Covid Politics Is The Worst Politics

 Recently, the virologists (?) at the Department of Energy have said with "low confidence" that Covid escaped from a lab in Wuhan. The "lab leak" hypothesis has been circulating since 2020, and while there are some important points to be made regarding keeping viruses safely behind locked doors, on a fundamental level it doesn't really matter if it was a lab leak or zoonotic crossover in a market. It could conceivably matter if China was engineering a bio-weapon, but there's zero evidence for that. Covid hurt them as much as it hurt anyone, and it would be a pretty crappy weapon at any rate.

While a lab leak could have implications for how secure bioresearch facilities should be, the idea that "liberals" routinely denied that it could have been a lab leak isn't really true. It's always been possible, if less likely than a market crossover. As Yglesias points out, Trump was rhetorically racist in his usual way, but he didn't really call out the Chinese government over a possible lab leak. 

The issue isn't whether we should be studying coronaviruses - we obviously should be - but how secure those facilities are. China's steadfast lack of transparency means we won't know and won't know whether they have taken appropriate steps - if it was a lab leak - to correct any lapses.

All of this gets filtered through the puke funnel of conservative PWN THE LIBTARDS nonsense so you get shit like this. Because the DOE says it might have been a lab leak (not "it was definitely a lab leak") we get the usual idiots saying that this means that masks and vaccines were wrong, too. There was a similar meta study about masking being ineffective at stopping the spread of Covid. The study actually said that mask mandates tended not to work in places where they were poorly enforced, like, you know, America.

I mean, in that Campos post, they actually say they were right about ivermectin. They use the rhetorical sleight of hand whereby the possibility of a lab leak being correct means that public health officials were lying about everything else.

The simple truth is that conservative politics has now devolved to a place where their primary position is to oppose whatever "liberals" want. Cleeks Law rules us all.

This inevitably makes their positions stupid and incoherent.