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Also... I mean, unless I've created a false memory, I specifically remember that the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon,

by scoofy 3y ago

Also... I mean, unless I've created a false memory, I specifically remember that the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon, and not actually the entirely plausible, accidental escape of a virus. I've always had a completely open mind about it, even if experts have repeatedly suggested that it's plausible, but unlikely. Those prattling on about how "people called us crazy" that it was a WIV lab leak seem to completely misremember what was actually being discussed in April-May of 2020, and also seem to be trying to score political points in American politics, when it seems very obvious that the CCP should take the lion's share of any blame regarding any lack of transparency.

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treis 3y ago
The most popular human origin theory was a lab leak. It was easier to argue against the crazies claiming a bioweapon so that's what most did and that's what got the most press. But the primary human origin story was an accidental release.
- qclibre23 3y ago
  Accidental release and bioweapons research are not incompatible.
  - btilly 3y ago
    Bioweapons research and got infected in a lab that was at BSL 2 ARE incompatible. If you expect it to be able to infect humans, you are going to take more precautions. The theory here is that they were doing research on animal models and didn't think that humans could catch it from mice. Therefore they took too few precautions, and it escaped through them.
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
No you misremember. Here I was ridiculed. Specifically remember a columnist at Parool, a Dutch local newspaper, talking about it how he was pressured by colleagues days after just mentioning a column it might be from the Lab. There was a consensus in the West it didn't came from the Lab, and those who suggested otherwise were non-scientific lunatics.
- Sakos 3y ago
  Shit, I remember arguing with people like him back when the whole pandemic started that it was a distinct possibility, one of several, that should be fairly evaluated like every other. And people like him just waved it off as conspiracy theory garbage like we're seeing here. Same shit, different day, except now with the flavour of gaslighting along with it.
  - wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
    It was wild. The most obvious theory was ridiculed. Some groups are very good at creating narritives in western media.
phpisthebest 3y ago
People were being banned from twitter, youtube, facebook ext for mentioning lab leak... Now you want to gas light everyone saying "it was perfectly ok to talk about in 2020 That is not accurate at all...
- acdha 3y ago
  Do you have any examples of someone who was banned simply for saying it could have leaked, as opposed to lying about it being a man-made bio weapon? The latter was common in right-wing circles because it excused their leaders’ incompetent handling of the pandemic and scientists pretty quickly established there weren’t signs of genetic modification, but throughout the process there were people discussing the possibility of a sample leaking through a lab safety failure.
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    It was facebook[1] stated policy to prevent all discussion, so even if there was not a user level bann they were removing all posts and discussions about it Twitter banned lots people for it (and other COVID "misinformation") it would be hard to point to a perfect example as often people that wanted to discuss lab leak also talked about masking, masking policy, vaccine efficacy, and Vaccine mandate policies. All of which were also forbidden topics. If you dared to speak out against "The Experts" at the cdc or WHO then you were either shadow-banned (i.e posts hidden, de-ranked, etc) or outright banned [1] https://reason.com/2021/06/04/lab-leak-misinformation-media-fauci-covid-19/ https://reason.com/2021/06/04/lab-leak-misinformation-media-...
- methodical 3y ago
  I remember learning a lot of the reasoning behind why I thought it was most likely a lab leak from a video I got as a top recommendation on youtube from a rather large channel that had near or over a million views at the time, so anecdotally I think perhaps a lot of the people who got banned for their discussion on the topic were either grouped up with people positing more extreme possibilities, or just an example of over reach. Either way, I personally don't remember people presenting the possibility of a lab leak being shredded (at least on youtube, I can't speak for the other platforms as I use them very infrequently).
mc32 3y ago
There were lots of narratives. The main one that was coming out was that it did NOT come from the WIV. That gain of function was NOT happening at the WIV. That it likely came from people outside Wuhan who brought it to Wuhan and that the the Wet market was not the source either (though the CCP was pushing that narrative, others were making it more vague saying it came from the hinterlands). A second narrative by skeptics/conspiracists was that it had escape the WIV and that the WIV was conducting gain of function research. A third fringe theory was that it was a bio-weapon (this idea is idiotic given the guaranteed blowback/footgun you would get) Also people were being banned, shadowbanned, demonetized, etc. for proposing a lab-leak theory. But, I guess that's par for the course. Remember when politicians (I mean Nancy) said, unmasked, don't worry, go back to Chinatown and do business (slightly before they then imposed restrictions) Also, don't forget, people who saw strange unexpected repetitions (filler) in the sequencing were scoffed at.
tzs 3y ago
> Also... I mean, unless I've created a false memory, I specifically remember that the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon, and not actually the entirely plausible, accidental escape of a virus. If you've created a false memory, then I've created a similar one. I remember very early some member of Congress saying it was a Chinese engineered bio-weapon deliberately released to cripple the US economy.
methodical 3y ago
This. I have a few family members very deep in the weeds (QAnon, Cabal, One World Order type of crap) and they love to play this narrative. In reality it seemed like it was rather obvious to anybody who looked at the facts that this pandemic had dubious origins. Just a few of these were the close proximity, same family of viruses being researched, mysterious personnel changes around the time of the initial spread, etc., yet those same family members have turned any reluctance on my part to flat out declare this pandemic as a manufactured Chinese bioweapon into flat out denial of any chance of it being anything more than a big coincidence. I guess it boils down to conspiracy theorists believing that you're either all in, or not in at all, and there exists no middle ground to wait for more facts before coming to a conclusion one way or the other. I also feel like noting that I didn't engage in discussion on the topic with many other people outside of aforementioned family members on the topic, so who knows, maybe I would've been ridiculed for sitting on the fence, but anecdotally I definitely remember people seeing either source as a possibility (minus the Cabal manufactured pandemic to sterilize the human race one, of course).
- zaroth 3y ago
  I can never understand if someone actually believes this or is just actively gaslighting. Anyone trying to discuss even the possibility of a lab leak was called xenophobic, a conspiracy theorist, banned from socials… Funny thing when the “conspiracy theorists” keep turning out to be right.
  - methodical 3y ago
    Except they haven't at all, lol By "the “conspiracy theorists” keep turning out to be right" do you mean like how Trump won the election in 2020, Biden is an actor, Obama has been hung for treason, people around the globe are dropping dead from the vaccine, etc.? These are the people I'm talking about when I speak about conspiracy theorists, people reasonably sitting on the fence when there is conflicting information are not. You speak in absolutes about how _everybody_ who presented the possibility of a lab leak was banned and labeled a xenophobe, and while I cannot speak onto your anecdotal experiences, I never saw this in any platform I participated on at the time, in fact (as I shared in another comment on this thread), I leaned towards the likelihood of a lab leak after getting recommended a very popular youtube video on the topic from a very popular channel. As far as I know, that video is still available, although it has obviously been a long time since I last watched it. Part of how cults are started is creation of a us versus them mentality, often where it doesn't exist. I believe this is why so many conspiracy theorists with more extreme beliefs might misconstrue their experiences in discussion around the topic, when in reality those discussing the very legitimate possibility of a lab leak never got much flak (anecdotally, as I said).
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> I mean, unless I've created a false memory I'm pretty sure your memory is very faulty. Of all those saying it could be a lab leak, very few were talking it being a bio-weapon. > Those prattling on about how "people called us crazy" that it was a WIV lab leak seem to completely misremember what was actually being discussed in April-May of 2020 Not at all. You are trying to rewrite history. Here's the bill from Congress, march 2023: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619... It is the sense of Congress that-- (2) there is reason to believe the COVID-19 pandemic may have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; People saying "people called us crazy" do deserve apologies, not downvotes. EDIT: just to be clear... I'm not saying it was or it wasn't a lab leak. I'm saying that there's a Congress bill from march 2023 saying there's reason to believe it was a lab-leak. And hence all those who said it was a lab-leak and who were called "conspiracy theorists" do deserve apologies.
- kelnos 3y ago
  Not disagreeing with the overall premise, but: > I'm saying that there's a Congress bill from march 2023 saying there's reason to believe it was a lab-leak. Congress writing up a bill asserting stuff like this isn't exactly something I consider persuasive either way.
- object-a 3y ago
  Until a cause is completely identified, there will always be "reason to believe". That doesn't mean that it's the most likely source or the most reasonable hypothesis. The President was also claiming the virus came from WIV back in May 2020. It was a common theory in some media circles
  - splendor_spoon 3y ago
    That same president also claimed it would be gone by the summer of 2020. The same president even claimed it would never make it to the USA! Maybe this will be a case of a broken clock being correct twice a day but it was certainly thrown in with quite a bit of incorrect information that was being spewed at those daily briefings. I don’t blame anyone for being skeptical of the information coming out of the Trump administration during that time.
dec0dedab0de 3y ago
I definitely remember it being discussed as a lab leak on HN sometime from December 2019 to March 2020
tomp 3y ago
You've created a false memory. Even back then, there weren't any good counter-arguments against the "lab leak" theory (except "it's racist" because somehow "the Chinese are so filthy their food markets cause pandemics" isn't racist?!), so to censor it, the powers that be (Big Tech, Mainstream Media) instead attacked the adjacent, but very different "bioweapon" theory.
jchw 3y ago
I knew this would happen, so much so I'm pretty sure I even called it ahead of time. This happens so frequently that there ought to be a word for it. Yes, some conservative personalities early on had pushed some dumb conspiracies about COVID-19 being a bioweapon. No, that was not the crux of the argument that the many scientists, journalists and internet commenters had when they argued in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. Now I personally was never very attached to the theory, but I absolutely believed that we should have researched whether or not COVID-19 was indeed leaked from a lab. An actual argument against my position was that we shouldn't as it would only further fuel racism, xenophobia and geopolitical tensions even if it were true. There was also a lot of backlash against researchers who wanted investigation into the lab leak theory, probably for similar reasons. There's always amnesia about things like this, but I'm pretty sure COVID-19 has become a case study on how not to handle a pandemic. A lot of what happened gave people a legitimate reason to distrust authority, and if we pretend that never happened things will simply continue to get worse as it repeats indefinitely. Again, I do agree that it was annoying seeing it become a political culture war issue about a conspiracy vs "trusting the science", but that is certainly not what I believe the majority of the lab leak hypothesis was angling for. Wikipedia even helpfully separates the two ideas into separate articles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation#Bio-weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation#Bio-we...
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  > Yes, some conservative personalities early on had pushed some dumb conspiracies about COVID-19 being a bioweapon. No, that was not the crux of the argument that the many scientists, journalists and internet commenters had when they argued in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. It's totally insane. GP is literally rewriting history and getting upvoted for it. I post a link to a Congress bill (linked from TFA), from 2023 under the Biden administration (so not Trump), saying "there's reason to believe COVID may have originated at the Wuhan lab" and I immediately get two downvotes. It's as if the shills who tried to bury the lab leak posts back then (not the bioweapon ones, just the lab leak ones) were still actively trying to control the narrative. This time by explaining why it was normal to label everyone who talked about lab leak a "conspiracy theory cracknut" because they'd supposedly all be talking about bio-weapon (which they weren't). > There's always amnesia about things like this, but I'm pretty sure COVID-19 has become a case study on how not to handle a pandemic. A lot of what happened gave people a legitimate reason to distrust authority, and if we pretend that never happened things will simply continue to get worse as it repeats indefinitely. I totally agree.
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pessimizer 3y ago
> the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon, This was the part that media outlets and government seized upon to call any discussion of the lab leak theory racist. There was no "discussion" about covid being a "bio-weapon," it was a bunch of anti-China hawks repeating it over and over again based on absolutely nothing. They were so obviously nationalist anti-Chinese that the theory that covid happened because Chinese people are dirty and eat weird diseased things was able to be sold as the not-racist theory.
dahfizz 3y ago
You fell for the straw man. The media argued against the most outrageous and conspiratorial version of the lab leak theory to discredit it. They successfully made you associate lab leak with racist conspiracy
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by scoofy 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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treis 3y ago

The most popular human origin theory was a lab leak. It was easier to argue against the crazies claiming a bioweapon so that's what most did and that's what got the most press. But the primary human origin story was an accidental release.

qclibre23 3y ago
Accidental release and bioweapons research are not incompatible.
- btilly 3y ago
  Bioweapons research and got infected in a lab that was at BSL 2 ARE incompatible. If you expect it to be able to infect humans, you are going to take more precautions. The theory here is that they were doing research on animal models and didn't think that humans could catch it from mice. Therefore they took too few precautions, and it escaped through them.

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

No you misremember. Here I was ridiculed. Specifically remember a columnist at Parool, a Dutch local newspaper, talking about it how he was pressured by colleagues days after just mentioning a column it might be from the Lab. There was a consensus in the West it didn't came from the Lab, and those who suggested otherwise were non-scientific lunatics.

Sakos 3y ago
Shit, I remember arguing with people like him back when the whole pandemic started that it was a distinct possibility, one of several, that should be fairly evaluated like every other. And people like him just waved it off as conspiracy theory garbage like we're seeing here. Same shit, different day, except now with the flavour of gaslighting along with it.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
  It was wild. The most obvious theory was ridiculed. Some groups are very good at creating narritives in western media.

phpisthebest 3y ago

People were being banned from twitter, youtube, facebook ext for mentioning lab leak... Now you want to gas light everyone saying "it was perfectly ok to talk about in 2020 That is not accurate at all...

acdha 3y ago
Do you have any examples of someone who was banned simply for saying it could have leaked, as opposed to lying about it being a man-made bio weapon? The latter was common in right-wing circles because it excused their leaders’ incompetent handling of the pandemic and scientists pretty quickly established there weren’t signs of genetic modification, but throughout the process there were people discussing the possibility of a sample leaking through a lab safety failure.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  It was facebook[1] stated policy to prevent all discussion, so even if there was not a user level bann they were removing all posts and discussions about it Twitter banned lots people for it (and other COVID "misinformation") it would be hard to point to a perfect example as often people that wanted to discuss lab leak also talked about masking, masking policy, vaccine efficacy, and Vaccine mandate policies. All of which were also forbidden topics. If you dared to speak out against "The Experts" at the cdc or WHO then you were either shadow-banned (i.e posts hidden, de-ranked, etc) or outright banned [1] https://reason.com/2021/06/04/lab-leak-misinformation-media-fauci-covid-19/ https://reason.com/2021/06/04/lab-leak-misinformation-media-...
methodical 3y ago
I remember learning a lot of the reasoning behind why I thought it was most likely a lab leak from a video I got as a top recommendation on youtube from a rather large channel that had near or over a million views at the time, so anecdotally I think perhaps a lot of the people who got banned for their discussion on the topic were either grouped up with people positing more extreme possibilities, or just an example of over reach. Either way, I personally don't remember people presenting the possibility of a lab leak being shredded (at least on youtube, I can't speak for the other platforms as I use them very infrequently).

mc32 3y ago

There were lots of narratives. The main one that was coming out was that it did NOT come from the WIV. That gain of function was NOT happening at the WIV. That it likely came from people outside Wuhan who brought it to Wuhan and that the the Wet market was not the source either (though the CCP was pushing that narrative, others were making it more vague saying it came from the hinterlands). A second narrative by skeptics/conspiracists was that it had escape the WIV and that the WIV was conducting gain of function research. A third fringe theory was that it was a bio-weapon (this idea is idiotic given the guaranteed blowback/footgun you would get) Also people were being banned, shadowbanned, demonetized, etc. for proposing a lab-leak theory. But, I guess that's par for the course. Remember when politicians (I mean Nancy) said, unmasked, don't worry, go back to Chinatown and do business (slightly before they then imposed restrictions) Also, don't forget, people who saw strange unexpected repetitions (filler) in the sequencing were scoffed at.

tzs 3y ago

> Also... I mean, unless I've created a false memory, I specifically remember that the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon, and not actually the entirely plausible, accidental escape of a virus. If you've created a false memory, then I've created a similar one. I remember very early some member of Congress saying it was a Chinese engineered bio-weapon deliberately released to cripple the US economy.

methodical 3y ago

This. I have a few family members very deep in the weeds (QAnon, Cabal, One World Order type of crap) and they love to play this narrative. In reality it seemed like it was rather obvious to anybody who looked at the facts that this pandemic had dubious origins. Just a few of these were the close proximity, same family of viruses being researched, mysterious personnel changes around the time of the initial spread, etc., yet those same family members have turned any reluctance on my part to flat out declare this pandemic as a manufactured Chinese bioweapon into flat out denial of any chance of it being anything more than a big coincidence. I guess it boils down to conspiracy theorists believing that you're either all in, or not in at all, and there exists no middle ground to wait for more facts before coming to a conclusion one way or the other. I also feel like noting that I didn't engage in discussion on the topic with many other people outside of aforementioned family members on the topic, so who knows, maybe I would've been ridiculed for sitting on the fence, but anecdotally I definitely remember people seeing either source as a possibility (minus the Cabal manufactured pandemic to sterilize the human race one, of course).

zaroth 3y ago
I can never understand if someone actually believes this or is just actively gaslighting. Anyone trying to discuss even the possibility of a lab leak was called xenophobic, a conspiracy theorist, banned from socials… Funny thing when the “conspiracy theorists” keep turning out to be right.
- methodical 3y ago
  Except they haven't at all, lol By "the “conspiracy theorists” keep turning out to be right" do you mean like how Trump won the election in 2020, Biden is an actor, Obama has been hung for treason, people around the globe are dropping dead from the vaccine, etc.? These are the people I'm talking about when I speak about conspiracy theorists, people reasonably sitting on the fence when there is conflicting information are not. You speak in absolutes about how _everybody_ who presented the possibility of a lab leak was banned and labeled a xenophobe, and while I cannot speak onto your anecdotal experiences, I never saw this in any platform I participated on at the time, in fact (as I shared in another comment on this thread), I leaned towards the likelihood of a lab leak after getting recommended a very popular youtube video on the topic from a very popular channel. As far as I know, that video is still available, although it has obviously been a long time since I last watched it. Part of how cults are started is creation of a us versus them mentality, often where it doesn't exist. I believe this is why so many conspiracy theorists with more extreme beliefs might misconstrue their experiences in discussion around the topic, when in reality those discussing the very legitimate possibility of a lab leak never got much flak (anecdotally, as I said).

TacticalCoder 3y ago

> I mean, unless I've created a false memory I'm pretty sure your memory is very faulty. Of all those saying it could be a lab leak, very few were talking it being a bio-weapon. > Those prattling on about how "people called us crazy" that it was a WIV lab leak seem to completely misremember what was actually being discussed in April-May of 2020 Not at all. You are trying to rewrite history. Here's the bill from Congress, march 2023: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619... It is the sense of Congress that-- (2) there is reason to believe the COVID-19 pandemic may have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; People saying "people called us crazy" do deserve apologies, not downvotes. EDIT: just to be clear... I'm not saying it was or it wasn't a lab leak. I'm saying that there's a Congress bill from march 2023 saying there's reason to believe it was a lab-leak. And hence all those who said it was a lab-leak and who were called "conspiracy theorists" do deserve apologies.

kelnos 3y ago
Not disagreeing with the overall premise, but: > I'm saying that there's a Congress bill from march 2023 saying there's reason to believe it was a lab-leak. Congress writing up a bill asserting stuff like this isn't exactly something I consider persuasive either way.
object-a 3y ago
Until a cause is completely identified, there will always be "reason to believe". That doesn't mean that it's the most likely source or the most reasonable hypothesis. The President was also claiming the virus came from WIV back in May 2020. It was a common theory in some media circles
- splendor_spoon 3y ago
  That same president also claimed it would be gone by the summer of 2020. The same president even claimed it would never make it to the USA! Maybe this will be a case of a broken clock being correct twice a day but it was certainly thrown in with quite a bit of incorrect information that was being spewed at those daily briefings. I don’t blame anyone for being skeptical of the information coming out of the Trump administration during that time.

dec0dedab0de 3y ago

I definitely remember it being discussed as a lab leak on HN sometime from December 2019 to March 2020

tomp 3y ago

You've created a false memory. Even back then, there weren't any good counter-arguments against the "lab leak" theory (except "it's racist" because somehow "the Chinese are so filthy their food markets cause pandemics" isn't racist?!), so to censor it, the powers that be (Big Tech, Mainstream Media) instead attacked the adjacent, but very different "bioweapon" theory.

jchw 3y ago

I knew this would happen, so much so I'm pretty sure I even called it ahead of time. This happens so frequently that there ought to be a word for it. Yes, some conservative personalities early on had pushed some dumb conspiracies about COVID-19 being a bioweapon. No, that was not the crux of the argument that the many scientists, journalists and internet commenters had when they argued in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. Now I personally was never very attached to the theory, but I absolutely believed that we should have researched whether or not COVID-19 was indeed leaked from a lab. An actual argument against my position was that we shouldn't as it would only further fuel racism, xenophobia and geopolitical tensions even if it were true. There was also a lot of backlash against researchers who wanted investigation into the lab leak theory, probably for similar reasons. There's always amnesia about things like this, but I'm pretty sure COVID-19 has become a case study on how not to handle a pandemic. A lot of what happened gave people a legitimate reason to distrust authority, and if we pretend that never happened things will simply continue to get worse as it repeats indefinitely. Again, I do agree that it was annoying seeing it become a political culture war issue about a conspiracy vs "trusting the science", but that is certainly not what I believe the majority of the lab leak hypothesis was angling for. Wikipedia even helpfully separates the two ideas into separate articles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation#Bio-weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation#Bio-we...

TacticalCoder 3y ago
> Yes, some conservative personalities early on had pushed some dumb conspiracies about COVID-19 being a bioweapon. No, that was not the crux of the argument that the many scientists, journalists and internet commenters had when they argued in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. It's totally insane. GP is literally rewriting history and getting upvoted for it. I post a link to a Congress bill (linked from TFA), from 2023 under the Biden administration (so not Trump), saying "there's reason to believe COVID may have originated at the Wuhan lab" and I immediately get two downvotes. It's as if the shills who tried to bury the lab leak posts back then (not the bioweapon ones, just the lab leak ones) were still actively trying to control the narrative. This time by explaining why it was normal to label everyone who talked about lab leak a "conspiracy theory cracknut" because they'd supposedly all be talking about bio-weapon (which they weren't). > There's always amnesia about things like this, but I'm pretty sure COVID-19 has become a case study on how not to handle a pandemic. A lot of what happened gave people a legitimate reason to distrust authority, and if we pretend that never happened things will simply continue to get worse as it repeats indefinitely. I totally agree.

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pessimizer 3y ago

> the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon, This was the part that media outlets and government seized upon to call any discussion of the lab leak theory racist. There was no "discussion" about covid being a "bio-weapon," it was a bunch of anti-China hawks repeating it over and over again based on absolutely nothing. They were so obviously nationalist anti-Chinese that the theory that covid happened because Chinese people are dirty and eat weird diseased things was able to be sold as the not-racist theory.

dahfizz 3y ago

You fell for the straw man. The media argued against the most outrageous and conspiratorial version of the lab leak theory to discredit it. They successfully made you associate lab leak with racist conspiracy

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