If you want to chase a conspiracy that actually matters, go find out who is pushing the narrative that COVID is fake and vaccines are dangerous. That conspiracy is literally killing thousands of people.
If covid did leak from a lab, accidentally, but there was a cover up, that's also worth exploring no?
It feels like you are choosing because of political motivations.
Swindlers and liars need to be exposed, and held outside of politics. It's not ok to stand in front of hundreds of millions of people and lie right in their faces. We've seen how such mental assaults ended before.
The whole "lab leak investigation" is a political side show attempt to distract people away from the real question, which is how did almost every country on earth utterly fail to control the spread and avert catastrophe? Both questions are fine to answer, but one of them might provide actionable information for future pandemics, and the other one is purely political blame-game.
We can't learn from our mistakes if we are prevented from finding out what the mistake was...
If the virus did get released from a supposedly secure research facility, this has huge implications for research policy and biosecurity standards worldwide. If the virus did originate from gain-of-function research, this again has implications upon whether we permit it or ban it worldwide. It was already banned in the US and other Western nations on safety grounds; maybe it's not safe anywhere in the world given that it could result in a global pandemic.
But without concrete evidence and open discussion, it won't be possible to make policy based upon rational discussion and decision-making.
Given the global impact of the pandemic, it would behoove us to give such investigation a high priority, given its profound importance to our long-term health and prosperity.
I don't think that's the case with most of them. There are a lot of movements coming from different backgrounds, believing in different things that are meeting at "it's not real, don't get vaccinated". The Bill-Gates-Wants-To-Kill-Us-people aren't conspiring with the Big-Pharma-Wants-A-Perpetual-Vaccine-Business-People, they just happen to come to the same conclusion ("don't do it").
From what little exposure I had to them, I think they're honest in their ideas. I believe they're wrong on most counts, but I don't think they're sitting at home scheming how to fool the masses. I'm sure there are some who seek to influence public opinion by spreading false narratives, but the large majority seems to just have lost pretty much all trust in Western governments and looks for alternative theories that explain the state of the world.
So, who benefits when Americans lose faith in their government?
The public at large if it results in more critical thinking, greater liberty or accountability.
I just don't think there's much evidence that losing faith in government leads to any of those benefits. And my experience tells me that it does the opposite.
I'm not sure they are. I mean, sure, for some things, there's likely someone somewhere making it up, but others just come to live by themselves.
A lot of them remind me of the preppers. They also have plenty of scenarios and end up in similar places on practical questions. And companies around that also were created or took up some of the content to market to them. This might be the same here: websites trying to attract these people for other reasons instead of those websites being the source of the ideas.
Since a lot of it is happening online, I guess it should theoretically be/have been visible, do you know of any reports that trace it back to those who created the different conspiracy theories?