I wish they would share whatever this new evidence is with the public. There's not agreement about what it means among the agencies who have seen it, so maybe having more eyes on the problem can clarify the situation.
I think in alot of cases if your understanding of a topic is based purely on what you've heard in the media, then you are less informed than someone who has never heard of that topic.
That's not even possible. Even if you are misinformed or misunderstand something about an issue, simply having awareness of an issue makes you more informed on that subject than someone unaware that it exists.
Large chunks of the media assured us that it was not only impossible that the virus came from a lab but also racist and xenophobic to even suggest it. If you told the average person who didn't watch the news that a lab that studies corona viruses is in a city where a corona virus started many would just assume it came from the lab.
> Large chunks of the media assured us that it was not only impossible that the virus came from a lab but also racist and xenophobic to even suggest it.
I don't think that's a fair assessment of "the media", at least not the mass media. When the lab leak theory started there was no evidence at all to support it beyond "A lab exists" and "We don't like China" which gave it status as a conspiracy theory.
As evidence grew suggesting that the virus wasn't engineered in a lab and could have jumped from animals to humans, the people who clung to, and very aggressively promoted, the lab leak theory were rightly called out for it. They were dismissing the evidence that we had which was increasingly suggesting it jumped to humans from animals, to support a fringe theory that had no evidence. Wild fantasies were popping up too, like how the virus was developed in the US or was a bio-weapon attack against China. This was all just conspiracy theory. Some of it was clearly borne from anti-Chinese sentiment. In fact it caused a huge spike in violence against innocent Asian Americans which did kind of spoil the lab leak theory and made people hesitate to consider it for fear of being lumped in with bigots and conspiracy theorists.
We kept investigating the possibility though, and gradually, we started to get evidence that China was hiding things. They hid early cases and pressured doctors to keep quiet about them. They denied investigators access to records and locations they needed. Researches at the lab had been hospitalized with covid-like symptoms. There was still zero direct evidence of a lab leak, everything was circumstantial, but it was suspicious enough that there were lots of people increasingly calling for more investigation. The mass media reported on all of these things.
At a certain point it became actually justified to support the lab leak theory, but people who were spouting off lab leak theories, even the more sensible theories, in the early months of the pandemic were not, and still are not, vindicated. Their suspicions were not based on evidence or reached through investigation of the facts we had.
Today we still have no real evidence for the lab leak theory. The department of energy says they have evidence that they won't share with us, and the other agencies they have shared it with were not impressed and haven't changed their views. At this point I'd say the lab leak theory is about as credible as a natural origin. We just don't have conclusive evidence either way. Because all the information we need is in China's hands, and they've been obstructing investigations, I suspect we might not ever never know the truth.
