> Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory.
Can we define/refine the concept of "lab-leak theory" a bit? Because some of the stuff floating around a year ago was a bit unhinged from reality:
> You’ve probably heard the rumor: The new coronavirus is a bioweapon. Some malicious country—perhaps the United States, maybe China, depending on who’s talking or tweeting—purposefully unleashed the virus that causes Covid-19 on the world.
> Ebright helped The Washington Post debunk a claim that the COVID-19 outbreak can somehow be tied to bioweapons activity, a conspiracy theory that’s been promoted or endorsed by the likes of US Sen. Tom Cotton, Iran’s supreme leader, and others.
> But Ebright thinks that it is possible the COVID-19 pandemic started as an accidental release from a laboratory such as one of the two in Wuhan that are known to have been studying bat coronaviruses.
"In the Shadow of Biological Warfare: Conspiracy Theories on the Origins of COVID-19 and Enhancing Global Governance of Biosafety as a Matter of Urgency":
> Two theories on the origins of COVID-19 have been widely circulating in China and the West respectively, one blaming the United States and the other a highest-level biocontainment laboratory in Wuhan, the initial epicentre of the pandemic. Both theories make claims of biological warfare attempts. According to the available scientific evidence, these claims are groundless.
This is classic “nurse vs. feminist nurse” cognitive distortion. Whether the virus was developed as a bio weapon, or simply as a product of well-intentioned gain-of-function research, is irrelevant to the factual basis of whether or not it escaped from the lab. We don’t need to establish how and why it was created, only that it was, in order to assess the likelihood of lab release as a root cause of the pandemic.
That's nice in theory, but a couple of things. First of all, there was a complete lack of actual evidence that there was a lab leak (this is also true of the Wuhan market hypothesis, it was all quite circumstantial) but we have seen similar viruses arise naturally in the past so our priors would favor the market hypothesis over the lab leak. Second, the lab leak hypothesis and the intent of the virus were tightly entangled in the original reports, especially from the US Administration, that is that China created the virus to harm the US. Third, intent absolutely matters. If this is a bio-weapon that was designed to be used in an attack, then the consequences of such actions are vastly different then if this was a naturally occurring virus that was collected in bats that happened jump to a human host and escaped the lab.
While I increasingly believe that the lab leak hypothesis may be the true origin, my priors still favor a natural jump at this point.
These are also not the only two possible scenarios, just demonstrating that there are different consequences for different intentions, it is literally why the US Penal code has Murder (1,2,...) and Manslaughter (...) as well as Self-Defense protections built into it.
Can we define/refine the concept of "lab-leak theory" a bit? Because some of the stuff floating around a year ago was a bit unhinged from reality:
> You’ve probably heard the rumor: The new coronavirus is a bioweapon. Some malicious country—perhaps the United States, maybe China, depending on who’s talking or tweeting—purposefully unleashed the virus that causes Covid-19 on the world.
* https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/why-do-politicians-keep-brea...
> Ebright helped The Washington Post debunk a claim that the COVID-19 outbreak can somehow be tied to bioweapons activity, a conspiracy theory that’s been promoted or endorsed by the likes of US Sen. Tom Cotton, Iran’s supreme leader, and others.
> But Ebright thinks that it is possible the COVID-19 pandemic started as an accidental release from a laboratory such as one of the two in Wuhan that are known to have been studying bat coronaviruses.
* https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/experts-know-the-new-coronav...
"In the Shadow of Biological Warfare: Conspiracy Theories on the Origins of COVID-19 and Enhancing Global Governance of Biosafety as a Matter of Urgency":
> Two theories on the origins of COVID-19 have been widely circulating in China and the West respectively, one blaming the United States and the other a highest-level biocontainment laboratory in Wuhan, the initial epicentre of the pandemic. Both theories make claims of biological warfare attempts. According to the available scientific evidence, these claims are groundless.
* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7445685/