So again, I ask - even if it's true, so what? It's impossible to conclusively prove, and even if proven what exactly is proven? That an accident occurred? OK, so what?
The article attempts to answer this:
> The vitriol also obscures a broader imperative, Relman says, which is that uncovering the virus’s origins is crucial to stopping the next pandemic. Threats from both lab accidents and natural spillovers are growing simultaneously as humans move steadily into wild places and new biosafety labs grow in number around the world. “This is why the origins question is so important,” Relman says.
However the reality is from the perspective of the USA it doesn't even matter. Even if China was malicious and deliberately sent it off to us, it could've been easily stopped but we didn't do it. Unless we're going to go to war over this it seems like a pointless exercise as conclusive evidence will never emerge as it requires cooperation from China.
We're worrying about whether it was created from labs in China, meanwhile we couldn't even prevent a massive superspreader event in Boston via the Biogen conference, filled with people who already has an awareness of the virus to begin with.
Even now as I type this cases of the variant are increasing and the amount of people taking the vaccine is decreasing and silly accidents like the J&J fiasco are occurring. Not to say that we can't explore both things simultaneously, but it's pretty obvious that the return on investment will differ - one will do... what exactly? And another will prevent more cases.
no it's not. it might be impossible to prove the negative, but if it did come from the lab there should be physical records and first hand witnesses.
> so what
so maybe we make it a point to have the lab shut down so this doesn't happen again? maybe we publicly acknowledge there are secret teams working on secret science and viruses that can kill people en masse?
but you have a point, it's always easier to embrace nihilism than tackle hard problems head on.
However we ended up unbanning it and we still do it now. If the goal is to simply stop this type of research in its entirety, there's still no point of trying to get China to stop as we have no authority in China (or any other country) to begin with. Even if China were to claim they've stopped we have no way of knowing.
Let's just assume China did have a lab accident. OK, then what? We tell them to stop doing it? Let's say they agree. In the future they decide to start doing it again. The entire thing is pointless to begin with. We can't get our own citizens to consistently wear masks and we think we're going to substantially change China's behavior here - hilarious.
It's pretty absurd to say that it makes no difference whether or not the virus was a lab leak or not. The answer to that question changes the posterior risk estimates of such research and therefore our international funding and domestic regulatory priorities.
There's also such a thing as soft, diplomatic nudges. Not everything is "force X to do Y when they want not-Y".