then suddenly for no reason – there was no change at all in the evidence – but suddenly upon the publication of Nicholas Wade’s piece the tide turned and suddenly it became possible for anyone to discuss this hypothesis out loud without being demonized. Which I found bewildering. Literally nothing new had emerged, it was just another presentation, there had been many prior presentations that had gone through the evidence, but suddenly it was like somebody had given people the green light to think for themselves.”
Probably good to insert the infamous line from the highly regarded Lancet,
The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.
This is further supported by a letter from the presidents of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and by the scientific communities they represent. Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture.
We want you, the science and health professionals of China, to know that we stand with you in your fight against this virus.
Has anyone here done that?
Can you name five people who have done that without a web search?