This is fairly standard conspiracy theory stuff. Next you'll be telling us about QAnon and pedophiles.
I remember when Agile was in its heyday and I said it had a lot of negatives and nearly got fired.
Do you know many scientists? To counter your anecdote, my personal anecdote is that many scientists I know (as friends or colleagues) are cantankerous contrarians who would delight in going against the grain especially in the knowledge that real proof of such a theory would vastly increase their profile/notoriety.
There is no value publishing against the apparent consensus for natural selection, because of the high risk, and the lack of a definitive proof, yet. A true scientist would even refrain to conclude for the natural selection hypothesis.
Are you trying to say there's a global conspiracy to silence scientists who disagree with the prevailing theories of natural selection and evolution?
Scientists are people too. You often see people hiding their real beliefs due to the fear of retaliation and public perception as well as misinterpretation regarding controversial topics, it is only natural that scientists have the same fear, especially when considering this case where we have a highly political topic.
What I'm taking issue with is the trope that there's some kind of conspiracy of silence going on, where the global science community has decided it's beholden to China and refuses to research / publish credible theories that this is a lab-made virus. My experience is that scientists aren't a homogenous group and quite a few of them actually care about truth and facts and put that above the risk of losing links to Chinese funding.
- "a hypothetical generation of SARS-CoV-2 by cell culture or animal passage would have required prior isolation of a progenitor virus with very high genetic similarity, which has not been described"
- "Subsequent generation of a polybasic cleavage site would have then required repeated passage in cell culture or animals with ACE2 receptors similar to those of humans, but such work has also not previously been described."
- "Finally, the generation of the predicted O-linked glycans is also unlikely to have occurred due to cell-culture passage, as such features suggest the involvement of an immune system."
Basically, synthesizing SARS-CoV-2 would require you to do at least three things that are currently unknown to science. Is it possible that a some military lab achieved this working in complete secrecy? Yes. Is it the most parsimonious explanation? No.
We have a substantially (96.2%) similar virus with known killing potential (3 out of 6 miners who caught it). It is discovered in 2013, but isn't added to any databases (despite the deaths making it very notable) until late January of this year.
The mine samples came from Yunnan province, but the research was done in Wuhan which is in Hubei province (Those provinces aren't even adjacent) at a lab which just so happens to be rather close to the seafood market where the first cases allegedly happened.
The similarity absolutely IS NOT an evidence of natural selection, neither guided selection or straight genetic engineering.
Although I am absolutely not in favor of Bannon, many scientists self-censor to preserve their carrier, funding, link with chinese labs. Only those in favor of the natural selection publish in well known journals.