I'll definitely take the paper from Nature Medicine over the article by someone associated with Steve Bannon. I simply do not believe it is plausible that this many scientists are in on the massive cover-up that would be required to hide such evidence.
Wait, you don't think people in China would be afraid of outing their government's nefarious deeds? Even in the U.S. our whistleblowers like Snowden have to run to Russia and face exile at best. How many people work in the NSA that could have said something but didn't? Now add that China isn't afraid to jail hundreds of thousands of people if it has to to get compliance. It's not afraid to harvest the organs of prisoners either. Add that they literally control all communication in the country behind a tightly controlled firewall.
> they literally control all communication in the country behind a tightly controlled firewall.
I think you have a bit of an idealized perception of the Great Firewall if you think it allows controlling all communication. That's certainly the goal, but in practice, the implementation is far from achieving it.
Well-known historical events like the Tiananmen Square protests can be censored because they're so well known, so the censors know what kind of content to block. (But people who want to talk about them anyway also know which keywords to avoid to evade censorship. It's a cat-and-mouse game.)
New scandals become known all the time and cannot be censored until the news has spread far enough to reach the censors. For example, when Li Wenliang warned his friends about SARS infections in his hospital, the censors didn't know they had to censor screenshots of that conversation or his name until it was too late. When Ai Fen gave an interview to Renwu, the censors didn't know they had to censor it until it was too late.
In the end, the Chinese government had to honor Li Wenliang as a martyr and Ai Fen as a hero to somewhat calm the waves of public opinion. It's extremely unlikely that they'd be able to successfully suppress the information if the virus was lab-made and someone blew the whistle on that.
The conspiracy theory presented in this paper is that mainstream medical journals around the world are "strictly censoring" evidence that COVID19 was developed in a lab.
The Nature article only underlines the similarities between Sars-Cov-2 and viruses in the wild. It uses that as an evidence that the virus comes from natural selection.
The similarity absolutely IS NOT an evidence of natural selection, neither guided selection or straight genetic engineering.
Although I am absolutely not in favor of Bannon, many scientists self-censor to preserve their carrier, funding, link with chinese labs. Only those in favor of the natural selection publish in well known journals.
> Although I am absolutely not in favor of Bannon, many scientists self-censor to preserve their carrier, funding, link with chinese labs. Only those in favor of the natural selection publish in well known journals.
This is fairly standard conspiracy theory stuff. Next you'll be telling us about QAnon and pedophiles.
I'm sure you agree that your personal anecdote isn't evidence of a vast global conspiracy where scientists around the world censor themselves in order to ensure they retain links to Chinese labs?
Do you know many scientists? To counter your anecdote, my personal anecdote is that many scientists I know (as friends or colleagues) are cantankerous contrarians who would delight in going against the grain especially in the knowledge that real proof of such a theory would vastly increase their profile/notoriety.
Exactly. Scientific history is full of these contrarians who presented evidence to show they were right and everyone else was wrong all along. Now, to be respected in the scientific community you need to present strong evidence, even better irrefutable evidence, if possible, so as to not be viewed as a crackpot. In other words when going against the grain you'd better have an airtight case that's credible. Even if it eventually gets shot down, which happens, you'll have wanted the scientific community to have learned something in doing so. You'll still be remembered for that.
Well in this case that would probably increase their notoriety but not their profile.
There is no value publishing against the apparent consensus for natural selection, because of the high risk, and the lack of a definitive proof, yet. A true scientist would even refrain to conclude for the natural selection hypothesis.
Scientists are people too. You often see people hiding their real beliefs due to the fear of retaliation and public perception as well as misinterpretation regarding controversial topics, it is only natural that scientists have the same fear, especially when considering this case where we have a highly political topic.
Sure - I agree that there will be some scientists who will self-censor.
What I'm taking issue with is the trope that there's some kind of conspiracy of silence going on, where the global science community has decided it's beholden to China and refuses to research / publish credible theories that this is a lab-made virus. My experience is that scientists aren't a homogenous group and quite a few of them actually care about truth and facts and put that above the risk of losing links to Chinese funding.
You’re using the word conspiracy to ridicule the idea that humans will not speak about something out of fear of repercussions, which is about the most in-evidence thing about past atrocities one can imagine.
Earlier this year, there were attempts to publish articles going against the narrative, and those who attempted were ridiculed, the exactly same way like it is happening in this comments section. No one wants this to happen to them.
This is not correct. There is additional evidence presented in the article which you do not mention. Essentially, to create SARS-CoV-2 in a lab, you would have to pull off several impressive feats of biochemical engineering:
- "a hypothetical generation of SARS-CoV-2 by cell culture or animal passage would have required prior isolation of a progenitor virus with very high genetic similarity, which has not been described"
- "Subsequent generation of a polybasic cleavage site would have then required repeated passage in cell culture or animals with ACE2 receptors similar to those of humans, but such work has also not previously been described."
- "Finally, the generation of the predicted O-linked glycans is also unlikely to have occurred due to cell-culture passage, as such features suggest the involvement of an immune system."
Basically, synthesizing SARS-CoV-2 would require you to do at least three things that are currently unknown to science. Is it possible that a some military lab achieved this working in complete secrecy? Yes. Is it the most parsimonious explanation? No.
We have a substantially (96.2%) similar virus with known killing potential (3 out of 6 miners who caught it). It is discovered in 2013, but isn't added to any databases (despite the deaths making it very notable) until late January of this year.
The mine samples came from Yunnan province, but the research was done in Wuhan which is in Hubei province (Those provinces aren't even adjacent) at a lab which just so happens to be rather close to the seafood market where the first cases allegedly happened.
The Nature paper states, near the end, that “More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another.” Contrary to popular belief, that paper does not “debunk” the claim of laboratory origin but merely casts some doubt on it.
Several papers have now been written which provide more scientific data to re-evaluate this claim, and Steve Bannon did not provide the funding for all of them.
