You shouldn't have used the word "covertly". That completely distorted your point and made it false.
I watched the Joe Rogan Josh Rogin clip you linked to. It's very interesting. But what Rogin says is that Fauci "found a way to turn gain-of-function research back on". He doesn't say that Fauci did anything covertly. He's describing effective bureaucratic maneuvering, which Fauci must be good at. He couldn't have stayed in his job for decades otherwise.
"Covert" means something very different, for example if he had taken money that was assigned to different research, funneled it to gain-of-function labs, and then falsified reports about how the money was spent. Some outrageous scenario like that is what you're implying with that word. Rogin implies nothing of the sort. Actually, from the facts in the OP article, which are drawn from public reports, it's clear Fauci got what he wanted overtly. That's how effective bureaucrats get things done.
By overstating the claim, you distracted from the significant thing, which is that Fauci was a major funder of gain-of-function research and, in the dispute between virologists about whether it was too risky or not, was strongly on the side that advocated for it. The other side managed to get the research shut down for a while, and then Fauci managed to get it turned back on. There's no suggestion or evidence that he did so in bad faith, as Rogin is careful to point out. But it does mean that he has a conflict of interest in dismissing the lab leak hypothesis, just like Daszak does. That's already a very strong point, and a lot for people to take. If you say that it was "covert" on top of that, you're acting like the very conspiracy theorist they want to tell everyone you are, and helpfully providing them with a bit that is easily debunked.
I agree that compromised isn't a smart word to use about this, but even if you think all these questions have been settled, I'm surprised you don't agree that it is bad optics to have the investigator to be the funder of the research being investigated, and even worse when he says things like: well, we asked them and they said no, so that's that. The conflict of interest couldn't be more obvious.
It's the media's job to investigate conflicts of interest, so the fact that they didn't looked into that, and that they took Daszak's original so-called debunking at face value, is bad optics on another level. It has left a credibility vacuum, so it's unsurprising that articles like the current one are coming in from the margins.
Right, but the Western sponsors of the work would have been aware of this. This whole thing was a major dispute among virologists, major enough to end up in a NYT editorial. That makes the lab escape scenario an international failure, not a national one.
It's a possible explanation, but that doesn't mean it's "very likely". In that case it would be easy enough to drive back down to the cave and collect the missing evidence of bat origin. Better yet, you'd never have to disclose the low-level employee part, so there'd be no political fallout. Easy win.
Also, my understanding (quite possibly wrong) is that while humans can get sick from bats, as cave workers did in Southern China, those viruses aren't contagious in the sense that the sick humans go on to infect others. "Since no case of an epidemic caused by direct bat-to-human transmission has yet been demonstrated, it is thought that the transfer to humans more probably took place via an intermediate host species in which the virus could evolve and move towards forms likely to infect human cells." [1] If that's right then your explanation of spilled bat samples is incomplete: it doesn't explain what caused the bat samples to adapt into a form that could spread among humans. That sort of puts us back at square 1. Another way of saying this is that if your explanation is likely, then we'd have expected the pandemic to have started where the bats are - through sick cave workers or something similar. But in fact it started far away.
If the evidence is that overwhelming, then why are so few researchers saying so? I can understand things being extremely skewed at the political and policy level - that's expected - and I can understand the media being skewed because I'm familiar with that on other issues. But if your argument is right then this is also basically a total collapse of the scientific community. That's harder to swallow. From your comment I assume that you're either a biologist or trained as such, so I'd like to hear how you explain that.
You're treating that question as settled. To me that is the mirror image of the media outlets trying to shut down an open question by claiming it's a "conspiracy" that has been "debunked". I would say what's needed is a credible, independent investigation, one that reasonable people can trust. We haven't had that yet.
That's a bit confusing because the OP makes an opposite point: "The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months."
I really think it's just the other way around. The more people make this about China, the less likely we are to find out the truth. If it's used as a geopolitical chess piece, it will get bogged down forever in political mud, which is kind of where the question is right now anyways. People will decide what they think about it based on how they feel about China. That's crazy.
The China aspect is probably a red herring. Gain-of-function research was internationally funded, including by the US. The perils had been pointed out for years by virologists [1], some of whom managed to get an editorial in the New York Times against it [2].
If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with the institutions and individuals that pushed it despite the risks. No one knows the answer to this (edit: I mean to whether covid escaped from a lab), but it's an open question that deserves credible investigation. Having the investigator be one of the principal funders of the research being investigated is such...bad optics, to put it nicely, that one wonders how anyone thought that would be ok.
I watched the Joe Rogan Josh Rogin clip you linked to. It's very interesting. But what Rogin says is that Fauci "found a way to turn gain-of-function research back on". He doesn't say that Fauci did anything covertly. He's describing effective bureaucratic maneuvering, which Fauci must be good at. He couldn't have stayed in his job for decades otherwise.
"Covert" means something very different, for example if he had taken money that was assigned to different research, funneled it to gain-of-function labs, and then falsified reports about how the money was spent. Some outrageous scenario like that is what you're implying with that word. Rogin implies nothing of the sort. Actually, from the facts in the OP article, which are drawn from public reports, it's clear Fauci got what he wanted overtly. That's how effective bureaucrats get things done.
By overstating the claim, you distracted from the significant thing, which is that Fauci was a major funder of gain-of-function research and, in the dispute between virologists about whether it was too risky or not, was strongly on the side that advocated for it. The other side managed to get the research shut down for a while, and then Fauci managed to get it turned back on. There's no suggestion or evidence that he did so in bad faith, as Rogin is careful to point out. But it does mean that he has a conflict of interest in dismissing the lab leak hypothesis, just like Daszak does. That's already a very strong point, and a lot for people to take. If you say that it was "covert" on top of that, you're acting like the very conspiracy theorist they want to tell everyone you are, and helpfully providing them with a bit that is easily debunked.