Not a scientist, or a doctor, or a administrator, or a politician, who might have some expertise in pandemics and the response to them, apart from what the effect they have on the economy is.
"And I’ll just come right out of the gate with my assessment of the LC report with regard to origins. It’s 1.5 pages of flaming hot garbage, discussed in more detail here. And it’s entirely due to the incompetent, hubristic leadership of Commission chair Jeffrey D. Sachs."
Conspiracy Theories About COVID-19 Help Nobody
By Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) at the University of Saskatchewan, and Michael Worobey, department head of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona,
Sachs’s increasingly speculative musing about pandemic origins culminated in a recent interview with Current Affairs, in which he directly dismissed the findings of our recent, peer-reviewed paper that established the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market as the epicenter of the pandemic, with live animals being sold there the overwhelmingly likely conduit of the virus into humans. Instead of engaging with the evidence we used to reach this conclusion, Sachs claims that we are “creating a narrative” to avoid addressing his preferred hypothesis: The pandemic began as a result of a conspiracy between the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NIH-funded scientists, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Sachs recently appeared on a podcast with notorious anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., where he elaborated on these claims. He believes that American and Chinese scientists collaboratively conducted so-called gain of function research—or experiments to make a pathogen more transmissible and/or pathogenic—and that this may have been part of “biodefense” research funded by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which does not include biodefense as its primary focus. Kennedy insinuates that this alleged work may have been a violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), a disarmament treaty that expressly forbids the development of such agents, to which Sachs replies “You can’t make this stuff up,” going on to say “a lot of this work is around the biodefense, highly classified environment and of course that means that the transparency, the understanding of what is going on here is so much less indeed than it otherwise might have been.”
Such serious allegations should be backed up by substantive evidence. However, no such evidence is offered besides suspicions based on unfunded grant applications, speculation about NIAID director Anthony Fauci’s motives, and the notion that virologists are lying to protect their profession and research funds. To date, apart from these unfounded suspicions, the sole piece of evidence that supports a lab leak is the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, China.
By contrast, the evidence consistent with a zoonotic origin, meaning infections that spread between animals and humans, is overwhelming and has since rendered the likelihood of a “lab leak”—resulting from bioweapons development or not—miniscule. Where a lab leak at the WIV might be expected to have led to the first COVID-19 cases being detected there, there were none. Instead, the majority of cases were at the largest live wildlife market in Wuhan, one of only a handful in the city with consistent sales.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/09/15/conspiracy-theories-covid-19-commission/Giving credibility to Kennedy is unforgiveable. That shows that Sachs doesn't know what he's talking about.
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