Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

That letter (and we are talking about only 27 people) was a bunch of scientists who got very defensive, very quickly, very early on, and were trying to stand up for their colleagues (when there was a lot of idiocy about them having unleashed a manmade virus deliberately). I pointed that out (on here) at the time -- that they were being tribal and defensive.

It also didn't offer any evidence of anything. It was a bunch of guys shouting. Just as there were a lot of ignorant people shouting CHINA! loudly. It was noise.

Those 27 signatories were being tribal, but I don't think they were lying. You could see whatever you wanted to see if you were starting with a conclusion and working your way backward. You could easily have sequenced the virus and concluded it was consistent with a zoonatic jump. They took it a step beyond, and defensively tried to shout down anyone else with the "conspiracy theory" stuff. But there WERE a lot of unfounded conspiracy theories in 2020. You had people saying that China created a virus and deliberately unleashed it on the world (there is zero evidence of this), and it was their colleagues who were getting hit with those accusations.

None of that was evidence of anything. I know I was tuning it all out and just trying to find and read things that provided actual evidence of where the virus came from. I thought it was pretty important at the time, because if it was a lab leak we all had a vested interest in identifying it and trying to make sure it doesn't happen again.

 

There was a lot of "gross ignorance" or whatever you want to call it in 2020. You had a moron president trying to politicize a pandemic and spreading misinformation about a virus.

Those scientists, as far as I know (and you couldn't possibly know) didn't have a political motive. You are just creating your own narrative about them. They were largely virologists and infectious diseases experts who were part of a tight knit community (they knew the scientists in China -- they all were working on the same kinds of things) and they saw a lot of conspiracy theories and things outright slandering their colleagues and they signed that ill-conceived letter.

Several of them signed their names to it because they simply wanted to dispel the conspiracy theories they were seeing, but Peter Daszak insisted on a broader statement, and they actually might not have known the statement was changed on them.

And in fairness, several of them publicly changed their positions in the coming months. In 2021, Bernard Roizman actually said he had come to believe that they were likely working on the virus in a lab and some sloppy individual brought it out. Charles Calisher did a complete 180 and said that it was more likely that it came out of the lab in Wuhan. There were several others, too.

I have yet to see some of the morons who were promulgating outrageous conspiracy theories be anywhere close to how honest some of those scientists were when they realized they had put their names on something they shouldn't have.