Thank you for linking an
opinion article from the New York Post. It contains such illuminating rhetoric as:
- "It sure sounds like China has a problem keeping dangerous pathogens in test tubes where they belong, doesn’t it?"
- "And this [lab] is located in the Chinese city of Wuhan that just happens to be … the epicenter of the epidemic."
- "Does that suggest to you that the novel coronavirus, now known as SARS-CoV-2, may have escaped from that very lab....?"
And of course my favorite:
- Both “man-made” epidemics were quickly contained, but neither would have happened at all if proper safety precautions had been taken.
Note that the author has reached a conclusion based purely on conjecture, which might be why he put "man-made" in quotation marks. And who is the author? A man named
Steven W. Mosher, who is a social scientist, not a natural scientist with a background in epidemiology, pathology, public health, etc. Wikipedia describes Mosher as an "anti-abortion activist and author who specializes in anthropology, demography and Chinese population control. He is the president of the
Population Research Institute (PRI), an advocate for human rights in China, and has been instrumental in exposing abuses in China's one-child policy." He also got expelled from Stanford for "illegal and unethical conduct." The guy obviously has an axe to grind and no relevant expertise, but you're welcome to agree with his opinion if you'd like.
As for me, I'll stick with the 27 public health scientists from nine different countries who have
strongly condemned conspiracy theories about the origin of the disease via The Lancet, one of the oldest and most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens. This is further supported by a letter from the presidents of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and by the scientific communities they represent."