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.”
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...
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.
Anyone who doesn’t think that this was a planned bioweapon is a complete idiot. Unfortunately, when unspeakable evil stares people in the face, most of them refuse to see it, because it’s just too upsetting to them.