Proof is not objective. There are levels of proof, different ones for civil and criminal in the US. So, maybe this doesn't prove it to you, but it will prove it to others. Argue for what level of proof you think is right here, but there is no absolute in proof for anything like this, ever.
You're not wrong. My take is this: the context of this debate is, for many, "China caused the Covid pandemic intentionally and conspired to hide their culpability." It's a big claim, literally a conspiracy theory, so I'd put it at the standards of a criminal trial. This is circumstantial evidence and, while it's certainly evidence that could be used to prosecute that claim, it isn't a case of China being caught in flagrante delicto. In particular, the screaming headline "First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV" is very weak. There are reports from someone that people at WIV were sick. Nothing firmly supporting that it was Covid, and nothing but anonymously-sourced evidence that people at WIV were even sick.
If it were a criminal case you could be right. But you cannot sue a nation state, you cannot imprison an institution and culpable people may be hard to come by.
But actually, civil liability is more relevant here, since worldwide damages were extreme and changes in how virus research is handled are obviously necessary. So if one were to sue relevant parties in a civil court for damages or to force their procedures to be changed, the standard of proof is just "more likely than the other explanations". And I think one may get there, at some point.
Also, for a civil case, intent isn't necessary, negligence would also suffice.
He said they may have done so and that there's a chance it was intentional, which is entirely true and quite a reasonable thing to say. He acknowledges that it's unlikely, and he doesn't think that they would do that or that they did. But it is absolutely possible. You'd have to be crazy to think it wasn't possible.
The same article says:
> As the pandemic began spreading in earnest in the United States, President Trump and other high-ranking officials in his administration began to circulate a controversial theory that the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, though there is no evidence supporting this claim either.
...which is a lie. There was evidence supporting that claim even back in June 2020. The mere fact of the lab's existence in the city at the time and the subject matter that it was studying is evidence. It is not enough evidence of its own, but it is (circumstantial) evidence. People get convicted of crimes based on circumstantial evidence every day, and rightly so.
It took me five seconds of googling to find the president floating that theory. To say nobody is accusing China of using Covid as a bioweapon is a howler - we have a whole community of cranks who are saying there's a conspiracy to conceal the fact Earth is flat, of course there are legions of cranks saying Covid was spread on purpose.
It took me five more seconds of googling and I found "Nearly 30% think China likely to have spread Covid on purpose, UK poll finds."[1]
Do I think China did this on purpose? No. Was it a very effective economic weapon? Yes. Should we be on the lookout for others trying to do this on purpose? Hell yes. Just because you’re paranoid…
I'm trying to wrap my head around this statement. If Covid was a weapon, it was a breathtakingly bad one at every conceivable strategic and tactical level. It's like saying "nuking your own country in order to poison the rest of the world with the fallout is a very effective economic weapon."
you're thinking internationally, you should be thinking supra-nationally. Some elements within China and USA wanted economic warfare (sanctions, dependence-decoupling) to prove they can come out on top
Every war inflicts damage to both sides, as soon as you lob one bomb you should expect more lobbed back at you
what war really is is applying enormous economic strain (both offense and defense) until one side collapses
From that view, the decision to release a virus that plausibly emerged from a Chinese lab performing research tied with US scientists creates a solid fog of who's responsible, both sides deny an attack happened at all, and the war mongers get to have their economic game that ideally (for them) leads to such jingoism on both sides that hot war becomes a likely outcome
