[willupowers]

The way it’s written leaves a lot to be desired and it’s apparent that the preferred narrative she puts forward is very contorted and not a very neutral source. Her bias is obvious to me when I strain to find any evidence of her scientist and researcher perspective in the article. We’re well aware that textbook cases are historically a zoonotic, but a scientist must never cling to indoctrinated knowledge or ideologies. A scientist remains open to discovery and uses all emergent evidence to weigh and disprove historical and new explanations. A scientist has no pre-existing preferences for scientific explanation, they follow where the evidence leads them, never being initially presumptive or dismissive.

If she wanted to appear more credible, she could acknowledge several things here:

-The article leads people to believe the BSL4 labs are safe with endless protocols and controls ensuring safety, thus the Wuhan lab is safe. This is presuming everything works as designed and it’s skirting the issue that there are still plenty of ways for a virus to leak out with those safeguards in place. Not to mention that there seems to be evidence that work has been performed in Wuhan in labs below the recommended safety levels, and Anderson’s answers can’t lend any weight against the less than ideal scenarios outside of how things are supposed to work safely, or an administration that is known to be less than transparent and less concerned with safety compared to western administrations.

-Anderson apparently puts forward the argument that since the reservoir of 2002 SARS was specifically located in Yunnan finally in 2017, that it’s pretty normal to have no evidence for natural origin at this point. In fact there was constant progress being made since ~2003 that continually pointed to a natural reservoir AND a natural intermediate host. Scientists already had the blanks filled in pretty quickly, and what took so long was only finding a specific occurring location and population of the reservoir. The intermediate host was very quickly identified, and scientists identified a species of bat which could act as the reservoir in testing. Yes, finding the virus in the wild in a remote cave in China takes time. What is concerning is that she ignores these inconvenient facts to put forward her odd narrative and equate 2002 SARS evidence search with the COVID-19 that has almost no evidence to point to for a natural source. As a scientist, I will not hide facts. So to be transparent I will tell you that Ebola also has a challenging lack of evidence to a natural source, which is not quite definitely decided yet. But Ebola had more initial evidence pointing to a natural source than COVID-19, and it’s more rare and something we have much less years of experience with in comparison to SARS and coronaviruses. The emergence of COVID-19 is highly unique in many ways compared to 2002 SARS and other coronaviruses and pandemics in general, and there’s no precedent of a origin search being this difficult for either or any virus in a similar class except Ebola that I’m aware. That’s how a scientist needs to be transparent and asterisk and footnote their statements and there’s little like that from Anderson in this article. The article is quite the opposite of being scientifically transparent.

-Anderson fails to provide more specifics about the lab which could better anchor the facts and support whether her somewhat flimsy accounts are credible. How big is the lab? How many people were working there? How many different sections or areas were there? Could she possibly have had enough visibility and oversight of the entire place that would make her account an accurate one as opposed to being just one account as an outsider of many, many people that work there with more inside knowledge and visibility and oversight? It’s as if Anderson is unaware that outsiders can be treated politely by a culture or group, but you are never made aware what insiders are privy to.

-It’s also as if Anderson does not question the suspect behavior China exhibits now and before the pandemic, for which there is endless examples to point to in many industries and areas of concern. It’s as if Anderson forgot that China suppressed the information of the 2002 SARS outbreak for questionable reasons, without a similarly politically or racially charged atmosphere, which is documented history.