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
That is addressing the theory that the virus was manufactured in a lab, i.e with the intent to release. Not the idea that it was released accidentally. It is very different.

>>beowul+59
The quote doesn’t say “with intent to release”. You’re writing that in. I’ll quote Thompson on ‘manufacture’

> Wait, what was that last one? “The baseless theory that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab”? I feel pretty certain that COVID-19 wasn’t deliberately manufactured and deployed as some sort of biological attack, but where does “gain-of-function” experiments end and “manufacturing” begin? Even if it ends up being true that the lab-leak hypothesis is wrong there is actually zero question that the Wuhan lab was manipulating coronaviruses to make them more lethal. To that end, the primary evidence we have that the lab-leak hypothesis is false is that China says it is false.

This gives a new perspective to Roose’s recommendations (well technically, the recommendation of the experts he consulted, which all happen to align with Roose’s previously stated beliefs) that the Biden administration set up a “truth commission”, appoint a “reality czar”, audit tech company algorithms, and “fix people’s problems” with a social stimulus.

The lab was doing gain of function experiments, which most people would agree would constitute “being made in a lab”.

I don’t necessarily think the lab leak hypothesis is the truth, but it certainly is a real possibility. And if it was an accidental leak then it would very likely have been a virus modified via gain of function.