Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

"Well, maybe the thing that just leveled San Francisco was an earthquake, or maybe it was a nuclear bomb. What difference would it make? There's nothing left here but a smoking crater, anyway."

Come on. Depending on the scenario, the implications are *massively* different.

https://twitter.com/EuphoricEuler/status/1391823305368276993

If this leaked from a lab, and if this can be demonstrated even to a preponderance-of-evidence standard, it demonstrates that we must urgently prioritize the creation of a global biosecurity regime, one organized around laboratory safety.

There should be one anyway. But if he's right, and if the world were widely to understand that the pandemic emerged from a laboratory mishap of the kind Wade describes, there would be overwhelming public pressure on governments everywhere:

the public would demand treaties and covenants to end this kind of research. We would take the matter as seriously as we do nuclear proliferation.

I'm in favor this, no matter what the evidence ultimately shows.

But if the world concludes it can be "fairly sure" this came from the WIV, you better believe no member in good standing of the family of nations will *ever* allow its scientists openly to do gain-of-function research in a BSL-2 lab again--

Sill less would they fund it overseas. It would take place covertly, but no one would get grants from any reputable source to do it. We would come to regard this as an unbearable lesson about scientific hubris. It would significantly to shape how we see ourselves, forever.

(Consider that people are *still* afraid--irrationally--of nuclear power, even though modern nuclear plants *cannot* melt down the way Chernobyl did that and are far, far safer than any other source of power at that scale.)

If the public comes to understand this as a lab mishap,

that's the end of GoF research. Ensuring proper safety standards at labs that handle deadly pathogens would become one of every country's foremost national security imperatives.

If it came from nature, people will draw quite a different lesson: "Stay away from the bats and give the virologists more money to do more of precisely this kind of research. That way we can stay a step ahead of the next pandemic." Labs doing GoF research would *proliferate.*

The distinction is enormous.

What's more, there is a moral issue--the families of the dead deserve the truth. And there is a liability issue. Three million people are dead, and billions of people--everyone on the planet--has suffered significant harm: loss of life, family,

friends, their health, their youths, their old age, their jobs, their security--with millions upon millions pushed to the ragged edge of poverty and beyond. Billions, literally, have been immiserated.
*If* it was an accident, it does not mean its authors were monsters:

It was an *accident.* Meaning, by definition, no one meant this to happen. We could not call it "genocide." But we would sure call it the deadliest case of negligent homicide in recorded history.

I don't think you've taken this all in fully. If Wade is correct--or at least, if he's on the right track-- *everyone* is implicated. China is proximately inculpated, of course, and so is the US government, which funded these experiments despite the clearest imaginable warnings.

Beyond that, any number of prominent scientific figures, the cream of academic virology, would be *directly inculpated* in events that led to the death of three million people.
It would shatter us. It would shatter public confidence in the enterprise of science itself.

That's not hyperbole. Imagine the effect it would have if people came widely to believe Wade's account. You *know* how people would react. Here it is: the Massive Global Conspiracy they've been longing for.

And alas, his case is well-assembled. It isn't a conspiracy theory. The editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists aren't really the types to go all-in on Q.

I'm not a virologist. I'm not biochemist. But he's made a serious case, in a serious venue, and. I have yet to see a particularly serious reply.

I may well. Perhaps these people who keep telling me there are "myriad factual errors" in it will take the time to point them out.

But if they fail to make an equally serious case in response--if they wave it off as "a conspiracy theory"-- they're contributing, in their own special way, to the death of our institutions and democratic culture.

They're free to do that, of course. They have the right to remain silent. But they shouldn't.
This will fester like a wound. We're already a country suffering an immense crisis of public trust.

I suspect the reason you're reaching for arguments like "what difference would it make" is because his case is strong. And the implications of that are really awful.

But that's not how adults deal with things. If this is what happened, we need to know. We really need to know.