Is it wrong to blame "China" if the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab? – HotAir

Wen is clear in saying that scientists should investigate the possibility that the virus escaped from the WIV, whatever that might mean for a surge in hate crimes in the west. But not every scientist may be that intellectually honest. Nate Silver pointed recently to this story in Nature with the comment, “it seems very warped that a bunch of prominent scientists are saying we shouldn’t investigate the claims for reasons that have little to do with science and lots to do with politics.”

In the Science letter, the authors note that Asian people have been harassed by those who blame COVID-19 on China, and attempt to dissuade abuse. Nonetheless, some aggressive proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis interpreted the letter as supporting their ideas…

Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, maintains that no strong evidence supports a lab leak, and he worries that hostile demands for an investigation into the WIV will backfire, because they often sound like allegations. He says this could make Chinese scientists and officials less likely to share information. Other virologists suggest that such sentiments could lead to more scrutiny of US grants for research projects conducted in China…

Fidler … says that the escalating demands and allegations are contributing to a geopolitical rift at a moment when solidarity is needed. “The United States continues to poke China in the eye on this issue of an investigation,” he says.

A lot of researchers out there seem willing, even eager to move on from the lab-leak theory for their own pet political reasons, or possibly for the overarching reason that confirmation would bring disrepute onto their profession and further undermine trust in the entire scientific expert class. It’d be easy for some to seize on Wen’s concern about hate crimes as another pretense for not dwelling on the virus’s origins. But the virus’s origins do matter, both for the future of civilian oversight of scientific research and for the credibility of China’s narrative that its handling of COVID was a success story relative to the west’s. Again, Wen’s not saying that the subject should be dropped or the lab-leak theory discredited for humanitarian reasons. But others will.

via hotair.com

I think it's fine to distinguish between the PRC and the CCP and the "Chinese" more generally, although using the latter to refer to the current regime in Communist China is just ordinary English as we all know by now. But I agree with Allahpundit. Much of this hand wringing about investigating the virus's origins seems to have more about anti-reckless virologist sentiment than anti-Chinese sentiment.

We really do have an urgent need to know where this remarkably destructive semi-creature came from. Dr. Anderson's concerns that there is not enough evidence yet to conclude where the virus came from seems a but disingenuous as the whole idea is to try to get enough evidence so that we do know, something scientists presumably specialize in. Dr. Fidler's claim that now we need solidarity not division sounds like a load of that swaddle I referred to earlier--No, we don't need solidarity with the people who should not have been fooling around with these deadly germs in the first place and might have let some loose out of carelessness, and who, by the way, are guilty generally of many other unspeakable crimes. As awful as this pandemic was, it could have been far worse and the next one might well be. Don't forget those samples of Ebola and other nasties the PRC/CCP got from Canada a year or two ago.