I don't think it's all about blame, knowing it came from a lab would also pull into question the practice of engineering viruses and the safety and security standards required.

True, it would be helpful in that kind of way. The risks does seam to outweigh the benefits.

That said, the blame game would still be there, and people would pull that card...

If it is possible that viruses of this type could be engineered, then lab safety needs to be upgraded anyway (or GoF research banned, or both) regardless of the origin of this specific virus.

It’s all about blame. Blame is a useful geopolitical tool.

> why play blame games

Because of the question of liability: If it was lab made and accidentally released, was it due to recklessness or criminal negligence? Is someone guilty of involuntary mass-manslaughter? Or if this was state-sponsored research, could they be found liable for the damage caused?

What court would usefully find this? What authority would enforce it?

US court?

Against China?

I think you'll find the wheels are already in motion (if the hypothesis is true).

If it was released from a lab, no matter whether or not it was accidental, Covid would be the mother of all torts. The entire planet can show harm and will be very interested in recovering their losses from the entity that mis-handled a lethal virus.

It'd be much like trying to recover money stolen by a drug addict though. Instant bankruptcy and proportionally nothing recovered, to the point that it's not even really worth it.

A drug addict with a $14T GDP.

With ~7M deaths and a ~$1-10M value of human life [1], that's $7-70T in losses in lives alone, before lost productivity and economic value.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#:~:text=In%20Wes....

Only if liability transfers to the state. Even if state-owned, plenty of state-owned enterprises have limited liability.

Even if that state has nukes?

i wonder what % of damage it caused to economy, compared to WW2 reparations.

The poor handling of the pandemic in many countries likely greatly increased the losses in those countries and also made it harder for other countries to get it under control. The tortfeasor would likely only be responsible for the losses that would have likely occurred if the pandemic had been handled competently.

A lot of countries would probably really not want to have the kind of public in-depth examination of their pandemic responses that would be necessary to figure damages.

Yup, I think that's the real worry of CCP officials and other world leaders, that not only will China lose face, lose influence, but also the world will demand reperation. That might cause a collapse of the already unstable Chinese system with ripple effects all over the world.

Even the big paper publishers say "No conclusive evidence for either theory."

https://www.science.org/content/article/do-three-new-studies...

>> Still, Worobey and his co-authors concede, even that evidence might not be enough to end this polarizing debate. “With the way that people have been able to just push aside any and all evidence that points away from a lab leak, I do fear that even if there were evidence from one of these samples that was full of red fox DNA and SARS-CoV-2 that people might say, ‘We still think it actually came from the handler of that red fox,’” Worobey says.

> Even the big paper publishers say "No conclusive evidence for either theory."

They initially claimed their evidence was "dispositive" but their peer reviewers made them take it out.

https://ayjchan.medium.com/evidence-for-a-natural-origin-of-...

I originally didn't think that it came from a lab. Primarily because flu epidemics have happened before and they were of natural origin and there hadn't been good evidence that it came from a lab. But my opinion changed as more good evidence started to turn up that suggested engineering.

There's literally no evidence suggesting engineering. This is a deeply flawed paper (several cornaviruses of natural origin "rate" higher as artificial using their methodology) and essentially every other paper claiming to find some signal of engineering has been disproven or retracted.