This piece by Dan Rather is a good example of the motivated reasoning that has poisoned the discussion over covid origins, and ironically a very unscientific approach. Whether science is under attack or not should have zero bearing on investigating how the pandemic started.https://twitter.com/DanRather/status/1406611921256828930 …
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The answer to the covid origins question will help us decide whether we should be building new coronavirus research labs or tearing them down. Whether this answer helps the opponents of science, or helps Trump, or upsets China, or destroys public confidence is irrelevant.
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The circumstantial evidence Stewart points to is compelling. You have a novel coronavirus arise in the same city as one of three labs in the world that study these viruses, and nowhere near where we find related diseases in the wild. You have a lot of people trying to cover up.
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We know we're about 1/5 for iatrogenic pandemics in the 20th century; we know the base rate of lab accidents is high; we know this all happened in a surveillance society where any tracks leading to an alternate source would be retrospectively visible to the authorities.
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So Stewart is in fact applying scientific principles in his hypothesis—in this case Occam's Razor. Check out the novel virus lab down the street from the novel virus spreading event, he says, and don't let political or social considerations derail your inquiry. That's science.
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If millions of people died because research into preventing a pandemic created the conditions for starting one, that is the most important lesson we could learn from covid. Getting the answer right, one way or the other, is the only way to prevent this all from happening again.
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I'm not asking anyone to believe the evidence we have right now is adequate. But I wish commentators like Rather would stop conditioning their beliefs on the consequences of one answer or the other being right, and stop attacking the question itself as somehow harmful.
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The one thing that science is supposed to be best at—updating beliefs based on new evidence—is something we've consistently failed at all through the pandemic. The mantra of "believe the science" revealed itself as just an argument from authority dressed up in a lab coat.
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End of conversation
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I would go farther argue that he is correct that GoF research is a major threat to humanity *whether or not* this pandemic happened to come from a lab, and we should use the popular attention to readjust our risk tolerance independent of the result of this one data point.
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