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This is classic “nurse vs. feminist nurse” cognitive distortion. Whether the virus was developed as a bio weapon, or simply as a product of well-intentioned gain-of-function research, is irrelevant to the factual basis of whether or not it escaped from the lab. We don’t need to establish how and why it was created, only that it was, in order to assess the likelihood of lab release as a root cause of the pandemic.



That's nice in theory, but a couple of things. First of all, there was a complete lack of actual evidence that there was a lab leak (this is also true of the Wuhan market hypothesis, it was all quite circumstantial) but we have seen similar viruses arise naturally in the past so our priors would favor the market hypothesis over the lab leak. Second, the lab leak hypothesis and the intent of the virus were tightly entangled in the original reports, especially from the US Administration, that is that China created the virus to harm the US. Third, intent absolutely matters. If this is a bio-weapon that was designed to be used in an attack, then the consequences of such actions are vastly different then if this was a naturally occurring virus that was collected in bats that happened jump to a human host and escaped the lab.

While I increasingly believe that the lab leak hypothesis may be the true origin, my priors still favor a natural jump at this point.

These are also not the only two possible scenarios, just demonstrating that there are different consequences for different intentions, it is literally why the US Penal code has Murder (1,2,...) and Manslaughter (...) as well as Self-Defense protections built into it.


> Whether the virus was developed as a bio weapon, or simply as a product of well-intentioned gain-of-function research, is irrelevant

I for one think it is very important to establish if it was the product of bioweapon program (or not).




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