> Remember when it was impossible to talk about the lab leak theory without being labeled? No, because I saw people talking about it continuously throughout th

> Remember when it was impossible to talk about the lab leak theory without being labeled? No, because I saw people talking about it continuously throughout the period. The conspiracy nuts and right-wing activists making wild evidence-free claims that COVID was a Chinese bio weapon or genetic engineering mistake were rightly dismissed, but people approaching it scientifically and trying to assess evidence for clues that it might have been a mishandled lab sample were not. That’s always been the problem with this: “lab leak” meant different things to different people, and the erstwhile martyrs tried to represent themselves as representing some broader truth when they had always been trying to work backwards from a politically-advantageous explanation.