Trump’s claim that a lab developed and released COVID-19 is ignorant.

That’s being generous.

1. People aren’t smart enough. The difference between SARS-1 and SARS-2 (COVID-19) is not genetically significant. But the diseases have very different pathologies. Scientists could not possibly take SARS-1, tweak its RNA, and have such a subtle change. We don’t understand genetic interactions at that level. That’s not arguable.

2. It’s only slightly more possible that COVID-19 was “discovered” in the wild, was being studied in a lab, and was accidentally released. That never happened before, and there a plenty of reasons why it wouldn’t happen. First, discovering a virus that works like COVID-19 would be exceptional, because it targets humans so well. People don’t look for coronavirus in hospitals. They look in bat caves. It would mean that the one bat virus adapted for humans was one of the millions of potential viruses actually sampled. Then, in labs that need to be sterilized, where people rigorously avoid contact, labs that are isolated to successfully do any research, this particularly virus was handled cavalierly.

On the other hand bats and people interact all the time, or people and pangolins or some other intermediate. Scientists can’t dead-reckon which virus to find in a cave. They pick some. Many many more orders of magnitude of interactions occur randomly between people and bats in certain places.

Morons will always exist. But there’s no reason to let ignorance pass.