So Virologists have a choice: A: State that this virus is natural and be hailed as heroes as funding into your field and research floods in. B: Back the Lab Origin betraying all of their colleagues, become social pariahs and hated in society for being guilty by association for 6+ million deaths. All while you life's work and career all gets thrown down the drain.
For a Virologist supporting the lab origin only has downsides.
It wasn't "racist" per se, but it was subsequently used as an ideological weapon.
There was a clear consequence of tying COVID-19 with some sort of WMD released by the Chinese, and it was the increase in violence against AAPI folks.
Nobody said WMD. Most likely culprit is irresponsibly risky experimentation combined with documented poor lab safety practices.
That said, even if there was a direct link between theories about Covid-19 origins and a rise in hate crimes, does that mean that those theories shouldn't be discussed? If the search for truth leads to unintended and unfortunate side effects, does that mean that the search for truth should be abandoned in favor of burying our heads in the sand? Or worse, adopting an alternate reality that is more harmful to us, like maybe the Chinese Communist Party "theory" that Covid came from a US Army lab.
This was in fact a not uncommon claim. It wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the backlash if concerns about an accidental leak been expressed as questions rather than with certainty, by people who weren’t also making racist statements or otherwise acting in bad faith about the pandemic (you could easily find Republicans saying it was both mostly harmless and a Chinese attack just sentences apart).
I think this is a take as naive as it can be.
Not only can we read about this lab leak hypothesis across all media outlets, there is an ongoing debate about its validity in most respectable ones. Debates should include opposing opinions, I presume?
There are also plenty of historical examples of why public opinion driven by media outlets does not qualify as the “search of truth”. Reporting itself has mostly nothing to do with that, either. This hypothesis and many others could be true or false, but the vast majority of the population is simply not able to reach an informed conclusion, even more if we take into account that not even experts have enough information to do so. Thus, one shouldn’t believe otherwise, while ignoring the fact that it is already being used to push public opinion in a certain direction.
This was not the case throughout 2020, into 2021. Discussing the lab leak publicly was a great way to get banned from Twitter or branded a misinformation-spreading fringe alt-righter, a-la-Rogan. This was despite the fact that there was no less evidence supporting its probability.
In the first half of 2020 there was no evidence whatsoever. Even if the hypothesis is proven true in the future, promoting it without any supporting evidence is indistinguishable from just lying.
It was indeed peddled by right wing outlets earlier in 2020, coinciding with the ongoing trade war between the US and China [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory
What you've just said is baseless. Nobody "aimed" this theory. The theory simply came into being because it is plausible, probable, and just made sense if you looked at the facts of the situation objectively.
The lab leak theory was plausible from Day One, and anyone who said otherwise was motivated by ideology or fear.
> If you had evidence of a lab leak then present it and then you can promote a theory that is likely to result in violence towards individuals otherwise please keep it to yourself until you have proof
There is more evidence of a lab leak than there is of a zoonotic jump (none).
Because it immediately led to an increase in anti-asian hate crimes. That included effecting Chinese-Americans who have literally never been to China and south east asians that were mistaken as Chinese.
It is difficult to have a nuanced discussion about lab safety in the public view when there's a big chunk of the political sphere that will use it to rile up their base. It sucks that censorship is the better option but we've learned from 9/11 that people are anything but reasonable - I had wealthy middle eastern neighbors who fled the country within a week of the attacks and, after everything that came from 9/11, it seems like they made the right decision.
I'm asking the following as seriously and as respectfully as I possibly can, and let it be known that I abhor all crime.
Was this anti-Asian hate crime story ever real, or was it a media narrative designed to bash Trump?
Just to play Devil's Advocate: what if crime rates in cities where many Asians tend to live are going up in general? How would you be able to distinguish between anti-Asian hate crimes increasing, and crime in general increasing? Is the rate of crimes against Asians going up relative to the rate of crimes against say Latinos or Whites or Blacks? Is the rate of crimes against Asians increasing more or less in say Red regions that might tend to be influenced by Trump's rhetoric versus Blue regions that might be less likely to tend to listen to his rhetoric? Has the media even bothered to ask this question and analyze the data, or were they quick to instantly rush to blame Trump for any Asian that was a victim of a random crime in order to score political points.
I don't know myself as it requires a lot more research than I can do right now, but what I can see as factual is that there are probably hundreds of stories about crime going up in the last couple of years for every big city.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/major-crimes-up-38-in-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/opinion/new-york-rising-c...
https://gothamist.com/news/why-are-shootings-and-murders-ris...
Just my 2 cents. The data might not indicate what the media says it does and I would say that we should recheck all of our initial premises about the last 6 years.
1. I emigrated after university - I grew up in Massachusetts and Vermont and was in High School when 9/11 happened if you're curious how that gels with my previous comment.
2. Guardian Article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/23/vancoucer-anti...
3. Linked police report https://vancouverpoliceboard.ca/police/policeboard/agenda/20...
That's remarkably higher than the average increase.
The most legitimate response you could hope to get to such a question is some anecdotal evidence.
The reporting of harassment and hate crimes usually involve the aggressor’s statements at the time of the occurrence, thus it is perfectly possible to link a physical or verbal attack to a motivation.
There isn’t a concerted effort anywhere to stop the debate about the lab leak hypothesis, and proof of it is the widespread coverage in media, from MIT review to NYT.
There is though a more unified push of such hypothesis made by right-wing outlets, like this one, FOX, or NYP, among others. And, if anything, that should give us pause, as this is more about shaping public opinion than informing.
There was, and is, no evidence of the theory that it originated from a zoonotic leap at a wet market, which is arguably more racist because it places Chinese culinary practices in the spotlight instead of risky science experiments.
It was denounced because the scientists (like Peter Daszak) who were cited by the media in stifling the theory were the same scientists who were backing the risky research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that likely lead to the lab leak. There was a clear conflict of interest that was undisclosed to the public.
Its scary to see how quickly our formerly respected institutions were to suppress a legitimate inquiry, simply because... why? It was associated with Trump? It offended China?
Anyone who argues for more social media censorship needs to look long and hard at the lab leak theory and how it was handled. These corporate giants that are supposed to be the arbiters of what constitutes misinformation got it wrong, and they got it spectacularly wrong. They got it wrong to the detriment of people who want to know what really happened, and they got it wrong in favor of America's greatest adversary.