zlacker

>>datafl+(OP)
We don't want to know. That may sound a bit glib but I think it's true. What would be the reaction if we could determine the outbreak was due to an unintentional leak? China cannot reimburse the world for the economic damage covid has caused. It cannot be held accountable for all the lives that have been lost. It cannot compensate the world for the diminished quality of life we've all suffered. But there will be plenty of calls for China to do all of that. If covid is the result of Chinese negligence, the reaction and conflict across the planet over what to do about it is going to be absolutely terrible.

And let's not even begin to think what will happen if there were to be evidence that this was an intentional release.

>>Mounta+Ud
The China aspect is probably a red herring. Gain-of-function research was internationally funded, including by the US. The perils had been pointed out for years by virologists [1], some of whom managed to get an editorial in the New York Times against it [2].

If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with the institutions and individuals that pushed it despite the risks. No one knows the answer to this (edit: I mean to whether covid escaped from a lab), but it's an open question that deserves credible investigation. Having the investigator be one of the principal funders of the research being investigated is such...bad optics, to put it nicely, that one wonders how anyone thought that would be ok.

[1] https://mbio.asm.org/content/3/5/e00360-12

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/an-enginee...

>>guesst+vf
You make a very good point (and thanks for the links).

However i would not let China off the hook until we have figured out exactly what happened. If nobody is held "accountable" (for a certain definition of this word) it is bound to happen again and the next time it most certainly will be "biological warfare".

This needs to be treated as seriously and as comprehensively the way we treat Nuclear Weapons.

>>rramad+uh
I really think it's just the other way around. The more people make this about China, the less likely we are to find out the truth. If it's used as a geopolitical chess piece, it will get bogged down forever in political mud, which is kind of where the question is right now anyways. People will decide what they think about it based on how they feel about China. That's crazy.

>>guesst+Sh
It's too late to keep politics out of this, politics were at the heart of this from the very start. Without politics the consequences of the outbreak would probably have been much less severe.

In the beginning of January 2020, president Trump was already informed by an advisor who had close contacts in Wuhan that the outbreak was much more severe than China made it look like. But he chose not to act on that, because the USA were in the middle of closing a trade deal with China. However later that month he changed his mind when the first infections in the USA happened, and later even more when a Chinese official came out with a theory that it might actually have been an USA sports team that visited Wuhan in late 2019 that was the source of the Corona outbreak (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-ch...)

So this is not about 'people making this about China', it has been China from the start trying to cover this up and trying to make it about other countries. A more transparent Chinese policy would have given other countries the chance to react early and save thousands of lives.

>>misja1+mu
>So this is not about 'people making this about China', it has been China from the start

Military games / Fort Detrick vaping disease troll was in response to Tom Cotton and co. formally spewing lab leak theory. Note earlier date in Feb.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...

US politicized first, when soft measures failed a month after warning Wuhan lockdown. There was ample warning, enough that many of PRC neighbors with high traffic contained well with at least some effort in coordination. PRC position up until then was let science figure it out, Wuhan was very covid19 was first discovered but doesn't mean originated there. The brief domestic deflection in early Feb was possible import from ASEAN. Even early PRC "dis"info campaigns emphasized harsh lockdown not lockdown skepticism. Countries that didn't take Wuhan lockdown seriously got burned. Queue west being prominent source of exporting covid world wide by taking lax measures. This is seen in import statistic of every country that rigorously tracked imported covid cases - PRC exported very little cases, and essentially none few weeks after lockdown. North America / Europe, magnitudes more.