Covid-19: New WHO group to look into pandemic origins is dogged by alleged conflicts of interest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The World Health Organization has chosen 26 scientists from 700 applicants for a new group to investigate the origins of the covid-19 pandemic, as well as future outbreaks. WHO plans to appoint members to the new Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) after a two week review to gather public opinion on the proposed choices, which ends on 27 October.1 Seven of the current choices (box 1) were part of the WHO international team that travelled to China earlier this year to study the origins of SARS-CoV-2 with Chinese researchers. The team’s resulting report downplayed the possibility of a laboratory incident,2 and investigators faced complaints about conflicts of interest. Led by the US, several countries, including Australia, Japan, Canada, and the UK, called for a “transparent and independent analysis and evaluation, free from interference and undue influence.”3 Box 1 ### Proposed SAGO members who were part of WHO’s team that met in Wuhan earlier this year to study the origins of SARS-CoV-2 with Chinese researchersRETURN TO TEXT
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.048 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.057 | 0.032 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".