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The only way a lab leak will be “officially confirmed” is by the CCP / Chinese government since it would have happened at a CCP-sanctioned facility and they stringently deny it.
Since this will never happen (for both liability and national pride reasons) this (‘almost certainly a leak’) is as good as it will get. It seems to me that most intelligent people, even on the libleft, have now updated to this.
I wish they would also update that it wasn't just bad protocol at Chinese labs, it was also irresponsible behavior by people like Dr. Fauci who were pushing gain of function research in the first place. Even though everyone knows it's a lab leak now, no one is acting like it. People on the left still treat Dr. Fauci like a hero.
Frustratingly, unless your primary concern is assigning blame (which seems likely to fall on both China and the US, and nobody is practically going to be paying out for this), the final assessment of origin isn't even that meaningful. If your goal is to avoid a similar recurrence, the fact that it seems plausible to have been a lab leak should be sufficient for enacting the same set of rule changes as if we knew it was. We can just make sure the next one is not a lab leak, and it costs us relatively little. For what it's worth, we can try to avoid future zoonosis too.
Just as public health authorities did themselves no favors by being misleading and overly restricting, COVID skeptics do themselves no favors by overstating the case - both explanations make sense and are plausible, and any conclusive evidence is likely gone. Focus on patching the vulnerabilities over assigning blame and asserting informational superiority.
People are giving AIs access to a wetlab. Nothing has been learned. Nothing has been patched.
Assigning blame serves an important function for vulnerability patching. If no one involved is ever responsible than why would they spend the effort to fix anything?
Given the existence of two plausible origin theories, both of which involve large-scale idiocy rather than individual criminality (which is not to say that nobody committed a crime - just that under both theories there is no criminality needed to end up with a pandemic), attempting to assign blame makes vulnerability patching harder because it creates high-powered incentives to hide the root causes. In practice, it also makes it harder to create common knowledge about root causes and appropriate responses because you require a higher standard of proof to assign blame to individuals than to identify patchable vulnerabilities.
In fact this is a more general point. If a disaster requires systemic vulnerabilities (whether in place of or in addition to individual culpability) then attempting to identify culpable individuals after the fact makes root cause identification, and therefore vulnerability patching, harder. There is a reason why both medicine and aviation try as far as possible to have blame-free accident investigation processes.
At some point you boil up the responsibility to a nation state. China should be paying reparations. The reparations should be based on how unsafely they acted.
If they don't allow foreign investigators full access to an immediate investigation then they are assumed to be maximally guilty.
Individual nations can then set punishments for their people internally for fucking up.
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Going after people who tried to censor one of these theories, coordinated to attack anyone who came out to say it actually is plausible, and to hide relevant information, sounds like a pretty good approach to vulnerability patching. No matter which theory is ultimately true, you do not want anyone like that in any sort of position of responsibility.
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Man, after punching you in the face, "Really when you think about it, there is no reason for us to fight. I was mad before. You are mad now. Suffice to say we both experienced madness and it's time to bury the hatchet."
I agree that we should patch the vulnerabilities. But the people patching the vulnerabilities should not be the same people who shut the world down and tried to create a global censorship regime. It matters.
You are never going to know who punched you in the face. You can take steps to avoid getting punched in the face again, regardless of who did it, or you can obsess over who punched you in the face and get punched in the face again and again.
I'd love to know who punched you in the face. I'd love for you to never get punched in the face again, and I'd love to never get punched in the face.
No amount of pressure from the West or anyone else is going to make China stop being sketchy as fuck, it's unlikely we will ever know.
Improving wet market and lab safety is an increasing existential threat.
Don't focus on the former at the expense of the latter.
I think we're broadly in agreement, but it's imperative that we don't put the same people in charge of the cleanup that caused the problem in the first place.
I'm not even talking about China. I'm talking about the gain of function researchers in the US. I'm talking about Anthropic setting up a biolab. I'm talking about the people whose bungled response caused an order of magnitude more damage than the virus itself. Nothing was learned. Putting Fauci in prison would at least "encourager les autres".
I think in a just world you might be right but the reality of the situation is that things have become wrapped up in comorbid political problems and a focus on say, jailing Fauci just firmly distracts from getting any useful done.
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