I'm not qualified to evaluate the claims either, but I'm not convinced the authors are trustworthy. They say:
"Harrison and Sachs (1) allege that scientists at NIH and elsewhere, including myself and colleagues, conspired to suppress theories of a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. This is false. A possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 was discussed in our earlier publications"
But there absolutely was a conspiracy to suppress the lab leak theory. This conspiracy is why the infamous letter published in the lancet that admonished the lab leak theory as a 'conspiracy theory's was retracted by the lancet. Peter daszak was one of the signers of the letter, but it came out he attempted to avoid signing the letter even though he arranged the entire thing. The reason he didn't want to sign it? In his words:
Why might he feel that way? Well for one his name was on the DARPA grant proposal from 2018 to engineer a coronavirus with the same mutation covid has.
"Harrison and Sachs (1) allege that scientists at NIH and elsewhere, including myself and colleagues, conspired to suppress theories of a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. This is false. A possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 was discussed in our earlier publications"
But there absolutely was a conspiracy to suppress the lab leak theory. This conspiracy is why the infamous letter published in the lancet that admonished the lab leak theory as a 'conspiracy theory's was retracted by the lancet. Peter daszak was one of the signers of the letter, but it came out he attempted to avoid signing the letter even though he arranged the entire thing. The reason he didn't want to sign it? In his words:
“so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn't work in a counterproductive way.” - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/wuhan-lab-collaborat...
Why might he feel that way? Well for one his name was on the DARPA grant proposal from 2018 to engineer a coronavirus with the same mutation covid has.