[theandrewbailey]

> Public health officials often mislead the American people through conflicting messaging, knee-jerk reactions, and a lack of transparency. Most egregiously, the federal government demonized alternative treatments and disfavored narratives, such as the lab leak theory, in a shameful effort to coerce and control the American people’s health decisions. When those efforts failed, the Biden Administration resorted to “outright censorship—coercing and colluding with the world’s largest social media companies to censor all COVID-19-related dissent.”

I remember when lab leak was officially considered a conspiracy theory, and everyone who mentioned or even referenced it should be canceled and shunned.

[therealpygon]

And since then, there is no more scientific evidence or verifiable sources. Hence the reason the CIA didn’t even believe it and gave it the lowest confidence rating it has. Used to be truth matters, now rumors and theories are more important.

[tim333]

For me Ralph Baric's 2024 test testimony moved the lab leak hypothesis to pretty likely. I think that's probably "since then" depending on when then is exactly.

Also the 2023 "so friggin likely" messages. There has been various stuff dragged out into public by the court actions, leaks and subpoenas that are the hallmark of open science.

[therealpygon]

And yet the CIA still maintains a low confidence, who would clearly have more information than either of us, despite being directed to back that ploy. Wonder why.

[tim333]

Dunno. There's a lot of politics in what all US government funded bodies say. The US after all were heavily involved with the lab research.

The Germans don't have much bias here and recently:

>Germany's foreign intelligence service believed there was a 80-90% chance that coronavirus accidentally leaked from a Chinese lab, German media say. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz7vypq31z7o

which is roughly the odds I'd guess too.

[therealpygon]

Sure, you can try to find supporting opinions on any topic. In either case, whether it was a lab leak or not, it’s not like anything would be different. Nor does it matter, given that the modifying strains for pathogens for research purposes is what every research lab does, because that is what virology is. If you recall, this is the same COVID that Trump and his followers said “does not exist”, then “was nothing more than a common cold”, was “no more deadly than the flu”, could be cured with a dewormer, that masks don’t help despite it being universally known that it does, so on and so forth. For those same people then to try to use the opposite of that misinformation they were spreading as a dunk now is comically hypocritical, as can be expected from MAGA/Trump.

[tim333]

>Nor does it matter

There is the matter of trying to prevent the next one. It kind of looks like there were other incidents around the WIV before covid 19 and it was a systemic issue of dangerous research without proper safeguards, and I doubt the WIV was the only lab at it.

There's a bit of an issue that if a researcher makes some dangerous new virus in the lab they get an interesting paper out of it, maybe tenure, and don't worry very much about that it could kill a million people in the one in a thousand chance it escapes. But a one in a thousand chance of a million deaths is still a statistical expectation of a thousand deaths.

[eviks]

But since the was no such a time (it was an official alternative), and only a few people got shunned, the theory became more prominent

[throwaway290]

For a time mentioning covid lab leak (like literally quoting published research) on Instagram or FB looked definitely suppressed to me. As non American this is maybe the only thing that looks wrong about US gov COVID handling.

[eviks]

None of this company was official USG

[throwaway290]

https://reason.com/2023/01/19/facebook-files-emails-cdc-covi...

> Claims vetted by the CDC included whether "COVID-19 is man-made." The CDC told Facebook that it was "theoretically possible, but extremely unlikely."

> For months, it was Meta policy to prohibit users from asserting that the pandemic may have originated from a lab leak. The platform revised this policy around the same time that the above email exchange took place.

[eviks]

your quote confirms the official policy was not "conspiracy theory, shun and ban them", and even the Facebook's policy changed to not ban.

[throwaway290]

Look, I am just an average user. I don't agree with US far right on much, I simply said it seemed like it was suppressed on FB/IG and turns out this was correct.

But if you want to argue FINE.

I don't think this is about shunning people like me because no one cares about people like me. It is about shunning scientists and famous people.

How about mainstream US media literally never touched for years the topic that a massive pandemic that caused billions in damage possibly came from an US funded lab in China? Either all scientists were dumb and thought it was impossible, or they all as one agreed to never talk about it, OR some scientists thought it's likely and wanted to talk about it but could not publicly. Almost as if people talking about unwelcome theory were idk how could we call it... shunned?

All US gov needed to say is yes this maybe happened but we are not sure. Instead they doubled down and even published known wrong papers. This discredited science for many years.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/nih-emails-origin-...

> Unredacted records obtained by The Nation and The Intercept offer detailed insights into those confidential deliberations. The documents show that in the early days of the pandemic, Fauci and Collins took part in a series of e-mail exchanges and telephone calls in which several leading virologists expressed concern that SARS-CoV-2 looked potentially “engineered.” The participants also contemplated the possibility that laboratory activities had inadvertently led to the creation and release of the virus. The conversations convey a sense of anxious urgency and included speculation about the specific types of laboratory techniques that might have caused the virus’s emergence. After roughly a week of debate and data collection, one of the key figures involved in the deliberations characterized the focus of the group’s work as follows: “to disprove any type of lab theory.” Several of the scientists on the calls and e-mails then went on to write and publish “Proximal Origin.” It became one of the best-read papers in the history of science.

[techpineapple]

It seems like we’ve become a populous where we base our entire rhetorical confidence on logical fallacies(if “they” don’t want us to believe it, it must be true!”)