>
>it was a leak of something that developed in the wild already,
>so it was only a matter of a few years before it would have
>emerged naturally anyway. That's why this is all so silly.
>

this is not necessarily the case. this is what the gain of function debate is all about. let's say it was a bat virus that couldnt currently make the leap to humans. or could leap but had a very low transmission rate once in a human host. Wuhan scientists MAY have tweaked this bat virus in ways that caused it to be much more dangerous and transmissible to humans. there is consensus that this is within the realm of possibility give current scientific knowhow and the Wuhan lab's capabilities

>Of course labs need strong security protocols. They have them,
>have had them for a long time, and they're constantly
>reassessing and strengthening them. Nothing that randos like
>us on the internet might think about lab protocols is news to
>any of the people who actually work in this field. They're 30
>years ahead of us on all this, they don't need help from the
>FBI or the media or you or me.

the wuhan lab had been studying SARS viruses for years with no unintended consequences and it is possible (there are reports this was the case) that lab safety standards had grown lax (or were never stringent enough in the first place). if nothing happens the first 99 times you put a tent under a dead tree, you think hey back to the trusted camp site. it's windy the 100th night in the tent and the tree comes down and smushes you.

to your second point, there are huge conflicts of interest among researchers in this area. they want grant money, they want to push the envelope and do innovative science. the once in a blue moon chance of a deadly virus being unleashed can factored out given these incentives. "it won't happen to me" til it does. even the best virologist in the world cannot foresee the consequences of changes they make to a virus with 100% confidence. the best scientist in the world could not look at the genome of, say, omicron, and describe exactly how it would interact with humans.

>
>
>As for the history of "things we're not allowed to talk
>about," you're mixing up accidental leak hypotheses with the
>hyper-dumb "bioweapon" hypotheses, and that's what everyone
>else was doing in those years too. All the more reason that
>the media (*especially* alternative media), and the public,
>are simply not equipped to consider these issues. We have
>better things to be pondering.

bioweapons are also a real threat. i do not think covid is the result of an attempt to make one. there is reason to be concerned that gain of function research done without ill intent could be used by another actor WITH malevolent intent. ...that certain GoF research could provide recipes that bad actors could quite easily copy. (the gene editing tech and expertise needed to do this stuff does not cost that much money)

you are very smug about all this. trusting the expert consensus is a decent heuristic, but in the case of gain of function research, these experts, as i said above, often have conflicts of interest. you are also portraying a world of experts who agree with you and dismissing those with concerns not shared by your expert class as an uninformed fringe. this is not really the case.