This effectively answers my question:
Or something else like administrative pressure
As I said before, they learned more about coronaviruses.
No, nothing like administrative pressure. From whom? The NIH? The NIH couldnāt organize a bake sale without a 9 month lead time, 2 study sections, and a pointless change to the formatting requirements for recipes halfway through. And if they did try to exert that kind of pressure, unlikely as it seems, every viral researcher in the country would hear about it and the howls of outrage would be still be echoing on Twitter.
The theory that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab is a plausible one. I think currently the evidence strongly against it but thereās nothing intrinsically unlikely about it. The theory that the US government successfully orchestrated a coverup of a lab leak by pressuring US researchers is not. A world in which Fauci and Collins can pull strings and silently control a bunch of researchers to support their nefarious scheme is a fantasy world. Other than the names of the participants, it bears no relationship to reality.
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Itās plausible now, it was plausible then, but itās not a plausibility in the paper.
In your own words, controlling the narrative is not an implausible explanation for why the story changed.
Science being politicized in the opposite direction.
Controlling the narrative, and controlling where people look, because it is certain all eyes would have been on that lab if the plausibility was acknowledged.
That high government officials were controlling the narrative is not a plausible explanation for why the story changed, not to anyone who knows the world these events occurred in.
Like all eyes werenāt on that lab anyway. What difference did it make? The Chinese government really does control the narrative coming out of the lab; changing the narrative in the US did nothing.
So either they were pressured or they took it upon themself to rule scratch out a lab leak theory.
Which paper? it seems I have always understood Fauci to have said it was possible, but then as information came out the likelihood was greater that it was a natural source. I never recall anyone saying it was implausible.
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I donāt really know that much about stocks, but if Iām not mistaken, stock prices donāt necessarily correlate with profit. Is that true? Iāll defer to whatever you say. You seem to know a fair amount about the markets.
In any case, the drug companies made a fair amount of money from Covid. How much? I donāt know, but I did quote an article that said Phizer made record profits. I canāt even say whether itās ethical or not. The company execs and government bureaucrats will answer to Jesus, not me. For sure, Iād hate to have to make that call.
Appleās high revenue resulted from people who voluntarily opened their wallets. Not so with tax payer money going through the government (wonder how much was wasted there), to Phizer and many other companies. How many government financed ventilators never made it to the hospital? Again, I donāt know nor do I want to say it was right or wrong. it just was.
āwe do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.ā
Probably a topic for another site, but while some profits are distributed as dividends, more for some companies than others, but still a small amount of the worth of the company, most are used to grow the company and pay the bills. Stock price reflects the marketās evaluation of what the company is worth and how much money they can make, so when profits rise, stock prices rise to reflect that. To get it back a little bit to the science and evolution realm, the stock market is a pretty good proxy for biological evolution, as you have environmental pressures, adaptation, catastrophic events, unfilled niches to exploit, extinctions of companies that fail, with profit and growth being the measure of success.
It is indeed off topic, so Iāll just say thanks for your input. Makes me think. I like your analogy of stocks and evolution. I think there are many other areas of life that could use the same analogy. Very good, Thanks!
Thanks. I see it is basically an opinion piece from a group of researchers giving their views of the origin, not a position statement from a government organization, And while they based their conclusion on the evidence given in the paper, they also stated, ā More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another. ā
You are certainly right that some people had strong views one way of the other, but it still seems they were open to change.
They looked at the evidence and published their opinion. They think a natural source is much more likely than a lab leak.
āOn March 6, Andersen wrote to Farrar, Fauci, Collins, and others announcing that āProximal Originā had been accepted for publication. āThank you for your advice and leadership as we have been working through the SARS-CoV-2 āoriginsā paper,ā he wrote. āWeāre happy to say that the paper was just accepted by Nature Medicineā
You should quote the entire paragraph:
What they are saying is not plausible is that SARS-CoV-2 has been genetically modified in the lab. They also say that it is impossible to prove or disprove other theories of its origin which would include the accidental leak of an unmodified virus from the lab.
I puts forth no original research, but rather compiles what was known at the time, and the portion you referenced was prefaced by the statemeteāwe believe thatā¦ā, so yes, basically an opinion piece, though one carefully considered and documented. And, obviously, it was a article in a scientific publication, not a government position, unless Nature Medicine determines government policy.
I didnāt read that, which makes the subsequent statement about there not being a plausible theory for a lab leak curious. Even without knowing what they were saying amongst themselves before publishing the paper.