'In March Of 2023 You Tweeted...': Brad Wenstrup Grills Doctor On Post About COVID-19 Origin

thank you Dr Thorp I now recognize myself uh for questions and I want to start with the empty chairs in the room we also invited Dr Skipper from nature and DR Horton from lanced both of which publish a significant amount of federally funded research Dr Thorp you're here you showed up you think your colleagues should have as well I do I'm disappointed that they're not here thank you before we get into some more substance um questions regarding some of the public statements and again we're trying to look at the process here and how we can do things better in the future but the first is um after our first hearing on the origins back in March of 2023 you tweeted one side has scientific evidence the other has Medi a mediocre episode of Homeland uh we've heard from scientists Foreign Affairs experts intelligence experts that a lab leak is possible even recently with Dr Dr fouchy he said it's not a conspiracy theory uh the the Tweet appears to contradict your testimony today uh would would you still put the same thing out today or have you learned something or why was that put out at the time no as I said in my written testimony I I was not as careful expressing my personal opinions on my personal Twitter page as I should have uh that does happen on social media from time to time uh I've gotten off Twitter and I highly recommend that because in addition to to making my life better I don't have to take my blood pressure medicine anymore so uh my doctor is very happy I got off of Twitter also yeah I apologize for that that was flipping and I shouldn't have done that well I appreciate that um so let me ask another question an editor published November 12220 you were discussing the recently revealed diffuse proposal uh the one where Ecco Health UNC and the W propos inserting fur and cleavage sites into a novel into novel Corona virus say you wrote unequivocally these experiments were not concluded how how did you know that they weren't yeah well uh opinions that I express on the opinion page are very clearly marked as opinion as you alluded to in the in your opening statement uh we publish opinions in uh science because we like to provoke discussion about them and every two weeks I have to come up with 720 words of my opinions to put on there and that was a topic that people were certainly interested in uh I was not aware especially of the information that your committee has since obtained about that Grant and I understand why you would be so interested in all of that at that time uh I was going from what was reported in news stories uh that were around that's what opinion journalists do we we read news stories and we write commentary based on those opinions so at that time uh I uh concluded that it was a proposal that wasn't funded and there are many proposals that are not funded uh in in science and so uh something that was not funded uh I didn't see as um as as as significant as some people did I understand how you could see it with circumstantial evidence to support uh some of the things that you're looking for uh and I was critical of uh both the way that uh Dr Collins and Dr dashik handled the the the uh revealing of that proposal and I certainly wasn't aware of something that I agree with you is very important that you've only recently uncovered and that that is that do dashik may have had other plans other than what was in The Proposal now I think it's also true that the viruses that they were talking about uh were not close enough to covid that those experiments themselves could have led to uh the pandemic but it's certainly true that they were discussing all of those things in that proposal and uh I I I got um no one that I mentioned in that editorial was happy with me after I wrote that because I criticized both parties yeah I mean when you say one thing in in your proposal but in your private comments you're talking about doing something different it raises an eyebrow about I was not aware of that at that time neither were we yeah so thank you uh Dr thurban your opening statement you walk through the editorial process and I greatly appreciate that I thought it was a great statement you put forward and I appreciated your cander uh you mentioned two Co Origins papers that were pre-printed and eventually peer-reviewed and published in science but what's the standard practice for preprints are they submitted to science and then published online or vice versa take take me through that yes this is very important for your committee and it's a very important part of my life so I app I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to walk through it we used to live in a simpler world where pre-prints didn't exist but they've made all of this in some ways better and in some ways much more difficult so uh it's common for uh scientists now to take the version of the paper that they are likely to submit to a journal and put it on what we call a pre-print server uh and on that pre-print server anybody who wants to can look at it the primary purpose of it is to get the information in the paper out to the scientific community so that other scientists can benefit from what they have discovered and that part of it you know I really like because our process can take a long time sometimes and it's a reasonable criticism of scientific publishing that we tie things up too long while we're doing all those procedures that I described to you so the pre-print uh is a mechanism for solving that problem uh however it creates a lot of complications because the media can cover those preprints uh it can get the preprints can get into the public discourse very easily and then then and this was certainly true with warab b andp car as those papers are improved uh during the scientific process and even afterwards because sometimes we have to adjust papers after the fact none of that is in the record that's on the preprint and this is why this is one of the main reasons why journals are important because not only do we uh uh evaluate and improve the version itself but then afterwards we're responsible for any comments and criticisms and adjustments in the paper that have to be made after the fact uh but it is so the benefits of a pre-print are that the journals aren't holding up the world from getting scientific information the drawback is it makes the whole thing noisier and so there are a lot of people in my in my line of work who long for the day when we didn't have pre-prints because it made our jobs easier in that respect I appreciate that uh before I go to the ranking member I just want to point these two papers were the subject of front page spread in the New York Times and one author quoted uh saying when you look at the all of the evidence together it's an extraordinary clear picture that the pandemic started at the Hunan Market but that's not what the paper ended up showing and you pointed that out in your opening statement I appreciate that um and it seems that these studies much like proximal origin and Lancet letter were used to stifle debate I now recogniz a ranking member for five

Channel: Forbes Breaking News

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Length: 7min 25sec (445 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024