Also article mentions FBI has “moderate” confidence it was lab leak. I find that very interesting given it wouldn’t be so much based on scientific analysis but some intelligence collection the FBI has.
Words of Estimative Probability (PDF) https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/ar...
An institution will not have assessments on everything at any point in time. Two different institutions might have didferent assessments for a billion reasons, e.g. they could have done the research at different points in time, the underlying evisence could differ, the interviewed experts could have said different things and so on.
Two different instutions reaching different conclusions is not as surprising as it seems.
If the CIA came out tomorrow and said they were 100% confident it was a lab leak from China we would have no way of knowing if that's based on facts or political propaganda.
Maybe, in 40-50 years we'll get an answer. Until then, it's too politically and strategically useful to keep it up in the air. At least one goal is for people to be arguing about it.
Then you know they are lying.
It makes it a lot more likely that public support for the non-lab leak theories will change once we get the chance to see the government's new evidence though.
Sarin would be classed as chemical, not biological.
It's also worth illustrating that their primary terrorist act killed 15 people, after releasing sarin on 5 different trains during Tokyo's busy rush hour. You would have been more effective just lobbing a single grenade.
It is beneficial to the survival of a virus to infect the largest group that it can. A virus targeted to a small group of people has a large "survival benefit" the moment it can mutate to infect everybody.
In addition, it's really hard to target a biological entity at a specific subgroup of humans. From a biological standpoint, all humans are damn near identical.
Depends on the virus - something with the long incubating periods and frequent lack of symptoms like Covid yes, but something much more quick and deadly (say, Ebola, even though 2-21 days is still potentially slow) could result in quick mass deaths without the opportunity to spread it around.
The more these claims based on minimal new evidence are repeated, the more it seems the virus may have potentially been released by nefarious actors as an attack on the population.
It's not implausable for an entity with knowledge and access to a virus being studied, to release a copy of it in the environment surrounding the lab while maintaining a high degree of deniability.
If it is so, then the question that remains is, much like in the case of Nordstream, which nation state has the most incentive to carry it out?
It may be unlikely but there have been many instances where the US population becomes a victim of its own government's covert actions. The quality of response doesn't neccessarily prove anything.
Previously the 'big lie' was that it was not from a lab. Now that it's assessed to be likely from a lab the new lie is the contention that it was done deliberately? Whose propaganda machine is at work here anyway? The Chinese govt or the US one? Or are they in cahoots now?
Wasn't the previous news claim specifically that somebody in Wuhan ate a bat or pangolin? Until it was made public that the US was involved in funding the research.