One of the subtexts of the debate over the origin of the pandemic concerns the role of the scientific journals. The magazines that publish scientific papers have become increasingly dependent on the fees that Chinese scientists pay to publish in them, plus advertisements from Chinese firms and subscriptions from Chinese institutions. In recent years observers have noticed that the news coverage of China in these magazines has begun to look a little less objective than it once did.
advertisements from Chinese firms and subscriptions from Chinese institutions
Science, the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has been running ads from Chinese companies and institutions, as well as job ads for positions over there, for a number of years.
I’m not surprised that the coverage is increasingly pro-China now. That could also explain the hostility of the AAAS’s senior management as well as Science‘s editorial staff to Trump.
I’ll add that to my reasons to let my AAAS membership lapse later this year.
The WHO and a computer model are responsible for all the insanity. Of course without insane people none of this would have happened.
What we have here, is a total lack of self awareness,… again…by the people trying to shape the narrative. Even to an ordinary person like me, this virus seemed to have some weird features. It wasn’t crazy to be suspicious. The failure to be transparent and the bizarre attempt to stifle any questions was obvious to at least half of the public. Did the people who signed on to these articles believe that they were so respected that their pronouncements would put an end to any suspicions and derail continuing research? Were they so certain of their claims, they never imagined the possibility that they could be challenged and have to retract? Maybe its true in a few cases, that they so feared being associated with Trump, that they were willing to risk their reputations. But, they brought science into question too. False in one, false in all. It is no wonder that people are reluctant to trust the science on the vaccines and the therapeutics. The medical establishment did this to themselves; they undermined their own credibility.
That said, it’s still amazing that they were able to enforce the narrative word wide and get others to run cover for them. So, obviously you can’t over estimate the power of FUNDING sources (government, corporate, and private). Also, In human institutions, “circling the wagons” is the default position, driven by the Bandwagon effect, peer pressure, institutional inertia…..It takes a lot of guts to stand out from the herd. In the covid origins question maybe even naivete played a role, given that our public health officials and academics had collegial relationships with their Chinese counterparts.
But boy if the media and academics are wrong, or mostly wrong, about covid’s origins, they threw away their reputations. If they were wrong, or mostly wrong, about alternative therapies, or wrong or mostly wrong about the vaccines, they failed everyone and there needs to be a reckoning.