That being said, there are a lot of confounding issues. Mostly political in nature.
First, the vast majority of people who insisted on the lab leak theory did it to deflect blame and target China as a scapegoat. And many trotted out terrible and conspiratorial reasonings for why the accidental lab leak theory was the "truth," many going to the point of it being an intentional leak and that it was designed in the lab by humans. Not to mention using these claims to suck up attention away from other things like actually handling the pandemic. And to pile on politically a China=bad narrative. So by association there's been a severe reluctance to add more ammo to this group's claims.
Secondly, history and the nature of the spread put the chances more on the side of a zoological vector given the information we have now. Obviously this isn't 100% proven yet, but so far most are hedging on historical priors. Especially considering the conditions of farming and the fur industry that exists in China. So the majority of the community side against the lab leak as the most likely option.
Of course, many scientists still leave open the option that it was a lab leak. We don't have enough information to completely be sure. And there's some odd circumstantial evidence that may point to a lab leak somehow. Including that China hasn't been the most forthcoming.
Still, it's very much a minority opinion in the field at this time and many people insisting it "must be investigated" seem to be doing it for political reasons as cover for other purposes.
Here's from Forbes an opinion piece about the current evidence we have so far about the origins and possible explanations. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/06/11/ask-...
I don't see how that works. The US funded some of the research in Wuhan and it was done in collaboration with US scientists. If the lab leak hypothesis is true both the USA and China could share the blame.
The original form was almost purely China=bad. Then it has morphed to include some of the US scientists as more information came out.
But specifically most (in the conspiracy group) are trying to tie it specifically to Dr Fauci who became a lightning rod for controversy and political attacks during the pandemic as he became the face of the government's response. Thus it's not all US scientists. Just the ones some don't like politically and who are "in bed with China."
And furthermore, sure the US may have funded some of it, but at the end of the day China is the one who goofed.
Of course, I'm speculating a lot and there are a lot of variations that I've seen for support for the lab leak theory. Just trying to summarize some of the hotter takes I've seen.
I don’t see anything political here. If Fauci and Daszak had come out against dangerous experiments at low biosafety levels we wouldn’t be talking about them.
Sometimes it's in the US, sometimes, it's somewhere else. The goofing is guaranteed, unless you pay somebody to goof on your behalf
I don't think this describes a lot of people. On the contrary, this seems to be an assumption by people who seem to not want to discover the nature/cause of the virus. It's possible to want to "handle" the virus properly at home while also wanting to know what caused it, and that always seemed to me the predominant attitude among those who were open to the lab-leak idea.
If China did have a lab that leaked the virus, they _are_ to blame. To say that we shouldn't hold their feet to the fire if this is the case, well, that's a fine political opinion you can have. It may or may not be prudent.
The essence of the argument why we shouldn't discuss the lab leak hypothesis is "people's feelings". In other words, feelings are more important than what is true.
Truth should be the highest priority, damn whoever's political interests it will help. It is so sad that thinking of truth as too dangerous is part of today's milieu.
And you pretty much can't disprove lab leak idea at this point because there can't exist any sufficient evidence against it to convince people who believe in it.
Even if you just personally let them inside the lab and gave them access to all documents the only thing they would find would be next suspicious clues regardless of what would actually happened. And even if there was very little they managed to find suspicious they'd say it's because evidence was removed and they are being lied to.
The truth became unknowable due to feelings.
You'll be always left with nothing more than accusations that can't be disproven (or proven).
The only thing that might put this thing to rest is further research on coronaviruses in animals and humans especially the ones that spread asympthomatically which are way harder to even find. And maybe some day we'll discover some ancestor of covid somewhere.
But it still won't put the lab leak hypothesis to rest if it's found in bats. Only if ancestor of covid is actually human coronavirus (other then the ones we discovered so far because they cause symptoms of common cold) and is detected in historical tissue samples from humans from before 2019 then maybe most people will rule out lab leak.
Meanwhile get ready for decades of blaming China for the pandemic.
People will believe feelings if they can't figure out the truth, sure, but that doesn't mean we have to tolerate fantasy over fact, and we shouldn't allow those people to make policy decisions. I mean, clearly we HAVE, but we shouldn't.
There should absolutely be as deep as possible an investigation into the origins of the virus, but it needs to be dispassionate in all directions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-officials-raised-alarms-a...
Btw, comparing a restaurant worker being sloppy and a supposedly BSL-4 lab functioning at the level of BSL-2 lab is not a good look.
Also, China's govt. has much much more control over a govt. lab than US has over a restaurant in California.
The analogy fails.
Deciding not to is the same in both cases
No, it doesn't.
> Its got a huge military and could nuke the place if it wanted to
By this logic, the US govt. has control over every corner of earth.
Also, was the US govt. running the place and ignoring safety warnings?
Was the restaurant possible responsible for a global pandemic?
The analogy is stupid and not worth discussing more.
All I am getting from this is that people think a restaurant I n US has the same level of responsibility as the lab in Wuhan.
> The Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences is a research institute on virology administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which reports to the State Council of the People's Republic of China.
It would be reasonable by most people's definitions to blame whoever has oversight over a virology lab that leaked a virus. In this (alleged) case, that's the Chinese government.
Is this part of the misdirection? Both sides do not want to know. Or let's say powerful interests on both sides.
If that worker causes a global pandemic the U.S. government covers up, yes.
The cover up by is the problem
The restaurant worker slipping up is bad luck if they happen to be first to contact a virus. The government that runs labs know there is 100% chance there are dangerous viruses there and have a responsibility to enforce the safeguards.
Once it's outside, sure, there's a duty to report, but other governments have a responsibility to their own populace to keep them healthy.
The US, for instance, should have more than enough spies in China to know everything china knows anyways, and took the chinese line that the virus didn't exist, or wasn't a problem up until Joe Biden got elected
As for the "until Joe Biden" bit, er ... no. Trump was kicked out in large part due to his incompetent handling of the virus in the US (he thought it was an orchestrated attack by his political opponents, given that they turned everything into such an attack).
The virus was a problem long before Biden won. Not that he is more competently handling it (he isn't), but the news media can now largely let go of their Trump derangement to start focusing on important things again. So it shows up more.
[1] https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/905779/CIA-China-Jerry-...
I think you’re misunderstanding the bit you are quoting.
Of course China is to blame if they had a lab leak.
The comment is instead making the point that most of those who are blaming China are not doing it motivated from a reasonable belief that there was a lab leak. Rather they are motivated by the opportunity to use China as a political tool to avoid blame for their own failures in dealing with the pandemic.
After 9/11 there was a failure in airplane protocol to not have bolted pilot doors and to not aggressively fight hijackers. I wouldn't say investigating Saudi Arabia should have been avoided - even if there had been voices at the TSA who wanted to distract from their own failures.
If you let a country intentionally kills hundreds of thousands of people and enact no penalty they will only escalate.
Still - I'd say the chance it was intentional to be less than 1/1000. Chance it was by accident - and that they covered it up - to be fairly high.
The question is if this was an intentional lab leak as is being suggested, I’m curious to know what people expect to happen.
As you pointed out this has killed millions of people, seems like people are angling for a war.
That outcome is why the accusation that this is intentional is a very very serious accusation and not one that should be tossed around by a bunch of half cocked internet sleuths (not saying you are one, just in general).
If it was intentional, then they're incompetent. I don't believe they're incompetent.
Not, “was it a lab leak?”
Rather: if proven it was a lab leak, what would the remediation be?
Would it be a) for tightening of biosecurity controls, b) toughening of wild animal trade, or c) war with China.
We will get a) and b) without knowing where it came from; as prudent steps to prevent this from happening again; they are already happening.
Perhaps we can avoid c) if we never “really know”.
That would be nice.
This is not a strong argument.
Regardless of all these wild pontifications, those who have run interference on the truth need to suffer the reputational consequences.
Having a immediate target that is clearly to blame and already an “enemy” isn't going to just result in a ideological slap on the wrist.
What consequences do you think there should be?
Pay for the damage to the US economy? To the world? Apologise and it’s fine?
What do think “holding them to account for what happened” actually means?
This isn’t some scientific journal where you lose magical reputation points.
There's already literally a response two comments down saying you would need to force change to the CCP. How do you imagine that's going to happen? Ask nicely? Sanctions? Well, that's worked just great so far.
Let's see, oh I can think of another way of forcing change... what could it be?
I'm not pretending this isn't a political clusterfuck. But I'd rather deal with a political clusterfuck than a bioweapon clusterfuck. And if they aren't developing bioweapons then great! If they are developing bioweapons then that feels like something that's better to know sooner rather than later. And if there wasn't a lab leak then even better! Now the world knows that it really was just a bizarre phenomenon. If there was a lab leak then they simply made a mistake, they can rectify that mistake moving forward, and the world moves on. If the world doesn't move on - what are they going to do? You think the US (or any country) will go to war (as in send in troops in huge numbers with the understanding most of them will likely die) with China because of an accidental lab leak? I don't.
It seems to me the dumbest possible thing to do is not investigate. I don't believe advocating for ignorance is ever a viable strategy.
We still haven’t gone to war with them, and we’re in a better position to do that as well.
Declaring war on China even if this was a lab leak, hell even if it was on purpose (Difficult to believe, but let’s go there) isn’t a workable or appropriate solution. Certainly not going to happen in the short term, blame it on globalism, but the global implications are bigger than ever and don’t make it practical.
Or I suppose some people just weren't alive to witness the changes! It was a long time ago, bizarrely enough. It feels recent. Perhaps in part because it's still so relevant.
Did something in my comment sound like I didn’t favor investigating? That was not my intention. The origin including lab leak should be investigated.
* Waiting a week after patient 1 to close the borders
* Intentional efforts to suppress testing
* "Covid won't happen here because we closed the borders" (a month into exponential covid case growth in the US)
* "...but if it does, it's barely worse than the flu"
* "...but even if it is, hydroxychloroquine is a miracle cure."
* "...but even if it isn't, we shouldn't lock down because it won't stop the spread"
* "...and even if we do, a silent first wave means we're all immune now that the first wave is slightly trending downwards and we should do a full reopen"
* Anti-mask
* Anti-vax
and more. Those fights had actual public health impact. "Whodunnit" had 0x the public health importance and 10x the flamewar potential, which is saying something, because we had plenty of flamewars as it was. Steering the conversation away from lab-leak steered the conversation towards things that mattered.
I think politicizing rational inquiry, especially when China did a lot to help the virus leave its borders, was equivalent to trying to deflect, and just added more obfuscation to a meaningful dialogue about what we should do and what we should learn.
In 2020 the questions people wanted answers to were "what was the government doing" and "when was relief coming" and "we need masks and ventilators are you going to distribute them". The only people who seemed to think the answer to all those questions was "well firstly we need to consider if this is China's fault..." was the White House.
I genuinely worry about all the people that believed it was a conspiracy theory, and still think they are on team science. They aren't.
It keeps being asked for the same reason that 9/11 truthers came into existence: because the idea that bad things can happen randomly to good people is a more scary idea then the one that bad things happen because someone planned for them to.
"It escaped from a lab" is an appealing idea because the very next conclusion will be "there should be no more virus labs!". Zoological origins, like SARS, or Swine Flu before it, offers no solutions - it's an ongoing problem.
It's like being in the middle of a house fire, looking for a way past the burning hallway to the door, and then someone else in there with you arguing "Don't worry about how to get out. What's really important is who started the fire!"
This seems like a distinction without a difference since both coasts got the virus ultimately from the same country.
Eg, close border until effective screening is in place
Worked very well for Taiwan, Australia.
For example, border closures. Putting aside the fact that at the time the entire mainstream establishment insisted that imposing them at all was dangerous, counter-productive xenophobia, the US had the only remotely sensible early border closures in the Western world - and that was an infinitely bigger problem than whether Trump should've imposed it a week earlier. In particular, Italy massively dropped the ball and ended up with a huge outbreak spreading infections to the US and the rest of Europe whilst somehow reporting zero cases. (Even US testing wasn't that broken!) There is approximately zero chance that the US could've banned travel from them in time to stop this - there was absolutely no justification for this at the time, given they were reporting zero cases unlike the USA.
Then the American media pointed to the fact that Italy had banned direct flights from China (much too late) as proof travel bans didn't work. Of course it didn't - Italy has borderless travel with the rest of the EU, everyone could just fly in to a different airport, it's the equivalent of Texas or California banning direct flights in a futile attempt to keep the virus out. The US took the more sensible approach of restricting based on where people had travelled recently, regardless of where they were travelling from - pretty much everyone else now seems to have copied this approach.
The media also seems to have misled everyone about what went wrong with Covid testing in the US. As far as I can tell, the USA had the earliest, most aggressive attempted rollout of testing out of all the countries in the West at least, maybe in the world. There certainly wasn't any lack of enthusiasm for it from the top-level, politically appointed levels of the government. The problem was the non-partisan career parts of the CDC screwed up, first by contaminating the testing reagents and then covering it up and letting them ship out to labs anyway, causing confusion and delays as the labs couldn't work out why they failed quality checks.
Closing the borders before patient 1 or almost immediately after patient 1 (plus aggressive contact tracing) would have been good public health policy. Closing the borders after a week of exponential growth and lack of aggressive contact tracing was hopeless. Good for appearances only -- and the good appearances came largely from xenophobia because the public health cat was well out of the bag by that point. See the difference?
I'm sure you can find plenty of bad liberal media takes on the issue, but that's completely beside the point as they were not in charge of anything. The bad (xenophobic) conservative takes didn't just come from the media, though, they also came from the president. Repeatedly and persistently.
> As far as I can tell, the USA had the earliest, most aggressive attempted rollout of testing out of all the countries in the West at least, maybe in the world. There certainly wasn't any lack of enthusiasm for it from the top-level
Just one tiny little problem with that narrative: Trump said the quiet parts out loud, multiple times, confirming what would otherwise have "just" been rumors and leaks. He didn't just fight and stall the testing, he publicly bragged about it later.
"When you do testing to that extent you're going to find more people, you're going to find cases. So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.' They test and they test. We got tests for people who don't know what's going on."
Now, of course Taiwan had a lot of success until recently and they did ban travel from China earlier than anyone else - but again, the role of this was almost entirely omitted from the early US news coverage because it didn't fit into the anti-Trump narrative. Their success was attributed to their Covid testing and tied into to the story that this was something Trump screwed up due to his focus on border closures and travel bans. (Meanwhile in the real world, their Covid testing basically collapsed the moment the disease got a foothold - in May 2021 when this had become a mass-produced commodity.) They also didn't have the level of travel from Italy that the US and other worse-affected countries did...
* we only have to lockdown for two weeks to flatten the curve
* ok, two more weeks and then we can reopen
* well, we can't reopen, but we'll have vaccines soon so we'll be able to reopen
* ok, we vaccinated 70% of people so we can reopen now
* Vaccines work!
* Well, they don't work in that country because those are the worse vaccines
* Israel and UK having another surge? Oh it's only amongst unvaccinated people
* Uh oh, Delta Plus is coming, better stay home!
They were still hugely protective against severe disease. So they work.
Who cares who did it, naturally it will be more evidence that communist dictatorships aren’t the best way to run things, but they’re never going to share the truth if that means a flogging.
This is the post truth world.
And in the post truth world, the 6 inch chimp brain under assault of an info tsunami it has no capacity to fully grok, has only one choice - to escape reality, deny responsibility, judge, blame and demand that an imaginary entities descend from the heavens to clean up the mess.
Guess what chimp troupe? It's not going to happen. Now get back to work.
Let's fight with our greatest might to make this a post-post-truth world.
Those responses are way more interesting, too. Taking another 20% chance off of a lab leak happening again doesn't fix that the US government will pretend a virus doesn't exist while it's killing people
This was the ideal for the Enlightenment, because the truth is good and from God. However we now live in the postmodern philosophy were truth is merely a political instrument and has no longer a holy status
How does not investigating help with those theories? There is a lab in Wuhan, they were working with coronaviruses, the infections seems to have started there, so logically someone points a finger... and the answer is "we won't investigate, because people are pointing fingers!"?
No negative investigation result is acceptable to the public IMHO.
Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence to support that the virus was in fact "designed in the lab by humans" so not sure why you're lumping that in with "conspiratorial reasoning".
Meanwhile, there was what looks like an actual conspiracy by prominent scientists led by Peter Daszak to mislead the public about the possible origins of the virus. These scientists intentionally, collectively, misled the public and hid their obvious conflicts of interests. Wouldn't that qualify as a conspiracy?
History and the nature of the spread did not support a zoological origin of the virus. The likelihood of zoological vectors is an over-stated fever dream of gain-of-function grant seekers. If anything, the fact that ground zero for the virus was on the doorstep of the Wuhan Institute of Virology where the research specialty is bat coronaviruses suggests the null hypothesis is lab-leak. Zoonotic spread was a hypothesis that favored the actors likely responsible for the accident.
The evidence that the virus escaped a lab is not merely circumstantial and certainly not merely that China is, er, not forthcoming. The principal evidence is in the structure of the virus itself. There are details of the virus spike protein that appear likely to have been created in a lab using a bat coronavirus as a base.
The "debate" has been highly politicized, all right. But the politics has been mostly on the side pushing for a natural origin. Would it suprise you if CCP propagandists were involved in promoting the theory that points the blame anywhere but at the government of China, perhaps pushing the narrative that anyone who says otherwise is, wait for it, racist? Given how punishing the Chinese government can be to those who are perceived to oppose Chinese interests, and the many conflicts of interest vis a vis China and the Chinese market that exist in our government and science research industry, is it surprising that the narrative pushed by corporate media would relentlessly promote zoonotic and demote lab-leak?
Assuming the virus did, in fact, come from a lab -- one that had been cited for lacking sufficient safety protocols and training for the research conducted there -- it's certainly reasonable to want to investigate and ensure it doesn't happen again. Who would that be "deflecting blame" from? And "scapegoat" implies that China wasn't to blame. If the virus originated from a government lab in Wuhan, then they are to blame.
An opinion piece in Forbes by an astrophysicist on evolutionary microbiology is worth not much in my book. Despite looking really hard, we haven't found the missing link in nature that would support an evolutionary explanation for the odd protein sequences. Gain-of-function is the simpler explanation. Meanwhile, the CCP is apparently engaged in a cover-up now, putting out agitprop about bat-bites and other smokescreens. Why would they do that, do you think?
I'm not even going to go into all the circumstantial evidence that connects our major GoF researchers and money to the Wuhan lab. That would take another long post.
Yes, if this were a narrow academic research project looking into the origin that was left de-politicized until there was an outcome that would be great. Unfortunately this whole thing was born political and China hasn't done itself any favors by always being so hush hush.
It also doesn't help that China's current leadership is extremely allergic to anything that implicates China at all, so their actions are largely compatible with what you'd see in a coverup.
Whether or not Covid came from a lab, it's at least plausible that it did, and a virus just as bad could get accidentally released in the future. So our options are:
- Continue gain of function research, and risk killing literally millions of people
- Stop gain of function research, and lose any knowledge we would gain from it.
Honestly, I don't know the first thing about gain of function research, but that's one hell of a risk we're taking with it. Can we maybe not try to make the viruses deadlier?
WIV did collaborate with UNC Chapel Hill to do GOF research in America, in mice using a SARS-CoV-1 backbone.
The US government send funds to WIV to study SADS-CoV in pigs.
Circular logic is invoked to "prove" that those funds led to secret GoF research which has never been published or talked about on the basis that the pandemic arising in Wuhan is too much of a coincidence (and coincidences logically can never happen).
And if you disagree with that, do you have details of the experiments and how they were seeking to enhance existing viruses which goes beyond just speculation and circular logic?
> But in an email to the paper, Shi said her experiments differed from gain-of-function experiments since they did not seek to make a virus more dangerous. Instead they were trying to understand how the virus might jump across species.
They have already been caught lying about not having any bats in the lab and so far they haven't been acting like someone who's innocent.
It doesn't claim either that they had bats in the lab.
https://twitter.com/r_h_ebright/status/1405239078698815489?s...
> The Wuhan lab constructed novel chimeric viruses that combined spike genes from new bat SARS-related coronaviruses with the genomic backbone of another bat SARS-related coronavirus.
> These were viruses that were novel, not viruses that were present in nature.
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
And your citation is to:
> Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus
Yes. There is a massive amount that we still don't know about the genoomic diversity of sarbecoviruses in bats in and around China. This is the kind of study that we need a whole lot more of. No idea what your point is.
2) You only read the title of the article I linked that was in sub-tweets. See the following tweet:
https://mobile.twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/14052391926286...
> The construction of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses able to infect human cells and lab animals at WIV (1) was published with acknowledgment to NIH grant AI110964 (https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...) and (2) was reported to NIH under NIH grant AI110964 (https://reporter.nih.gov/search/0dVX_GElSEGDOsNMZq7qaQ/proje...)
So, yes, gain of function research was happening at WIV.
You can debate if that's a good idea or not, but SARS-CoV-2 is way too distant from WIV1/SARS-CoV-1 to arise from any lab experiment with chimeric viruses. And its also too far away from RaTG13, which still needs decades of evolution to turn into SARS-CoV-2.
> The work met--unequivocally--the definition of gain-of-function research of concern under the 2014 Pause.
> The work met--unequivocally--the definition of potential pandemic pathogen enhancement under the 2017 HHS Potential Pandemic Pathogen Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework.
I feel that people are over-simplifying this issue greatly on both sides in this thread. Basically, it seems like the definition of GoF is not totally agreed upon even by top scientists. A lot hinges on intent/expectations, but of course scientists can't perfectly predict what will happen with these experiments.
It seems like the research referenced was not "GoF" research in the sense that it wasn't intended or predicted to cause GoF. But at the same time, going back to even 2015, there was criticism that this research was risky, even if it technically was not GoF research.
Some scientists also seem to think we should be doing more GoF research to learn more before the next pandemic.
These are the links I read, both of which I thought were pretty even-handed. For the record, I often think fact checking sites present totally biased nonsense, but in this case it seemed okay.
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/05/the-wuhan-lab-and-the-gain...
Thread from an MIT researcher quoted in the article:
So they were creating chimeras from a spike they found that was similar to the pangolin spike but has never been published. And they were combining that with a backbone that they found that was RaTG13-like but similarly has never been published. Even though their prior targets have been SARS-CoV-1 and WIV1 backbones, and they skipped over RaTG13, which would have been of more interest to study because of its association with the miners, to select an RaTG13-like backone of an unpublished virus. And then presumably they did all this in HELA cell lines expressing human ACE2 and did serial passage / gain of function so it became well adapted.
Then even if you have all this happen, you somehow need to get that virus up someone's nose. Because petri dishes don't cough. And we know that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't spread pretty much at all from surfaces. And you need to get a sufficient infectious dose. So someone had a party in the lab and decided to chop up a dish of proto-SARS-CoV-2 cultures and rail a line of it like it was coke or something.
Or, nature does chimeric (recombination) gain of function experiments all the time, and every confined animal farm in China is a bioreactor in a lab doing stochastic serial passage experiments with "lab workers" who have never even heard of biosafety levels.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427830v3
https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00709-1.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/science/covid-lab-leak-fa...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/world/asia/china-covid-wu...
At least everyone seems to have stopped yapping about furin cleavage sites this time.
> There's no indication WIV was doing any gain of function research.
> The work met--unequivocally--the definition of gain-of-function research of concern under the 2014 Pause.
I'm surprised that people had forgotten this already. You don't hear much about a "democratic hoax" or a "bioweapon" nowadays, but those words were a part of the conversation a year ago.
Note that the phrase "politically motivated people" was substituted for the original term "whack jobs", which I think is more appropriate; however, your asked me to use "non charged terms", so I did my best.
I can think of two reasonable reasons why someone wouldn't want to investigate the matter:
1. It would be embarrassing for China.
2. It may be hard to properly communicate or convince people of the difference between an accidental lab leak vs. an intentional lab leak which could add fuel to a fire of jingoism/nationalism in other countries.
Again, I'm trying hard not to make a judgement here. Hopefully I did a decent job.
There’s also a #3, that is that I’m irritated that people are becoming experts on virology after reading a Wikipedia article (or worse) and deciding to “look into” this, then declaring things to be damning evidence based on an extremely limited understanding of the subject matter.
3. Experts who conduct or fund virology research don't want it to be true, because it would inevitably cause a massive clampdown on what research is allowed and how it is conducted. It would also cause lasting damage to the field's reputation and prestige. Eg. imagine being a nuclear researcher in the aftermath of Chernobyl.
4. People who have significant personal or business ties with China are concerned that a finding of culpability will result in escalating tariffs and other sanctions, damaging China's economy and potentially causing collateral damage for those who do business with Chinese firms.
1. Because Trump called for an investigation into the Lab Leak Theory. Since Trump is bad, everything he says and does is always bad. This meant that everyone who was anti-Trump said that the lab leak theory was 100% false, definitely a consipracy theory and hence.... bad.
2. Because the Chinese government have used the modern political environment to deflect all critism as racism. Because people often shorten "Chinese Government" to "China" in news (much like the US), they take it that attacks against "China" aren't really attacks against the country but instead racist attacks against the people. Since racism is bad, criticism of China is racism, and investigating the Lab Leak leak is criticism of China - it stans to reason that the Lab Leak theory is racism, and hence.... bad.
Government, politics, and politicians are among those things that should be very boring. The mark of a good political leader is that you don't have to think about politics very much during their tenure. Interesting government was a major cause of death in the early 20th century.
Another poster in another thread once said that during the Bush and Obama years, safeguards against misleading the US public with counterintelligence ops were removed. I feel like that must have something to do with the explosive growth of the partisan-bullshit-drama-news business. The obvious factors in changing news media are the internet and social media, but I don't think that fully explains the widening divide and eager abandonment of objective reality.
It is a poor vehicle for a narrative. Thus, it is weaponized by contorting it into half-truths that serve the important purpose of affirming pre-existing values.
The past year has made it extraordinarily clear that the epistemology of science is far too demanding for most people. And that’s okay; it just usually isn’t so starkly obvious.
Dreyfus affair was the highlight of that phoenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair
Unfortunately, same thing is happening with YouTube bloggers right now: I checked economists of 3 different kinds, and all of them would mostly pick the other's argument, exaggerate it to absurdity, then blame the opponent being socialist/social darwinist/nazi/anarchist/etc.
Most of audience enjoys simple confirmation of their views, and accepts whatever is put in its favor: pure theorizing, demagogic questions, anectdotal evidence and cherry-picked data. Many reject any evidence that puts their worldview under stress -- I personally had this moment with friends, who'd just claim "this is not important, X is always Y, and Y > Z."
Is it? (the answer is no).
Because the other place that we actually do need to invest enormous resources in researching for viral origins is the wilds of China. Because if it's not a lab leak, then there's a carrier species out there as a reservoir and a series of transmission and exposure behaviors which made it's emergence more likely, and we really need to identify those as well as any potential future viruses which may emerge from the same reservoirs - as was predicted would happen after SARS (and then did, hence COVID-19).
Lab-leak proponents are basically UFO-believers at this point: constantly claiming we need more research into the lab leak, and dismissing any alternative explanations (hence why we're up to "China did secret, undetectable gain of function research at the Wuhan lab")
Were one to entertain the possibility that a lab facility in China was the source of infection leading to a global pandemic then isolationists and nationalists and other persona non grata might imagine they've received some validation of their policies. Naturally this is intolerable. So intolerable, in fact, that you are obligated to employ however much cognitive dissonance you find necessary such that any suggestion of a lab leak becomes unthinkable. Obviously anyone that fails to do so is exhibiting faulty and dangerous thinking.
All of this is self evident when you understand the correct prioritization of concerns. While discovering the true genesis of some great failure and correctly ascribing fault may have value, the risk of validating ones ideological opponents -- vanishing few and impotent as they may be -- has many times more import.
At worse... virology would receive an indelible stain of epochal vitriol.
But from a populist perspective, it's really scary. Crime is up across the board 33% in the US due to various factors, populist anger is real and that's just 'regular covid stuff'. On the margins of the bell curve, people do really crazy things. Anti-Asian acts, ranging from a few simple harmful words on the street, to full on assault, have measurably increased this year. So you can see some of the impact of populism right in the numbers. With 600 000 dead Americans and 240 Million guns ... it's pretty scary to think of what might happen.
Geopolitically, it's a 'monster' thing, on the order of 9/11, invasion of a country etc.. Accident or not, if China 'caused' a massive worldwide decline and millions of deaths ... it's hard to imagine what the fallout would be.
If there were inexorable, clean, hard evidence ... then I can see 25% of the population demanding blood, i.e. 'war' as within the scope of retribution.
So the 'truth', the 'nuances', 'public communications' and 'goestrategic implictions' all form different aspects to thi answer.
same way it matters if police coerce a suspect to "confess".
tainting an inquisition that started with no factual observations is what has happened.
There's around 8 billion people on Earth. Most of the wealth on Earth is controlled by a small number of those people. What stops the other people from taking it from them? Answer: The illusion of power and control, via use of that wealth.
Historically, the best way to control people is to divide them...over and over. That's what we're seeing nowadays: via use of the mass media. You'll rarely see a major news story nowadays that doesn't pit large groups of humans against one another. Currently, the best "division" strategy is for them to use the media to promote left-wing thought.
Since a lab-leak doesn't align with the political aspect of Covid, they're doing everything they can to squash any discussion of it. Admitting they were wrong, or having discussion around the possibility of them being wrong, would bring the possibility of people waking the fuck up to the level of bullshit they're being fed.
It now beats the #2, "Covid isn't real but it was created by the Chinese government".
Wake up, Sheeple!
And if you lived in the 15th century you'd probably be the guy ridiculing anyone who said the Earth might not be flat. How dare those crazy people!
They are probably as interested as Chinese government in downplaying the role of this lab in the Covid outbreak.