zlacker

>>nnx+(OP)
It's interesting to see that with Donald Trump out of office, the "lab escape" hypothesis is not roundly dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy theory anymore.

>>incrud+I2
Nobody ever dismissed it. It has been a viable theory since the beginning. What was dangerous was pointing the finger at China and saying “this is all their fault!” without any evidence. There STILL is not evidence, but that doesn’t mean it should not be investigated as a source.

Dismissing the theory outright has never and will never be an option. I don’t like that this is what the team decided to do, and I suspect there is a lot of tension in this investigation.

>>beowul+N6
They absolutely did. See this NYT article. Ben Thompson of Stratechery discussed it in an excellent article linked below. Key excerpt from the NYT piece. Doesn’t get more official than that:

> Hoaxes, lies and collective delusions aren’t new, but the extent to which millions of Americans have embraced them may be. Thirty percent of Republicans have a favorable view of QAnon, according to a recent YouGov poll. According to other polls, more than 70 percent of Republicans believe Mr. Trump legitimately won the election, and 40 percent of Americans — including plenty of Democrats — believe the baseless theory that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/technology/biden-reality-...

https://stratechery.com/2021/mistakes-memes-and-foreign-grou...

>>graeme+s8
The NPR article that your NYT article links to is more direct about this; I'll link to it and quote it here directly: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/951095644

> The poll gave people a sort of test to see if they could spot misinformation like the coronavirus was created in a lab or that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.

> 40% of poll respondents believe one of the biggest conspiracy theories that's out there about the virus, that it was made in a lab in China. There is no evidence for this. And scientists say that the virus was transmitted to humans from another species. But I talked to people all over the country who responded to our poll and they still believe this.