[zkms]

> I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china

The likes of Alina Chan and Richard Ebright are "easy mode" counterexamples for your statement.

I'll swing for the fences: Even Tom Cotton was -- at least once, I am exceedingly uninterested in combing through all his tweets and media appearances -- careful to distinguish between "lab leak" and "intentional act", despite being brazenly political and probably inspired by anti-China animus.

From the thread beginning at https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126:

"Let me debunk the debunkers. @paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus:

1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market)

2. Good science, bad safety (eg, they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred)

3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach)

4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in)

Again, none of these are “theories” and certainly not “conspiracy theories.” They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence, if the Chinese Communist Party would provide it.

We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either."

[the8472]

Last time I checked our democracies are still running on the premise of informed voters. If discussion of hypothesis needs to be suppressed during a 3-year-long "emergency" then we have an issue.

[zkms]

> It's trivial to find people inside your echo-chamber being well-behaved --- this doesn't answer what a platform's moral responsibility is to society.

I am not a Republican, Tom Cotton is incredibly far away from anything which could be considered my "echo chamber", and I never claimed he was well-behaved.

I chose him specifically to make the specific and narrow point that even brazenly political actors were careful to explicitly distinguish between accidental/unintentional release and an intentional release; and also made clear that "intentional release" was the possibility they regarded as least likely. This was in response to the comment I replied to, whose author said "I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china".

I think most people -- political leaders and otherwise -- are perfectly capable of distinguishing between "high-risk research goes tragically wrong" and "a bioweapon was released on purpose".

If anything, these hamhanded efforts (equating a prosaic "people and/or equipment messed up" scenario to "intentional release of bioweapon", making spurious accusations of racism, claiming that the case for a natural origin is ironclad, government agencies refusing to hand over relevant documents to Senators with the right to see them, etc) to censor discussion and impede investigation of the former has fueled incredibly noxious conspiratorial thinking.