The problem is the label fascist (and similar terms) can just be thrown around and applied to one's opponents whether they are actually fascist or not. Exhibit A would be Putin describing the democratically elected Ukrainian government as 'Nazis'.
This is deeply unfortunate.
I have had a similar experience. Blocked by Stuart Neil, Eddie Holmes and no doubt many others. I think I have been placed on a blocking list for merely expressing views favouring a lab leak. So much for open interchange of ideas in a respectful way.
Hi Kevin, US Right to Know has a large repository of documents they have obtained under FOIA. The Slack message in question can be found at usrtk.org/wp-content/u... on page 73. The date of the message is 27 February 2020. To be fair to the lab leakers, they usually show this message with the date.
To state the obvious, to suggest a lab leak is not a conspiracy theory. Such leaks happen on a fairly regular basis. Wikipedia even has an article devoted to the topic.
In the case of Kristian Anderson, he did not wish to put a pending grant from NIAID at risk. In contemporaneous private Slack messages he was very concerned that Covid arose because of a lab leak but he put his name to a paper which dismissed such a possibility.
Unfortunately many of the closest experts downplayed or did not disclose conflicts of interest such as close links with the Wuhan Institute of Virology or other institutions in China (they did not wish to jeopardise these links by criticising China).
Hiltzik is firmly in the zoonotic origin camp. Even Ralph Baric admits that a lab leak can't be ruled out. The publisher of the New York Times has also admitted that the lab leak was prematurely dismissed (but he did not have the courage to say this in his own newspaper).
Daszak is not helping trust in science. He has regularly failed to disclose conflicts of interest and there have been major discrepancies in what he has said over time. For example, before the pandemic he stated that a lab leak was one of the key ways in which a pandemic could start.
