Self-anointed 'Vaccine Scientist-Author-Combat Antiscience' still fighting lab-leak 'misinformation'

A whole lot of so-called “experts” still have a whole lot of egg on their faces today after the lab-leak conspiracy theory for the origins of the COVID pandemic turned out to not be a conspiracy theory after all. If only someone had tried to convince them that it was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad idea to dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis as unscientific, racist, conspiratorial garbage.

Someone did try to convince of that, in fact. Many people did. GOP Sen. Tom Cotton was one of them, and he was slimed and raked over the coals for it by the FoLLoW tHe SciEnCe™ community.

If you go back and actually listen to the original Cotton interview and then read how it was reported, it's pretty clear who did the actual conflating https://t.co/UTnwxGqE9t

— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) February 27, 2023

Example: the original WaPo piece is archived here. https://t.co/mlDu2i08X1 Cotton went no further than "it could come from that lab," and then *WaPo* jumped to "how dare he suggest this is a manmade bioweapon" pic.twitter.com/Qr5IKcLamu

— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) February 27, 2023

Let me debunk the debunkers. @paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus: https://t.co/536ygN1gC7

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) February 17, 2020

We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either.

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) February 17, 2020

Sen. Cotton called for transparency. The “experts” fought tooth-and-nail against it. It didn’t work out well for the latter group. And now we’re seeing how they behave when confronted with extremely compelling evidence that they put all their eggs in the wrong basket.

3/n now the WSJ writes that awful title today when the virology community presents overwhelming evidence for natural origins, and even most of the intelligence community agree with natural. All but a handful of physicists at the energy labs.

— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) February 26, 2023

It’s important to note, since Peter did not, that COVID having natural origins does not actually disprove the lab-leak hypothesis. Virology labs often conduct research on viruses that originated in nature. The problem is when one of those viruses that originated in nature somehow gets out of the lab and spreads to places where it wasn’t naturally found, like, say, outside of caves inhabited by infected bats.

4/n I’m not sure what the heck is going on, but the optics to me: piling on to anti-science witch hunts now underway by the House committees. An attempt to whitewash the misdeeds of the House Freedom Caucus and FoxNews during the pandemic and how they caused needless deaths

— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) February 26, 2023

Now, now, Peter … just because you got caught trying to whitewash your own COVID misdeeds doesn’t mean that’s what people giving credence to the lab-leak hypothesis are doing. But you already knew that, didn’t you? You just know where your bread was buttered and don’t want to go hungry.

Peter Hotez isn't actually upset about misinformation here

What really bothers him is that he thought that his team was going to be able to fully control the narrative and he sees that their grip on it is slippery https://t.co/9pAxgbIZiG

— PoliMath (@politicalmath) February 27, 2023

everything you need to know about elite failures is contained in this short tirade

1) any info that Hotez doesn't like is "misinformation", ie: the gov't & social media companies should shut it down

2) you should ignore any analysis with new info b/c "we know otherwise"

— PoliMath (@politicalmath) February 27, 2023

3) the implication that our experts are good, decent, God-fearing folk of the highest intellectual and moral quality while your experts are just "a handful of physicists"

I love the implied sneer that comes from "a handful of physicists"

— PoliMath (@politicalmath) February 27, 2023

We can actually picture Hotez sneering as he typed that.

It's that, and the possibility that he might have been promoting and spreading false information for three years.

Such a fact would be devastating to someone so arrogant. https://t.co/yKeuOmrXHW

— Pradheep J. Shanker (@Neoavatara) February 27, 2023

Don't underestimate how much arrogance has to do with their behavior.

Admitting they may have been wrong is very, very painful. Almost unthinkable.

— Pradheep J. Shanker (@Neoavatara) February 27, 2023

Admitting they may have been wrong would be the first step toward redemption in the eyes of a willfully misled public. It would also just be the right thing to do.

And that is why — perhaps with a handful (see what we did there?) of exceptions — they’ll never, ever do it.

There will be all sorts of autopsies about how a lot of gatekeepers got the lab leak theory so wrong, but offhand it's worth noting that 2/3 of the most embarrassing media controversies on 2020 were in the service of intentionally misreading Tom Cotton.

— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) February 26, 2023

We'll probably never have firm confirmation in our lifetimes, but if media and social media covered up the fact that China accidentally killed 6 million people and threw the entire world into a depression, I think that's bad.

— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) February 26, 2023