On Thursday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “On Balance,” Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Jamie Metzl discussed newly-released messages by authors of the “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” article arguing against the lab leak origin theory of COVID-19 that showed that some of the authors of the paper actually viewed the lab leak as more probable than the paper indicated and stated that some scientists dismissed the lab leak theory because they “had basically invested their careers in the idea that there were going to be more pandemics and that one of the most important ways of preventing those was to foster scientific collaborations across borders.” And they didn’t want to be seen as “supporting a conservative Republican narrative.”
Host Leland Vittert asked, “Why would people who are scientists, whose job it is to seek truth, say things that they knew to be untrue?”
Metzl answered, “There are some people who are saying it was a systematic conspiracy coordinated by Dr. Fauci. I absolutely don’t think that’s the case. What I do think is that, in the early days of the pandemic, a lot of people were afraid. There was a whole generation of scientists who had basically invested their careers in the idea that there were going to be more pandemics and that one of the most important ways of preventing those was to foster scientific collaborations across borders. So, it was very difficult for those people, in the early days. And certainly, I’m a progressive, liberal Democrat, and when I started raising this issue, people would say, hey, you’re supporting a conservative Republican narrative. So, there were scientists who thought, well, we don’t want to feed this anti-science agenda and we don’t know the answer. And I think they just shaded their conclusions from, we don’t know, and — according to them — we think it probably comes from nature, to we absolutely do know.”
He continued, “And then the media had shifted in those Trump days from what I call, he said, she said journalism, which is, somebody said x and another person said y, and we had President Trump, who was a pathological liar. And so, the media got in the habit of saying, well, here’s what Trump said, and here’s why it’s not true. And most of the time, that was a great way to do journalism. But, once in a while, maybe even accidentally, Trump said something that was accurate.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
