Mon, May 3, 2021 2:21 p.m.
Nicholas Wade on the Origins of Covid
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038
It’s a very long article by Nicholas Wade, former science writer for the nyt, nature, and science (and author of the controversial book, A Troublesome Inheritance), but I’m glad I read it.
It's the most lucid, compelling account about the disputed, murky origins of the coronavirus I’ve encountered to date. Quite technical in places, it nevertheless makes a strong argument that while it’s still impossible to say with certainty (because of Chinese recalcitrance, which itself raises suspicions), by far the stronger evidence points towards the laboratory origin hypothesis, specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and their gain-of-function research supported with U.S. taxpayer dollars.
So why has the origin become so contested? Because of course not just reputations and funding are at stake, but blame for a pandemic which has so far cost more than 3 million lives and laid waste to billions of others.
Why haven’t biologists and virologists in particular been more eager to find and reveal the truth, which is supposedly out there?
According to Wade, in an observation that will ring quite familiar to some of us:
Science is supposedly a self-correcting community of experts who constantly check each other’s work. So why didn’t other virologists point out that the Andersen group’s argument [against the laboratory origin hypothesis] was full of absurdly large holes? Perhaps because in today’s universities speech can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency. [Emphasis added.]
Scientists are, first and foremost, only human, warts and all.
N.S.: Knowledge tends to collapse into the sociology of knowledge.
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