Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

Should we care a lot about the safety and security of places where dangerous infectious diseases are studied? sure!

I think we should care A LOT MORE about our [apparent total lack of] ability to quickly deploy effective public health responses to new infectious diseases (regardless of their source).

Maybe it was an accident at a sloppy lab, ok, so labs on the other side of the planet in sovereign countries we do not control might make mistakes. We should get better at responding fast to save lives.

Maybe it was a sinister bio-terrorism plot. We should get better at responding fast to save lives. Bio-terror/warfare plan looks a whole lot like a good public health plan IMO.

Maybe gasp it really was from bats or something. We should get better at responding fast to save lives. This stuff DOES happen.

Maybe s/.*/I don't care where it came from/g. We should get better at responding fast and saving lives (my opinion).

>>hospad+aK1
Maybe, just maybe you can care about two things at the same time? Maybe, just maybe, a Wuhan lab leak was concealed by the Chinese gov't to save face, thus shrinking the amount of time we had to respond fast in order to save lives?

>>zozin+JM1
Western nations had plenty of time to react, relatively speaking. The US was hit especially hard, though, by policies which dismantled the government's ability to handle this sort of event, the discarding of a practiced playbook for responding to this sort of event, and government and right-wing lies and conspiracy theories.

Given that the US government's response was basically to do nothing until it was too late, and then to do nothing except hinder the states' abilities to respond, it's hard to imagine that an extra six months' time would have made any difference, other than giving them six more months to downplay and dismiss the problem.

So yeah, we can care about whether the Chinese government was trying to save face, but in the end does it matter whether that's the case or not? The only thing we can change is our own countries' responses to pandemics like this.

zlacker