Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’
You don’t know that. Nobody knows that, because China destroyed all the evidence. If this was true, they could have proved it, they could have shown the world! “Behold our innocence!!” Why didn’t that happen?
One (simpler) explanation is that proving an absence of something is almost impossible, and that attempting too hard would make them look a heck of a lot guilty.
There is a good reason why the burden of evidence is “innocent until proven guilty”, and yes this extends to the (in your eyes) untrustworthy.
Prove to me you never stole candy from a store as a child (or if you did, replace that accusation with any item of higher value until you hit something you did not steal)
There is also the whole ‘why would we have to prove anything? We are fucking China!’ stance all big hegemonic countries have.
It’s not just big hegemonic countries in general but specifically the particularly image-obsessed character of geopolitics in East Asia. Mianzi is a real concern in Chinese diplomacy.
lmao, if you don’t have evidence for X, you don’t have evidence that X is being suppressed. You just lack evidence.
The communities pushing “COVID was a lab leak” the hardest are demonstrably not cured by evidence.
nope fuck off
Yes, but we can reason based on what we know.
Most likely the municipality were trying to cover up corruption in the regulation of the wet markets. Maybe they ignored health and safety laws in return for bribes, and didn’t want that to come out.