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

5 months ago

During a House Oversight Committee hearing earlier this month, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) questioned a witness about his social media post pertaining to the origin of COVID-19.

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Transcript

00:00 Thank you, Dr. Thorpe. I now recognize myself for questions, and I want to start with the

00:05 empty chairs in the room. We also invited Dr. Skipper from Nature and Dr. Horton from

00:10 Lancet, both of which publish a significant amount of federally funded research. Dr. Thorpe,

00:17 you're here, you showed up. Do you think your colleagues should have as well?

00:21 I do. I'm disappointed that they're not here.

00:25 Thank you. Before we get into some more substance, questions regarding some of the public statements,

00:32 and again, we're trying to look at process here and how we can do things better in the

00:37 future. But the first is, after our first hearing on the origins back in March of 2023,

00:44 you tweeted, "One side has scientific evidence, the other has a mediocre episode of Homeland."

00:53 We have heard from scientists, foreign affairs experts, intelligence experts, that a lab

00:57 leak is possible. Even recently with Dr. Fauci, he said it's not a conspiracy theory. The

01:04 tweet appears to contradict your testimony today. Would you still put the same thing

01:11 out today, or have you learned something, or why was that put out at the time?

01:15 As I said in my written testimony, I was not as careful expressing my personal opinions

01:20 on my personal Twitter page as I should have. That does happen on social media from time

01:25 to time. I've gotten off Twitter, and I highly recommend that, because in addition to making

01:30 my life better, I don't have to take my blood pressure medicine anymore. So my doctor is

01:35 very happy I got off of Twitter also. I apologize for that. That was flippant, and I shouldn't

01:39 have done that.

01:40 Well, I appreciate that. So let me ask another question. An editor published November 12,

01:47 2021, you were discussing the recently revealed Diffuse proposal, the one where EcoHealth,

01:53 UNC, and the WIV proposed inserting furin cleavage sites into novel coronaviruses. You

02:01 wrote unequivocally these experiments were not concluded. How did you know that they

02:06 weren't?

02:07 Yeah, well, opinions that I express on the opinion page are very clearly marked as opinion,

02:12 as you alluded to in your opening statement. We publish opinions in Science because we

02:19 like to provoke discussion about them, and every two weeks I have to come up with 720

02:25 words of my opinions to put on there, and that was a topic that people were certainly

02:29 interested in. I was not aware, especially of the information that your committee has

02:35 since obtained about that grant, and I understand why you would be so interested in all of that.

02:40 At that time, I was going from what was reported in news stories that were around. That's what

02:47 opinion journalists do. We read news stories and we write commentary based on those opinions.

02:53 So at that time, I concluded that it was a proposal that wasn't funded, and there are

03:01 many proposals that are not funded in Science. And so something that was not funded, I didn't

03:08 see as significant as some people did. I understand how you could see it was circumstantial evidence

03:15 to support some of the things that you're looking for. And I was critical of both the

03:22 way that Dr. Collins and Dr. Daschuk handled the revealing of that proposal, and I certainly

03:31 wasn't aware of something that I agree with you is very important that you've only recently

03:35 uncovered, and that that is that Dr. Daschuk may have had other plans other than what was

03:40 in the proposal. Now, I think it's also true that the viruses that they were talking about

03:46 were not close enough to COVID that those experiments themselves could have led to the

03:52 pandemic. But it's certainly true that they were discussing all of those things in that

03:56 proposal. And I got no one that I mentioned in that editorial was happy with me after

04:04 I wrote that, because I criticized both parties. Yeah, I mean, when you say one thing in your

04:09 proposal, but in your private comments, you're talking about doing something different. It

04:14 raises an eyebrow, but I was not aware of that at that time. Neither were we. Yeah.

04:19 Thank you, Dr. Thurbin. Your opening statement, you walk through the editorial process, and

04:23 I greatly appreciate that. I thought it was a great statement you put forward, and I appreciated

04:28 your candor. You mentioned two COVID origins papers that were preprinted and eventually

04:33 peer reviewed and published in Science. Well, what's the standard practice for preprints?

04:38 Are they submitted to Science and then published online or vice versa? Take me through that.

04:44 Yes, this is very important for your committee, and it's a very important part of my life.

04:48 So I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to walk through it. We used to live in a simpler

04:53 world where preprints didn't exist, but they've made all of this in some ways better and in

04:58 some ways much more difficult. So it's common for scientists now to take the version of

05:06 the paper that they are likely to submit to a journal and put it on what we call a preprint

05:12 server, and on that preprint server, anybody who wants to can look at it. The primary purpose

05:18 of it is to get the information in the paper out to the scientific community so that other

05:24 scientists can benefit from what they have discovered, and that part of it, you know,

05:29 I really like because our process can take a long time sometimes, and it's a reasonable

05:34 criticism of scientific publishing that we tie things up too long while we're doing all

05:39 those procedures that I described to you. So the preprint is a mechanism for solving

05:45 that problem. However, it creates a lot of complications because the media can cover

05:53 those preprints. It can get, the preprints can get into the public discourse very easily,

05:59 and then, and this was certainly true with Warraby and Picar, as those papers are improved

06:06 during the scientific process and even afterwards, because sometimes we have to adjust papers

06:11 after the fact, none of that is in the record that's on the preprint. And this is why, this

06:17 is one of the main reasons why journals are important, because not only do we evaluate

06:24 and improve the version itself, but then afterwards, we're responsible for any comments and criticisms

06:32 and adjustments in the paper that have to be made after the fact. But it is, so the

06:37 benefits of the preprint are that the journals aren't holding up the world from getting scientific

06:42 information. The drawback is it makes the whole thing noisier. And so there are a lot

06:46 of people in my, in my line of work who long for the day when we didn't have preprints,

06:52 because it made our jobs easier in that respect.

06:54 I appreciate that. Before I go to the ranking member, I just want to point, these two papers

06:58 were the subject of front page spread in the New York Times. And one author quoted saying,

07:03 when you look at the, all of the evidence together, it's an extraordinarily clear picture

07:07 that the pandemic started at the Hunan market. But that's not what the paper ended up showing.

07:13 And you pointed that out in your opening statement. I appreciate that. And it seems that these

07:18 studies, much like proximal words and lancet letter, were used to stifle debate. I now

07:23 recognize the ranking member for $5.

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

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