The fact that a certain segment of the population believes in a theory doesn't prove the theory, rather it illustrates that the GQP's constant iterative propaganda often works. They wanted it to be the fault of China because that was an attempt to insulate the Republican party from its often disastrous response. And, once they discovered that they could use the idea to ding Fauci, who became a target because of his criticism, they pushed even harder.
Certainly, there are good reasons to be suspicious of the Chinese government— and we need to be sure that the lab-borne theory is wrong because understanding how this virus spread is the key to stopping the next one—but much of the effort around the lab-borne theory is disingenuous.
So, of course, a reasonable person who thinks that COVID-19 is an attack would also accept that making the country immune would be a smart strategic goal.
But, it's not a reasonable idea. The people who believe that China attacked us also vehemently fight the vaccine, because they're fundamentally irrational.
This is going to be longish, but since most of y'all mature I'll drop it here.
To be scientifically sound, the lab leak idea isn't even a theory. It's a
hypothesis. It's important to emphasize, because it's totally fine to hypothesize anything, including that COVID may have been a result of a lab leak. Hypotheses are there for testing and if they hold after thorough testing, they become
theories. And theories that become proven over and over and over again become
facts. Biomedical facts are perhaps the hardest to establish. This is a phenomenon people usually don't care until they are suddenly become impacted. When this happens, they start lashing out on the people tasked to
actually overcome these issues, like Anthony Fauci.
The issue with the lab leak hypothesis is that to date, it had not had sufficient supporting evidence to even progress into what I'd consider a theory, yet people like
@Herdfan already throw it around like it was a fact and try to weaponize this in a conversation to make a (n insincere) point. The consequence is that people cannot have a mature discussion about this. I was asked about what I think about a lab leak a year ago, and my opinion hasn't changed a lot since:
1) It's not impossible because there are some really weird things about this
acute infectious pandemic, such as being perpetuated by asymptomatic carriers. You could hypothesize that such feature could enable an outbreak among lab workers to run undetected until it's way too late.
2) However, RNA viruses can mutate easier due to the less stable genome and if people can believe in the emergence of vaccine-resistant variants they should also easily believe that something can develop through natural evolution.
3) More recent analyses show that the initial epicenter(s) of the outbreak may have been separated in both space and time from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
4) The fact that evolutionarily intermediate coronavirus strains are found in mammals and the rate of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in deers inNorth America (vast majority testing positive) for example can indicate how enormous the pool of susceptible animal hosts for this virus and it's not "human specific".
Now, mature adults can discuss these without jumping into conclusions, but children will do what
@Herdfan is doing, select aspects that they confirm their ideas, and fully ignore others that contradict those.
I used the verbiage "indirect act of bioterrorism", because it's obvious that COVID-19 served nobody's short-term interests (not even big pharma's, which is a very risk-averse industry). My impression has been that even the right wingers agree with this. The issue is accidental bioweapon production is still bioweapon production. So this is where the next level of dishonesty gets released on us, implying US funding of such research even though there not only absolutely zero evidence that such played a role in COVID. Even better, I've never seen Rand Paul back pedal so quickly when he admitted that his gain-of-function circus has nothing to do with COVID. The soundbites didn't include that for Fox. So we can talk gain-of-function all day long, Rand admitted to have no corroborative evidence to link it to COVID. It's sole purpose was political theatrics.
The only gain-of-function I see is how people who couldn't care less about life-sciences, now gained the ability to mutate any sort of evidence into some Frankenstein's monster of literally toxic confirmation bias.
More from Allen West:
https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1447562535113150465/
You know the vaccine only costs about $20 and doesn’t require you to go to the hospital, right? You’d think a “common sense” Republican would know the old adage “an ounce of prevention…”
Instead, you’d rather be hospitalized and taking all manner of treatments over one simple vaccine? This
makes my head hurt.
Like Allen West. A self-proclaimed fiscal conservative who fails to recognize the cost-efficiency differential between the vaccine and Regeneron (I did the estimate here before, and AFAIR it was >100x more expensive than shots...).
You’re also totally contradicting yourself, you propose it’s a bubble issue but you also suggest it’s not a bubble issue.
