American Virologists feared that their field would be blamed for the pandemic, and used motivated reasoning to convince themselves that the field could not be r

American Virologists feared that their field would be blamed for the pandemic, and used motivated reasoning to convince themselves that the field could not be responsible for the pandemic. And the US was gripped by Trumpism, so anything in any way connected to Trump automatically became verboten. Some of the leading voices in opposition to the lab leak hypothesis such as Peter Daszak had close academic connections (collaboration, grants etc.) with the BSL4 lab in Wuhan.