Posted on 03/24/2021 7:37:02 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Edited on 03/24/2021 8:04:42 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
Nikolai Petrovsky was scrolling through social media after a day on the ski slopes when reports describing a mysterious cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China, caught his eye. It was early January 2020, and Petrovsky, an immunologist, was at his vacation getaway in Keystone, Colorado, which is where he goes most years with his family to flee the searingly hot summers at home in South Australia.
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
It did. In Wuhan China. Engineered with US backed research.
What a stupid article. Where have these people been.
These MIT guys and gals are in for a rude awakening.
Who are the racists suggesting this?
I’m not here to debate the origins of the virus—you’ll want to click through to the MIT article for that discussion—but it’s important to understand the depths of the politicization of the pandemic and the scientific community.
David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University, says a lab leak was never the subject of a “fair and dispassionate discussion of the facts as we know them.” Instead, tempers soon began to flare as those calling for a closer look at possible lab origins were dismissed as conspiracy theorists spouting misinformation. Election-year politics and growing Sinophobic sentiments only added to the tensions. Attacks on Asian-Americans had been escalating since the pandemic began, and with then-president Trump fuming about a “Chinese virus,” many scientists and reporters became “cautious about saying anything that might justify the rhetoric of his administration,” says Jamie Metzl, a senior fellow at the Washington, DC–based Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank.
[…]
But in late April 2020, as Petrovsky’s group was thinking about where to publish their work, “Trump blurted out” that he had reason to believe the virus came out of a Chinese lab, Petrovsky says. And at that point, he adds, much of “the left-wing media” decided “they were going to paint the whole lab thing as a conspiracy theory to bring down Trump.”
In other words, Trump Derangement Syndrome began to trump science.
Efforts to determine the origins of the virus, according to Relman, “have become mired in politics, poorly supported assumptions and assertions, and incomplete information.” Metzl, meanwhile, fears that going against the narrative could result in “career suicide.”
Petrovsky, commenting on that politicization of science, said his researchers were “dealing with global forces that are way more powerful than a scientist trying to tell a science-based story.”
My. How increibly intuitive thety are at MIT, sarc/off
Darn those pesky bats and their silly gain of function research.
They are just fanning the smudgepot of the smokescreen. Anyone with half a brain knows what happened by now. No one can convince men the collective world intelligence apparatus doesn’t know the truth, heck we know the truth and have for a year. All they are doing is sowing chaos to the masses.
‘Leak’ implies accidental.
It did not leak.
Germ warfare was what they called it years ago.
Thankful to President Trump for Op Warp Speed!
When they cancelled the French researcher who discovered HIV because he said that COVID possesses properties that shouldn’t exist in nature and its origins should be highly suspected, you knew that politics were trumping (pun intended) scientific discussion.
China has greased all the right palms.
An article supposedly about hard facts just HAS to toss in this bromide. The fact that they threw in this conjecture, which has absolutely nothing to do with the virus or President Trump and everything to do with young male black culture, casts doubt on the entire article.
The author could have as easily written a different non-sequitur with the same effect and relevance to the story.
The murder rate in Portland jumped 500% since the pandemic began...
I thought the article was good. It laid out the science as to how/why the virus might have been engineered in and/or escaped from a lab. It also objectively showed how politics may have influenced the “investigation” and what scientists faced if they suggested an alternative hypothesis.
Rather than criticize the author (and these scientists) for questioning the official line and the information suppression over politics we might want to thank them for writing a well-reasoned piece that indicates an open dialogue about the origins of the virus.
Just my .02. Yes, I have always believed there was much more to the story and the CCP had a big role in this either through nefarious action or incompetence (or both), but we need “science” to back that up.
Bioweapons can be highly effective articles of war. This is especially true if you can design a virus that targets humans that is not well known or understood and you can vaccinate your populace against it. This was the subject of study back all the way back in the 60’s during the Cold War and it continues today.
It goes without saying that most articles in the MSM have to pay homage to woke culture. Usually a sentence or two that has little bearing on the subject that is placed awkwardly in the piece.
Yuri Deigin published an in-depth technical analysis of the origins of SARS-COV-2 in "Medium" on April 22, 2020: Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research. It was curious that he decided to publish his analysis in Medium rather than a peer-reviewed journal and it was also curious that his work didn't generate a big outburst of criticism and get "cancelled." It was published and then just seemed to have quietly died.
The fact that the deeper you dive into the research activities of coronavirologists over the past 15–20 years, the more you realize that creating chimeras like CoV2 was commonplace in their labs. And CoV2 is an obvious chimera (though not nesessarily a lab-made one), which is based on the ancestral bat strain RaTG13, in which the receptor binding motif (RBM) in its spike protein is replaced by the RBM from a pangolin strain, and in addition, a small but very special stretch of 4 amino acids is inserted, which creates a furin cleavage site that, as virologists have previously established, significantly expands the “repertoire” of the virus in terms of whose cells it can penetrate.
Yes, I've noticed that. Some weird sentence that is just inserted randomly somewhere in the article. There seems to be some primal part of the brain that forces authors to do that. Do they think they are inoculating themselves with such a transparent ploy?
It’s the price of admission in a “woke” world and it does inoculate them from “woke” criticism by their peers.
It’s pretty silly.
With that being said, this article is still far braver and much more science based about suggesting alternative hypotheses to the “woke” media narrative and the ridiculous behavior by the WHO.
For the record, the “wet markets” in China and elsewhere in the 3rd world have long been acknowledged to be a perfect vector for pandemics. This was true when I was a grad student in the early 90’s and it remains true today.
“Food safety” is a national security issue that is rarely acknowledged publicly nor is it talked about much.
It sure didn’t come from any wet market.
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