On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence.
There were tons of articles and threads on it everywhere including HN, no one was being silenced, give me a break. The oppression complex is really out of control, as if people were being visited by the secret police and forced to immediately cease all discussion about the lab leak theory. It just had no credibility due to lack of evidence. As more info comes to light it's being given more credence, simple as that.
Really seems many want to feel like they've been oppressed and silenced when that couldn't be further from reality, reaching absurd levels of delusion here.
Virtually none of the evidence being discussed here, aside from 3 workers at the lab getting sick in November, is new. Its all the same info that has been available for well over a year. And much of it not coming from "misinfo merchants".
> Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence.
This cuts both ways. There have been many who haven't been saying that the lab-leak is definitively the source of the virus, but simply saying that its a credible possibility with at least as much evidence as any other theory, and should therefore be investigated. Throughout the last year, it was pretty consistently called a conspiracy theory or "debunked", when clearly it was neither. Declaring something to be misinformation when it is not, isn't any more skeptical that declaring something to be the truth with no evidence.
You can try and poo-poo all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the mainstream narrative, both on social media and in the mainstream media, has been wildly off about this for over a year, and virtually nothing has changed from an evidence perspective to warrant their about face. The general narrative was simply wrong, due to a combination of hubris, partisanship, and lack of skepticism.