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It was absolutely wishful thinking: on the part of virologists Ron Fouchier and Christian Drosten, proponents of gain-of-function research who were a major force pushing for the zoonotic origin theory. Kristian Andersen said as much in the leaked Slack conversation, calling them "much too conflicted to think about the issue straight - to them, the hypothesis of accidental lab escape is so unlikely and not something they want to consider".
The wishful thinkers carried the day, no doubt aided by the fact that accusing China of imperiling all of humanity through incompetence, without ironclad evidence, at a point in the pandemic where virologists and public health bodies desperately wanted their cooperation, was never going to fly. All communication with the public by large institutions is like this: multiple factions disagree internally but unite around a common message, a process in which politics and cognitive biases inevitably intervene. If one is naive about this reality, I suppose it might seem like a conspiracy. But a definition of "conspiracy" that encompasses something so pedestrian seems like a motte and bailey: on the one hand we have the unremarkable PR practice of selectively presenting only the most agreeable facts, and on the other we have the director of the NIH covering up Chinese bioweapon projects. Your priors for these two types of "conspiracy" should be radically different.
No, wishful thinking would be something like "I'm sure the Chinese are competent enough to implement safeguards making a leak extremely unlikely", not "Given the shitshow that would happen if...". If you combine that with "given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus" it also clearly shows that conflating the "lab leak" theory with "engineered bioweapon" theory was deliberate.
And that motte and bailey is carried out entirely by the anti-conspiracy side. If you don't want people to call such pedestrian behavior a conspiracy, stop calling them "conspiracy theorists" for suggesting such behavior might have taken place. Bonus points if you don't censor their theories from the Internet.
If you're not going to engage with my direct quote from a leaked Slack conversation imputing motivated reasoning on the part of the virologists pushing the zoonotic origin hypothesis, I'm not sure what to say. I've met my burden, take it or leave it.
The comment heading this thread is explicitly advocating for this broad notion of conspiracy, i.e. one where all facts are publicly known and consensus among "conspirators" is informally established through open communication channels.
You haven't. The existence of people who may have engaged in wishful thinking does not make other people, who are very deliberately engaging in spin manufacturing, disappear from the face of reality.
Yes, this is exactly what happened in the discussed example, and it is exactly what was called a conspiracy theory by mainstream media, and it is exactly what social media used as justification for banning said theories.
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