[johnforbes]

Trump said the lab leak theory should be strongly looked at. He was correct, and prominent scientists now admit that this factor of not wanting to be seen as a "tool" of Trump prevented science from proper research.

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
Hide authors and affiliations

Science 14 May 2021:
Vol. 372, Issue 6543, pp. 694
DOI: 10.1126/science.abj0016

[Clownkicker]

Once again johnfibs supplies us with evidence of his tiresome partisan lies. Thank you, johnny.

Here is the entire article johny referenced. Why he is such a pussy that he couldn't just post it himself instead of posting the useless list of sources for us is just one of those mysteries we must live with, I guess. Note that nowhere in the article does it say that they didn't investigate the lab leak theory due to any "Anti-Trump bias" or that they didn't want to be seen as tools of Trump. johnny simply made it up.


"On 30 December 2019, the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases notified the world about a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China (1). Since then, scientists have made remarkable progress in understanding the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), its transmission, pathogenesis, and mitigation by vaccines, therapeutics, and non-pharmaceutical interventions. Yet more investigation is still needed to determine the origin of the pandemic. Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable. Knowing how COVID-19 emerged is critical for informing global strategies to mitigate the risk of future outbreaks.

In May 2020, the World Health Assembly requested that the World Health Organization (WHO) director-general work closely with partners to determine the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (2). In November, the Terms of Reference for a China–WHO joint study were released (3). The information, data, and samples for the study's first phase were collected and summarized by the Chinese half of the team; the rest of the team built on this analysis.

Although there were no findings in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident, the team assessed a zoonotic spillover from an intermediate host as “likely to very likely,” and a laboratory incident as “extremely unlikely” [(4), p. 9].

Furthermore, the two theories were not given balanced consideration. Only 4 of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident (4). Notably, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus commented that the report's consideration of evidence supporting a laboratory accident was insufficient and offered to provide additional resources to fully evaluate the possibility (5).

As scientists with relevant expertise, we agree with the WHO director-general (5), the United States and 13 other countries (6), and the European Union (7) that greater clarity about the origins of this pandemic is necessary and feasible to achieve. We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data. A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest. Public health agencies and research laboratories alike need to open their records to the public. Investigators should document the veracity and provenance of data from which analyses are conducted and conclusions drawn, so that analyses are reproducible by independent experts.

Finally, in this time of unfortunate anti-Asian sentiment in some countries, we note that at the beginning of the pandemic, it was Chinese doctors, scientists, journalists, and citizens who shared with the world crucial information about the spread of the virus—often at great personal cost (8, 9). We should show the same determination in promoting a dispassionate science-based discourse on this difficult but important issue."-Science, May 2021, page 694


Note that the authors of johnny's phony 'smoking gun' article only eported that the lab leak theory is "extremely unlikely" just as we were told all along.

But most importantly, johhnfibs is trying to turn this into some sort of vindication of Trump's incompetence dealing with the pandemic. But as the article says, knowing the exact source of the outbreak doesn't effect Trump's response to it THIS time. It only has a possible effect on our response to some possible future outbreak.

Trump's incompetence would not have been effected in the least if he knew this information. Even if the source were a lab leak, that wouldn't excuse Trump's refusal to take the pandemic seriously for months, and then fail to put a plan in place to distribute vaccines when they became available. And furthermore, the article supports what Fauci has been telling us all along also, much to johnny's partisan chagrin.

[johnforbes]

Oh no, the article by itself is no smoking gun.

I never said that; you did.

The importance of the article is this -- it made the dam break.

For a year, censorship and deplatforming shelved a crucial hypothesis on covid origin.

Forget your obsession with Trump hatred for a second.

Science lost because the groves of academe hated Trump.

[Clownkicker]

Geezus, johnny, "science" didn't "lose" anything because of Twitter and Facebook "deplatforming" (<--criminy...) anyone legitimately looking into the hypothesis. Such research is not done on Twitter and Facebook, dimwit. Such research has been done for decades before either of them even existed. and it still is. Stop being so idiotically melodramatic.

You are pretending that these people not looking into the source and publish their findings changes anything in America. It doesn't.

But let's pretend science actually DID "lose" something (as if it's even possible for science to lose something.) Now, what does that have to do with public health policies concerning this pandemic? Nothing. What would that have to do with Trump's incompetence in not having a vaccine distribution plan in place. Nothing. And what would that have to do with Trump's refusal to tell his ignorant supporters to go get vaccinated with the vaccines he is supposedly responsible for. Nothing.


Now, the real critical points you are missing are these:

You said "Top Virologists Admit Lying to American Public for Months on Likely Wuhan Lab Leak Theory Because They Didn’t Want to be Associated with President Trump
Chan is one of 18 scientists who finally admitted in the journal of Science last month that the Wuhan coronvirus likely originated in a Wuhan, China virology lab."

Both of those statements are lies, as the article proves. You made it all up.

[johnforbes]

Of course, science lost.

Chan is admitting that Ivy League peer pressure (Trump hate) delayed open investigation of the lab leak theory for a crucial year during a global pandemic.

Politics has always affected science (Lysenko, Galileo, Copernicus, etc), but this is another disgraceful example.