The “party line” I was referring to was that of acceptable views as held by the intelligentsia, something my last few posts had been concerned with. Since you don’t believe such a class exists, it’s understandable you didn’t get it.
But, really, would Ms Chan’s work have a snowball’s chance in a very hot place if submitted to you or most of the people posting on this board? The response to her open letter in 2021 brought on a barrage of name-calling and even threats of violence:
“The attacks were so fierce that Dr Chan worried for her personal safety and started taking precautions, wondering if she was being followed and varying her daily routines… The backlash made her fear that she had put her professional future in jeopardy, and she wrote a letter to her boss, in which she apologized and offered her resignation.” (NYTimes, Aug 4, 2021)
This for seeking additional information. Ah, yes, the wonderfully dispassionate world of science on full display.
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Much of this topic appears to have been written in relation to the highly speculative hypothesis of weaponization of a virus. This seems to have overwhelmed the potential for substantive analysis that may have derived from a recognition of gain-of-function research in virology. Although weaponization and gain of function would overlap technically, they’re quite different conceptually. Moreover, gain-of-function research has been proven to have been funded at Wuhan. To have ignored this is to have missed the point, in my opinion.
Yes, the WSJ opinion piece does show bias through the framing of its argument. The same could be said of the Washington Post, NYT, Boston Globe, NBC, ABC, etc., etc. where they supported the zoonosis theory and dismissed anyone who mentioned the lab leak theory - including renouned virologists - as fringe conspiracy theorists in their news reporting and opinion pieces. Get past the choice of specific charged words and look at the factual evidence provided.
No credible source claims with absolute certainty that the virus originated from the Wuhan lab, or the wet markets. Every report I have read equivocates with verbage including some measure of likelyhood. For example, in 2021 the FBI claimed with “moderate confidence” that the virus originated at the Wuhan lab, and British intelligence concluded that it was “feasible” that the virus originated in a lab. In 2023 the Energy Dept stated with “low confidence” that the virus originated in a lab. Of course, the WHO - working with the Chinese government - concluded that the virus did not originate in a lab.
Except with regard to global cooling/global warming/climate change/climate chaos/name of the day science, where any scientist who questions the dogma risks not being hired, not receiving tenure, not getting funded, not getting published, or being hounded out of their department.
If someone could come up with legitimate proof that the current models of a warming planet due to anthropogenic causes are wrong? Dude, that would be huge, it would make a career, it would be amazing for the individual (or, more likely, team) that managed it.
But if you’re just going to be a crank and not provide meaningful proof, yeah, you’re doing a disservice to the discipline.
Unless powerful scientists, whose interests are threatened by such a revelation, attempt to suppress it. Here’s a good example:
The U.S. maternal mortality increase was fake. It was a thing that never happened .
In 2021, Joseph et al. published a paper in Obstetrics & Gynecology demonstrating that the entire recorded increase in maternal mortality since 2003 was due to a change in the way data was gathered.
…
Christopher M. Zahn, the interim CEO of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, wrote a lengthy statement in response, arguing that “reducing the U.S. maternal mortality crisis to ‘overestimation’” is “irresponsible and minimizes the many lives lost and the families that have been deeply affected.” Why? Because it “would be an unfortunate setback to see all the hard work of health care professionals, policy makers, patient advocates, and other stakeholders be undermined.” Rather than pointing out any major methodological flaw in the paper, Zahn’s statement expresses the concern that it could undermine the…goal of improving maternal health.
This is absolutely breathtaking, and not in a good way. One of the most prominent doctors in the field of obstetrics is openly arguing that positive data about U.S. health should be suppressed , and that popular misconceptions based entirely on data artifacts should be encouraged to persist, in order to motivate the public to devote more resources to the goals he thinks are important.
To me, this clearly qualifies as disinformation. Zahn is demanding that researchers bury their findings so that the doctors, activists, and politicians he likes can get more money.
Wait, somebody writing a statement opposing a scientific finding counts as suppressing those findings?!?
And how in the world was Joseph et al.'s paper suppressed? Because last I looked (read: while writing this response), not only is the full text of the paper still available at PubMed, but I see that it has been cited by other papers indexed in PubMed continuously since publication.
Seriously, your claim about scientific results being suppressed doesn’t make sense.
Suppressed doesn’t have to mean that publications are rendered inaccessible. It means that those with a vested interest maintain a false narrative so that two years after publication, the WSJ ends up writing an article about maternal mortality reaching the highest level since 1965, with quotes from clinicians like this:
“It’s heartbreaking,” said Dr. Nawal Nour, chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “We’ve worked so hard to get the trend going the right way, and it just doesn’t seem like we’re heading there.”
“It’s sad but not surprising,” said Dr. Veronica Gillispie-Bell, an obstetrician and gynecologist and associate professor at Ochsner Health, a health system in New Orleans
We had a sad incident happen this year. An eight month pregnant woman was in a car driven by her boyfriend. We had had an ice storm the night before leaving an inch of ice on the roads. We live in a rural area, so there was not much ice removal. Authorities were begging people to stay off of the roads. Unfortunately, the car slid and hit a tree. The woman and her child were killed. The boyfriend was unhurt. I have often wondered if she was part of the maternal mortality statistics or not. Since I didn’t know the family, I never found out just why they were out on the roads. It was so sad.
The reckoning is just beginning on all the “science” surrounding Covid. This Princeton professor of sociology and public policy discusses the loss of trust in public health professionals–starting on paragraph 4 she discusses the current hedging by Fauci and others on the origins of Covid.
Has there been pushback? Sure! And honestly, there’s supposed to be. Every new result should have pushback! Any new result needs to be vetted by multiple teams. That’s the way the correct answer winds out, rather than science being whipped about by faddishness.
But you presented that example as if it were a case of suppression, when it is very clearly not.
There was a lot of discussion of this at the time, and pretty transparent discussion.
Scientists are trained to speak about likelihoods in ways that don’t match normal people’s uses of language. It is a long-recognized issue, but there are very good reasons for current practice, and so changes may or may not be worth it.
It’s a direct response to Alina Chan’s article, but doesn’t try to support or debunk her claim. Rather, it delves into why people are or are not willing to believe it.
I’m still on the fence as to which theory I feel is more legitimate. But I do believe one thing, regardless of which theory turns out to be correct, China is at fault. 1. Either their scientists were sloppy and allowed the virus to leak from the Wuhan lab, or they allowed (annd continue to allow) unsanitary wet markets which continuously provide fertile ground for zoonotic spillover. 2. They covered up the outbreak initially resulting in the spread of the virus into an unsuspecting world and have obstructed investigations into the origin from the beginning.