Because political ideals. The left treats this as a conspiracy because:
(1) Trump initially blamed COVID on China and the ethos of the left is that Trump isn't ever allowed to be right, and "resist" means unconditionally doing the opposite. So once Trump said it, half the country unplugged their brains.
(2) It's no fun to blame a lab in Wuhan when the left could instead blame DeSantis/Republicans/Unvaxxed.
(3) The US is kinda wimpy about a real fight over this, regardless of who is in office. Xi would tell Biden (or whoever) to pound sand if the US ever really tried investigating this and seeking some sort of retribution. Again, the path of least resistance is to stick one's head in the sand and find a convenient scapegoat like Joe Rogan or whatever.
(4) Too many people have already definitively declared it impossible so they're pot committed to their position even if it's wrong, no different than mask efficacy (zero). There have been a couple issues where one side went all-in so there's no reversal or even slight walking back because the repetitional risk is too high.
I'm pretty sure there was a conspiracy. Not a conspiracy to create a pandemic, but a conspiracy to hide an accident due to incompetence. Not all conspiracies are myths, just consider Watergate: there was a conspiracy to hide Nixon's shenanigans. The only difference is that one happened in a dictatorship while the other happened in a democracy with a free press.
Oh I agree, at a bare minimum there's nothing even remotely wacky about the lab leak theory. I'm just explaining why half the country has counterintuitively decided to brand it as lunatic fringe conspiracy rather than it being self-evidently plausible if not likely.
Well I'm guessing that because of your political ideals you're committed to the wrong position that masks are ineffective so studies like this won't convince you, https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-068302
No, it's my commitment to objective analysis and not bizarre herd behavior combined with religious/cult undertones that led me to this conclusion.
I always love when someone posts like one single "study" that almost always doesn't even qualify as amateur hour (eg data mining) and thinks it's some sort of mic drop, as if there aren't 25 disconfirming studies or data points for every one thing saying masks have even a faint amount of efficacy.
The link was to a rigorous meta-analysis in one of the top medical journals of several studies with combined n=389k that concluded that masks showed a 53% reduction in covid-19 incidence.
it's too bad this was downvoted because it's probably the best explanation.
I'm not totally sure about 3, my guess is that we have collected far more useful intelligence that our agencies have released, but nothing sufficient to make a geopolitical claim about China, and the cost of being wrong with such an accusation is huge.
The irony in this statement is palpable. You're so obviously ready to confirm your priors that you'll actively go out of your way to avoid other plausible explanations.
I'm a democrat and I definitely think a lot of left-leaning scientists really made themselves look like idiots by saying that claiming China had a lab leak was "racist". It was always a reasonable (IE, not impossible or even extremely unlikely) hypothesis, and only some of the people who suggested it were doing so out of racial hatred for China.
(1) Trump initially blamed COVID on China and the ethos of the left is that Trump isn't ever allowed to be right, and "resist" means unconditionally doing the opposite. So once Trump said it, half the country unplugged their brains.
(2) It's no fun to blame a lab in Wuhan when the left could instead blame DeSantis/Republicans/Unvaxxed.
(3) The US is kinda wimpy about a real fight over this, regardless of who is in office. Xi would tell Biden (or whoever) to pound sand if the US ever really tried investigating this and seeking some sort of retribution. Again, the path of least resistance is to stick one's head in the sand and find a convenient scapegoat like Joe Rogan or whatever.
(4) Too many people have already definitively declared it impossible so they're pot committed to their position even if it's wrong, no different than mask efficacy (zero). There have been a couple issues where one side went all-in so there's no reversal or even slight walking back because the repetitional risk is too high.