Thorp emphasized that the peer review process at Science had tempered the claims in the papers and generally criticized how the media covers preprints as sensational. Science Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp testified to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in a hearing about the scientific publishing industry’s handling of one of the most controversial scientific questions in decades: how the COVID-19 pandemic began. “Where did the pandemic begin?Thorp said that two papers published in Science in 2022 pointing to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market as the origin — Worobey et al. Food market in Wuhan. The hearing called attention to two other early papers that stifled debate about the origins of the pandemic in the early months of 2020. Democrats said that the investigation into the scientific publishing industry and the National Institutes of Health unduly hurts public trust in science andContemporaneous emails and Slacks also showed the authors had undisclosed concerns about the Wuhan lab and privately described one of the arguments in their paper as “crap. A letter in The Lancet in February 2020 dismissed concerns about the Wuhan Institute of Virology as “rumours,” “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” that unfairly maligned Chinese scientists. Right to Know uncovered that the letter had been organized by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, a close collaborator of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including on the DEFUSE proposal. Rep. “Trust suffers because of censorship and a lack of debate,” said Rep. Republicans countered that the silencing of some scientific hypotheses hurts trust. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa.
