Essay Grading: F

When grading Daszak's Guardian essay, it's important to remember that theour Celebrity Scientist author is:

• advertised (self & Org-wise) as a World-Leading-Expert - the best-of-the-best science intellects  - selected in the original topTop tenTen origin-hunters - on-the-planet
• backed personally by millions-of-dollars in (taxpayer) funding - the visible cream-off-the-top of what your Non-Profit Org, the ironically-named EcoHealth Alliance raked-in a whole pipe-line of (95% US tax-payer funded, tyvm Tony) - trusted to use that money for the benefit of human kind
  
• backed by access to state-of-the-art Bat Lab facilities  (the most-expensive kind - with horrific cruelty to animals, btw)  (holy grail: cross the Rubicon to engineered, humanly contagious bat-viruses (to get more funding!))
• entrusted with representing the World Health Organization on-behalf-of us-all to understand the origin of a disaster that altered the course of humanity (killed millions whilst catapulting humanity into a future-gone-bad Blade-runner unreality).
  

Hell!  That's an awful lot of world-leading-intellectintellect-force forceto contend with there, Pete.Pete!  ButIn theyour bestmind (& that of many scientists), simply stating your credentials is a winning argument you'veall gotby is:itself:  Ignore the Conspiracy Theorists - Scientists KNOW Covid wasn't created in a lablab.    But it's not enough for a winning argument.  The beauty of logic is that it doesn't care about how much money or power you've got or whether you're a Top Ten scientist or a humble chicken farmer.  Logic only cares about your premise, your details to support that premise, & whether your conclusion is based on sound reasoning ... or not.  To simply keep saying I JUST KNOW, & anyone who questions me is a Conspiracy Theorist, doesn't cut it.

On any report card, it's important to say something positive, so if the goal was to create a fog-of-irrationality to cover up the origins of Covid & spread CCP disinformation, then i'd have to give you A+ for effort (though THE Guardian deserves part of the credit as the mega-platform promoting you).  But theThe audaciousness you showed, your social-media pushpush, your use of MSM to trumpet your messaging - that was all top-notchnotch.

But if it's meant as an academic argument, then even if it was written by a Year 10 student,  you couldn't in all honesty give it a pass mark.  Here's a recap as to why:

You've provided no evidence to support your contention that Richard Dearlove's call to investigate a lab-origin makes him a crackpot conspiracy theorist.  

A barrage of immature name-calling doesn't make it so, Pete, i'm sorry.   It's unscientific.  It only diminishes you.  If that's the best that you, one of our (supposedly) brightest scientific minds can muster, in the world's moment of need, then that's very disturbing. 

Your use of the pejorative term Conspiracy Theorist four times (like it means something) in the one article (& dozens of more times in other writings) betraysreveals a lack of substance.  

Your labeling of aresearch call to investigate the possibility ofindicating a lab-origin by Dearlove & Sorensen (& other researchers) as an outlandish claimclaims, equivalent to saying SARSCovid cameoriginated from aliensspace,  is nothing more than a silly Strawman.

Your only evidence to support your case is that Scientists just know.   But no explanation of how they know.    The WIV database was taken down & we haven't even had the investigation yet!  If one of the chief investigators is claiming it's a foregone conclusion even before it's happened, then straight-away we can deduce that the WHO Investigation is a sham. 

You do cite the notorious Proximal Origin paper published in Nature (aka The Pangolin Paper), assuring us it was peer-reviewed & written by senior virologists who strongly refuted a lab-origin, but provide no details.  Again, the words Nature, senior virologists, peer-reviewed are meant to be winning arguments, but an examination of that paper (including a world-first critique by Formosa Hut), exposed the glaring China COIs of these senior virologists as well as the fatally flawed logic of blaming Covid onto pangolin & the Nanhua Seafood Market (see links for details).

(Edit note: FOI emails (obtained after i wrote this) from the authors of Prox-O revealed that they all thought Covid looks engineered - they wrote the paper specifically to deflect attention from that.)

The implications of thatthe above are frightening: our world-leading experts, that we pay for, relyrelied on in our moment of need - they are happy to betray us, & every principle of science (& ethics)ethics, in order to commit a global, academic fraud.  Why?  To protect a totalitarian regime - & their own self-interests.

At Formosa Hut we have this Golden Rule:

When a person resorts to irrational name-calling in a discussion about details - they are revealing their insecurity.

For example a homophobe might be insecure about their own sexuality, or a racist about their personal value as a human.  The language used in emotive outbursts is always revealing.   It was this rule that first alerted us to something odd going on with THE Science Community.   Why on earth are you demonizing people for stating the obvious?  In Daszak's case, for example, he can't stop using the term Conspiracy Theorist to attack his opponents & accusing them of being devoid of  logic and reason.

Therefore, using Golden Rule theory, Pete, you are conspiring to cover-up the origin of Covid, & logic is your greatest insecurity. 

You see logic as your enemy.   Logically, the WHO Investigation would include a deep-dive into what was going on at the Bat Lab, right-next-door to where the outbreak occurred.  Logically, you would not be part of the investigation due to your massive conflict of interest regarding WIV.  Logically, WIV wouldn't have shut down their database of bat-viruses (which is meant to be internationally accessible) if there was nothing to hide.  Logically, you wouldn't be ruling out a lab-event before it had even been examined.  Logically, you wouldn't be lauding a closed, totalitarian regime as open & transparent, when everyone knows they're not.

None of this would really matter - you'd be one more scientist with a COI-tainted viewpoint - who's way more interested in their next funding check than they are in the truth.  What's frightening, though, is the platform you have (MSM + WHO), from which to spread your disinformation - the immense power that entails - including the power to force people across the globe to comply with this fake reality.