This doesn’t surprise me. Nor would it not occurring naturally, or in this moment Fauci making it up to appease certain people. My trust in most institutions were almost non-existent before the start of 2020
Pretty much both of these combined. The fact that basically every story about this a year back was "experts" saying that is was literally impossible for this to be man-made was not science in the least. You really can't trust much if that's the type of dialog we have that basically put people who said it was possible it was from a lab on equal par with flat-earthers.
You semi-misunderstand.
And how much harm is done by people being disenfranchised by official messaging and not believing actual science later?
I don't know, ask the republican party about that. They've made their bed with actively disregarding "science" at every level, openly scoffing it and those who use it to try and advise best courses of action. They are famous for listening to "talking heads" namely their Glorious Leader and religious figure heads, who babble bullshit, contrary to established, confirmed science, because they were told it was BS.
Yeah, this just reads like typical and prudent scientific skepticism, stating that as long as something can't be ruled out, it cannot be disregarded.
Yeah, it wasn't important during the pandemic because it doesn't help to solve the problem, which is why I never really cared about it much. In the long run, it could be of importance though. Though putting fake science out there I believe does more harm than good because how many people are truly going to get made at asian people here for a mistake that happened in China? And are you really gonna stop word from getting out that it's a possibility it's from a Chinese lab? That's a big fat NO. All the messaging mishaps over the entire pandemic did more harm than their intended good because people get mad when you bullshit them.
Would the former CDC director and Fauci say man-made is a possibility if it wasn't? The story isn't that Fauci believes it's likely to be man-made, just that there's a possibility.
The former CDC director's logic as to why he thinks it's man-made is how attuned it was at the start to be transmissible in humans, which makes logical sense. I don't know the genetics of it obviously but I doubt if you can 100% prove it's natural genetically, you'd have such high level medical people saying man-made is a possibility. The question also is how much do we even know about genetics to know if it could or could not come about naturally, it is still a new field.
Well they do it under the guise of "medical" research, because technically nobody is allowed to research viruses as Bioweapons.
None of what you says necessarily involves a man-made virus. A natural virus with which experiments are conducted can also escape from a lab.
