Pointing out that the origin of the virus matters enormously, Rich wrote that knowing the virus escaped from a lab “wouldn’t have changed how we responded to the pandemic in real time.”
Actually, I’m pretty sure it would have changed the response considerably.
If the virus was accidentally released from a laboratory, that means it was being researched in a laboratory. Which means someone, and probably several researchers, within the Wuhan Institute of Virology already knew some things about this particular virus when Wuhan residents started showing up at hospitals with strange new…