Does the origin of COVID really matter?

That question, raised rhetorically, seems to be more and more the new trope by BlueAnon-type, if you will, thought leaders, whether politicians and political advisors on the one hand, or PhD scientists in the relevant disciplines on the other.

It appears to be their response to the Department of Energy report (they've ignored, it would seem, Sen. Richard Burr's Senate committee minority report from last year, as reported by ProPublica and blogged about here, precisely because he is a Republican) about the possibility of a lab leak, and putting it enough in the public eye it can no longer be denied. (I don't know if deep-shit level BlueAnoners like Peter Hotez have even gotten to the level of being willing to express a rhetorical question yet. And, per Kuff of here at Texas Progressives, since I extracted one of his Roundup items a week ago to make into a separate post about Your Local Epidemiologist, I don't know if he's gotten past his "so-called" framing yet. Or will in the near future.)

But I digress.

Answer?

Yes it does, and arguably a lot.

Here in the US, it's possible that with Donald Trump as president and his mix of semi-denialism and racist comments, that even if BlueAnoners had been open to the possibility of a lab leak in 2020 and early 2021, that wingnuts wouldn't have taken COVID seriously. But, that's no excuse for the early squashdown of the lab leak idea, not only here in the US, but Britain and elsewhere, as UnHerd reminds us.

First, just like Donald J. Trump, BlueAnoners have contributed to further erosion of public trust in science.

Second, by not being more forthright right away, they've contributed to further erosion of international cooperation on public health. With Xi Jinping as president of China, along with Trump as president of the US at the same time, this might have happened anyway, but it's once again no excuse. Outside the US and Western allies, it's most certainly no excuse from the World Health Organization.

Third, and derived from that, they've enabled reflexive anti-American writers like Max Blumenthal to run more flak for Xi's regime and to enable his stonewalling.

Fourth, it matters because it means that lab safety and security at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — AND at other labs, including at North Carolina here in the US — where lab leaks have happened before, still are not being addressed with as much safety as they should. That's even more a concern when you have labs doing gain of function work, and even more when St. Anthony of Fauci lies about that.

Fifth, the BlueAnoner stance has encouraged a few (maybe more, but not me) actual leftists like Sam Husseini to go horseshoe theory and believe there was bioweaponizing.

That said, Kuff is in "good" company with BlueAnon Kevin Drum, 

Sadly, a non-BlueAnon like Jonathan Katz also derides the idea. (Why Kuff linked to his footnotes instead of the body, I don't know.) I know that Katz's framing is wrong; the reality is there is a theory, but because China is not Haiti, per his comparison to events there in 2010, it's hard to get either confirmatory or disconfirmatory details. As for some theoretical exposition shifting from WIV to the Chinese Centers for Disease Control, that's part of that issue, and doesn't make such theories nothing but talk, in my opinion. Per Katz, it is good that (as far as we know!) the CCDC didn't do gain of function research, but, for me at least, gain of function is not a "required" part of the lab leak idea. It would be an adjunct worry, instead, if if the lab leak theory is correct, and WIV not CCDC is the culprit. Katz comes close to a red herring here. Per Katz, I'm OK with "hypothesis" or even "working idea" rather than "theory," but "just talk" or "all talk," I'm not.

At this point, I think Kuff is treating the whole discussion in a tribalist manner.

Update: Markham Heid got 19 PhD scientists to speak not for attribution about this and related matters. I think the one who says, re the lab leak hypothesis itself, that 75-25 is their odds on a natural angle vs a lab leak, sounds about right. Others, multiple others, on the issue of "absolute certainty," say Worobey is surely right on "preponderance of evidence' but wrong if he's pushing "absolute certainty" on natural origin. One of these people says he is absolutely doing that. Richard Ebright, maybe?