The Department of Energy leans towards the COVID lab leak hypothesis. What now?

 So many questions.  Answers are a dime a dozen.  Coherent answers are somewhat pricier.  Plausible answers?  Answers in which a scientifically minded skeptic can have a high degree of confidence?  Gimme a grant and no deadlines.  We're on a price tier system here.  If you just want an answer, though, I can blather and bloviate with the worst of them.  Let us consider the big news of the morning, if ever so briefly.  The Department of Energy has reached a tentative conclusion-- which is no conclusion at all, really-- that COVID likely came from a Chinese lab.  You know, that thing about which we weren't even allowed to speculate online, by formal decree a couple of years ago, because tech censors know best!  Blah, blah, "the first amendment blah, blah, government, blah, blah, private companies," which is totally compatible with the pro-business, deregulatory impulses of the people who make this argument, right?  Right?  Look, either you believe in the principle of free speech, or you don't.  Full stop.  Don't hide behind a legal doctrine that you don't actually support.

The back-and-forth indeterminacy of the lab leak hypothesis, among many other stories in recent years, shows the dangers of social media censorship.  Did COVID come from a Chinese lab?  I do not know, and properly parsed, neither does the Department of Energy.  They have a low degree of confidence in their current assessment.  It would be as though you ask me about the house's chances of winning a bet on the roulette wheel.  The odds favor the house.  The odds always favor the house, or casinos wouldn't make money, but on any one spin, the advantage is small.  They win because with enough spins, you lose in the long run.  I mean, what kind of a dumbass, incompetent businessman could possibly lose money running a fucking casino?!  How stupid, how inept, how pathetically useless and fucked of wits would you have to be to set up a casino and lose money?!  Oh, right.  Anyway, moving on, the point is that this is the DoE's tentative conclusion given the data at the moment.

What do I think?  I updated my assessment when I read the DoE's analysis this morning.  I was mostly on the wet market side as of last night, and I moved some increment towards the Chinese lab this morning.  How much?  I do not know.  I must cogitate.  Why must I?  Because I am a political science professor.  Must you?  Not necessarily.  It is OK to say, "I don't know," and I may eventually decide that I simply do not know.  I, too, can do that.

Yet the problem is that this matters for international relations.  COVID killed millions.  Estimating the worldwide death toll is difficult, and even lefties in the US only selectively care about deaths elsewhere in the world (or even here), as I regularly observe.  Let's go with a non-ideologically conservative estimate of six million, worldwide.  That would be half a holocaust.

If the DoE is correct, China caused half a holocaust.

Half a holocaust, worldwide.  Lying, and covering it up.  Jew-boy, me, says fuck off with your nazi comparisons.  You hurt my feelings!  You're a nazi because words are violence!  You cited a study that contradicted my beliefs!  Violence, you nazi!

No.  But there are two people in all of history with more blood on their hands than Hitler:  Stalin and Mao.  (Shall we count Marx, then?)  The Chinese communist regime is mathematically one of the three most evil regimes in human history, and if the DoE is right, it just did a half-a-holocaust.

Again.

With the point being that this doesn't match how many people Mao murdered.  And is it a coincidence that we learn this as China considers direct military aid to Russia, as a man who sees himself as the heir to Stalin tries to rebuild the mathematically most evil regime in all of history?

So while neither you nor I need to come to a conclusion on the lab leak hypothesis, this matters, because the Chinese regime matters.

Unless you think that China has learned its lesson, and they'll get their act together and they'll be good global citizens from now on.  Sure.  Sounds about right to me.