This is from a recent Harvard/Politico poll:
There's no longer any partisan difference at all. Across all parties, the lab leak theory is favored 2:1 over a natural origin for the COVID-19 virus. Here's how this has changed over time:
Since 2020, the virological community has discovered more and more evidence that COVID-19 evolved naturally. At a guess, fewer than 5% of the people who know what they're talking about still take the lab leak hypothesis seriously.
Why the enormous—and growing—distance between the public and the experts? My guess is that it's for two reasons. First, the lab leak zealots are simply louder and more persistent than the experts. Second, the lab leak theory makes all the front-pages whenever there's some fresh news about it. For example, when the Department of Energy decided a lab leak was likely, it got big play everywhere.¹ Ditto for the release of the names of the Wuhan researchers working on coronaviruses.² Conversely, science moves more gently. Evidence mounts over time and there are few decisive breakthroughs that make the news. And even when there are, they're barely comprehensible to the ordinary person.
So bad money drives out good. The lab leak theory is exciting and easy to understand—and implicates China, which everyone loves. Meanwhile, the natural origins story is boring and largely rests on a PhD-level knowledge of virology. What's more, experts are all careful to acknowledge that they can't prove the lab leak theory is wrong, which keeps the door permanently open for the crackpots.
By now, the lab leak theory is literally a one-in-a-million shot. The evidence is overwhelmingly against it. But no one cares.
¹And the news that literally every other intelligence agency thought the DOE case was weak? That didn't get so much play.
²The same dynamic played out here.
I am not a scientist, I am not the brightest individual here and COVID is way over my head.
that being said
who the hell are we to pass judgement on the Chinese? "OH, they destroyed information" OK so we don't support their labs anymore. "The UN needs to step in and..........." Since when is the UN Good at anything? "We need to de-certify their labs". We, as in United States? who the heck are we?
We are dealing with a foreign country who we have been trying to appease for some time. This is a lab in China, employing Chinese and we want to impose our will on them?
So, Republicans. This killed more US. citizens than Pearl Harbor did. Do we want to declare war on them?
And DEMS, China and the U.S. aren't exactly buddies here so why do we support these types of labs? Are they doing the dirty work so we don't have to?
I am baffled by all of this.
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I think Kevin gets it right that there are various reasons for people on the left, the center, and the right to WANT the lab leak theory to be true. Partly this is politics and partly it is so there is someone to blame.
But, isn't it also because we kind of have this feeling that Occam is whispering in our ear "what are the chances that a worldwide pandemic just happened to spring up a few miles from the premier international lab that studies and experiments with these viruses?" It takes some pretty strong evidence to move our biases off that position.