Engineering this virus intentionally for research purposes and releasing it on purpose are very different things. If we still haven’t demonstrated the former conclusively why are we even discussing what the consequences should be for the latter?

It's a distinction without a difference. The level of negligence required to have it leak from a lab rises to the level of culpability.

If you knowingly drive a car with no brakes and kill someone, how is it less bad than driving a functional car and killing someone on purpose?

They knew the Wuhan labs had massive safety issues, from years prior to the pandemic. They knew GoF research was risky, and did it anyway. They knew covering it up was criminal behavior, yet did it anyway.

Executing someone for negligence is barbaric.

Why do you suggest that hasn’t been proved conclusively? It’s been more than two years no one has located the original pool (and we’ve been testing huge numbers of bat populations) or offered a plausible explanations for how the virus could be anything other than a bioweapon.

Essentially none of the virus’s main mutations are things that could have occurred without human involvement and certainly not on the timescale since its last common ancestor.

Sure, if someone released it deliberately, that would likely justify death for that person or persons.

But if it were developed with good intent, and released by a pure non-negligent accident, that would

Roughly, if it was deliberately developed with the intent to release, that would justify the same for everyone in the management chain with knowledge of the plot. But that responsibility would stop at the level where the plot intent was hidden.

From the article, it seems the most likely clue would be that the entire US chain and the WIV lab leadership was intent on developing knowledge to stop pandemics, but the Chinese military's involvement in the lab produced corrupt work on some team. Whether this was even known to the lab leadership, or they could know it is doubtful.

To take that and say that everyone all the way up the chain to Fauci should be executed is to advocate for guilt by association. If you want that, you should move to China, Russia, or some other autocracy, because it has no place in a democracy.

If you have some evidence that Fauci had intent and directed anyone to create and release such a virus, you need to produce that evidence before calling for his execution.

(note, I know you specifically avoided making such a call, but your message is easily read as supporting such calls)

Yeah, I wasn’t referring to Fauci in particular. At the very least, I think it’s safe to say he wasn’t in Wuhan at the time, and didn’t physically have access to release the virus at that time / place (if that’s how it happened).

My objection was to this idea that “death” is so far afield from the realm of reasonable discourse... and that there’s definitely nothing going on and we should just move on with the rest of our lives.

There needs to be the largest criminal investigation the world has ever seen. It should make the 9/11 commission look like peanuts. The possibility that this was done on purpose needs to be taken more seriously than probably any issue in the history of human civilization, because if people are able to do this in purpose and get away with it, then it’ll likely lead to the end of human civilization. Perhaps no one committed any crimes… but millions died and we need to be damned sure that we know exactly why.

I agree. This should be an extremely large and extremely serious investigation, no holds-barred.

It could even end up not only as a cause for death penalties, but for a hot war.

One huge problem is that China also knows that they would be the target in a hot war. So, they will do what they're already doing - attempt to destroy all evidence and bar access to the rest.

The other huge problem is that scientists would see such an investigation as, at the very least, risking the end of much viral research for generations. So, it may be hard to find enough good scientists in the field who DGAF about the consequences for their field, despite the fact that one of the best arguments for continued research is a finding that it WAS a weaponization attempt. Far better to make actual bio-secure facilities and develop models and vaccines than get blindsided by something even worse. But anti- hysteria will more likely rule the day.

There may be some solution to these problems, but I haven't got it.

So at this point, we are obviously already in a war against autocracies. As can be seen with RUS supplies of EU natgas, the result of interdependency is coercion, not actual democracy springing up via interchanve. CCP is obviously implementing similar long-term plans on many strategic technologies.

The only way forward today is to literally ban cooperation on this kind of research with such autocracies. CCP has just demonstrated that they will NEVER provide key information in an emergency, no matter how much they 'promised' or 'contracted' to be open.

Yes, international cooperation among peoples can be a wonderful thing.

But we've already done the experiment. If the other people are ruled by an autocracy, it is only poisoning our democracies and building vulnerabilities to future coercion.