Ednews reports the following news citing Science.
A group of risk experts has found a new angle on one of the most hotly contested science issues of our time—where the SARS-CoV-2 virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic came from—by conducting what it calls the first systematic survey of scientific opinion on the matter.
The report, posted online on Friday, suggests virologists and other scientists with relevant expertise favor the view that the pandemic began when a natural virus jumped from an animal to a human, not because of an accident in a research lab studying or manipulating coronaviruses. The survey, like every other morsel of information around the pandemic’s origin, triggered a fierce debate on social media, where the report was both praised as “an important global survey” and panned as a “fake study.”
The survey itself casts some doubts on the experts’ expertise. It asked whether they were familiar with a series of hotly debated documents pertaining to the coronavirus’ origin, including the report of a World Health Organization mission to China, papers in Nature and Science, and a 2021 U.S. Department of State fact sheet. Also on that list was “Hanlen et al (2022),” a fictional paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences included to check whether the respondents were being truthful and paying attention. One in three respondents said they were familiar with the nonexistent paper.
