https://archive.ph/eesNr https:// www. thelancet. com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext

CORRESPONDENCE|ONLINE FIRST

Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19

Charles Calisher, Dennis Carroll, Rita Colwell, Ronald B Corley, Peter Daszak, Christian Drosten et al.

Published: February 19, 2020• DOI: https:// doi. org/10. 1016/S0140-6736(20)30418-9

We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),1 and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9,  10 as have so many other emerging pathogens.

https://archive.ph/GVskv https://web.archive.org/web/20210609164326/https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1402407551375794180

Alexandros Marinos‏ @alexandrosM 7 Jun 2021

The Lancet letter of Feb 18, 2020, sent a message to scientists the world over: Investigate a lab leak, and you will be tarred as conspiracy theorist. Was it a honest outpouring of support? Or astroturfing? To start, of the 27 signatories, 7 were affiliated with EcoHealth...

https://archive.ph/RWdCc

Concerning info about the long-time editor of The Lancet seems to be coming out: When contacted this January by The Paris Group to publish a pro-lab leak letter signed by 14 experts, he rejected it without review: "we have agreed to uphold our original decision to let this go"

He told South China Morning Post in May 2020 it was "unfair", “not helpful”, “not scientific” to seek a patient 0 and such efforts could be “highly stigmatising and discriminatory”. We shouldn't allow "conspiracy theories to contaminate our thinking".

In August 2020, he wrote in The Guardian that "This wave of anti-China feeling masks the west's own Covid-19 failures". Make of it what you will, but I would not choose this man as the referee of the COVID origins question.

Horton, in a 2017 article "Medicine and Marx", opens with a Xi Jinping quote and closes thus: "As the centenary of his birth approaches, we might agree that medicine has a great deal to learn from Marx." It is as even keeled as you imagine.

https://archive.ph/4eOsr https:// www. scmp. com/news/china/science/article/3082606/its-unfair-blame-china-coronavirus-pandemic-lancet-editor-tells

It’s unfair to blame China for coronavirus pandemic, Lancet editor tells state media

Catherine Wong Published: 8:51pm, 2 May, 2020

The editor-in-chief of The Lancet has said it is “not helpful” and “unfair” to blame China for being the source of the Covid-19 pandemic in an interview with Chinese state media.

Richard Horton said the international community should instead work with the Chinese authorities in dealing with the outbreak.

“China didn’t want this epidemic,” Horton said during Friday’s interview with state broadcaster CCTV when asked about the mounting pressure China has been under to take responsibility for being the origin of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. “China isn’t responsible for this pandemic. It’s happened.”

The editor of the British-based medical journal offered a strong defence of China during the CCTV interview, saying that while it is important to understand the origin of the virus, it was “not helpful” and “not scientific” to seek for a patient zero and such efforts could be “highly stigmatising and discriminatory”.

“It’s very important to understand the origin of this virus and to study those origins scientifically and not to allow such conspiracy theories to contaminate our thinking,” he said, adding that these would only “risk destabilising our response to this virus”. 

https://archive.ph/IqQIN https:// www. theguardian. com/commentisfree/2020/aug/03/covid-19-cold-war-china-western-governments-international-peace

Opinion  China

The threat of Covid should kindle global cooperation, not a new cold war with China

Richard Horton

A wave of anti-China feeling, fostered by western governments, is rising. But it is misplaced – and threatens international peace

Mon 3 Aug 2020 07.09 EDT Last modified on Mon 3 Aug 2020 07.42 EDT

This approach to China is deeply mistaken. My experience of working in China, collaborating with world-class Chinese scientists and physicians, and cooperating with the Chinese government over its extraordinary efforts to strengthen its health services, tells me that China is a complex nation and that binary verdicts of guilt or innocence misunderstand its intentions.

The Chinese perspective is very different. The “century of humiliation”, when China was dominated by a colonially-minded west and Japan, only came to an end with the Communist victory in the civil war in 1949. The country grew erratically and with terrifying mistakes under Mao Zedong, who aimed to establish relatively secure national borders. Deng Xiaoping created the conditions for economic expansion, lifting as many as 800 million people out of poverty.

Every contemporary Chinese leader, including Xi Jinping, has seen their task as protecting the territorial security won by Mao and the economic security achieved by Deng. Many of China’s policymakers will argue that the government’s actions should be seen not as aggressive, but as defensive.

In the case of Covid-19, China’s scientists acted decisively and responsibly to protect the health of the Chinese people. They advised early lockdown to cut the lines of viral transmission. They implemented strict physical distancing policies to reduce social mixing. And they built temporary hospitals to expand bed capacity and to enable triage of the sickest patients to intensive care.

https://archive.ph/zNjVu https:// www. thelancet. com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)32805-2/fulltext

COMMENT| VOLUME 390, ISSUE 10107, P2026, NOVEMBER 04, 2017

Offline: Medicine and Marx

Richard Horton

Published: November 04, 2017• DOI: https:// doi. org/10. 1016/S0140-6736(17)32805-2

When President Xi Jinping addressed the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China last month, he spoke of “the scientific truth of Marxism-Leninism”. Marxism (with Chinese characteristics), as President Xi went on to set out, is to be the foundation for a Healthy China. Who would dare today in the West to praise Karl Marx as the saviour of our wellbeing? Marx is long dead. He died physically on March 14, 1883. He died metaphysically in 1991, as the Soviet Union ebbed away into a newly independent Russian state. The Communist experiment had stuttered, faltered, and finally failed. It's legacy? As Michel Kazatchkine wrote in The Lancet last month, the health system in the Soviet era “rapidly deteriorated” in its later years, leading to “inadequate availability of medical drugs and technologies, poorly maintained facilities, worsening quality of health care, and falling life expectancy”. But is it fair to consign Marx to the margins of the history of health? May 5, 2018, is the centenary of Marx's birth. It is a moment to reappraise Marx's contribution to medicine and to discover if his influence is quite as harmful as contemporary wisdom would suggest.