[adt2bt]

If I had to guess, it's something along these lines (again I'm just guessing, these are general social sentiments that I observed over the past 2 years):

1. Trump mismanaged the pandemic, this resulted in cognitive dissonance amongst his supporters. (they like him but their brain doesn't like the feeling that it was wrong)

2. A 'convenient' explanation to avoid this dissonance is COVID is a Chinese bio-weapon. They (big bad China) released COVID to make Trump look bad and to kill Americans.

3. Liberals, seeing through this, push back on this generally unsubstantiated claim (at the time and potentially even now) that COVID is a bio-weapon. In the eyes of most, Liberals have taken the side of 'COVID is a natural random mutation, not a lab leak'.

4. Now whether or not it's a lab leak or natural is a political game, where your team wins depending on where the facts finally lie (or if you can manufacture enough support for your 'side').

5. See: Rand Paul v Fauci in various senate hearings about gain-of-function research and funding for a Wuhan lab & generally liberals trying not to talk about it because it would be another example of them 'lying' in the eyes of conservatives (think 'masks don't help' but alllll over again).

[dwaltrip]

This seems like a pretty good take to me. As an American who cares a lot about having compelling reasons for my beliefs and opinions, it's so fucking exhausting.

Lately, I've been getting more comfortable with just saying "I don't know" for the latest controversial topic. It's not great for making small talk though.

[umanwizard]

Spot on. Nearly everything these days gets shoehorned into the insane US culture war, including the origins of Covid.

[dnautics]

I don't buy this, obviously not an unbiased sample, but most individual liberals I know are on board with it being a lab leak. Can't necessarily say that about 'liberal leadership class' in the US, though.

[TMWNN]

I've read that most US/western scientists in the field immediately thought that COVID19 was likely a lab leak, and were dumbfounded by the Daszak et al. letter in Science denouncing any discussion of same as unfounded racism.

[dnautics]

Anecdotal, of course, but this tracks with the subset of my friends/former colleagues who are researchers in biotech. As an Asian person, I thought the focus on the wet markets to be weirdly racist/exoticist. If anything the lab leak hypothesis is anti chinese-state, but not racist, but the Chinese state loves to conflate being anti-chinese-state with racism in it's propaganda.

[adt2bt]

(GP here) I generally agree with this. It's why I wrote 'in the eyes of most'. IMO liberals are bad at defining their own opinions in the court of public opinion, and often are viewed as !Conservative, even if their views are more nuanced.