Murtaza Hussain
@mazmhussain
“Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/covid-pandemic-lab-leak.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
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Dean Pierce 👨💻🌎🌍
@deanpierce.eth
The main problem with the "lab leak" narrative is it often gets framed like it was some top secret bioweapons research that got so powerful that it busted itself out of the lab, and was being used by people who are either anti-science or anti-China to push their own weird agendas. These twisted narratives were the hateful and dangerous ones that many were trying to counter, which seems appropriate IMO. Wuhan, which is bigger (population) than the top three US cities combined, happens to be near a cave system that's a hotbed for coronavirus mutations, most of which don't touch humans, so safety controls are pretty lax. They probably collected samples from the wild, and were probably sloppy with it. Some of the researchers probably got infected with it and took it home to friends and family, but it could just as well have spread from where it was collected. It was probably both. Wuhan has the top coronavirus lab *because* it's adjacent to the place where most novel coronaviruses evolve naturally. This is fine
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