What a Wuhan lab leak would mean

2. Hindsight is 20/20. While there were prior lab leaks and those who thought this would happen, I think the fact that Covid happened and the severity of its effects will cause those believe point 1 above to reconsider the degree of risk and whether it’s really worth the potential benefits.

I've thought of the intent as a little like using a fuzzer in security research, although that might not by a great analogy.

And even if they did, they probably attempted to combine viruses from two non-human species and then they probably didn't conceive the possibility that this chimeric virus would be transmissible to Humans, escape and then cause a pandemic. If this is actually what happened, that's a miracle in itself.

I'll say first, I'm not a right-wing nut - I'm leftist/socialist and I'm not saying it was a lab leak, but I can see a BIG reason for china to release a pandemic.

China is on the cusp of becoming the #1 super power, a pandemic could distract other nations while it raises even more it's economic power. It seems china has faired pretty damn well over the pandemic. China could care less about fatalities, or even world support. If it cared about world support it wouldn't have UYGHURS in prison camps.

China doesn't want mass casualties (more mass than covid anyhow), if they want world domination they need survivors to rule, so a pandemic virus with the features of covid seems perfect, or maybe it was just a social experiment to see what the world would do during a pandemic.

Pandemic could also weaken local countries they might be eyeing to take over - like Taiwan, even though they handled it pretty well there, but others like India maybe?

Or maybe it was just an accidental leak, but they were still experimenting with it from a "potential weapon" - standpoint. Whether you fire a missile on purpose or accidental there's still repercussions following.

While it might cause some trivial reputational discomfort for the CCP who is already engaged in ethnic cleansing, but they'd also realize (if they haven't already) that they have a direct path to winning a bio-war without even losing credibility, because their authoritarian control gives them a huge advantage. They showed that they can implement a hard lock-down to reduce R0 to <1, whilst the western democracies tie themselves up in knots over masks, lockdowns, and 'muh freedums'. A new version that had R0 of maybe 4 (vs 2.7 for SARS-COV-2) and mortality in the 15% range (vs 2-6%), introduced into animal populations...

One can hope that they aren't that unethical, but the fate of many tens of millions under the rule of that party says otherwise...

To me, the central point of the article is this paragraph:

> These events highlight three significant scientific issues exposed by the pandemic that need tackling regardless of the origins: a dismal WHO leadership and structure not up to the task of protecting public safety; the collusion of a scientific establishment that sought to shut down debate rather than follow evidence; and the shredding of the reputations of some key journals that failed to promote free debate based on facts.

Isn't your comment here exactly doing what the article is lamenting, shutting down debate based on your interpretation of the text?

This can mean anything from fully funding it to giving it some small amount of money and having no real control or transparency, or even funding people from the lab to do research in America. Can you provide a source?

It would be an interesting international law mess. Some thorny issues:

1. If it was due to Chinese negligence, how would damages be calculated?

In many (most?) national law systems the party harmed by negligence has some duty to mitigate the harm. For instance if you are out watering your garden with a garden hose, and you see an ember from my BBQ land on your garden shed and start a fire which you could trivially put out with your hose, but you just stand there and watch the fire spread and burn the shed to the ground, I'm probably not going to be liable for buying you a new shed. My liability will probably be limited to the small amount of damage from the first few seconds of the fire.

Is there any similar concept in international law? If so, I expect that a lot of countries would want to avoid trying to answer the question of how much of their deaths and economic loses were due to China's negligence and how much were due to their own poor handling of the pandemic.

2. If it was an accidental lab release but not due to negligence, are there damages?

In many national legal systems there is the concept of an "Act of God" or similar. As an example suppose one of the 30 m (100 ft) tall trees in my neighbor's yard about 18 m (60 ft) from my house were to fall over in a windstorm and smash my house. If the tree was unhealthy or its root system shallow or weak, the neighbor would probably be negligent for not having the tree safely removed, and so my neighbor would owe me a new house. If the tree was a healthy tree well rooted then we'd be looking at an "Act of God", and my neighbor is off the hook.

Is there anything similar in international law?

Not only that but also majority of the funding was during Obama's second term. Which means Biden administration has an even stronger incentive to sweep this under the rug.