Scientists and journalists of science taking each other apart in public circa 18 months after something started isn't remarkable. It's actually what should happen.
The author can pick apart declaration of interests in The Lancet's op-eds for conflict of interest because in scientific publications the declaration is made.
By contrast this article on 'unherd.com' does not have a conflict of interests statement. I don't know the author of the article, and am not told who reviewed it / or by what process. We're not told how the work was funded; at least they don't mention being bank rolled by a single hedge fund millionaire [1]. I'm sure one could write some similar article hinging on that fact and some suggestive eyebrow movements.
There's a lot of sanctimonious crap out there on the internet about the 'sociology' of science which somehow lacks any form of reflexivity.
Worse that that; the WHO has become a political organization. Their unforgivable cover -up of China's seismic incompetence is nothing short of disgraceful. Up until very late they were silently abetting China's cover - up, blindly swallowing their lies that the disease wasn't infectious and advising the world not to restrict travel to and from China. We need to take a long, long look at the WHO. If not for their colossal failings of biblical proportions, who (ha, ha) knows if we would still be needing to wear masks now. Also China, but everybody seems to be more than willing to avert their gaze and pretend nothing happened there.
Seems like this supports the idea we should be taking a hard look at WHO, because your take would imply extreme incompetence, not just being complicit in a cover up
This is part of a broader phenomena I see: people have less and less trust in any authority, with increasingly good reasons.
High social trust is the bedrock of a functional, egalitarian society, and I can't tell if it is being thrown away out of simple short-sighted greediness and self interest, or if the idea is to eliminate functional, egalitarian societies.
In Western societies, violent crime increased, poverty and its effects began to increase. One of the few common denominators was the constant narrative drum-beat that "the system is rigged." We even teach it to primary school children now.
It's a message designed to foment violent revolution, mostly with the hopes of creating a communist dictatorship as a successor to Western democracy. It's also a message that's been useful for creating mobs. You know, right out of Rules for Radicals and Engels' writings.
In the 1940s, Britain had unattended newsstands. People would select a newspaper or periodical, and leave their money in a cup, making correct change. In New York, there were "cafeterias" that did essentially the same where diners selected their food from an open buffet, totaled up their tab, and informed the cashier what they should pay. Both in Britain, and in the U.S. these things disappeared out of necessity in the 1960s.
When you make a concerted effort to educate people to think that imposition of Law and a civil society is a "rigged system" designed to "keep them down" the natural reaction will be to disregard social norms for moral behavior. And this is what we've seen.
It's just gotten to a fever pitch and become pervasive now.
The same is happening now with all the scientists asking the EMA and the FDA to look into existing drugs which work well against Covid. Either ignored, or worse, isolated from their own community as lunatics. No wonder people is scared to speak up unless there's nothing left to loose.
In a certain sense the scientific community has always been a cartel. It wouldn't work otherwise. This is precisely the element that was missing in antiquity when we talk about knowledge, science, and the intellectuals of that time. There's no such monopoly on statements and this is why all the 'scientific' work back then is philosophico-theological in nature. Aristotle's zoology fundamentally derives down the chain of existence from a First Mover, his works Of The Soul (his theory of mortal things) and Metaphysics (his theory of non-mortal things) are all a single continuum.
Covid aside, I became somewhat disillusioned with academia during my graduate studies. Many/most papers were not reproducible and were generally of low quality. Students were often pushed through the system by their advisors who gained points for each student graduating but not until a maximum number of papers had been extracted from them.
Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,"
We focus too much on metrics for funding. It’s rare nowadays that a researcher can work on something for years and be allowed to take risks and fail. There’s little reward for reproduction and even less for knowledge translation (putting it into practice!)
This seems to be another instance of the theory that they were doing gain of function research at Wuhan and the results of that research escaped. A quick skim through the article did not produce any actual proof to support the theory. Did I miss it?
You didn’t miss it, this is a meta article discussing how discussion of a lab leak was shot down as a conspiracy theory after sponsors of the Wuhan research with conflicts of interest posted letters claiming that is was zoological early on in the pandemic. The resulting mass of virologists latched on to the theory and it has held in place until the recent letter submitted to Science which calls for investigation into the lab leak. To learn more about the plausibility of the lab leak you’ll have to read the Science letter here
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1/tab-pd...
Moreover, the linked article states as a fact: "But before the ban went into effect, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded some gain-of-function research which, through an intermediary nonprofit and subcontracting arrangement, came to be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The moratorium was lifted during the Trump administration, apparently at the urging of Anthony Fauci, and a 2019 renewal of the 2014 research grant did include gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses." However, snopes https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fauci-gain-function-covid/ says "To date, none of these claims have been substantiated and Fauci has explicitly denied that NIH funded of gain of function research on the coronavirus." In particular, Fauci said under oath to Congress: "The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology." Of course, I don't know what is true, but the linked article is certainly full of unproven assumptions...
The author can pick apart declaration of interests in The Lancet's op-eds for conflict of interest because in scientific publications the declaration is made.
By contrast this article on 'unherd.com' does not have a conflict of interests statement. I don't know the author of the article, and am not told who reviewed it / or by what process. We're not told how the work was funded; at least they don't mention being bank rolled by a single hedge fund millionaire [1]. I'm sure one could write some similar article hinging on that fact and some suggestive eyebrow movements.
There's a lot of sanctimonious crap out there on the internet about the 'sociology' of science which somehow lacks any form of reflexivity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnHerd