Thread by @doctorow

Covid did not escape from a Chinese lab.

China is an untrustworthy, paranoid, autocratic state with a history of deadly epidemiological coverups (SARS), and it mishandled and lied about the covid crisis early on.

But covid is not a bioweapon.

1/

Here's a pretty good high-level explainer from @elizabarclay:

vox.com/2020/3/4/21156…

2/

Here's @snopes rebuttal to an incredibly irresponsible @washingtonpost op-ed that pushed the conspiracy theory:

snopes.com/news/2020/04/0…

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tldr: "Not only do these arguments — discussed in detail below — lack merit on their own, factual scientific studies concerning the origin of SARS-CoV-2 actually provide the strongest refutation to date of the claim the virus was 'created in a lab.'"

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Article after article has quoted esteemed scientists with direct expertise in the field who have staked their reputations to rebut these claims, using evidence and reason.

newsweek.com/claim-that-cor…

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It's not true.

There are actual coronavirus conspiracies, like the loopholes that let big businesses siphon 94.5% of the $349 Paycheck Protection Program earmarked for small businesses:

pluralistic.net/2020/04/20/gre…

6/

And the conspiracies by private equity companies to slash health workers' pay while collecting bailouts and denying claims and spending millions to lobby against surprise billing:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1252340836940931074

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As with 9/11 truthers, the coronavirus-in-a-lab truthers have grasped something essential - that opportunistic sociopaths view tragedies as opportunities to loot and consolidate power - and then reach the wrong conclusion: that they caused this crisis.

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Disaster capitalists and other war criminals DO sometimes cause crises (toppling governments in Latinamerica, say), but they don't need to.

9/

They have created a world that's so unstable that disasters happen on the reg, and they have "ideas lying around" waiting for the right moment.

pluralistic.net/2020/03/21/mos…

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This is actually way more sinister. It means that when elites contemplated a crisis like 9/11 or coronavirus, their response wasn't to plan to prevent the crisis or soften its impact, it was to plan how to use it to their advantage.

11/

We don't need to indict sociopaths for conspiring to cause crises. The depravity of planning to profit from them is more than sufficient to condemn them as unfit to rule.

eof/