I feel that for people paying attention to COVID news, this has always been the case; there's never been any kind of conclusive evidence on the origin of the virus (that I've read of). The article outlines three main possible origins - natural, accidental combination in lab, deliberate construction in lab. (There's a fourth option I've seen floating around - deliberate release of a constructed virus.) It seems that most of the scientists in the article are considering the second option; however, right-wing media has apparently in multiple instances sought to take their work to push the third, or even fourth option.
It is thoroughly unsurprising to me that most scientific publications would take a stance against releasing studies or articles considering option two or three, as right-wing media and politicians were/are fishing for anything with a suitable scientific veneer they could throw out as evidence of someone to blame. (And its not hard to see why - telling your constituents they have to deal with job losses, family deaths and lockdowns because someone in China ate a bat leaves people without something to blame, and the politicians tend to be the closest relevant people.) Given the amount of anti-asian racism/crime/murder we've seen spiking in the last year, I think the publications' stances (and the more mainstream media) to lean heavily towards option one is understandable - no one wants to be the used as justification for hate crimes or political action a la the Iraq war buildup.
Perhaps in another year or two things will have cooled down enough that stuff like this can be considered without collateral damage.
Absolutely. Lots of issues that are just way too high-emotion right now for rational and objective discussion.
One other reason it's way too hot to discuss right now: it would suggest that scientists were at least partly to blame for the pandemic. Even if you're not Chinese, you might not want to be discussing that idea if you were a scientist yourself.
Not if it causes people to (emotionally) dig themselves into positions which they later are unwilling to relent on because people hate admitting they're wrong, and hate it more the more adamantly they had stated their position before. We're in a very polarized environment, with very little trust between groups, and having an early emotional hard conversation could actually be another obstacle in the way of having a productive one later.
> Given the amount of anti-asian racism/crime/murder we've seen spiking in the last year, I think the publications' stances (and the more mainstream media) to lean heavily towards option one is understandable
So we start with one marginal conspiracy theory 4, add some lies trying to silence very likely theory 2, and as a result get even more people believing in global conspiracy to create and use the virus, who think the lies are the best proof for their theory.
Any lies are bound to backfire, and there is nothing understandable in supporting dishonesty. The Iraq war buildup is not comparable here in any way as it was a misinformation campaign started by government, not an attempt to find the truth.
I don't think it matters much how long we take, because it's not figuring out the pandemic - that we're already failing to do, even without an origin story - but instead figuring out the origin.
The origin, truth be told, is basically irrelevant, just like the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. We live in the world today, and while the story of how we got here might be somewhat academically or historically interesting, it's about a million items down the list of things that are actually important right now.
The origin is interesting but hardly conclusive in stopping the next pandemic, which is only a matter of time anyway.
Instead, the significant economic and health costs could have been significantly mitigated by the response of governments. That’s going to be more important for preventing harm in the next pandemic. Even if it was a lab escape, how does shutting down the labs help for the future? They are also a defence against the next pandemic
You don't have to shut down the labs. Understanding how it happened in the first place can inform effective policies to prevent future lab leaks. The Obama administration temporarily suspended Gain of Function research in the US in 2014 to investigate and mitigate lab leak risks. They did not dismiss lab leak concerns and characterize them as xenophobic attacks on the country.
Frankly, any solution that does not in some way involve "how can we prevent or reduce the incidence of this kind of problem happening" is political nonsense to me. Even with the most effective defensive protocols, a pandemic-grade virus costs a staggering amount of resources to deal with.
It is thoroughly unsurprising to me that most scientific publications would take a stance against releasing studies or articles considering option two or three, as right-wing media and politicians were/are fishing for anything with a suitable scientific veneer they could throw out as evidence of someone to blame. (And its not hard to see why - telling your constituents they have to deal with job losses, family deaths and lockdowns because someone in China ate a bat leaves people without something to blame, and the politicians tend to be the closest relevant people.) Given the amount of anti-asian racism/crime/murder we've seen spiking in the last year, I think the publications' stances (and the more mainstream media) to lean heavily towards option one is understandable - no one wants to be the used as justification for hate crimes or political action a la the Iraq war buildup.
Perhaps in another year or two things will have cooled down enough that stuff like this can be considered without collateral damage.