Being culpable for a disaster on this scale would be unprecedented in the economic reparations, so much so that we'll likely never find the origins.
I duno if that would ever really happen. I think much like a lot of things, concerns about Uyghurs it would just dissolve into the diplomatic and economic seas.
True. And not just economic reparations, you can imagine diplomatic relations and all would be severely impacted.
What evidence is informing this belief? i.e. what is your model for assigning "P>0.5" to the probability here? For example do you think the SARS outbreak circa 2002 was also a lab escape?
As long as people believe that evidence is covered up, then they can believe anything.
https://asiatimes.com/2020/04/why-us-outsourced-bat-virus-re...
Surely they’ve been receiving reports on progress, if so I’m sure there could be a match.
Similarly, I believe there were scientists in India who determined the capsule which deploys the virus into cells looks exactly the same as the HIV mechanism.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Scientists-slam-Ind...
This kinda matches people testing positive for HIV in an Australian vaccine trial:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/world/australia/uq-corona...
I've worked in several labs, created several viruses (non-pathogenic) myself. People are careless, did you read the article?
I wasn't trying to be confrontational about it, just trying to understand why that's your opinion. In particular I was curious about your "very likely", because my priors are that most infectious diseases are not caused by lab leaks, and that there's no particular evidence of a lab leak here (though as you say plenty of reason to believe such evidence would be suppressed). But it's not my field so I'm not strongly attached to those priors.
I'd certainly agree with the article's premise that the lab theory should not be dismissed out of hand, but I think that's a different conclusion than saying "it's very likely to have originated in a lab leak". My takeaway from the article is "it's possible, but still not very likely", though I suppose I'd give a higher % of probability now than before reading the article.