A lot of people have tried to ascribe the reluctance of many scientists to admit the possibility of a lab leak to some conspiracy from the top or even political leanings. But it seems more likely to me that many scientists in the field, especially those that work specifically with gain of function, are going to be reluctant to blame a lab leak because they know that if it is found that covid was from a lab, then their funding is at risk. Not to mention those that may not have funding at risk but believe that gain of function research is important regardless of the risk.
The amount of gaslighting, propaganda, changing narrative during this pandemic was honestly shocking. Trump was bad but it’s amazing to watch how suddenly things can be reversed. Which, is not an issue by itself, you adapt as you get more information, but claiming a position as absolute then changing after a month is. Not to mention all the political flaming and disinformation as propaganda for your “side”.
Once you've a few people in control of who can be heard, you're back to serfdom days.
The internet was supposed to bring a voice to everyone, now there's massive gatekeepers at a scale never known to man.
Anyone can be cancelled, only FB, Twitter n Google know what the 'truth' is.
End of day it's the equivalent of CCP, which people in the west dread so much.
Orwell, would be having nightmares right now.
I knew this was going to happen. Scientists, especially prominent ones, have huge egos and love to make strong statements ("proof", "smoking gun") even when they talk out of their ass. Combine that with the virulent anti-Trumpism and it's not hard to see how the media could report what they did.
The lab leak theory is nonsense and a distraction. If you compare where the mutations of sars-cov-2 are, relative to a wild type bat coronavirus, they are distributed randomly across the genome. If you were to genetically engineer a virus, those mutations would not be random, there would be a discrete chunk of edited base pairs that had been spliced in from somewhere else but that isn’t present. It seems unlikely that in this day and age a virology lab would be doing gain of function experiments without crispr since it’s far easier than the alternative.