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Lots of individuals denounced the system, but you didn't hear from them because they didn't meet the demands of the entirely-manufactured scientific "consensus" on the wet market theory. As it turns out, that "consensus" was almost entirely driven by Anthony Fauci's camp of virologists (it's not just him, but a relatively small group of people who have a monetary/career interest in continuing the type of research that happens at the Wuhan Institute) who saw the "lab leak" theory as a fundamental threat to their ability to continue doing research that many saw as unethical and bordering on bio-weapon development. In response, they essentially took control of the COVID response and the official COVID narrative.

That is why the director of the NIAID, which is a research organization and not a public health agency at all, took charge of the century's biggest public health situation over the head of the (sadly impotent) CDC, which should have been in charge of coordinating the US's response.

The scientific consensus that you were sold was never really a consensus. It was a power play.

By contrast, there's a strong consensus on climate change, for example, that involves a very large number of scientists who should know and who are not incentivized to believe it.

There is a virus lab in Wuhan because a lot of coronaviruses originate in that region. Its existence/location is not evidence of a lab leak.

If anything, the lab leak “theory” has received too much media attention when the primary evidence (location of a lab) is easily explained by other factors.

Imagine a virus was spread from penguins to humans. It would not be surprising if research on the virus were conducted in Antarctica!

My favorite post of all time that I can no longer find:

>Thesis: China is a backward country where basic hygiene is not followed and any animal will be eaten live and raw.

>Antithesis: China is more advanced than many first world countries, with state of the art biological research pushing boundaries beyond what current protocols can handle.

>Synthesis: An infected bat escaped from the Wu Han institute of virology and was promptly eaten.

At the very least it was such an obvious connection that ruling it out should have been an early step; when the PRC clammed up, and stopped letting any data out that should have been seen as the attempt at a cover-up that it likely was.

Maybe it didn't come from the lab. Maybe it didn't come from China at all. But maybe we should have checked that? Maybe we should know if some senior coronavirus researchers at that lab got sick with weird illnesses in the later part of 2019? Maybe we should have confirmed their virus handling procedures were up to snuff, and that a lab leak was unlikely because they were such upstanding and responsible scientists?

Accurate. A few bits to support this:

- Yishan Wong, once Reddit CEO and still very much in the know, admitted to the following (direct quote):

> Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the "debate" included ...massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world - e.g. harrassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes, etc.

- Twitter had a CCP-affiliated person on their board of directors during Covid

- I assume everyone here is familiar with the Lancet letter.

I completely disagree with your characterization of this example, and on the contrary I think your example perfectly shows how "follow the incentives" gives you truer, clearer understanding of what happened:

1. If you dug in to the authors of the now infamous Lancet letter ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_(COVID-19) ), you could see how they had huge conflicts of interests.

2. Early on in the pandemic, you could see how some people went to a lab leak (intentional or not) theory very quickly with no evidence (e.g. "The China Virus"). On the flip side, though, I think you had a lot of people pushing against this who felt that any acknowledgement of a potential lab leak was playing into "conspiracy theories". So my point is that you have to trace incentives on both sides, and both sides had incentives that were actually against finding the actual truth.

3. I think the other thing that is extremely important is to realize that nearly all humans prefer some explanation to "I don't know". Even today you see people on both sides of the Covid origins debate who are adamant their position is right, when I think the real situation is more "Some lab leak or escaped zoonotic virus being studied by a lab is more likely than not". So early on in the pandemic, you had people confidently proclaiming their personal theories as facts that weren't backed up by evidence. And importantly, the truth nearly always eventually comes out. You say "that hypothesis was totally suppressed for the mainstream media for about 2 years". That timeline is wrong, there were lots of things being reported in early 2021 about a potential lab leak - this article that summarizes the state of reporting is from June 2021: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-media-cal...

A big part of the problem here is that the term "conspiracy" has multiple meanings. Here's the dictionary definition:

> An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.

This means that for there to be a conspiracy, the conspirators have to communicate with each other about it. Many people would read your post and conclude that you think that there's a centralized organization that all the journalists get their marching orders from.

I feel like in reality you probably think that the journalists, like most humans, are very good at knowing what is "in vogue" and what is "outside acceptable discourse" for their circles, and so they engage in systematic bias.

A lot of arguments over conspiracy theories consist of people using the dictionary definition of the word scoffing at people who are using the second definition of the word.

Your treating the lab leak hypothesis as near fact is exactly the kind of bullshit we need less of.

There are not "a few (orders of) magnitude" in probability between these hypotheses.

That would at least need to be 1% vs. 99% and that's being charitable.

What we need is an education system that teaches people to simultaneously entertain conflicting hypotheses and update the belief in them as information becomes available.

Your post is the perfect example of what that doesn't look like.

(Footnote: There are a number of examples in history for pathogens leaking from labs, and for zoonotic origins, so having such strongly biased priors under poor evidence in either direction really just shows that you want to believe something.)

the irony for me at least, is that even at hyper liberal institutions all my colleagues (students, post doc, faculty even) entertained the idea that a lab leak was possible. just when it came to the media this hypothesis was labeled as a conspiracy theory.