DivisiveCOVID‘lableak’debatepromptsdirewarningsfromresearchers_the

时间：2021-06-30 20:01:21 来源：作者：网络转载

原标题：Divisive COVID ‘lab leak’ debate prompts dire warnings from researchers

- “Allegations that COVID escaped from a Chinese lab make it harder for nations to collaborate on ending the pandemic — and fuel online bullying.”

The “lab-leak” hypothesis has prompted dire warnings from researchers, said a report published on journal Nature.

Back in March, the World Health Organization has released a report on the global tracing of COVID-19 origins, which concluded that an introduction through a laboratory incident was considered “extremely unlikely”.

But since then, politicians, journalists, talk-show hosts and some scientists have put forth allegations linking the coronavirus to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Even without supporting evidence, the debate over the “lab-leak” hypothesis has grown louder in the United States, said the article.

For many researchers, the tone of the calls to investigate Chinese laboratories are “unsettling”, which could thwart efforts to study the virus’s origins.

Furthermore, the rhetoric around an alleged lab leak is mounting tensions between two powerful countries at a time when the world joins in hands to curb the COVID-19 pandemic and prepare for future health emergencies.

“At the World Health Assembly this week, for example, health officials from nearly 200 countries are discussing strategies including ways to ramp up vaccine manufacturing and to reform the World Health Organization (WHO),” David Fidler, a global-health researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations was quoted to say, “but a US–China divide will make consensus on these issues harder to reach.”

Other concerns are growing that the so-called lab leak theory has been fuelling online bullying of scientists and anti-Asian harassment in the United States, as well as offending researchers and authorities in China whose cooperation is needed.

In February 2020, 27 scientists co-signed a letter in The Lancet affirming their belief in a natural origin of the virus and decrying efforts to pin the blame for the outbreak on Chinese scientists.

For some scientists, the resurgent interest in a lab leak has been frustrating, rather than illuminating. “Quite frankly, over the last number of days, we’ve seen more and more and more discourse in the media with terribly little actual news, evidence, or new material,” said Michael Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program, during a May 28 press conference.

Some scientists in the US were already looking into this possibility in the early days of the pandemic. Kristian Andersen, a professor at the Scripps Research Institute, exchanged emails with Fauci in January 2020 about his suspicions that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was engineered because its genetics didn’t resemble what he thought would occur in nature, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed and the Washington Post. “I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory,” Andersen wrote to Fauci.

[责任编辑: WXL ] 游戏网

资源转载网络，如有侵权联系删除。