What difference does it make? Let's say that it's both lab-grown and wild game. OK, so that means we should scrutinize both. OK, then. Now what?
No amount of scrutiny can prevent an accident from occurring. It's not as if this pandemic happens every year. We're talking about a once in a century event. Not to mention some countries prevented the virus from spreading within their own countries very effectively, and others, well, did not.
Prior to that, people did get sick, and public investigations were mounted to pinpoint the problem. Nobody wanted to admit to themselves that they were to blame, that they had hurt or killed someone, but the society benefited from the momentary discomfort and those hard truths.
The situation is more like you're McDonalds and everyone at your store and your competitors stores are getting food poisoning.
Instead of properly understanding why contaminated food is arriving at your store and stopping the poisoning within your store, you're researching whether or not the contaminated food originated at Burger King.
It's not bad to research whether or not the contaminated food originated at Burger King, but regardless knowing that isn't going to stop the food poisoning from spreading within your store.
I like this analogy because there are already food safety laws just like how there are safety standards for working within a lab. Regardless, accidents happen, and people get poisoned. Kind of like the Chipotle outbreaks.
If you buy tacos from Chipotle and they sell you a tainted taco on accident. You get sick. Hopefully you survive. In any case you will want Chipotle to do a thorough investigation to prevent it from happening again.
Now would you want McDonalds to research Chipotle or stop outbreaks in their own stores? Seems pretty obvious to me. Perhaps I'm missing something?
Ultimately Chipotle is already incentivized to figure it out themselves, unless the argument is Chipotle is intentionally infecting their own customers?
Going back to the original point - what the USA should do for its own citizens won't change regardless of whether COVID was an accident, from wild game, etc.
Whatever you think about this, it seems unbelievably foolish to locate these labs in the middle of metropolises.
If you believe McDonalds in this analogy should be investigating the origins of Chipotle's problems as opposed to resolving their ongoing issue then we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Are you serious?
So effectively this becomes a situation of "oh yeah they should've not had that accident, oh well." In the USA we've had the same problem ourselves (lab accidents with pathogens), and we banned gain of function research and ended up removing the ban a few years later.
The entire exercise is meaningless. Note - I'm not even saying we shouldn't research the origins of COVID, what I'm saying is, the result doesn't really matter.
And yeah, maybe China doesn't wanna think that way, but let's find out first, and second find out why.
On the other hand there are some great ways to think about this politically. If by "we" you mean the U.S. we don't really have a leg to stand on as far as respect from the international community right now anyway, so any fight we bring to China is basically one on one.
Other countries besides the U.S. would be able to wring significant concessions from China if they chose to a) believe collectively that it was China's malfeasance that caused the pandemic, and b) stood together to demand a response.
Ok but they can do both, right? I mean, I can improve my performance by looking at my own performance, but also watching others.
Moreover, the US can exert a lot of pressure on other countries to meet certain standards and reduce risk. Knowing what went wrong will help determine standards.
It's not like lab-leak-causes-disease only happens once. This happens all the time, just like aircraft incidents. If incidents weren't investigated and tracked, planes would be riskier than they are.
It’s either from wild animals, it was an accident, or it was spread with malice. In all scenarios we already have procedures around gain of function research, limiting interaction with animals in markets and biological weapons, respectively.
If the prevailing theory was that it came from an asteroid that would be interesting.
I personally doubt China would pay anything even if it was a lab accident. I guess we’ll see.
Is there a viable other option?
Don't these facilities require large numbers of extremely highly educated staff?