I get why the lab leak hypothesis is of geopolitical interest, but I don't get how it's important scientifically.
The question for me isn't "did covid come from a lab?" but rather, "is there anything about the severity of covid that's unique to a possible lab origin"?
The question for me isn't "did covid come from a lab?" but rather, "is there anything about the severity of covid that's unique to a possible lab origin"?
If there isn't anything about a lab origin that could have contributed especially to covid's severity, then digging into a potential lab origin feels like a waste of time and goodwill, fighting over who to blame for the current crisis instead of working to avoid the next one.
And for what? I think there's a good chance that any evidence in that direction would be extremely messy and circumstantial, convincing to China's geopolitical rivals and unconvincing to its friends.
Meanwhile, we'll also be making it harder to get countries to work together to solve the actual problem which (in my opinion) is making changes to how we as a species do things so we're less likely to have millions of people die in a global pandemic in the future.
To be clear, I'm fine with looking into a lab origin if there's a strong reason to believe regulating work in labs is a key part of making sure this never happens again AND there's reason to believe proof of a lab leak would give us important information about how to do that.
Even so, do we really need to know if this specific pandemic came from a lab in order to come up with common sense improvements to our current lab biosecurity protocols? My guess is no.
I know this is going to be an unpopular view on Twitter but sometimes learning more information doesn't contribute anything to your decision making and it's not worth the cost (both financial and social) that you would need to pay to get it.
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