Off the bat, this does not pass the sniff test in term of motive. Why would a state actor run this kind of unserious attempt at a laboratory? Why take risks of discovery by operating on US soil? Is this how you would run a pathogen research program if you were a CCP planner?

On the other hand, the people making noise about this have clear electoral and base pandering motive. It might turn out indeed to be a mentally ill individual, though admittedly one with a lot of cash to burn on their pet project (this is the one discordant part for me). Or a fly by night medical device manufacturer, that had this (fake) pathogen freezer collection as a potemkin village type lab to impress investor/employee/family (?), potentially to ensure the fund from China would keep coming (a classic corporate fraud, then). Or a combination of both.

There also big "unreliable narrators" vibes around reporting on this issue, where everything is reported from a few persons, without a lot of factual confirmation. For instance, the list of pathogen is entirely based on labels, not actual testing:

>CDC officials confirmed that the CDC made this list of pathogens based solely

on the labels that were placed on samples.

There is 0 factual proof that the vials do contain pathogen, and not horse blood fancifully labelled by the aforementioned mentally ill or grifting individual.

And also:

>Of the equipment in the Reedley Biolab, most was for packaging products.

None of the not-at-all trivial equipement to run a serious virology or bacteriology operations are reported or shown in the report. What research, or production, or pathogen could have occurred without that kind of equipment?

But these important facts were not proeminently in the coverage - I had to read the report to find it. The whole "CDC didn't do enough" plot line is also fully compatible with the CDC accurately characterizing this as completely absurd, and not bothering to implicate itself in a political stunt.

@CamillePerrin yeah, my initial feeling of 20% may even be high. I am taking the pictures / etc from local news at face value. It may be even more fake than that, either constructed for them or them pretty obviously explaining things wrong. it just seems so crazy. But my other view is that with everything so politicized, what if it was really something worth looking at, but CDC/China/Zoonosis/etc is so radioactive, all the agencies just shied away?

FYI I'm a strong bayesian believer in lableak for the normal reasons and think it's pretty well-known among people familiar with it that it's obviously true, and that public opinion will change in 5-10 years once the related people retire. I don't believe any kind of crazy conspiracy / death / intentionality / etc stuff, just that it was normal academic incentives run amok, fear of being called racist, fear of not getting that postdoc, personal ambition that led us to just never quite cut off the dangerous research and then scramble to hide it for the "public good", "trust in government" and other similar things.