[ethanbond]

Maybe so, but it’s also naive to think we’ll ever get to certainty or near-certainty about the lab leak hypothesis without China’s participation (which, if culpable, we obviously will not get and cannot force).

So the argument should take the form of, “jeez, this was awful and even if this was natural or artificial, we are purposely producing stuff like this on a daily basis in labs that regularly make mistakes.”

[Mountain_Skies]

At the very least, we can look at our own response to the pandemic, both government and societal, and agree that huge mistakes were made, and lessons need to be learned instead of taking the usual "Hey, let's just move on and forget about all the evil things we did" approach. There certainly needs to be a reckoning for the tech world that gleefully jumped on the authoritarian bandwagon and tried, somewhat successfully at times, to stifle all opposition to the botched pandemic response.

[ethanbond]

Sure, none of which is dependent on the origin of the virus.