The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

The WHO is also a vital resource for developing nations which lack the technical infrastructure and know-how to do their own research or develop their own policies, and depend on support from the WHO to advise and provide resources to deal with medical crises. It's out there saving lives across the developing world every day.

Both of these things are true, but the reason the WHO is a political football is because the nation states it depends on for funding and resources keep kicking it about for their own political purposes. The WHO is the organisation our countries have built, organised the way we structured it, vulnerable to nation state interference so that our nations can interfere with them when we want to.

The only way to get the job the WHO are tasked with done properly is to stop kicking them about and actually support them in their efforts. Insist they be freed from nation state interference, stop blaming them for being kicked about, and go after the nation states interfering with and undermining them. That also means reforming the WHO itself and better resourcing it. We need to stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution.

There was at least one paper calling it "natural selection", and some folks who read it agreed that it ruled out laboratory accidents:

"The high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

https://twitter.com/ehundman/status/1246597925288816640

https://www.newsweek.com/claim-that-coronavirus-came-lab-chi...

Working with the default hypothesis of "everybody is out there to destroy me" is not only a sign of paranoia, but in most cases also wrong (because in reality not everything is about you and accidents happen).

So starting with the default hypothesis of malice has the serious downside that you will constantly feel threatened even if looking back there was no rational reason to feel threatened. This is not only incredibly exhausting, it also will lead to a "crying wolf"-type of problem, if the perceived threat rarely turns out to be one. And when something really dangerous is going to happen, you might not be able to react in a rational way (because all your previous reactions were irrational ones).

What I think is important to rationally tackle that question is also to factor in confidence. I will always assume innocence (just because it makes me a happier person), but that doesn't mean my confidence in the other person being innocent is always big. If there are signs that other person is acting in malice, my confidence that they are innocent will shrink. Once that confidence crosses a certain threshold I will assume malice. This can also happen within a split second, so I don't see how this would not be the rational way to do this. If you go get bread at the bakery, you wouldn't assume the baker wants to poison you per default right? So you would assume their innocence unless there are clear indicators they are a baker that poisons their customers. The other way around, if a man jumps out of a bush in a dark alley and comes at you with a knife, you wouldn't assume they are innocent, because there are really strong indicators they are not.

So what is irrational is to have incredible high confidence in either innocence or malice when in fact you are in a situation with lack of evidence to either direction. And this is the case in this situation.

> The poll gave people a sort of test to see if they could spot misinformation like the coronavirus was created in a lab or that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.

> 40% of poll respondents believe one of the biggest conspiracy theories that's out there about the virus, that it was made in a lab in China. There is no evidence for this. And scientists say that the virus was transmitted to humans from another species. But I talked to people all over the country who responded to our poll and they still believe this.