With just the suspicion of a lab leak, there will always be half-measures because of researchers arguing that you are needlessly tying their hands. And there will always be people who believe them, either because they trust those researchers or because they don't want to spend any more money on safety measures.
With proof of a lab leak, nobody would listen to researchers' complaints about those strict safety measures anymore. And having seen the huge cost to society, the evaluation of cost and benefits of that research and its safety will be seen in a totally different light.
Also, having someone to blame would imho rally sceptics and deniers behind a common narrative. There would be a common external threat and a common enemy to fight, meaning that the means of that fight like travel restrictions and vaccinations would be more readily accepted.
It would be appaling and immoral to let something of this magnitude go unanswered. If someone is responsible, they need to feel the consequences. Because the consequences of not reacting to something like this, and it getting out later, are far more serious and devastating: That would in one stroke wipe out all legitimacy of involved governments, leading to revolutions all over the west (and quite possibly the rest of the world).
They would also argue that they aren't responsible for western policy responses, even if those responses were inspired by theirs. Things like hunger are a side effect of lockdowns and supply chain disruptions, not directly the virus.
The true number of deaths genuinely caused by COVID that wouldn't otherwise have happened is unknown and probably always will be. It's probably in the same general area as the 4 million figure, it wouldn't be 50% or anything, but really for a virus that so heavily affects the old and co-morbid you'd need to be calculating in terms of life years lost rather than concrete "deaths". It's the latter style of counting that has led to this mass confusion in the first place.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
The main exception are totalitarian states like Russia or China, where the numbers were either entirely suppressed or fabricated.
The Economist tables show this. Britain reports 10,000 more COVID deaths than excess deaths, and the over-count is surely much higher than that given that the healthcare system now has huge backlogs with people dying on waiting lists for non-COVID related diseases. Denmark also reports far more COVID deaths than excess deaths. Some of those are created by policy, and the proportion will only increase over time given the vaccines + generally screwed up health system.
Then there's the question of how excess is calculated. It's excess vs a model. What matters here is not really what's true but what China can argue is true. Modelling is discredited in the west now, in the unlikely event they cared to respond at all, they would certainly argue that any calculations of damages were based on motivated reasoning and bad modelling (and then present their own bad modelling in response).
That theory is obviously not compatible with the excess mortality graphs moving in lockstep with the Covid death graphs. If the virus has no correlation with deaths and it is all a mis-attribution, why would the pattern of deaths match so well with the pattern of excess mortality?
Excess mortality being a model rather than ground truth is irrelevant too. It still doesn't explain the correlation.
The claim about an inert virus was an extreme example to make the point clearer. Imagine such a virus did exist (which it doesn't). Then by the methodology used to compute COVID deaths, there would still be a large number of deaths attributed to the virus even as excess deaths didn't move at all, even though that should be a statistical impossibility.
The question is therefore not "is SARS-CoV-2 entirely inert", obviously that would be ridiculous. The question is "to what extent are the reported numbers confounded by age and co-morbidity effects". The Economist is arguing that excess death figures show the confounding doesn't exist or must be so small it hardly matters. I'm arguing that by their own data (which seems to be continuously updated even long after the article is published?) there are countries where either the numbers are over-counted in this way, or the mortality models are seriously wrong, because COVID deaths > excess deaths.
There is no reason to think this won't happen again in our lifetimes. We have this amazing global logistic network that can apparently ferry a virus all over the world in about 3 months. Lab safety has to be beyond question.
I imagine we'll see some monumental changes in Chinese lab safety after this, independent of whether or not they believe it came from a lab.
No, we won't. That would be the party admitting it was wrong before, which can never happen outside of a coup.
I reckon they'll act.
Damages are usually based on some notion of reasonable behavior on the part of the damaged party. If the damaged party behaves unreasonably and that increases the damages they suffer the negligent party usually does not have to pay the extra damages.
I think a lot of countries look at this, realize that at best they can make the case that China is responsible for 5-15% of their damages, realize that their political opponents will spin that as the current government being responsible for 85-95% of their loss, and decide it is better to just move on.
The most likely outcome would not be greater transparency or control over how such research is conducted. More likely it will move into the shadows, in military labs whose very existence is shrouded in secrecy. That's not just speculation, either. It already happened with biowarfare in the USSR and USA and probably elsewhere during most of my lifetime. Do people not remember these issues being discussed in the context of destroying the last smallpox samples? Or the anthrax scare(s)? Or the Reston "Hot Zone" incident(s)?
Demanding reparations from China for their WMD program going out of control would be a good start.
Then criminal cases against everyone involved in the West who approved something so boneheadedly evil and pointless.
It is like being in an armed standoff in a building full of soldiers from each side and "attacking" the enemy by setting fire to the building you are all in.
A virus is a weapon of terror not war. It is unfit for purpose.
[0] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/feb/16/chinese-maj...
WWII started like that. To make things simple, countries who lost WWI were destabilized and reparations were a big reason. It promoted the raise of nationalist, revengeful leaders like Hitler and Mussolini. You know the rest.
They carefully avoided making the same mistake after WWII.
The only reason the US hasn’t gotten after china is because of the economic/supply chain ties and the implication of the US gov itself.