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Bureaucrats can’t manipulate science

DEAR EDITOR:

I believe we are living during a time where science has been corrupted by politics. It is as if the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko has been resurrected. By altering genetics research on crops to conform with Joseph Stalin’s beliefs, he was partly responsible for the starvation of millions of Ukrainians during the 1930s.

Fast forward to 2020 and the banning of the lab leak origin of COVID-19 by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Early on in the pandemic, there was talk of a zoonotic reason for the pandemic, from bats to humans, despite the fact that China was operating a level 4 virology research center in Wuhan. The reigning doctrine was that it was racist to blame China for the outbreak. The woke and politically correct crowd was outraged when some in the scientific community and President Donald Trump proposed the idea that a leak of the virus was a possibility. The fact checkers in the national media and social media companies whose total science knowledge probably ended in the seventh grade were the so-called guardians of their truth, thus preventing any serious discussion of the origins of COVID-19.

Fortunately, very credible evidence about a lab leak has become public. Thousands of species have been examined and not one was found to harbor this virus. It finally was discovered that in the fall of 2019, some Wuhan lab personnel became ill with coronavirus-like symptoms. China released to the world a copy of the COVID-19 genome in January 2020. Somehow, some critical regions of the virus were deleted. Researchers from UC Berkeley studied the complete genome and found some RNA base pairs that don’t occur naturally — strong evidence the viral RNA was manipulated. The bat species originally blamed for the pandemic has a habitat 1,000 miles from Wuhan. Taiwan, in November 2019, asked the WHO for assistance for a serious viral outbreak occurring in China. It was ignored.

Science took a back seat to politics in dealing with the epidemic. It was the first time where a healthy population was quarantined. These draconian measures caused significant personal and financial hardships, businesses destroyed and medical treatments delayed. Nations and states who initiated modest measures fared better than those that chose total lockdown, since it was known early on what populations were most at risk from the virus.

If we continue to have science manipulated by politicians and bureaucrats, I suggest our children learn Mandarin. China will become the next dominant power.

JIM McCLOSKEY

Boardman

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