> With all due respect, the lab leak hypothesis does not change the fact Covid exists now
It would though, in Jan 2020. When it was almost equivalent to xenophobia. When everyone was told travel was no biggie. And everyone should hang in NYC because the preparedness is so high. What does it say about those experts who espoused these bs? I remember Anthony Fauci publicly saying in news conference there is no way this is a lab leak and it has to be a natural virus.
If a year later now it seems the were not being honest to public (intentionally or not), what makes you think a year from now they won't reverse course on vaccine?
> how a vaccine rollout better than Europe (so far) means they have blood on their hands.
You don't think US wouldn't have a better response if this was not an election year in 2020? I remember the tone around vaccine suddenly changing post election from "I will use it when Drs say it is safe" to "if you don't take vaccine you are a bigot".
> the safety profile of some vaccines (Pfizer/BioNTech) seems very good (compared to AZ, which is still not bad)
Sure "seems good", it is like saying safety profile of this code I am going to be using in production that will be tested on billions of people "seems fine" so let's go ahead and if anything happens we will be on the "same boat as millions of other people" as you said.
My hypothesis around this is this - countries that have been successful the most in controlling the virus i.e. China have the lowest vaccination number too. So what makes you think we are smarter than them when we did an awful job managing the virus?
> Shit does sometimes happen, and often it's out of our control.
This is the point though. Shit happened and it was within our control. There were multiple mis-steps from health officials and media from the get go with outright downplay to being completely wrong (about masks and other things) and politicizing. And there were no recourse. No introspection. No apologies. The NYC health commissioner who said their preparedness was very high is still there. No one had any accountability.
Hell there are still 700+ people dying in US everyday, do you hear those CNN panelists outraged about those deaths? No, we have moved on. It's all about channeling the narrative. The political war has been won and that''s all that mattered in an election year. People's lives were secondary.
And we still are supposed to trust blindly the same group of people?