(Tom: This is a great read about a scientist-turned-detective with a level of ethics that matches her competence in biology. Well worth the read! Executive summary: The seafood-market theory, which Chinese health officials and the World Health Organization espoused in the early days of the pandemic, was wrong. The virus was lab engineered.)
“There’s long been a sense that if the public and politicians really knew about the dangerous pathogen research being conducted in many laboratories, they’d be outraged. Denying the possibility of a catastrophic incident like this, then, could be seen as a form of career preservation [for scientists]. ‘For the substantial subset of virologists who perform gain-of-function research,’ Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and another founding member of the Cambridge Working Group, told me, ‘avoiding restrictions on research funding, avoiding implementation of appropriate biosafety standards, and avoiding implementation of appropriate research oversight are powerful motivators. Antonio Regalado, biomedicine editor of MIT Technology Review, put it more bluntly. If it turned out COVID-19 came from a lab, he tweeted, ‘it would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom.’”
Finish reading: