"Wuhan has an advanced virology laboratory engaged in gain-of-function research and some idiot screwed everything up for all of us" is somehow more racist than "there's a wet market down the street where they buy raccoon dogs to eat"? The latter just seems far more condescending to me.
Saying “someone in a lab made a professional mistake” is arguably less judgmental about a whole society than saying “people got sick because they eat wild animals in unsanitary places.”
The former is a workplace accident
FBI - moderately confident it was lab leak
DOE - low confidence
NIC - low confidence in natural origin
CIA - undecided
Other intelligence agencies - undecided or indeterminate
There was a declassified ODNI report that still considered both a natural origin and a lab-associated incident to be plausible.
[1] https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-...
Still no definitive proof of such was offered.
For example, in commerce is there any reason to expect that events of broad liability will analyzed with a focus on a preference to causes rather than their effects?
If the cause was judged to be a lab leak, enormous investments would be jeopardized, and livelihoods disrupted, especially among the intelligentsia most qualified to ascertain that cause. Those living in the domains close to the cause would suffer the effects of liability even if they were not judged to be directly responsible.
If the cause is zoonotic (a contrived but useful distinction) then investments and intelligentsia become more secure as they are needed.
The fact that such investments and intelligence are possible causes must be defended against, even if they are not the cause.
In the case of the industry landscape immediately prior to Covid-19, there was an internal warning from researchers about GoF risks which politically went to the top of the U.S. and EU administrative branches. This warning was abided and used to rearrange a bunch of language about criteria for funding, and along the way risky work was outsourced to China.
It was understood in the society of research that they were playing with fire.
These points do illustrate any cause, but they do illustrate how we may expect a reaction about causes to unfold.
To put it more simply, if the policy and programs rationalized to mitigate such a hazard as Covid-19 were ever perceived to be the cause of such hazard, that would be a disaster. No one needs to be indoctrinated to know to avoid this perception, and doctrine will evolve to suppress any such perception.
And looking back we see the President of the U.S. was on point with the spin of the "China" virus, while China did everything in its power to keep quiet.
To repeat, the provenance of the explanation is in effects rather than cause.
This can be seen in the reaction to other catastrophes with high social profiles (two popular examples being 9/11 and JFK): explanations of cause are radically simplified and then dismissed to control liability, to the point of controlled disinterest in causes.
In some cases, such as the NATO attack on Bosnia, the order of causes and effects are rearranged contrary to science to produce the desired political perception; in that case events were rearranged to show how violent intervention had prevented a catastrophe when in fact it had caused a catastrophe.
electroglyph•8mo ago