One should never have to be told that politicians want to contaminate the scientific process with political agendas.

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Some people need to be reminded that some people who work in the scientific community do allow that contamination, sometimes with alacrity.

The origins of Covid-19 is a good example of this. Of course, yes, I figured that the natural origin hypothesis made the most sense. Then, of course, the lab leak side gained some traction.

Now, this was kinda were people started to get truly weird. This was an outbreak of a novel virus that we knew nothing about and people were already engaging in name-calling and vicious insults against people who thought differently before we had anything resembling hard evidence. If science operated as a democracy or as an appeal to the highest authority we'd still think that cholera was an airborne virus.
Of course, the moment Trump voiced his opinion, everybody went nuts. Several scientists have been willing to admit that they knew that the lab leak was plausible; but, they didn't wanna be associated with Trump.

As things have been evolving, to a reasonable person, the lab leak is at least plausible. It'll be difficult to prove one way or another; especially since I doubt the Chinese government will be fully cooperative. Communist dictatorships don't take possiblity of embarrassment lightly.

What is more likely than plausible is that Fauci has been acting more like a politician than a scientist.

People who are much more vocal about believing the lab leak than I am have been far too vocal in falsely claiming the onslaught of Fauci emails prooves the lab leak -- they don't. Still, they show that Fauci was at least somewhat aware that gain of function research was being done despite the moratorium and that he was willing to privately acknowledge the possibility of the lab leak.

Fauci has always had a far greater responsibility to act like a scientist and be truthful about what he thinks than Trump. Both have responsibilities to be truthful; but, the expectations are different.

Fauci, at the very least, appears to have violated the set of ethics that makes science work. Just by knowing that the lab leak might be true while publicly attacking people, including other scientists, for tossing out that idea he created an onslaught of media outlets and partisan zealots against his dissenters in the scientific community and forced them into silence. So, he behaved unethically. It's possible that he behaved illegally. Either way, we plebs shouldn't be shouting at each other or insulting each other on this issue. None of us know. The people who are really acting unscientificlly are the ones yelling "Trust the science!" into a bullhorn.



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Politicians engage in practice called "political science."

Unlike hard science, STEM, where people are interested in pursing the truth, a politician studies the effect of words in the pursuit of power.

Political science has a completely different foundation than real science. Unfortunately people fall for the claim that "scientific socialism" is somehow based on science because it contains the term "science."

!PIZZA

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