Scientists speak out about how they were ignored, even silenced, when they suggested a lab leak in 2020

Speaking to Fox News, scientists from the U.S., Britain, Germany, Israel and Australia have recounted that it was difficult to publish research about the possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic began due to a lab leak, and that they found themselves shunned by other scientists, even when those scientists themselves found the lab-leak theory plausible.

“We got our heads shot from every direction, from people who we now know were actually thinking exactly the same thing, but have chosen to say the opposite,” Nikolai Petrovsky, a professor of medicine at Flinders University in Australia, told Fox News Digital.

The scientists speaking to Fox News claimed that others in the field were desperate to protect the scientific community – and funding – so they coalesced around the single idea that a lab leak would have hurt their work, and the community. The scientists who supported the theory had research papers rejected, and the media branded them conspiracy theorists.

Lord Matt Ridley, author of the book “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,” told Fox News that funding was also a motive for silence. “Senior scientists were quietly saying to me, ‘We think you’re right that it does need to be taken seriously, but we don’t say so because the funding agencies might give us a hard time.'”

The lab leak theory has now become mainstream, but for a long time most outspoken scientists rejected it, including those at the very top. German physicist Roland Wiesendanger called this move a betrayal of science. – READ MORE