You say the article feels like a conspiracy theory, yet it points to negligence as the likely culprit, which is pretty much the opposite of a conspiracy. You call it FUD (fear uncertainty doubt), but I'm totally uncertain how it would qualify as FUD.
There is one obvious conspiracy by the Chinese government to prevent all understanding of the virus. That does fit the definition of what a conspiracy is.
> "This document does not make any attempt to link the work done at these laboratories as part of a 'bioweapon' or "bio-warfare" program."
This makes perfect sense if you are an American, because in the anti-intellectual Trump era, there was a well circulated rumor that COVID was a Chinese bio-weapon that the CPC figured it could deal with better than Americans because China can weld people's door's shut, and you can't do that in America. This is on par with the widely circulated Chinese rumor that the American military brought it to Wuhan. Obviously both of those are extremely unlikely and very much conspiracy theories. Certainly on the American side our scientists said it's extremely unlikely that COVID was engineered and has none of the markers of bio-engineering very early into covid.
This is the article stating that it is not addressing that conspiracy theory, which was very much part of the conversation when it was written over a year ago.
> Just so you can throw the word "bioweapon" out there?
Out of your own ignorance of the context you are assuming malice.
>and never even stops to admit that there's the possibility that the causal reasoning is backwards
This is literally the second paragraph in the article, and it was bolded for emphasis:
This document does not attempt to provide a concrete conclusion
on whether either claim is factually true. Rather, it examines
the probability that each claim is true to allow the reader to
make his or her own conclusions. While either claim cannot be
irrevocably proven true, an attempt has been made to ensure the
evidence used to support these claims is as factual as possible.
Furthermore, you completely ignored the meat of the article focusing on a couple of weaker and overall not super central points.
> Very convenient. In other words, no-one with a serious research background could be convinced to put their name on this nonsense.
It's almost like there is an extremely draconian authoritarian ruling government with very deep reach that has a long history of disappearing people it doesn't like or punishing them via connections with people who have power over them that people might be afraid of.