Who cares if it came from a lab, there are zero consequences to anyone whether it did or not, and it's the least impactful detail of what has happened. "Allowing," debate on the disease origin is a cynical switcheroo.
1) So we can learn and mitigate the risks of something similar happening again.
and
2) In the event that the virus was leaked from a laboratory, the world would like to send the lab a small invoice for costs incurred and damages.
It's window dressing, and I'm becoming even more suspicious that the disease origin is just another managed narrative, as everybody who believes it came from a lab believed it last year, and nobody who rejected the lab leak view last year is going to have their mind changed to where they accept institutions they believe in are culpable.
It's an issue designed to politically neutralize people, so that we will be just like people arguing about jet fuel burning temperatures on the internet instead of confronting our governments about surveillance and state overreach and the patriot act. The whole so-called "debate" is a honeypot tarpit for useful idiots.
We now have documentary evidence that Fauci authorized money to be channeled through various organizations to labs in Wuhan. These documents also link people involved with this activity to the very same people who assured us through letters to a highly respected journal that the lab leak theory was completely wrong.
This brings to mind many questions, but do people act like this when they are not covering things up? This bears investigating.
It's unlikely that the people investigating will be the same ones developing new drugs or treatments for covid.
Maybe not, but maybe they should instead be investigating how policy failed us so catastrophically around the world after it escaped its original area.
When the world obsesses over its origin, it seems to be blatant deflection over failures at home.
This is a nonsensical argument for reasons ISL pointed out in their reply (among others), and framing the issue as a question of origin OR <other important questions> is a false dichotomy - they are all important questions worth seeking answers to and will inform different aspects of how w respond to, and ideally prevent, future pandemics.
>The worldwide community is large. We can do many things all at the same time. Investigating the source is not a distraction.
That, to me, is the interesting part of the lab breakout case. Are we regularly underestimating the risk of novel viruses in research laboratories?
This is a great argument when we're talking about, for example, people working on making phones vs. people working on cancer research -- their efforts aren't interchangeable.
But political capital to examine policy failures? That's a limited precious resource that is all too often redirected towards frivolous, self-interested pursuits by people who are unwilling to examine their own.
China is an easy scapegoat here. You see it all over this thread. Many many americans talking about Chinese policy while their country pretended nothing was happening for months and likely facilitated the virus' travel throughout the US and the world as one of the main epicenters of travel.
American politicians (as well as others'), as well as the beaurocracies under their control, love nothing more than people looking at anyone but them when something goes wrong and they will take advantage of it.