I don't buy this, obviously not an unbiased sample, but most individual liberals I know are on board with it being a lab leak. Can't necessarily say that about 'liberal leadership class' in the US, though.
(GP here) I generally agree with this. It's why I wrote 'in the eyes of most'. IMO liberals are bad at defining their own opinions in the court of public opinion, and often are viewed as !Conservative, even if their views are more nuanced.
I've read that most US/western scientists in the field immediately thought that COVID19 was likely a lab leak, and were dumbfounded by the Daszak et al. letter in Science denouncing any discussion of same as unfounded racism.
Anecdotal, of course, but this tracks with the subset of my friends/former colleagues who are researchers in biotech. As an Asian person, I thought the focus on the wet markets to be weirdly racist/exoticist. If anything the lab leak hypothesis is anti chinese-state, but not racist, but the Chinese state loves to conflate being anti-chinese-state with racism in it's propaganda.
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