“Newsweek ran a headline ‘Scientists Shouldn’t Rule Out Lab as Source of Coronavirus.’ And that, Chan says, is when ‘shit exploded everywhere.’”
The world’s preeminent scientists say a theory from the Harvard/MIT’s Alina Chan is too wild to be believed.
But when the theory is about the possibility of COVID being man-made, is this science or censorship?
Sep 9, 2020
Boston Magazine – In January, as she watched the news about a novel virus spreading out of control in China, Alina Chan braced for a shutdown.
The molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT started stockpiling medicine and supplies.
By the time March rolled around and a quarantine seemed imminent, she’d bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of fillets from her favorite fishmonger in Cambridge and packed them into her freezer.
Then she began to ramp down her projects in the lab, isolating her experimental cells from their cultures and freezing them in small tubes.
As prepared as she was for the shutdown, though, she found herself unprepared for the frustration of being frozen out of work. She paced the walls of her tiny apartment feeling bored and useless.
Chan has been a puzzle demon since childhood, which was precisely what she loved about her work—the chance to solve fiendishly difficult problems about how viruses operate and how, through gene therapy, they could be repurposed to help cure devastating genetic diseases.
“How had this virus come out of nowhere and shut down the planet?”
Staring out her window at the eerily quiet streets of her Inman Square neighborhood, she groaned at the thought that it could be months before she was at it again.
Her mind wandered back to 2003, when she was a teenager growing up in Singapore and the first SARS virus, a close relative of this coronavirus, appeared in Asia. It hadn’t been anything like this. That one had been relatively easy to corral.
“How had this virus come out of nowhere and shut down the planet? Why was it so different?”, she asked herself … Read more.
THE STORY THAT STARTED IT ALL:
Scientists Shouldn’t Rule Out Lab As Source of Coronavirus, New Study Says
BY JASON LEMON ON 5/17/20
NEWSWEEK – A new scientific analysis of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has argued that scientists should not rule out the possibility that the virus originated in a laboratory setting, no matter how likely or unlikely that could be.
While U.S. officials and intelligence agencies have held out the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China has dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory.
The scientific community has generally agreed with China’s position that the Coronavirus jumped species in nature, probably at a wet market in the city of Wuhan. That view has been in part based on the evidence that the COVID-19 virus was not genetically manipulated.
Scientists who looked at the study at Newsweek’s request said that the analysis is unconventional and uses techniques that are unproven. They cautioned against drawing conclusions until more research can corroborate the analysis.
The new study, which has not been peer-reviewed and was published on the site bioRxiv hosted by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, notes that the novel virus is “well adapted for humans.”
It was authored by scientists from the Department of Zoology & Biodiversity Research Center at the University of British Columbia, the Fusion Genomics Corporation and the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
bioRxiv cautions that studies published on its site should not “be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or be reported in news media as established information … ” Read more.
PREVIOUSLY ON HEADLINE HEALTH:
The Coronavirus Was Not Engineered In A Lab. Here’s How We Know.
W.H.O. Casts Doubt on Virus Originating in Wuhan
Wuhan Residents Party Like It’s 2019, Rest Of World Suffers
