Zoonosis, bad luck, racism, and megacult delusion.

The best experts on the globe are still saying COVID is zoonotic. These researchers have scientific reputations to uphold. True, rigorous science is a public discipline involving a large community of researchers.

They're unlikely to just handwave and talk nonsense. They might make an error, but some of these scientists are truly superb, and dauntingly capable.

Royal Society reports, Johns Hopkins researchers, University of Sydney specialists, and other leading non-China-based researchers have agreed with the zoonosis analysis.

Here's the really important thing, however. All first-world, Western, great powers have bioweapons research and labs. Statistically by size, China is about (very roughly, but significantly) half of this world of labs (It's less than half, but it is big, and Chinese research output in the last decade has skyrocketed).

If there is going to be a catostrophic bioweapons accident, and many experts regard it as a matter of when, rather than if, then China stands a large statistical chance of being the unlucky host.

It makes sense, also, to think also about broader global science-risk context, and relatively recent history. Japan and Russia have both had serious nuclear accidents due to wanton mismanagement.

The West has a long record of intentional high-risk, high-science behaviour. France intentionally irradiated the Bikini Atoll. Great Britain (at Maralinga in Australia), the US, and France have intentionally exposed troops and First Nations folk to H-bomb tests. The US Tuskegee syphilis study is infamous.

Japan recently announced its intention to dump Fukushima waste water in the world's oceans. There was an outcry at such a planned offense to our global natural ecology.

This kind of behaviour and attitude doesn't seem to be appropriate to encourage a high level of concern, globally speaking, for safety involving any kind of extremely hazardous labs and technologies, military or otherwise.

More specific to pandemics and biohazards: origin and outbreak risks are global. In an environment where bioweapons - not to mention biohacker - labs are everywhere, it makes limited sense to attach blame for any accident to a political ideology, and little sense at all to blame a race of people. How is a Guizhou grandfather, or school girl in Hubei, responsible for such an accident, in such a scenario? Johns Hopkins, Royal Society, and Sydney Uni researchers are not CPC, and not Chinese. What's their interest in propagating falsehood?

Few serious and sober Western experts are willing to entertain the idea that COVID-19 was intentionally released from a lab, and there are very serious doubts that it was engineered in one. The zoonosis analysis still prevails in sober, well-funded Western scientific institutions.

All of that being said, megacult narratives that encourage high risk behaviour and the abuse of scientific resources and power for terrorism (of the kind that former CIA and State Department head Michael Pompeo endorsed, for example) seem very much to introduce a serious interacting risk factor on the basis of political and ideological psychology. There is a kind of psychological risk-taking, group personality associated with fideist and supernaturalist megacults.

Western bioscientists have little interest in dissimulating about the origins of COVID. LiMeng Yan, on the other hand, is known to have been having marriage trouble with her CPC husband, is known to deeply disparage the Chinese Communist Party, and defected to the US. What's more worrying from a psychological risk perspective, however, is that Yan signed on in the US with Steve Bannon and his bizarre, megacult-affiliated misinformation channel.

Megacults seem, almost universally, to adversely influence the social management of pandemics as well. The response to COVID from the Catholic megacult in the West involved responsible moves, with Priests donning water pistols and masks at baptisms, and requesting congregational compliance with stay-at-home laws at the behest of their Pontiff. However, whether Italy's own disastrous COVID outcome is megacult-narrative related is still unclear. Or, perhaps it is not completely unclear.

Meanwhile, US megacult familiars of Paula White and Lauren Boebert, seemed to have been broadly determined to regard COVID as some kind of demonic conspiracy theory that could be beaten supernaturally (How that delusion itself even works, exactly, is a nontrivial question for psychologists to investigate.) They may have been beaten for insanity points by some Asian megacults, however. Perhaps the emphasis should be on how governments and societies have responded to the COVID crisis. While Thailand's Buddhist megacult seems to have allowed its naturalistic beliefs to take it in the right direction regarding COVID responses, stratified societies in India seem to be little concerned for the comparative health and safety of those literally labelled untouchables by high-caste, Hindu megacult fundamentalists.

We have a long way to go to prevent and manage pandemics properly. The group psychopathology of megacults, and their memetic narratives, is something that will have to be more carefully factored-in to pandemic responses, even as researchers develop new technologies in viral vaccinations to prevent zoonotic outbreaks.

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