Chan and 17 other scientists wrote a letter in the May issue of the journal SCIENCE on this point.
They admitted that, in essence, they didn't want to be viewed as a "tool" of Trump and so they kept quiet about the lab leak theory being the most likely theory for a full year.
Facebook and Twitter and YouTube censored and deplatformed people for talking about a lab leak, so that always contributed to this anti-science mess.
nvestigate the origins of COVID-19
Jesse D. Bloom1,2, Yujia Alina Chan3, Ralph S. Baric4, Pamela J. Bjorkman5, Sarah Cobey6, Benjamin E. Deverman3, David N. Fisman7, Ravindra Gupta8, Akiko Iwasaki9,2, Marc Lipsitch10, Ruslan Medzhitov9,2, Richard A. Neher11, Rasmus Nielsen12, Nick Patterson13, Tim Stearns14, Erik van Nimwegen11, Michael Worobey15, David A. Relman16,17,*
1Basic Sciences and Computational Biology, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA 98109, USA.
2Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, MD 20815, USA.
3Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
4Department of Epidemiology and Department of Microbiology & Immunology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
5Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.
6Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
7Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 1A8, Canada.
8Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology & Infectious Disease, Cambridge, UK.
9Department of Immunobiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06519, USA.
10Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
11Biozentrum, University of Basel and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Basel, Switzerland.
12Department of Integrative Biology and Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
13Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
14Department of Biology and Department of Genetics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
15Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.
16Department of Medicine and Department of Microbiology & Immunology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
17Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
↵* Corresponding author. Email:
relman@stanford.edu
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Science 14 May 2021:
Vol. 372, Issue 6543, pp. 694
DOI: 10.1126/science.abj0016
- By Clownkicker