Where the virus came from remains an unanswered question, notwithstanding righteous assertions from all directions. From Matt Taibbi at racket.news:
In a supreme irony, the scientists hired to stamp out the “lab leak” theory may vindicate the politician most tarred as a conspiracy theorist for keeping the theory alive
Dr. Kristian Andersen on Senator Tom Cotton: “The guy isn’t totally wrong.”
When Public and Racket obtained hundreds of pages of communications between the scientists who published perhaps the most influential Nature Medicine paper about the origins of Covid-19, one of the first things we noticed was the scientists’ fixation with hits and Internet traffic. If Heathers had been written for the Instagram age, the script would have read a lot like the Slack chats between Drs. Kristian Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry, and Eddie Holmes.
Before and after publication of their seminal “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the researchers seemed always to have an eye on social media. “Thanks for blowing up Twitter!” writes Andersen to the group at one point. “Seems like Twitter are reasonably interested in our paper?” asks Holmes. They even appeared to take Twitter’s temperature before making edits, with Dr. Garry at one point noting, “the twittering has been closer to 99% [positive],” in a discussion about whether or not they need to add a line about recombination. After publication, the “We’re #1” digital high-fiving factor flew off the charts:
