I use Wikipedia with some regularity, and often include links to it
when I leave comments on certain topics. However, I have noticed that
the more politically significant and controversial the topic, the less
likely it is that entries are fair, accurate and balanced. I first
noticed this when reading biographies of contemporary politcians. I
rarely edit Wiki, but one of the then-Dem candidates in a local primary
had a bio that contained what I knew to be untruths. I was able to start
a discussion page on this, and some of the untruths were removed after a
I presented evidence. It wasn't as easy as I'd imagined, but far from
impossible to edit as the open source model is intended to work. Since
then, I've seen other cases like this in pages related not only to
politicians, but also contemporary topics of political significance
One clear example of which I became aware recently is the origin of
Covid 19. Type "wiki origin of covid" into your google search bar, and
immediately you will see the following in enlarged print, with some
clauses highlighted:
"Most
scientists agree that, as with many other pandemics in human history,
the virus is likely derived from a bat-borne virus transmitted to humans
in a natural setting. Many other explanations, including several
conspiracy theories, have been proposed." (Google search result)
Below the authoritative quote is a link to the Wikipedia page, "Origin of Covid-19," from which it comes. The concluding sentence of the opening paragraph of that page reads thus:
"Some scientists and politicians have speculated that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory. This theory is not supported by evidence. [followed by a supposedly corroborating footnote #15]"
A few questions:
1) Which scientists and politicians have "speculated" that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory?
2) What arguments and evidence did they adduce?
3) Are the arguments and evidence any less well supported than the Wuhan Meat Market/Natural Spillover explanation embraced in the article as *the* "scientific consensus?"
Perhaps most importantly:
4) WHO are the sources for the conclusion that lab-leaks can be ruled out as "non-scientific" or "conspiracy theory?"
If we start with the last question, the WHO question, we will be led to discover the other answers. So what is the source corresponding to footnote #15 which states "[lab-leak theory] is not supported by evidence."??
That footnote directs readers to a 2021 Cell article titled The Origins of SARS-CoV-2: A Critical Review. The lead author is Eddie Holmes, whose role in establishing the natural spillover as the "only" valid explanation has been discussed previously on this blog, including in an OP from earlier this week by Germaine which includes interview footage of Holmes interspersed with the contents of his own contradictory leaked Slack messages to the other scientists with whom he co-wrote the decisive article Proximate Origins of Covid 19 (PO) that has come under fire by a rather large group of international scientists, several of whom have testified in Oversight Hearings on the topic. But it doesn't stop there. Having combed through many of the journal articles referenced by "the authorities" (gov't agencies like the NIH and MSM science journalists) the list of co-authors for A Critical Review (2021) includes a familiar cast of characters in the literature.
All of the authors of PO are listed as co-authors in A Critical Review with the exception of Ian Lipkin, who stopped claiming that lab leak scenarios were all but impossible in 2021. The PO co-author said in a statement to the Washington Post in 2021:
“If they’ve got hundreds of bat samples that are coming in, and some of
them aren’t characterized, how would they know whether this virus was or
wasn’t in this lab? They wouldn’t.”
Statements like that
one by Lipkin provide one reason that his name is seldom invoked by his
PO co-authors to debunk lab leak scenarios. Another, darker reason, is
the fact that at Ian Lipkin failed to disclose the fact that he worked
for the NIH-funded company, EcoHealth Alliance, at the heart of the
debate from 2012-2014, and co-authored at least 10 research paper with
the group between 2011-2021. As US Right To Know journalist, Emily Kopp documented, at least one of these papers
was on novel Coranaviruses that "EcoHealth and its partners sampled
around the world." Between his distancing himself from conclusion of PO,
and the fact that he failed to disclose conflict of interests, it's
small wonder that his old establishment friends seldom bring him up.
But, though PO is cited as evidence on the Wiki page, the ethical breach
of Dr. Lipkin is not discussed, nor is the conflict of interest of its lead-author, Kristian Andersen, who was awaiting an $8 mil. grant from the NIH
while writing PO. The grant came through a few months after the March PO
publication in August, 2020.
At any rate,
Lipkin's reservations about the mainstream theory he helped to establish
are not mentioned in Wikipedia's page. They are also left out of the
paper Wiki cites in para 1which is supposedly fair and balanced, i.e. "A
Critical Review." So we have Kristian Andersen (lead author of PO who
testified last month that he "changed his mind from lab leak theory to
natural spillover" in days based on "the scientific method." We have
Robert Garry, another outspoken co-author whose Slack messages also
reveal that in private he worried intensely about lab leak scenarios,
like his colleague Kristian Andersen, both before, during and after the Nature Medicine publishied PO. The 2 scientists appeared together last month testifying before Congress. Both lied.
We NOW know (thanks to massive leaks of private messages discussed in several posts here) that Andersen and Garry (and the others) bluntly contradict the conclusions of their own paper.Both continue to claim that their beliefs changed rapidly due to "the scientific process," even within a few short days. In the past, both spoke of "new evidence" they had discovered; but the "evidence" falls far short of justifying the conclusion of the article. Robert Garry was interviewed 9 months ago (BEFORE we had all the hundreds of messages he refers to throughout the interview). One email he wrote, though, had already been leaked. Written 2 days prior to the article, the email bluntly states, "I just can't figure out how this gets accomplished in nature" (referring to the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 occurring without engineering). In the interview, he dances around questions asked, and among other things cites (dubious) evidence that was (mis)-used in 2020 to make the case. This "evidence" involved the hypothesis that pangolins were the intermediate host of the virus that became SARS2-CoV-2 because they have a particular receptor cite that might have helped to explain the jump from bats to humans. Garry, in 2022, brings that "evidence" up, and correctly, the interviewer states, "that proves nothing." At the time, it would not have been possible to quote Kristian Andersen (Garry's senior colleague) saying in a private message of that time period leaked last month the same exact thing:
"[T]he more sequences we see from Pangolins (and we have been analyzing/discussing these very carefully), the less likely it seems that they're the intermediate hosts. Unfortunately, none of this helps refute a lab leak origin and the possibility must be considered as a serious scientific theory (which is what we do), and not dismissed out of hand as another "conspiracy theory."
If that were not enough to make one skeptical of the claim that "pangolins were definitive evidence," there were biological and zoological reviews of such claims that pangolins concluding they were NOT intermediate hosts. Here is one example from Oct., 2020-- 2 years prior to the interview with Garry below. Keep these things in mind as you watch Robert Garry talk about what was then a single leaked email in the following video interview. Garry swings desperately from one rebuttal to another, citing"pangolins" as evidence, and even making the absurd claim (in light of all the other messages we now have) that he was "just playing devil's advocate" in that email. Since he and his colleagues from the PO paper, which was overseen by Fauci and Collins and WHO's Jeremy Ferrar in UK, are all listed as authors for the definitive paper cited in the opening paragraph of Wikipedia's article, it is more than fair to ask HOW these experts defend their own scientific authority on this topic.
It
is worth emphasizing that though Garry (above) says that Anthony Fauci,
Francis Collins, and Jeremy Ferrar (all of whom were conferencing with
the authors, providing feedback, advising revisions and word-choice
substitutions as we now know from released texts) were "agnostic" and
encouraged the writers to follow the evidence wherever it led. They
were, in his words, completely
"hands off" on the writing of the
exceedingly influential article. We now know this is tragically wrong.
They are on the record in their own leaked private words, and speak for
themselves in the many transcripts. They also speak through Eddie
Holmes who made final revisions to the paper without consulting "lead
author" Kristian Andersen-- a major no-no in science. In order to explain such an unusual and
anti-scientific maneuver, Holmes apologized in a message to Andersen emphasizing the role of "pressure from the 'higher-ups.'
There is
also damning circumstantial evidence of corruption and graft. Lead
author, K Andersen, was -- at the time of writing PO-- applying for a
grant from the NIH. Not only did he not announce a conflict of
interests, but after the paper was published, his laboratory received an
$8.9 million NIH grant in August of 2020.When Anthony Fauci cited the
paper from the podium of the White House, he claimed that the it showed
that the data were “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an
animal to a human,” all but completely ruling out lab origins. Kristian
Andersen, in a euphoric mood, then tweeted, "We RUUUUUUUULE! That's tenure secured, right there."
Remarkably, Andersen has only doubled down since, testifying under oath
that his "change of mind" was "just a text book case of the scientific
method." Garry was at his side concurring during that congressional
hearing last month.
Investigative journalist, Emily Kopp of US Right To Know, and Biosafety Now!'s Dana Parrish both criticized Wikipedia for making the Origins of Covid-19 page all but impossible to edit, even by credentialed scientists who do not agree with the unscientific conclusion. Parrish claims that Wikipedia (it's "arbitration committee for contentious topics") has given authority to virologist, James Duehr (Mt. Sinai/Icahan ) to control edits on that page. This is his user page on Wikipedia as "Shibbolethink:" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shibbolethink and this is his academic page: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Duehr The Wiki editing page is locked for almost all users, regardless of scientific background or affiliation. It is guarded by the strict protocols of "Contentious Topics," preventing changes or revisions (Dana Parish: Twitter, August 2). No changes can be made without the express approval of the "Wikipedia Arbitration Committee" (see links at end of OP). James Duehr, according to Parish, has been entrusted with overseeing the page. He has also spent a lot of time on Reddit trying to establish natural spillover as the official account of Covid 19 origins: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95 /covid19_did_not_come_from_the_wuhan_institute_of/ This is not open and transparent science, but evidence of a "mission" to cement into place an "official narrative" despite all the mounting counter-evidence. As Matt Ridley and Alina Chan write in the Wall St. Journal, Eddie Holmes-- who put the finishing touches on the paper without even consulting any other authors-- told the others how "happy" the "higher-ups" were with the results. They write:
"Shortly before their paper went public, evolutionary biologist and virologist Edward Holmes of Sydney University reported to his fellow authors that “Jeremy Farrar and Francis Collins are very happy” with the final draft. Two of the authors wrote in private messages that they had rushed their paper out under pressure from unidentified “higher-ups.” The role of these senior scientists went unacknowledged in the paper."(WSJ: 7/26/23)
In my research of this manufactured consensus, I found a small and recurring list of named authors and co-authors whose papers more often cite their *other papers* than any new laboratory or forensic evidence. The circularity is dizzying. In the Wikipedia page's short section on "Laboratory Incidents," we are told that all such theory is "highly contraversial" and lacks evidence. They make the very strong (but untrue) claim that:
"Available evidence suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was originally harbored by bats, and spread to humans from infected wild animals, functioning as an intermediate host, at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, Hubei, China, in December 2019."
This claim is backed by footnotes which direct readers to 2 "landmark origins studies published side by side in Science in July of 2022." The first one [which is discussed below] is Michael Worobey's "The Huanan Seafoodo Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic"aand the second is The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2. The lead author of the latter is Jonathan Pekar , currently a Ph.D candidate at UCSD. It is striking that both papers list as co-authors all but one author of Proximal Origins, and several from A Critical Review (which also included all but one PO authors). (Ian Lipkin who no longer rules out lab leaks is the odd man out in all 3 articles). Specifically, the paper claiming definitively that the Meat Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the pandemic lists such familiar names as Robert Garry (interviewed in the above video) Eddie Holmes (PO and Critical Review author), Andrew Rambaut (co-author of PO and Critical Review), Kristian Andersen (lead PO author, co-author of Critical Review), and Jonathan Pekar (the grad student credited as lead author of the other "landmark origins studies" footnoted).
A short list of the VIPs on that appear in the great majority of cited papers Wiki uses to disqualify "lab incidents" would thus include ALL the PO authors, Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Andrew Rambaut (but not, as mentioned Lipkin who changed his mind). It also includes scientists with whom those authors were closely affiliated including EcoHealth president, Peter Daszak, Jeremy Farrar, Angela Rasmussen, Michael Worobey, Susan Weiss and several others who have written "dispassionately" and served as primary sources for the media since 2020.
The Worobey study claiming the Wuhan Market was definitely the "epicenter" of the outbreak was flawed, and has been criticized both by scientists and in a Washington Post editorial pointing out that there is no evidence provided there. The epidemiological mapping Worobey et al. relied upon drew on only ~6% of the early Wuhan cases. Unscientifically, Worobey stated, "we assumed that the locations of the others would be the same." The Washington Post issued an editorial which harshly criticized the study . Worobey told WaPo:
"There's
probably at least 10 times more cases that we haven't sampled because
only something like 6 percent end up in the hospital. We fully expect the cases that we don't sample to come from exactly the same geographic distribution as the ones we do sample." (WaPo: 11/27/23)
That is not logical or scientific. Why would one expect that? Further, a geoscientist, Daniel A. Walker showed that the map had been incorrectly interpreted in the study, and also by those who used it for further extrapolations. Nevertheless, it is still cited as "proof" of something for which no proof exists-- the origins of Covid-19, whether natural or research-related.
The short list of VIPs who had a had in writing nearly all the 'authoritative' Origins studies in the Wiki article (and MSM) goes on.
Peter Dasziak who is president of the group that did the NIH funded research, and principal investigator, went on to play a major role in the World Health Organization 2022 "investigation of origins in China," along with Jeremy Farrar (a "higher-up" on the conference call over the PO article, and later the WHO 's Chief Scientist . From government (Fauci, Collins on the conference call) to WHO (Jeremy Ferrar) to NIH-funded Wuhan experiments researcher (Peter Daszak of EcoHealth) to ex-employees of EcoHealth (Ian Lipkin) to scientists like MichaelWorobey, who (after Biden called for a new investigation into origins) provided psuedoscientific "evidence" in favor of natural spillover, to scientists in the same circles as the above, such as Angela Rasmussen and Susan Weiss, whose names appear on several of the related journal articles in Science, as well as being heavily quoted by MSM articles. In short, what we have here is a rather small, powerful special interest constellation which has taken advantage of its power to wall itself off from dissenting scientists and public health experts, establishing and (to this day)maintaining the MSM "orthodox" narrative that consigns lab-based theories to the "fringe/conspiracy" category-- even when the national intelligence of this country is split on the question of origins, and there are ongoing oversight hearings in Congress investigating the whole matter of the roles of Fauci, Collins and their leaked messages and communications with the authors of PO.
A fair question would be, "Who did the Wikipedia cite in the "Lab Incidents" section of the article, or for that matter ANY section of it? The answer is exactly zero. Although they continue to update the page (I noted the inclusion of a NYT article penned 2 weeks ago by an EcoHealth ally David Quammen-- discussed last week in another post here. But so far, such eminent scientists (epidemiologists, virologists, molecular biologists etc.) as Raina MacIntyre, Richard Ebright, Bryce Nickels, Justin Kinney (featured last week here in a video interview from Australian TV) , Andre Goffinet, David Relman, Michael Lipsitch and other leading specialists are not quoted or even mentioned at all. The group, Biosafety Now! (which includes some of those scientists) and their ongoing petition to have PO retracted, and call for a new forensic investigation to restore public faith in science and implement regulations for dangerous Gain of Function research with potential pandemics is not mentioned either. The congressional testimony of Ebright on GoF studies in Wuhan given this past March is not mentioned either. All the evidence is tilted to the side of the virologists who carried out the work in question, and those in government who funded that work. This is scandalous.
I can't conclude from this that all, many or most other articles in Wiki involving large vested interests and political/state interests are also subject to epistemic manipulation. But the manufacture of consensus in this case provides-- at the very least-- a good reason to further research the topic of Wikipedia's treatment of topics which are both consequential and controversial in such areas as science, politics and biographies, among others. We have learned, through the Covid-related leaks, that MSM and our own gov't cannot necessarily be trusted in the vital area of Public Health and safety. Perhaps it is not shocking, then, to learn that the most widely used encyclopedia in the world has been equally partial in the Origins of Covid area. Though most academics do not use Wiki for citations, I've seen some that do. Certainly it is regarded as some kind of epistemic guardrail to settle disputes online everyday. It is, therefore, important to study the editorial process very carefully now, and with great attention to just who can and cannot open discussions and make substantive changes. How much deliberate knowledge-distortion does or does not occur on this cite? As a user and contributor to Wikipedia, and a concerned citizen, I would like to know the answer to that question.
Here is the Talk/Discussion page for the Origins article which establishes the page as a "Contentious Topic" subject to oversight and control by the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee
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