But a leading scientist told Farrar that “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.” Collins, the former director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, warned it could damage “international harmony.”<p>trust the scientists I mean politicians I mean scientists!
This is bad. This is bad for COVID and bad for scientific integrity as a whole.<p>There needs to be a public response by scientists decrying the bad behavior here. It's the least we can do to try to slow the general public's loss of faith in experts.
Much as we'd like to believe 'bad people' made this Covid disaster happen, in fact it was us. Firstly by encroaching on the habitat of wild animals in search of more resources to exploit, and secondly by our failure to control the virus once it emerged. We did this.<p>Note that no new evidence is presented here, only that <i>some</i> scientists thought it <i>might</i> have leaked from the Wuhan lab. Some other scientists then suggested it would be unhelpful to debate that conjecture.<p>As it was, the Wuhan lab possibility was aired at length in the media, and many experts concluded that the origin was almost surely completely natural (in the sense of not from a lab).