A possible lab leak has seemed reasonable, given the circumstances, since early on. If it weren't for all the politics around it, I think it should have gotten a more careful treatment.
Unfortunately, it also became a political football. US-China trade wars were still in full swing at the time and both countries were jockeying for advantages in negotiations. There were lots of political people here that saw "blame China" as a way to force trade concessions, and others who muddied the waters further by going beyond an accident and wondering out loud if it was an engineered weapon.
On The Media recently had a little bit of coverage of this [1] and the guest, Alina Chan, had the completely reasonable conclusion that a science-based approach to investigating a lab leak is merited, that lab accidents do happen, and that if it was discovered to have been a lab leak, then the reaction ought to be to move labs like this one away from dense population centers and enact some quarantining protocols for researchers working with infectious diseases.
But this is still a subject that's going to be difficult to have a grounded discussion about because now it's being used as a political football against perceived media biases and censorship and the failings of liberalism and yadda yadda yadda.
A possible lab leak has seemed reasonable, given the circumstances, since early on. If it weren't for all the politics around it, I think it should have gotten a more careful treatment.
Unfortunately, it also became a political football. US-China trade wars were still in full swing at the time and both countries were jockeying for advantages in negotiations. There were lots of political people here that saw "blame China" as a way to force trade concessions, and others who muddied the waters further by going beyond an accident and wondering out loud if it was an engineered weapon.
On The Media recently had a little bit of coverage of this [1] and the guest, Alina Chan, had the completely reasonable conclusion that a science-based approach to investigating a lab leak is merited, that lab accidents do happen, and that if it was discovered to have been a lab leak, then the reaction ought to be to move labs like this one away from dense population centers and enact some quarantining protocols for researchers working with infectious diseases.
But this is still a subject that's going to be difficult to have a grounded discussion about because now it's being used as a political football against perceived media biases and censorship and the failings of liberalism and yadda yadda yadda.
[1]: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-med...