Covid-19 originated naturally and not in lab, virologists conclude
irishtimes.com
irishtimes.com
Let someone host a debate that pitches scientists on either camp against each other. Let them fight it out in public.
It is quite useless for the public to divide themselves depending on what version of "science" they want to believe in.
And to me, the lab leak scientist's arguments were a lot stronger where the other one looked a lot hand waving and speculation to me. Don't know, maybe I was hoping there would be really strong arguments from the proponent of natural origins.
I can't think of a time when a public debate actually ended up convincing anybody. Presidential debates are, at best, a chance for one candidate to screw up. I don't think anybody came out of the Bill Nye debate against Ken Ham believing anything different than they came in with.
Debate is a poor format for teaching. Material goes past you at the debater's pace, not yours. If you actually wanted to know the answer, you'd read written material. Or interview the experts yourself, so that your questions can be answered, not the ones that the other debater finds most pertinent to convincing people.
I have little faith in the ability of the vast majority of people to form sound opinions on anything. Even the ones who come to the right answer will mostly be responding to the consensus that happens to coincide with their ideology, rather than sound ground-up reasoning.
In this case, any rational basis for this is going to depend on knowing a ton about virus evolution AND about common laboratory practices. It's going to take more than an hour's worth of lecture to teach you what you need to know just to judge a sound argument.
Practically all people would come out of that judging the one using the best tactics, not the soundest arguments. With a heavy thumb on the side of whoever they were predisposed to agree with in the first place.
If you want to hear a real discussion of the subject, you'll have to go to a virology conference. And you probably won't understand a word of it. Nor would I.
Feel like this false dichotomy of "it was either wet market or created as a chimera virus in the lab" is not persuasive to the many people who think it likely was a natural virus that got pushed into the world because it was being handed by humans in a lab.