The Wuhan coverup is more typical than you think – The Spectator World
The biggest shock amid the COVID-19 pandemic has been the discovery that the virus may have been released during an illegal collaboration on so-called gain-of-function research between the US nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Recently revealed National Institutes of Health (NIH) documents show that American taxpayers directly subsidized this joint effort, despite a federal government ban on any experiment that might give pathogens the ability to leap species.
Even worse was that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak tried to shut down any debate on whether the coronavirus had been leaked from a lab by getting 27 prominent scientists to endorse a March 2020 letter to the medical journal Lancet. Yet one crucial detail was omitted from the correspondence: 26 of his 27 co-signatories also had connections to China s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
While the layperson might find it fantastic that so many researchers could have been engaged in such cynical and destructive behavior, this has become the reality of a scientific profession full of deception, rank self-seeking, and even political manipulation.
I find the “deception, rank self-seeking and even political manipulation” impressive but not fantastic. Former CDC head Robert Redfield’s having his *life threatened* by some scientists — that rises to the level of fantastic. But usually some scientists just threaten to ruin the careers of other scientists and that usually doesn’t rise to the level of a felony, though it’s often an unfortunately unactionable tort. Those darn scientists. Maybe the question of the virus’s origins should not be political, but of course it is. One side is saying, let Science provide the answer! And the other side is saying — We’re the scientists, and we say STFU!