This whole fiasco has me convinced that the medical industry suffers from the same hubris, profiteering, and strange collective delusion and ignorance that caused the 2008 financial crisis.
I'm old enough to remember the financial crisis, when it was always assumed that things couldn't be as bad as they were because there's no way thousands of high paid bankers could all be so reckless and have it wrong at once. After all, these are the smartest people in the world, right? Surely they saw this coming. Surely they're not that foolish...
Well, it turns out they didn't see it coming and they were that foolish. It turns out they were all consumed by arrogance and, collectively, were far more incompetent than anyone was willing to give them credit for.
I was reading this for a bit wondering why a professor/doctor would make these statements, then I looked him up- he's an economist. He does not have the necessary medical or scientific credibility to make the accusations he's making, nor does he provide any reliable evidence supporting his claims. The Lancet commision shut itself down (https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2414) after it was made clear that their choice of investigator (Daszak) was about the last person you'd want to have involved.
In short: this claim is extremely serious but lacks the necessary evidence to convince anybody to run an investigation. Also, this sort of reminds me of how many times Lancet has looked foolish during COVID.
I thought the same thing when I noticed he's an economist - though I do understand what he's saying - the furin cleavage site is suspicious AF. For example
"""
Furin cleavage sites are also found in certain bat-origin MERS-like merbecovirises, but not—with the exception of SARS-CoV-2—in the sarbecovirus lineage. The presence of a furin cleavage motif at the SARS-CoV-2 S1–S2 interface is therefore highly unusual, leading to the smoking gun hypothesis of manipulation that has recently gained considerable attention as a possible origin of SARS-CoV-2. However, with analogy to influenza, it was shown many years ago that the simple insertion of a polybasic site into an H3 virus does not result in a high pathogenicity phenotype7 and is likely to only function in the context of a series of other genomic changes provided by a process of natural selection. """
i.e. an actual scientist is saying it's suspicous (sort of), and his only rebuttal to that point of view is "just that doesn't guarantee anything". If scientists WERE doing this (which they probably were/are), it makes sense that while it doesn't guarantee anything, if they did get lucky and achieve a highly pathogenic phenotype and it were to contaminate something, that'd be that.
What I really don't understand is why this is so abjectly anti-US: US scientists trained Chinese ones in biotech, and they fucked up, and that's the US's fault? So if the US helps china, they're bad, and if they don't and 'try to contain china', they're bad too. Ok. Note this guy has been criticized for his stances on China. Hard to say whether that's reasonable or nationalist backlash, but this doesn't help IMO.
This is a misleading citation, because when you read it, it attests to the issues Sachs discusses in this interview and not to the point you appear to insinuate.
"""
Task force chair Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor at Columbia University in New York, told the Wall Street Journal that he had shut down the scientist led investigation into how the covid-19 pandemic started because of concerns about its links to the EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organisation run by task force member Peter Daszak.1 “A lot is going on around the world that is not properly scrutinized or explained to the public,” Sachs told the newspaper, adding that the task force would broaden its scope to examine transparency and government regulation of risky laboratory research.
The decision came as evidence continued to accumulate that Daszak had not always been forthright about his research and his financial ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak now faces increased scrutiny from scientists, the media, and members of US Congress.
...
Shortly after the pandemic began Daszak led a February 2020 statement in the Lancet alleging that it was a “conspiracy theory” to argue that the pandemic could have started from a laboratory leak in Wuhan. “I have no conflicts of interest,” Daszak later told the Washington Post, regarding his collaboration with Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.4
But Daszak’s story began falling apart last November when the non-profit group US Right to Know published emails gathered through a freedom of information request that showed he had orchestrated the Lancet statement without disclosing that he was funding Shi Zhengli through grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Daszak’s credibility took a further hit this June when Sachs published an essay that called for an independent investigation of the pandemic’s origin and charged that both China and the NIH should be transparent about virus research, including “gain-of-function” studies that make viruses more transmissible and virulent.5 “It is clear that the NIH co-funded research at the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] that deserves scrutiny under the hypothesis of a laboratory-related release of the virus,” Sachs wrote.
"""
Reads like he's confirmation-biased himself into being certain that he knows what's happened, like many other conspiracy theorists. He's also convinced that there are forces suppressing "the truth". The difference is I guess he's someone well known.
6 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 29.1 ms ] threadI'm old enough to remember the financial crisis, when it was always assumed that things couldn't be as bad as they were because there's no way thousands of high paid bankers could all be so reckless and have it wrong at once. After all, these are the smartest people in the world, right? Surely they saw this coming. Surely they're not that foolish...
Well, it turns out they didn't see it coming and they were that foolish. It turns out they were all consumed by arrogance and, collectively, were far more incompetent than anyone was willing to give them credit for.
In short: this claim is extremely serious but lacks the necessary evidence to convince anybody to run an investigation. Also, this sort of reminds me of how many times Lancet has looked foolish during COVID.
(https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...)
""" Furin cleavage sites are also found in certain bat-origin MERS-like merbecovirises, but not—with the exception of SARS-CoV-2—in the sarbecovirus lineage. The presence of a furin cleavage motif at the SARS-CoV-2 S1–S2 interface is therefore highly unusual, leading to the smoking gun hypothesis of manipulation that has recently gained considerable attention as a possible origin of SARS-CoV-2. However, with analogy to influenza, it was shown many years ago that the simple insertion of a polybasic site into an H3 virus does not result in a high pathogenicity phenotype7 and is likely to only function in the context of a series of other genomic changes provided by a process of natural selection. """
i.e. an actual scientist is saying it's suspicous (sort of), and his only rebuttal to that point of view is "just that doesn't guarantee anything". If scientists WERE doing this (which they probably were/are), it makes sense that while it doesn't guarantee anything, if they did get lucky and achieve a highly pathogenic phenotype and it were to contaminate something, that'd be that.
What I really don't understand is why this is so abjectly anti-US: US scientists trained Chinese ones in biotech, and they fucked up, and that's the US's fault? So if the US helps china, they're bad, and if they don't and 'try to contain china', they're bad too. Ok. Note this guy has been criticized for his stances on China. Hard to say whether that's reasonable or nationalist backlash, but this doesn't help IMO.
""" Task force chair Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor at Columbia University in New York, told the Wall Street Journal that he had shut down the scientist led investigation into how the covid-19 pandemic started because of concerns about its links to the EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organisation run by task force member Peter Daszak.1 “A lot is going on around the world that is not properly scrutinized or explained to the public,” Sachs told the newspaper, adding that the task force would broaden its scope to examine transparency and government regulation of risky laboratory research.
The decision came as evidence continued to accumulate that Daszak had not always been forthright about his research and his financial ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak now faces increased scrutiny from scientists, the media, and members of US Congress.
...
Shortly after the pandemic began Daszak led a February 2020 statement in the Lancet alleging that it was a “conspiracy theory” to argue that the pandemic could have started from a laboratory leak in Wuhan. “I have no conflicts of interest,” Daszak later told the Washington Post, regarding his collaboration with Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.4
But Daszak’s story began falling apart last November when the non-profit group US Right to Know published emails gathered through a freedom of information request that showed he had orchestrated the Lancet statement without disclosing that he was funding Shi Zhengli through grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Daszak’s credibility took a further hit this June when Sachs published an essay that called for an independent investigation of the pandemic’s origin and charged that both China and the NIH should be transparent about virus research, including “gain-of-function” studies that make viruses more transmissible and virulent.5 “It is clear that the NIH co-funded research at the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] that deserves scrutiny under the hypothesis of a laboratory-related release of the virus,” Sachs wrote. """