I wouldn't use the word bad faith, but I think for a lot of people it was very likely motivated by political/social pressure more than by trying to find the truth. In a positive light one could interpret some of the dismissal as an effort to combat anti-Asian racism occuring here. In a somewhat more negative light one might think it was simply the move to make to avoid
even remotely aligning with conservatives. There were probably also dynamics going on with foreign politics, but even just on US soil there was more than enough politicization of the issue.
I see a very different dynamic reading the article. Remember, at the time this all happened Trump was still very publicly backing the Chinese government's response. Tom Cotton was very much bucking the party line in calling the CCP liars.
What I see over and over throughout all of this is repeated conflation of "lab-leaked" and "man-made".
Tom Cotton absolutely never even insinuated that the virus was man-made, only that a china was lying about the market and that a lab leak was a possible origin
This distinction was quickly lost, but it is not clear that was due to malice or even partisanship. In this very article, with the benedit of hind site, the author repeatedly conflates the two an switches which concept is being discussed.
At the time there was no basis to reject the lab-leak theory. There was at the time some preliminary basis to reject the man-made hypothesis. As far as I cam tell, we are just really bad at protraying any nuance when all the incentives reward sensationalizing everything.
Yes I agree there was a lot of conflation of man made and lab leak, but I much more frequently saw people dismiss lab leak because of arguments focusing on man made, than people saying they believed the man made hypothesis because it could be a lab leak. That might just be my social circle though.
Similarly, I can't recall a time that lab leak wasn't considered a conservative conspiracy among my social circles, and that does include a conservative group from my hometown. In the exact same groups I do recall a rapid swapping of position on masks however.
That is of course anecdote, but in general Trump has been very critical of China, and also issued travel bans relatively early on that were painted as racist by the media. Additionally, Trump and his fans childishly insisted on calling COVID the "China flu" for awhile there.
So the origin of the lab leak hypothesis may not have been conservative, but from what I can tell they pretty quickly latched onto the potential for anti-China sentiment there. And not too long after that we had another situation where the Democrats decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater because they didn't like the ideas that had picked up steam with Trump supporters.
But maybe you're right it's a more untargeted lack of ability for nuance. Certainly in this case that's possible, as it's a more difficult technical topic. I just see the way some of my friends hedge fairly benign statements these days, out of fear of being associated with Trumpers. I actually know someone who got rid of the couple of red baseball caps they had because they were afraid people might think it's some sort of MAGA statement. Nuance is even harder when there's a fear of saying anything that might get you out-grouped.
> Similarly, I can't recall a time that lab leak wasn't considered a conservative conspiracy among my social circles, and that does include a conservative group from my hometown. In the exact same groups I do recall a rapid swapping of position on masks however.
That seems to imply what I was saying: The confusion wasn't purely partisan. Though, partisanship certainly didn't help with nuanced communication.
I found the partisanship on both sides of the aisle absolutely appalling during this pandemic.
Yeah that's fair, it's never going to be easy for the general public to stay correctly informed on rapidly evolving technical topics. But once some piece of misinformation got too deeply entrenched on one side the partisanship took over pretty hard. Maybe that's nothing new, I am relatively young, but something about it does feel like it's getting worse.
