An intentional lab leak makes no sense to me at all. Its like starting a fire in your house to spite your neighbour.
Very few people are arguing that it was intentional. I agree that an intentional lab leak is highly, highly unlikely, but I think an accidental lab leak is at least just as likely as the wet market hypothesis and CCP certainly acted extremely suspicious.
All major world governments do illegal and shady acts when faced with situations that may result in the need for extreme ass-covering. (cf. "righteous strike")
If it were an accidental lab leak: so what? How does that change things? If anything, it would accelerate a {trade,cold,cyber,shooting} war with China, which is universally a bad thing, even in pursuit of justice for something that was likely accidental (if indeed it came from a lab, which is presently undefined/unknown to the public).
> pursuit of justice
It has nothing to do with a pursuit of justice, at least not for me. It's about understanding where the disease came from and how it jumped to humans, so that we have a better shot at stopping something like this happening again.
That's a more important question about whether or not this particular virus came out of a lab or not, because, if the answer to the above is "yes", then we need to take whatever your/whoever's proposed mitigation/prevention steps even if this thing came about via natural pathways. Even banning GOF research in labs might not be sufficient, if malicious people (wooo "bioterrorism") could go about doing this outside of labs.
Also, we need to plan and prepare for the next global respiratory pandemic in any event, as we know they happen periodically regardless of origin. That's true even if we never authoritatively understand the origin of this one.
They would have acted the same regardless of what the initial case was caused by. That's just the way they roll.
While I agree with that, what this misses is that knowledge of if and how the virus escaped is valuable knowledge that helps us by showing us where the flaws in our current processes are.
Flight safety is a fitting analogy. You need to analyze exactly why a plane crashed so that you can see the gaps in current safety processes. It is that iteration (crash -> analyze -> improve -> crash -> analyze -> improve) over many generations that is why flying is so safe. Without this, it's armchair theory and you are not left with a system that is robust to the real world.
Just playing the devil's advocate here, but, I'd argue that it makes quite a lot of sense from a biological warfare perspective in terms of intelligence gathering on how different societies and countries behave against such a threat.
In particular, the pandemic has brought to the surface the how large schism between the two parties in the US, the constant politicization of science and nearly every other topic, the vast differences in perspective of different groups of the population, and provided information on the outcomes of different measures in different cultural landscapes, the level of preparation of different countries, the time it takes to figure out the correct response, and the responses of the people in guideline changes.
It has also shown that a well prepared, authoritarian country, with mRNA vaccines in the works can incur very minimal losses in terms of population due to swift vaccine rollout, hard lock-downs and strict measures.
China's losses compared to say UK, US, India, Russia and others have been very small if the data they have actually provided are to be believed.
But all of this is pure speculation from a random netizen so take it with huge grains of salt.
If you scroll to the bottom of it, China owned up to accidentally leaking brucellosis mere months before Covid became a thing, sourced by China Daily (CP's English website). That's why I don't get the accidental lab leak hypothesis. It's inconsistent with previous ones unless you make some 4D chess plays in reasoning.
As for suspiciousness, is that action different than in other situations, or are we they just behaving like that all the time and most of the West is only learning about it now? I'm leaning towards the latter.
1) Natural bat origin
2) Natural non-bat origin
3) Originated elsewhere (per above) and broke out in Wuhan
4) Unintentional lab leak of a natural strain
5) Unintentional lab leak from GoF research
6) Unintentional lab leak from bioweapons research
7) Intentionally released to by the CCP
8) Intentionally released by internal opponents of the CCP
9) Intentionally released by external opponents of China
10) ... and so on
I can come up with sensical (if not always likely) scenarios which fit all of those, and many more.
Most of the scenarios suggest we should be doing much more.
For example:
* If there was an unintentional lab leak of a strain in GoF research, China knows things about COVID19 we don't. They took extreme measures. It's reasonable to assume they might have had some reason.
* If this was a "test" of a bioweapon -- understand China's and the world's response -- it's worth treating as a dry run (note that this does not necessitate Chinese-run test)
* If this were a bioweapon, we should take long COVID very, very seriously, since the best bioweapons are designed to cripple rather than to kill.
What's odd to me is that, as far as I know, no one has compiled a list, evidence, or implications.
All the instances of messing up found so far were incompetence and bureaucratic bullying. This certainly obstructed the free flow of information and delayed effective investigation and action though, but there’s no real sign of a concerted cover up because there were several lines of investigation in the open from early on that were never shut down.
If it could be made in a lab and released (intentionally or accidentally), another could be made in a lab and released (intentionally), and our strategy should be exactly the same even if SARS-CoV-2 is of entirely natural origin, as the entire planet now knows the destructive value of this class of bioweapons (if constructing such artificially is within our technology).
The US ban on GOF research suggests that it is believed to be technically feasible to achieve this. This means we must proceed strategically as a species as if the lab leak hypothesis were true, because over time the probability of an intentional lab leak approaches 1. The origin of this particular pandemic remains irrelevant in that case.
China figured it out and unleashed a global pandemic by opening the borders to not be a victim of day the CIA.
It’s possible it’s intentionally leaked but not by China
But isn’t this precisely the strawman argument that’s effectively destroyed rational discussion about the lab-leak scenario?
As far as I know, absolutely no rational scientist has suggested the intentional ‘bio-weapon’ release of the virus on China’s own population as a realistic scenario, in any way.
But I’ve found whenever discussing an accidental leak with people who oppose it, they almost invariably use this as their main argument rejecting it: “why would the Chinese use this weapon against themselves?”
It seems just another example of the debate being clouded by a politicization that isn’t even there.
> our strategy should be exactly the same even if SARS-CoV-2 is of entirely natural origin
This is still missing the point. The point is that studying the details of how it leaked (if it did leak) gives you information that you can use to refine safety processes. Without these details, you are left with mere armchair theorizing about what new procedures are necessary and what the flaws are in current procedures.
Read about the history of plane crashes, where the details of how planes crashed were used to improve flight safety.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/g73/12-airplane-cras...
- United Airlines 232 "The NTSB later determined the accident was caused by a failure by mechanics to detect a crack in the fan disk ... The accident led the FAA to order modification of the DC-10's hydraulic system and to require redundant safety systems in all future aircraft."
- TWA 800 "It was everybody's nightmare: a plane that blew up in midair for no apparent reason ... most likely after a short circuit in a wire bundle ... The FAA has since mandated changes to reduce sparks from faulty wiring and other sources."
Now how could such improvements have been made without knowing how the plane crashed?
Perhaps including the second part you quoted wasnt necessary for my point, but if you think that makes my post politically motivated then Im afraid its only because you choose to see it that way.
While finding out the answer to the latter is interesting, I think "a ban on GOF research" is likely closer to the answer to the former, which reduces the significance of the latter.
We're going to see more of these, whether from SARS-CoV mutations, bioterror, or future lab leaks. The large-scale changes our society needs to make are identical even if we were only facing a subset of these threats (ie if lab leaks could be completely eliminated, which is what I believe you're talking about).
I’m not saying it proves it was a lab leak, just that I don’t trust them, so when they say it wasn’t, that’s rather meaningless. And since the WHO weren’t allowed to investigate for over a year, that they say they didn’t find any evidence is also meaningless. The fact that the lab leak hypothesis kept getting shut down early for less than scientific reasons (calling it racist for example) also doesn’t help building trust.
It would take some years until we properly see all the consequences, but I wouldn't be surprised if afterwards historians would note Covid-19 as a factor that benefited China in their long term competition w. "the west", not as a cost.
Like, 5k deaths is something that I wouldn't approve of for almost any reason, but looking back at documented 20th century history, planners (both in China and elsewhere) were clearly willing to pay such and even much higher costs for reasons of global politics/power play, so the mere existence of such a cost by itself certainly does not mean that it's implausible that someone would intentionally order a thing like that.
It might not even be something initially decided by those on top. Just as likely that the lab management decided to sweep it under the rug to avoid damage to their reputation, and then by the time it blew up, the higher-ups couldn't admit to being ignorant without damage to their reputation; and so on, all the way to the top. It happens all the time in bureaucracies.