Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing that's particularly frustrating about all this is that any conversation with the growing contingency of distrustful people has been made very difficult by what I would call poor, avoidable, and illiberal decisions made by the federal government during COVID. (TBF, decisions during a crisis are always hard.) Lab leak theory was dismissed and actively suppressed. Inflated claims were made a priori about absol…
Having lived through it myself, I found the government’s actions extremely mild when compared to something like what ICE has been up to. Zero people were directly killed by authorities because of Covid noncompliance. From my perspective, it’s hysteria borne out of the difference in requirements for urban health policy vs. rural health policy, and the fact that rural people quite often travel through urban areas (e.g.…
I would not say shutting down all discussion about a topic (lab origin) that ends up getting vindicated is a minor scandal. It's something everyone observed that erodes trust at a national level.