Right next to the Wuhan lab leak...
Conspiracy nuts are like broken clocks, and sometimes they're really the first people to put together stories before the Amazon Washington Post will report it
Conspiracy nuts are like broken clocks, and sometimes they're really the first people to put together stories before the Amazon Washington Post will report it
That being said, it doesn't invalidate the conspiracy theorists. They fill a useful role - public discourse has three unwritten rules. Assume everyone is speaking in good faith, assume consequences of their actions that they didn't advocate for are accidental and assume that they are only working with information in the public sphere.
All three of these assumptions are unsound, so public discourse is always slightly divorced from reality. We can't have discourse without those rules, but the crazies provide a helpful chorus of "but what if we assume bad faith/indirect action/private knowledge". These ideas need to be in the conversation, even if only peripherally. It is pretty obvious that there is a lot of that negative stuff going on, even if we don't know which specific cases are coincidence vs intent.
It's often extremely divorced from reality. For instance the Israel / Palestine conflict.
What?
Some people refused to believe, for example, that big tech firms work with the gov. The idea seems quaint now but some didnt even believe Snowden!
In the end, a balance is needed.
Many academics have been a proponent of the leak theory, whats shocking is not the press picking it up now, rather how quickly it was discarded before.
It absolutely is _now_ but try saying that between Mar 2020 and Mar 2021 you got downvoted into oblivion.
As it is now we have a huge majority in these discussions that believe that because we haven't found where the virus came from it must be from a lab for the simple reason that almost everyone "know" that we found the source in a few months last time (SARS-CoV) while in reality we have still not found the source after 15 years of hard work.
On top of that these discussions are political in nature when it becomes anti-china or pro-US or whatever and by then should be downvoted.
TBH, the lab leak hypothesis should seem less damaging to the Chinese government's reputation than the wet market hypothesis. On one hand, you have an isolated failure of lab safety protocols, on the other, you have decades of government support of wild animal trade despite mountains of evidence for its risk of zoonotic disease outbreak, not to mention environmental costs.