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Glenn Greenwald: To Deny the "Lab Leak" COVID Theory, the NYT and WPost Use Dubious and Conflicted Sources
Related: ethics in medicine, gears of the machine, Glenn Greenwald, SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka Coronavirus
Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it.
This is not a post about fake news (rampant), or about where COVID really came from.
Rather it is about the politicized nature of science, which makes it anti-science. What a disaster for humanity.
Glenn Greenwald: To Deny the "Lab Leak" COVID Theory, the NYT and WPost Use Dubious and Conflicted Sources
2021-12-02
A bizarre and abrupt reversal by scientists regarding COVID's origins, along with clear conflicts of interest, create serious doubts about their integrity. Yet major news outlets keep relying on them.
That COVID-19 infected humanity due to a zoonotic leap from a "wet market” in Wuhan — rather than a leak from a lab in the same Chinese city — was declared unquestionable truth at the start of the pandemic. For a full year, anyone dissenting from this narrative was deemed so irresponsible that they were banned from large social media platforms, accused of spreading "disinformation.” No debate about COVID's origins was permitted. It had been settled by The Science™. Every rational person who believed in science, by definition, immediately accepted at the start of the pandemic that COVID made a natural leap from bats or pangolins; that it may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan which just so happens to gather, study and manipulate novel coronaviruses in bats was officially declared a deranged conspiracy theory.
The reason this consensus was so quickly consecrated was that a group of more than two dozen scientists published a letter in the prestigious science journal Lancet in February, 2020 — while very little was known about SARS-CoV-2 — didactically declaring “that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The possibility that COVID leaked from the Wuhan lab was dismissed as a "conspiracy theory,” the by-product of “rumours and misinformation” which, they strongly implied, was an unfair and possibly racist attack on “the science and health professionals of China.
For months, that letter shaped the permissible range of debate regarding the origins of COVID. Or, more accurately, it ensured that there was no debate permitted. The Science™ concluded that COVID was a zoonotic virus that naturally leaped from non-human animal to human, and any questioning of this decree was deemed an attack on The Science™.
That Lancet letter has fallen into disrepute due to the key role in its publication played by one of its signatories, Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance. To say that Daszak had a gigantic but undisclosed conflict of interest in disseminating this narrative about the natural origins of COVID is to understate the case. Daszak had received millions of dollars in grants from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to conduct research into coronaviruses in bats, and EcoHealth awarded part of that grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab which would be the leading suspect, by far, for any COVID lab leak.
All of this led to an unraveling of the Official Consensus. In May of this year — fifteen months after The Lancet pronounced the debate closed — Facebook reversed its policy of banning anyone who suggested that the virus may have come from the Wuhan lab... Weeks later, President Biden “ordered intelligence officials to 'redouble' efforts to investigate the origins of Covid-19, including the theory that it came from a laboratory in China.” The president's statement noted that “the US intelligence community was split on whether it came from a lab accident or emerged from human contact with an infected animal.” Suddenly, mainstream outlets such as The New York Times began publishing claims that, just months earlier, were officially declared "disinformation” and resulted in removal from social media platforms: “some scientists have argued that it’s possible SARS-CoV-2 was the result of genetic engineering experiments or simply escaped from a lab in an accident,” said the Paper of Record in October. The Official Consensus had undergone a 180-degree turn in the course of just over a year. "Lab leak” went from insane conspiracy theory that must be censored to serious possibility that must be investigated.
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WIND: we have strayed so from science that “scientists” are literally the antithesis of it.
Surely it should be a crime to engage in political discourse while pretending it is science—those dirtbags calling themselves “scientists” should be barred from ever publishing anything again.
Don’t get me started on the non-existence of real journalism among all mainstream platforms.
Or how formerly prestigious journals like The Lancet are revealed more and more to be little better than a scientifically-bent National Enquirer—a repository for fraud along with the grotesque infiltration of wokeness and political ideology into faux scientific papers. Science is rotting from within.
Believing “the science” is for idiots.
