It was a conspiracy theory, and it may still be, because the WSJ only mentions that lab workers were "ill" and presented symptoms similar to those caused by COVID-19, which could be... really anything. The main strain of the flu in 2019 was H1N1. It could have been that. It may not have been. We don't know yet.
I don't think there is anything wrong about "mocking" people for peddling conspiracy theories with zero evidence. Let's be honest, even if some of their ideas end up being true, it would have been just a coincidence. It's like arriving to the correct solution to a math problem, but through a completely wrong process.
Still doesn’t seem like the right thing to do though, especially if we consider ourselves an advanced scientific civilization.
I'm going to need a source for that, because that's definitely not how science works. At all.
Again, making random assertions with no evidence does not make them right. And of that, there are uncountable examples out there.
Galileo, Semmelweis, Heisenberg. Women’s right, abolishing slavery.
But even the current mRNA vaccine developers were dismissed for 15-20 years as unimportant.
What you call "dismissive", is just reactionary traditionalism.
Also, all of these provide evidence to support their claims.
> But even the current mRNA vaccine developers were dismissed for 15-20 years as unimportant.
This. This is the problem, right here.
You believe that mainstream media works like science, and it does not. So when big headlines hit the public opinion with things like "this woman was mocked and now her work on mRNA is the basis of the new vaccines", you take that the academic world actually dismissed those novel ideas.
Science does not work like that. And the media like hyperbole. And that hyperbole is what stucks the most in the public memory.
She was denied tenure.
"In 1990 she was offered a tenure track position at the University of Pennsylvania. Around this time, a different group of researchers developed a technique for injecting mice with RNA in such a way that those mice started to produce the proteins encoded by the RNA. [...] After six years of work at the University of Pennsylvania, due in part to a lack of interest from funding agencies in supporting her work, Karikó was demoted from her tenure track position. This type of demotion generally leads to the end of a scientific career. In the same year, she was treated for cancer and her husband encountered a visa problem, leaving him temporarily stuck in Hungary."
https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/pioneers-in-science-kata...
She was on the tenure track, and didn't get tenure.
That's denial of tenure.
Funding agencies provide funding based on grant reviews by... academics. So yeah, academics dismissed her novel ideas.