I'm not sure why it's supposed to matter. In both cases, China did a bad thing; in both cases, it's a good idea to review and possibly improve biolab safety protocols and also to end wet markets as the latter were obviously a biohazard even before the pandemic.
The WIV lab was built by the French with money from many different countries and the research was being done by EcoHealth Alliance with US funding so blaming it on the Chinese is probably not the whole picture.
EcoHealth alliance made a grant application to DARPA and DARPA turned them down because it was too risky but it seems pretty obvious that they got the money somewhere else.
China? Look into Peter Daszak, he even mentioned his bias when the WHO sent him to investigate his own lab. Fauci was involved in funding the research via NIH, and he didn't mention this when shit hit the fan. The goal of the research was to manipulate the virus to see if it could transfer to humans, ie gain-of-function. There's a reason it was conducted in China and it's not the chinese.
And it gets worse, even though EcoHealth Alliance lied in their books they recently received another grant to keep doing similar research. It was discussed here at the time. What could go wrong?
It's a rabbit hole but you might be surprised how corrupt it looks. Don't get fooled by those trying to shift your focus to China.
"Here look instead at the other people who did bad things too" is a great way to repeat every disaster and accident across history and learn zero lessons.
The government of any place gets to take the blame for things happening in that place, even in more extreme cases where deeds were fully funded by a hostile government who sent in secret agents. ("The buck stops here").
So, if you want to blame $meme_de_jour as well, then go for it — but even if guilty, regardless of whether that's malice or incompetence or bad luck or a novel failure that nobody could have foreseen, that doesn't exonerate anyone else who dropped a ball, which China absolutely did more than once regardless of the origin, as they also tried to downplay the initial infections.
Of course it matters. It affects the priorities and the costs. If there was indeed a lab leak that caused the pandemic, you can justify having far more oversight, and more safety precautions even at great expense, because you have evidence that failing to do so killed millions of people.
Also, this would call for greater scrutiny and regulation of organizations such as the Ecohealth Alliance that are providing funding for such labs.
In addition, saying it doesn't matter rewards a coverup.
If someone breaks your leg, saying you should eat more calcium and be careful walking down the steps, and it doesn't matter if someone actually hit your let with a tire iron, isn't that helpful.
> If there was indeed a lab leak that caused the pandemic, you can justify having far more oversight, and more safety precautions even at great expense, because you have evidence that failing to do so killed millions of people.
If it's even reasonably plausible, and this is as good a chance as any to take a close look and find out, then you should spend this money to prevent such an outbreak even if COVID didn't happen this way.
Likewise in reverse, that wet markets were already seen as likely to cause the emergence of a new zoonotic disease, they should be changed or closed anyway because that risk is exactly the same now as in 2018 regardless of whether or not it was the origin of COVID.
> In addition, saying it doesn't matter rewards a coverup.
Only for people whose attention span misses that I also wrote "both cases, it's a good idea to review and possibly improve biolab safety protocols".
(I suspect this is quite a large percentage; people anchors on single points very easily, no matter how hard you try to make it clear "two things: what about both?")
> If someone breaks your leg, saying you should eat more calcium and be careful walking down the steps, and it doesn't matter if someone actually hit your let with a tire iron, isn't that helpful
In this case it's more like:
Doctors and lawyers trying to work out if your broken leg was caused by the cage fights you do every weekend, or by your recent slip down a very long and excessively polished staircase in a building that might or might not have be up to code at the time.
And the options are:
"Stop fighting in cage matches", and/or "see if that building was up to code and if it was campaign for better building codes".
