Note: A revised version of this post along with discussion can be found here:
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 the Proximate Origins paper 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 on 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 lead-author K 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 unspecified "new evidence." 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.
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 exacct 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. He says swings from one rebuttal to the next, 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 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 Anderssen. In order to explain such an unusual and anti-scientific maneuver, Holmes apologized in a message to Andersen adding, "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 page all but impossible to edit even by credentialed scientists who do not agree with the unscientific conclusion. Parrish claims that Wikipedia 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 discussion page is locked for most users, and those who make changes, according to Parrish , can watch the text revert to its former condition "in minutes."(Dana Parish: Twitter, August 2). Duehr also 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. A short list of the VIPs on this list includes 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.
Michael Worobey wrote a "definitive" (actually a flawed and debunked) article claiming the Wuhan Market was definitely the "epicenter" of the outbreak. In a separate post here recently, I showed that the cluster mapping he relied upon drew on ~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 geo-scientist showed that the map had been badly interpreted in the study, and also by those who used it for further extrapolations.
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 WHO's 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 circle 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.-- we have here a 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.
Having explained the basis for the sourcing in the Wikipedia entry on Origins of Covid, we can see why editing privileges for this article would be heavily guarded and why attempts to insert countervailing evidence by scientists have failed.
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
Do any readers here have experience with related issues on Wikipedia? What do you make of all this?
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