I need the scientists+editors who are directly or indirectly covering up severe research integrity issues surrounding some of the key SARS2-like viruses to stop and think for a bit.

If your actions obscure SARS2 origins, you're playing a hand in the deaths of millions of people.

I know it feels like your decision only impacts 1 publication or 1 genome. It's not.

Your decision helps bad actors to escape accountability and corrupt the public's knowledge on this issue.

Your decision makes this highly important research less transparent & less scientific.

If we don't fight to reduce pathogen spillovers into humans - whether natural or lab - it's a guarantee that more pathogens are coming from where SARS2 came from. People will find out some day and remember what top scientists and journals were doing to hinder investigations.

If your job/title, reputation, or paycheck is at stake, stop and think - is this worth jeopardizing millions of lives in the future? Your children's lives? Because of dangerous activities that you helped to downplay or cover-up?

This pandemic has already been so major that it has rearranged global political and economic hierarchies, and become the top influencing factor on the US presidential election. Countries are ceding rights to their territory in exchange for untested vaccines.

I want you to think about all of the billions of people whose lives and futures have been impacted by this pandemic - and what they think about you standing in the way of an open investigation of the origins of SARS2.

I know you didn't ask to be in this situation. But it turns out that this is your decision to make.

You are in your position right now, faced with the choice of either empowering or undermining a transparent investigation into where SARS2 came from.

I cannot handle any more top scientists or journals telling me that they're against a presidential candidate who doesn't listen to science when they themselves don't listen to science.

People who know me well know that I (1) am very left-leaning and (2) always try to give people benefit of the doubt. But my experience over the past half a year re: covid has started to make me think that several (not all) top scientists and journals are not acting in good faith.

The thing that scares me the most is the thought that top journals/scientists can be incentivized to turn a blind eye to scientific integrity problems. This will lead to a situation where there are journals that powerful bad actors know they can count on to publish BS in.

Armed with a rubber sword, facing an onslaught of Boltons riding in on horses.