Agreed, this is why after this, whatever the root cause, we should have international "discouragement" on disease research. This stuff is going to leak out. Not saying this one did.
If the lab leak is real, then we should absolutely use this as a reason to stop Gain of Function research or at least establish institutions that ensure the safety of such research, preferably across international borders. The point being that you want to avoid something like this ever happening again.
Pretty much everyone involved stands to lose from it proving to be true that a lab leak occurred. China looks bad, the CDC/US looks bad, researchers look bad, EcoHealth Alliance looks bad[1], the lancelet looks bad.[2] Heck even politifact and factcheck.org reported the idea as debunked for the first year or so, and Facebook for around the same time took down content with that angle.[3] It would also likely result in a backlash against interest in GOF research in general.
The only group that stands to benefit are those who benefit by making those groups look bad, who will also unfortunately exaggerate their claims for greater effect.
That is a really uncharitable reading of what I said. I don't know the details of what they were researching, I am not an expert. I'm just saying, the scenario that it could have been a lab leak, or that there could be a lab leak in future, should be taken more seriously. I don't know if they did GOF experiments (and I'm sure the pop-sci image of monkeys in cages a few feet apart is probably wrong). But we should think of regulating more strictly whatever they did (or didn't) do that could cause such an outbreak.
All well and good, but the debate really needs to shift to how we manage gain-of-function research in future and what additional monitoring or protection needs to be in place in ALL laboratories dealing with high-risk viruses and pathogens.
It would not have been the first lab leak and wont be the last.
You speak as if this is a bad thing. If the U.S. funded research that caused the covid outbreak, the international community should lose trust in us, especially since public officials dismissed (perhaps unfairly) theories that would have put the U.S. at fault. Obviously, this goes doubly for China.
Increasing safeguards relies on us knowing what the vectors of outbreak are. It matters if this was caused by an underpaid lab assistant selling animals that were meant to be contained, or a random person catching animals to sell, or a researcher that didn't quarantine after being bit. The safeguards should be different.
The amount of censorship, especially among the qualified scientific community in just about every facet of this disease is alarming. Even if the origins were accidental or lab-born or whatnot, the response has been so politicized worldwide that pure science has been largely thrown out the window. Every possibility should be analyzed & tested, even if it goes against the interests of a ruling party and all parties are guilty of exploiting this.
It’s hard to believe how bad this is. Not the lab leak theory itself, but the fact that scientists found it plausible that a scientific mistake released an epidemic which killed 20m people – and decided they should cover this up because “talking about it might harm science“. This is truly scandalous, and I don’t see how those people can remain in their post.
At the same time, articles like this one are insidious because they do advance the "lab leak hypothesis" without bringing any new information to the table. It's really a case of repeating something enough times so that, true or not, it becomes mainstream and accepted, which is exactly what the powerful interests pushing for that "hypothesis" are trying to achieve.
IMHO, considering the current global situation and the ramifications, the wise thing to do would be to invest in research and investigations but to stop making headlines on this unless something significant emerges one way or the other. Unfortunately, if there is one thing that is absolutely impossible in our modern, connected Western world that runs on social media and outrage it is silence.
If we are looking for patient zero I agree, it's not relevant to place blame.
If this thing leaked from a lab, of course we would want to know! There can be lessons learned to prevent this in the future, and if the chinese government knew and covered it up, the world should definitely hold them accountable.
You raise good points, but note that not everyone is rational here. Covid has in fact shown irrational so many people are, even in the 21st century.
If it were discovered to be a lab leak from something previously discovered in the wild, especially from a NIH funded lab, hell would break lose and it would hurt many aspects of biological and medical research.
Although I think, from skimming the report, there is probably enough information to say that this (1) wasn't intentional and (2) is possibly a lab leak.
That is enough to say that it will probably happen again in our lifetime from an actual lab leak. We have the technology, the world is large, there are a lot of foolish researchers in it. We need to be more prepared to curtail or cease international travel.
Maybe we'll end up banning it again and stopping international funding of it?
It's pretty absurd to say that it makes no difference whether or not the virus was a lab leak or not. The answer to that question changes the posterior risk estimates of such research and therefore our international funding and domestic regulatory priorities.
There's also such a thing as soft, diplomatic nudges. Not everything is "force X to do Y when they want not-Y".
The problem is this extremely dangerous research is bound to lead to a leak eventually, because in fact there have already been hundreds of lab virus leaks around the world in the past, and the stakes get higher as the viruses they engineer get more and more lethal. China is actually doubling down and increasing the amount of risky virus research they are doing. If it isn’t regulated eventually something even worse could leak out of another lab.
So yeah, it is important to find out what the origin of this virus was because whatever the reason was we want to ensure that it isn’t the same reason for the next big pandemic.
Well for starters, the reason a lot of this research was pushed to China was congress had grown tired of finding ways to punish the CDC for lab leaks and mistakes here in the US. It was only recently that the CDC had been allowed to restart a lot of its more dangerous research. So how about the US stop funding dangerous research regardless of where it is at?
Either the lab leak was true and this was a self-inflicted wound, or it was highly suspicious and uselessly dangerous research, as it didn't help us stop the pandemic.
I agree. Personally I’ve not dismissed this possibility at all. But as it stands, it’s just a hypothesis with suggestive information, but nothing concrete. There are verified wrongs to criticize them for right now, and can be a starting point for remediation, rather than drum up hate and criticism of mere hypothetical wrongs. (And of course, one such example of a verifiable wrong could be proof of Chinese institutions destroying evidence of the disease’s origin...)
on the other hand, if covid leak originated in a lab. Then scientists carelessly caused a global pandemic that killed millions. There must be some accountability for that too.
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