A week and a half ago, Stanford University announced a conference on pandemic policy that features several of the usual suspects who spread misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Truly, Stanford has become the “respectable” academic face of efforts to undermine public health.
Ever since COVID-19 first emerged in 2020, evidence-free claims that it had arisen due to a “lab leak” have proliferated and caused as much harm as antivax. A recent paper argues that this conspiracy theory has been very harmful to science. I argue that it’s more than just lab leak that is harmful.
Earlier this week, the New York Times op-ed page ran an article by Alina Chan, Queen of lab leak conspiracy theories. How is it wrong? Let me count the ways…
Two new studies published last month strongly support a natural zoonotic origin for COVID-19 centered at the wet market in Wuhan, China. Naturally, lab leak proponents soberly considered this new evidence and thought about changing their minds. Just kidding! They doubled down on the conspiracy mongering, because of course they did.
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial claiming that the sequence CGGCGG in SARS-CoV-2 means that the coronavirus must be engineered. It’s utter nonsense.
