Why would you put much credence in a group like DRASTIC when more than 2/3 are anonymous? (There are some very credible scientists that are members. They don't seem to be afraid of using their real identities, why would the others require anonymity?)
And Members of DRASTIC have engaged in personal attacks against virologists and epidemiologists on Twitter, falsely accusing some of working for the Chinese Communist Party.[1].
A more credible investigation into the origins of the virus would look like something like the examination of the University of Sienna's early research in Italy
.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/di ... 021-07-23/
The DRASTIC project seems just a little too much like a Project Veritas... And stuff like fuzzy :PDFs of murkily sourced "research grant applications" has that kind of smell.
I very much doubt that China will fully cooperate in researching the origins of Covid 19. Why?
Because it was and is a political football for Trump and the republican party.
In recent months, our nation and the world has been hit by the once-in-a-century pandemic that China allowed to spread around the globe. They could have stopped it, but they allowed it to come out,” Trump said as he accepted the Republican Party’s nomination in August 2020.
“It’s China’s fault. It should have never happened,” he said at a presidential debate with Joe Biden in September 2020
“We built the greatest economy in the world; it was horribly interrupted by something that should have never happened, came in from China—the plague. The plague from China,” he said on Fox & Friends on the morning of Election Day 2020. There are hundreds of similar examples from the president and his inner circle.
Why would the national government of China want to cooperate when they had already been scapegoated?
Remember that the scientific community for the most part continued to emphatically reject the lab-origin theory. Past pandemics had started when a virus leaped from animals or birds to people, so why should this new coronavirus be any different? U.S. scientists were perhaps also influenced by their respect for their Chinese counterparts. While Chinese officials had tried to stifle the flow of information to the rest of the world, Chinese scientists had generally proved highly cooperative with their Western counterparts. When Chinese scientists cracked the virus’s genetic code early in January 2020, they promptly posted full results for all to read. That did not seem to most Western scientists to be the behavior of conspirator
I've quoted from an article in the Atlantic by David Frum, who draws this comparison.
Republicans in the House and Senate are now demanding formal investigations not only of the virus’s origin, but of the American scientific community’s role as well.
In many ways, what is happening is highly reminiscent of the anti-Communist battles of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In those days, the United States faced a dangerous external challenge from Soviet Communism. Isolationist Republicans had little interest in meeting that challenge: It would cost money and implied foreign commitments. They opposed the Marshall Plan, NATO, everything that really mattered. Instead, they used the foreign threat to justify launching a purge against an enemy within: domestic ideological opponents.
Conspiracies are rarely real. But for some, battling a conspiracy serves a great political purpose. When a significant portion of the republican base are anti vaxxers, you can see how this serves their political aims?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ry/618911/
And Members of DRASTIC have engaged in personal attacks against virologists and epidemiologists on Twitter, falsely accusing some of working for the Chinese Communist Party.[1].
A more credible investigation into the origins of the virus would look like something like the examination of the University of Sienna's early research in Italy
.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/di ... 021-07-23/
The DRASTIC project seems just a little too much like a Project Veritas... And stuff like fuzzy :PDFs of murkily sourced "research grant applications" has that kind of smell.
I very much doubt that China will fully cooperate in researching the origins of Covid 19. Why?
Because it was and is a political football for Trump and the republican party.
In recent months, our nation and the world has been hit by the once-in-a-century pandemic that China allowed to spread around the globe. They could have stopped it, but they allowed it to come out,” Trump said as he accepted the Republican Party’s nomination in August 2020.
“It’s China’s fault. It should have never happened,” he said at a presidential debate with Joe Biden in September 2020
“We built the greatest economy in the world; it was horribly interrupted by something that should have never happened, came in from China—the plague. The plague from China,” he said on Fox & Friends on the morning of Election Day 2020. There are hundreds of similar examples from the president and his inner circle.
Why would the national government of China want to cooperate when they had already been scapegoated?
Remember that the scientific community for the most part continued to emphatically reject the lab-origin theory. Past pandemics had started when a virus leaped from animals or birds to people, so why should this new coronavirus be any different? U.S. scientists were perhaps also influenced by their respect for their Chinese counterparts. While Chinese officials had tried to stifle the flow of information to the rest of the world, Chinese scientists had generally proved highly cooperative with their Western counterparts. When Chinese scientists cracked the virus’s genetic code early in January 2020, they promptly posted full results for all to read. That did not seem to most Western scientists to be the behavior of conspirator
I've quoted from an article in the Atlantic by David Frum, who draws this comparison.
Republicans in the House and Senate are now demanding formal investigations not only of the virus’s origin, but of the American scientific community’s role as well.
In many ways, what is happening is highly reminiscent of the anti-Communist battles of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In those days, the United States faced a dangerous external challenge from Soviet Communism. Isolationist Republicans had little interest in meeting that challenge: It would cost money and implied foreign commitments. They opposed the Marshall Plan, NATO, everything that really mattered. Instead, they used the foreign threat to justify launching a purge against an enemy within: domestic ideological opponents.
Conspiracies are rarely real. But for some, battling a conspiracy serves a great political purpose. When a significant portion of the republican base are anti vaxxers, you can see how this serves their political aims?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ry/618911/