Thoreau made a similar argument after his carelessness started a major wildfire, stating that once he lost control of his campfire, it was "as if the lightning had done it". His neighbors weren't impressed, and I'm not impressed here either.
This thinking is just bizarre. ~20M people are dead. If SARS-CoV-2 arose from a research accident at the WIV, then those deaths were all avoidable, simply by not funding research that was already considered to be an unacceptable risk by many academics (Relman, Lipsitch, etc.) before the pandemic, and actually defunded until 2017. These were real people, mothers and grandfathers and friends. Would you not rather they hadn't died?
The WIV was funded by the American NIH, and used techniques first developed by Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. If SARS-CoV-2 arose from a research accident there, then the American government is in no position to blame China. On the other hand, that gives the American and Chinese governments a collective incentive to downplay that possibility, as seems to have occurred.
This thinking is just bizarre. ~20M people are dead. If SARS-CoV-2 arose from a research accident at the WIV, then those deaths were all avoidable, simply by not funding research that was already considered to be an unacceptable risk by many academics (Relman, Lipsitch, etc.) before the pandemic, and actually defunded until 2017. These were real people, mothers and grandfathers and friends. Would you not rather they hadn't died?
The WIV was funded by the American NIH, and used techniques first developed by Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. If SARS-CoV-2 arose from a research accident there, then the American government is in no position to blame China. On the other hand, that gives the American and Chinese governments a collective incentive to downplay that possibility, as seems to have occurred.