By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
On July 5, 2021, The Lancet, a respected premier journal that publishes cutting-edge medical research, published “Science, not speculation, is essential to determine how SARS-CoV-2 reached humans.” The 24 authors are “physicians, veterinarians, epidemiologists, virologists, biologists, ecologists, and public health experts from around the world....” That includes eleven from top institutions in the United States (three from MA and one each from CO, TX, MD, NY, GA, CA, IA and OH), three each from the UK and Australia, two from the Netherlands, and one each from Germany, Spain, Malaysia, Italy and Hong Kong.
Back in February 19, 2020, they “...joined together to express solidarity with our professional colleagues in China.” As they have continued to research the newly recognized virus SARS-CoV-2 virus and its variations over time, they re-issued their statement with further emphasis: “...we reaffirm our expression of solidarity with those in China who confronted the outbreak then, and the many health professionals around the world who have since worked to exhaustion, and at personal risk, in the relentless and continuing battle against this virus. Our respect and gratitude have only grown with time.”
They continue: “The second intent of our original correspondence was to express our working view that SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated in nature and not in a laboratory, on the basis of early genetic analysis of the new virus and well established evidence from previous emerging infectious diseases, including the coronaviruses that cause the common cold as well as the original SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV.”
Citing recent research, they continue: “The critical question we must address now is, how did SARS-CoV-2 reach the human population? This is important because it is such insights that will drive what the world must urgently do to prevent another tragedy like COVID-19. We believe the strongest clue from new, credible, and peer-reviewed evidence in the scientific literature is that the virus evolved in nature, while suggestions of a laboratory-leak source of the pandemic remain without scientifically validated evidence that directly supports it in peer-reviewed scientific journals.”
“Careful and transparent collection of scientific information is essential to understand how the virus has spread and to develop strategies to mitigate the ongoing impact of COVID-19, whether it occurred wholly within nature or might somehow have reached the community via an alternative route, and prevent future pandemics. Allegations and conjecture are of no help, as they do not facilitate access to information and objective assessment of the pathway from a bat virus to a human pathogen that might help to prevent a future pandemic. Recrimination has not, and will not, encourage international cooperation and collaboration.”
“New viruses can emerge anywhere, so maintaining transparency and cooperation between scientists everywhere provides an essential early warning system. Cutting professional links and reducing data sharing will not make us safer. We also understand that it might take years of field and laboratory study to assemble and link the data essential to reach rational and objective conclusions, but that is what the global scientific community must strive to do.”
“It is time to turn down the heat of the rhetoric and turn up the light of scientific inquiry if we are to be better prepared to stem the next pandemic, whenever it comes and wherever it begins.... Having robust surveillance and detection systems in place across the globe is essential to detect and report new or evolving pathogens that can potentially unleash the next local or global threat, as required by the International Health Regulations. Equally essential will be ensuring that the field workforce, laboratory facilities, and the health-care community can all work under the safest conditions. Until this pandemic ends, we ask, as we did in February, 2020, for solidarity and rigorous scientific data.”
I will personally add that relying on espionage agents replaces science with politics. The claim of a torpedo attack in the Second Gulf of Tonkin incident led to an escalation of the Vietnam War—but there was no torpedo attack. “Intelligence” that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction (nuclear and chemical weapons) was used to justify the Iraq war—but there were no such weapons.
Science is far more reliable. But science takes time.
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