The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

You mentioned this twice. "Contributed to real death." What do you mean specifically? Don't just use it as a scare quote.

It's not a good enough justification anyway.

This article has a number of issues that jump out to me from just a cursory read.

The author admits that the NIH has a specific definition of "gain of function research" and then seems to go forward with the article using their own definition, without calling out that they're doing this. Why are they using their own definition instead of the NIH's?

The Chinese research this author cites claims that there are large reservoirs of virus's in bat populations that are currently able to cross into the human population with minimal, if any, mutation required. This makes a natural crossover event more likely compared to the lab-leak hypothesis. This point seems to escape the author entirely.

Next, this whole paragraph is a mess:

> The revelation that the WIV was working with SARS-like viruses in subpar safety conditions has led some people to reassess the chance that SARS-CoV-2 could have emerged from some type of laboratory incident. “That’s screwed up,” the Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin, who coauthored the seminal paper arguing that covid must have had a natural origin, told the journalist Donald McNeil Jr. “It shouldn’t have happened. People should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs. My view has changed.”

There are multiple topics that are being jumbled up. The surrounding context has been heavily discussing genetic engineering research. Ian Lipkin's paper discussed a virus with natural origins. The linked article is discussing the possibility of a lab-leak. These are all different topics and no attempt is being made here to distinguish and collate them. The linked article doesn't make it clear on whether Lipkin changed his view on the virus being of natural origin or of possibly being leaked from a lab or even something else.

In fact, this whole article can't seem to distinguish between the hypothesis of an engineered virus escaping a lab, and a naturally occurring virus escaping the lab. The article ends by belatedly admitting that Baric believes that a natural spillover is still the most likely explanation but devotes zero space to explaining why. Instead, the author sees fit to spend the rest of the article explaining why Baric thinks WIV should be investigated further.

To many of these lab leak articles are structured distressingly like a Q-drop: "Look at all these facts that I'm going to recite in a spooky tone of voice but not bother to synthesize into a coherent hypothesis. Isn't it spooky?" It's not clear to me if it's because the author is writing high-brow clickbait, is unable to recognize these flaws, or is deliberately trying to sling conspiracies. The lab leak hypothesis should be investigated, but not like this.

None of us can solve it alone.

First we need good tech, like Mastodon.

Then we need to move our own digital "lives" onto those better platforms, and start encouraging our friends to join us.

For my part, I'm working on a new social app where everything is E2E encrypted [1], so you don't have to trust the server. The main use case is to let parents share photos of their kids in a safer way. I'm hoping this will be a big draw for people who have currently checked out of the creepy ad-tracking platforms.

[1] https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios

That crazy shit is only a problem because they built an algorithmic feed that automatically finds the most virulent bullshit, and then shows it to everyone it possibly can.

Drop the algorithmic feed, and you solve most of the problem. Unfortunately for Facebook, this would also cut their ad revenue, so they'll never do it.

Much of the article reminds me of the description of how NASA ended up launching a shuttle in temperatures far below what they originally would have allowed. You walk just past the line, nothing bad happens, so you move the line a bit. You walk just past that line, nothing bad happens...and this repeats until, inevitably, eventually, something bad happens.

Regardless of whether or not this pandemic came from this lab, the industry incentives described in the article can only eventually result in one.

We have a mechanism for dealing with this sort of problem, and it involves outside audits. The "bad thing" involves being slapped down by an outside authority that has teeth behind its recommendations. In order to have authority in places like China, it would also need to have authority in places like the USA, which means a bunch of American (and European) scientists would see their own work get more difficult, as well. This has to make it more difficult for them to decide to think objectively about the possibility that this pandemic came from a lab.