It feels like the kind of narrative that could lead to destabilization and may be fueled by xenophobia.
But beyond the responsible adults there are few people in the world that can study the genome and they never really had internal consensus. They had internal consensus to downplay the 'its made in a lab' conclusion, but there is no clear evidence of the opposite.
Keep in mind at that moment in time this would give ammunition to general public to harass random asian looking individuals.
You can imagine that's a not a conclusion you want to exist in the head of your common hooligan.
You can also imagine that most people convinced of anything are just, ehm, idiots. Because if you can't do the science yourself, or if you can't but haven't, it would be foolish to believe any kind of consensus where most of the people talking also can't or haven't done the science themselves. The majority is always wrong, and scientific consensus of a new event becomes insightfully about 10 years in after a few revolutions of ideas like the one currently happening.
It is in the end just a economic system of gatekeeping by a cabal. A cabal very much in a situation of economic dependency on political structures. So there can't be a scientific consensus about this in the media. Only a political one.
A common error or misrepresentation seemed to be conflation of "lab escape" with "man made." They're not the same thing; a virus from nature (smallpox etc.) could still escape from a lab.
That's certainly a type of lying, but perhaps not an extremely willful kind. Making false statements because you wholeheartedly believe them to be true is still lying, perhaps wholly unbeknownst to the speaker.
It would seem that we're collectively dialing back to "origin still inconclusive" instead of kneejerk "definitely NOT criminal negligence by $COUNTRY".
That appears reasonable, and probably would have been the original take if not for all of the extreme anti-China agitprop that is the norm seemingly everywhere in the USA's mass media these days.
TBH the source does not matter one bit, any more than the identity of Satoshi. Covid is here and must be addressed as it exists; the origin story is just narrative fuel. People eat that irrelevant shit up, because we're still basically "They did WHAT? to WHOM?!" narrative-obsessed little monkeys.
I feel the exact opposite. If the source of exposure ended up being proven to be lab-leak (beyond a reasonable doubt), I would want to understand how it happened and what measures needed to be taken to prevent this event re-occuring, even if it only occured due to gross-negligence and not malice.
It's worth examining what caused a confluence of information sources to aggressively discredit a theory they are now presenting as plausible, and how they are handling what seems like a dramatic shift in perspective, as well as the causes for the shift.
Moreover, it's worth considering how we can better analyze and verify news media and other information sources. I notice many errors and misrepresentations in areas where I have personal knowledge and expertise, but I tend to accept news reports at face value in areas where I have little expertise or knowledge.
Organisations and people will happily go with their side's narrative, regardless of scientific accuracy. Most likely, in this specific case, there was a political reason to save the face of the Chinese Communist party (who omitted information, so it's likely at fault here); someone probably got paid in some form, circulated fake news and the rest of the media / political machine just repeated their side's safe source.
This is why you can't just "trust the experts" and that's why the scientific process is a continuous work in progress which needs multiple people thinking and debunking each other.
Sure, the experts consensus is a safe default - certainly safer than believing random individuals saying the opposite on the internet - but experts can be wrong and conspiracy theories sometimes turn out to be true.
Please someone write an unstealthing service, a cross between Wayback Machine and diff, that outputs a feed of such edits.
I'd love to see a trend of sites surfacing changes themselves and serving up a per-article history like Wikipedia or GitHub. Bonus if they annotate the changes. In this case they could just write something like "the lab escape theory still looks unlikely but we're now less certain of that".
In fact, in my whole career the NYT journalist was the most unprofessional, unethical one. They knowingly took things I said out of context and portrayed them to mean the opposite things.
Startup founders, I advise you to decline NYT interviews, they are extremely unscrupulous.
https://thenextweb.com/news/the-wayback-machine-now-lets-you...
How do they determine that a case has no link to the wet market?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Basically cases of covid had occurred before the cluster reported from the Huanan wet market, and no connection could be established between these cases and the marketplace
That leaves the escape from lab hypothesis. Which is certainly has not been disproved. Maybe the scientific community should just ask themselves, how could it have happened and how could it have been avoided?
I don't believe at all in blaming China, that is just xenophobia in disguise. Would you blame India for the Indian variant, or the UK for the British variant?
But name a time since the dawn of commercial air travel 1950-2019 where a country, much less the country with the largest population on earth, suspended all air travel for any reason, much less a flu they'd only discovered a few weeks prior.
I have my doubts on how many other countries would've isolated their entire population and suspended travel in and out if given the same time line and information.
Do you really think if a flu outbreak had been detected in the US that we would have suspended ALL travel in and out of the country in December of 2019 only a few weeks after becoming aware of it?
It's been a century since this last happened, no one alive in 2019 really had any memory of such a catastrophe unfolding. I think China would've been called alarmist, totalitarian, and an unreliable business partner, had they taken the full measures of lockdown early enough to possibly prevent it spreading internationally.
Have a great day!
I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but it's their self-inflicted mode of operation.
