Only foreign scientist in Wuhan lab says Covid-19 leak highly unlikely(scmp.com)

Only foreign scientist in Wuhan lab says Covid-19 leak highly unlikely

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3139077/only-foreign-scientist-wuhan-lab-says-covid-19-leak-highly

1 comments

The way the article is written leaves a lot to be desired and it’s apparent that the preferred narrative Anderson puts forward is already fairly contorted, not making for a neutral source. Her bias is obvious to me when I strain to find any evidence of her scientist and researcher perspective in the article. We’re well aware that textbook cases are historically zoonotic, but a scientist must never cling to indoctrinated knowledge or ideologies. A scientist remains open to discovery and uses all emergent evidence to weigh and disprove historical and new explanations. A scientist has no pre-existing preferences for explanation, they follow where the evidence leads them, never being initially presumptive or dismissive. If Anderson wanted to appear more credible or reputable, she could acknowledge several things here that's plainly obvious at this point:

-The article leads people to believe the BSL-4 labs are safe with endless protocols and controls ensuring safety, thus the Wuhan lab is safe. This is presuming everything works as designed following all protocols, and it’s skirting the issue that there are still plenty of ways for a virus to leak out even with those safeguards in place (SARS/coronaviruses have leaked from labs on multiple occasions already, from a general hospital lab, a virology lab in Beijing, and another BSL-4 lab). Not to mention that there seems to be evidence which goes unacknowledged that safety protocols were not adhered to and work has been performed in Wuhan in labs below the recommended safety levels. Anderson’s answers fail to lend any weight here against the less than ideal scenarios outside of how things are supposed to work safely, or an administration that is known to be less than transparent and less concerned with safety compared to western administrations.

-Anderson apparently puts forward the argument that since the reservoir of 2002 SARS was specifically located in Yunnan finally in 2017, that it’s pretty normal to have no evidence for natural origin at this point. In fact there was constant progress being made since ~2003 that continually pointed to a natural reservoir AND a natural intermediate host. Scientists already had the blanks filled in pretty quickly, and what took so long was only finding a specific occurring location and population of the reservoir. The intermediate host was very quickly identified, and scientists identified a species of bat which could act as the reservoir in testing. Yes, finding the virus in the wild in a remote cave in China takes time. What is concerning is that she ignores these inconvenient facts to put forward her odd narrative and equate the 2002 SARS origin search with COVID-19 that has almost no evidence to point to for a natural source. As a scientist, I will not hide facts. So to be fully transparent I will tell you that Ebola also has a challenging lack of evidence to a natural source, which is not quite definitively decided yet (a new finding is currently being peer reviewed). But Ebola had more initial evidence pointing to a natural source than COVID-19, and it’s more rare and something we have much less years of experience with in comparison to SARS and coronaviruses. The emergence of COVID-19 is highly unique in many ways compared to 2002 SARS and other coronaviruses and pandemics in general, and there’s no precedent of an origin search being this difficult for either, or any virus in a similar class except Ebola that I’m aware of. With that noted, that's how a scientist needs to be transparent and asterisk and footnote their statements and there’s little like that from Anderson in this article. This article is quite the opposite of being scientifically transparent.

-Anderson fails to provide more specifics about the lab which could better anchor the facts and support whether her somewhat flimsy accounts are representative of the truth. How big is the lab? How many people were working there? How many different sections or areas were there? How many projects were ongoing at any time? Could she possibly have had enough visibility and oversight of the entire place that would make her account an accurate one as opposed to being just one account as an outsider of many people that work there with more inside knowledge and visibility and oversight than Anderson? It’s as if Anderson is unaware that outsiders can be treated politely by a culture or group, but you are never made aware what insiders are privy.

-It’s also as if Anderson does not question the suspect behavior China exhibits now and before the pandemic, for which there are many examples to point to in many industries and areas of concern. It’s as if Anderson forgot that China suppressed the information of the 2002 SARS outbreak for questionable reasons, without the same politically or racially charged atmosphere of Trump, which is documented history.

-To be more transparent, Anderson should probably disclose that in August 2020 she co-authored a now withdrawn pre-print paper that claimed food origins was more attributable than other vectors to explain the COVID-19 outbreaks in Vietnam, New Zealand, and parts of China. It seems Anderson is just too close to the phenomena; does she see a forest for the trees?