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Politicized science is bad science
By Kent R. Kroeger (March 19, 2021)
Key Dates:
November 17, 2019: A 55-year-old individual from Hubei province in China may have been the first person to have contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
January 21, 2020: A Washington state resident returning from Wuhan, China (Hubei province) becomes the first U.S. citizen with a confirmed case of COVID-19.
Early February, 2020: Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, in a podcast, says the coronavirus was created and released by the Chinese Communist Party as a bio-weapon. [Note: No direct evidence exists to support this accusation]
February 19, 2020: Twenty-seven scientists release a joint statement stating: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
March 16, 2020: President Donald Trump for the first time refers to the SARS-CoV-2 virus as the “China virus.”
March 17, 2020: A group of biologists publish a research paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which concludes that SARS-CoV-2 is of natural origin.
February 3, 2021: A World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2 visit Wuhan’s Institute of Virology for the first time…
