Michael 英泉 Eisen
Amidst all this discussion of the COVID origin docs released recently by the Senate committee, I remain dumbfounded by the CONTINUED lack of interest of the scientific community into where this pandemic came from. Whatever you think about the motivations of the people who wrote the Proximal Origins paper (and the documents certainly call those into question), the effect of this on the scientific community writ large was to signal that the official stance was "natural origin" and that any questioning of that claim, let alone investigations into it, were anti-science conspiracy theories. I'm hardly a lab leak proponent - I've said all along that my prior was natural origins, although that's shifted a bit with subsequence disclosures - but it was really quite ugly how even being publicly open to the possibility of lab leak was treated as an apostasy - despite the fact that many scientists agreed in private. I hope scientists - especially those with political or other influence - will reflect on this and when called upon to discuss scientific issues of great public import will place far less emphasis on "controlling the narrative" and instead will emphasize protecting public inquiry and being personally open minded.