| > I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china The likes of Alina Chan and Richard Ebright are "easy mode" counterexamples for your statement. I'll swing for the fences: Even Tom Cotton was -- at least once, I am exceedingly uninterested in combing through all his tweets and media appearances -- careful to distinguish between "lab leak" and "intentional act", despite being brazenly political and probably inspired by anti-China animus. From the thread beginning at https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126: "Let me debunk the debunkers. @paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus: 1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market) 2. Good science, bad safety (eg, they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred) 3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach) 4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in) Again, none of these are “theories” and certainly not “conspiracy theories.” They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence, if the Chinese Communist Party would provide it. We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either." |