There’s been many examples recently. A very public one was that Covid was likely from a lab leak. There were many institutions and government figures that worked to oppress that, but now most experts agree this is a likely hypothesis.
"On average, respondents assigned a 77% probability to a zoonosis, 21% to the lab-leak scenario"
While most scientists generally favor the natural origin theory, an alternative theory with a 21% chance is not something that should be dismissed or suppressed.
Sure, but that's a very different take to "most experts agree it's a likely hypothesis". My impression is that scientists have consistently said it's possible, but quite unlikely, and unsupported by the evidence.
==most experts agree this is a likely hypothesis==
Oddly, I find the lab leak discussion proves the exact opposite point. No truth has been found in the matter, hence even your use of words like "most experts", "likely", and "hypothesis." If anything, the insistence that it is a lab leak is proof that evidence isn't needed for some people to make a grand conclusion.
Just look at the performative (not informative) website [0] the current administration created to spread this theory. It focuses on things like lockdowns, social distancing, and mask mandates, which obviously have nothing to do with the lab leak theory.
When you view this website, which side does do you think is trying to create a narrative? It even seems to oppress information that doesn't support their view. Seems like pure propaganda to me.
If you think USA is too politically charged, even under the Biden administration and intelligence communities, then you can look to other countries, scientists, and others that have also come to the same conclusion independently.
The amount of circumstantial evidence is overwhelming and there’s clearly motive for cover up in the governments and organizations since they were involved in funding the research in Wuhan which sent three lab workers to the hospital before the outbreak was acknowledged.
A concerted effort to cover it up in China, maybe. But in the west it's not covered up, it's just acknowledged by what it is - a hypothesis. We don't actually know, and might not ever know, if Covid originated in a lab. Insisted it definitely did is, in fact, propaganda.
The US has no motive to cover it up, especially since the likes of Trump have been calling it the "China Virus" since day 1. We just don't know, and we especially didn't know at the start of Covid. Then, it was truly a conspiracy theory, so we shouldn't be surprised it was treated as such.
What trips people up about Covid is that we were, and still are, discovering things about it. It was a novel disease. People take changes in guidelines and popular opinion to mean the elites are lying to us or that there's some grand conspiracy. But no - they're changing their minds because they were wrong before, because their understanding of the virus and how to handle it were constantly evolving. We were throwing shit at the wall and finding out in real time if it worked. That's not how we treat Polio or Measles because we already know how those work.
The is now public evidence that Fauci acknowledge it was likely early on in private emails and then set out to campaign against it. In front of Congress he is criticized of perjury for lying that his agency funded gain of function researching. Fauci tried to argue it was not quite gain of function but similar even though everyone knows it was. He public also show that he moved all related conversations to private emails, in violation of the records act, to avoid scrutiny. He convinced trump to reverse an Obama era rule on funding gain of function research.
In the end, Obama pardoned fauci but he did not let ecohealth alliance nor its leader off the hook. They can no longer receive funding. Its leader was also the one who wrote in the lancet that it was a natural event.
There’s lots more evidence in public record now. But clearly it was an embarrassment for all involved including the USA.
> Covid was likely from a lab leak...government...worked to oppress [sic] that
Controversial opinion scoped solely to this one topic: who gives a shit?
In general I agree that governments shouldn't be in the business of cover-ups or suppressing the truth (and in this case I don't think we'll ever know the "real" truth). But what's the difference here? Covid happened, however it happened, and we all had to deal with it.
Bringing it up now feels politicians trying to distract from more pressing problems that they don't have any answers for.
We're not studying traffic accidents with knowable failure rates and capped losses. This is a once-in-a-generation event. Do literally everything possible to prevent it because the stakes are so high.
We could for sure prevent a re-occurrence by cracking down on biology experiments and markets, going into permanent lockdown, stopping all international trade and transit, and so on. But very few people want that, so we compromise and prioritise.
