Not really. Isn't the best place to open a center that "researches tick based disease transmission" somewhere that's close proximity to a hot-spot for ticks that transmit diseases?
Yes, very similar situation. Opening a Coronavirus research lab next to an area historically active for natural virus harbors and transmission makes perfect sense. However, that situation also empowered the uninformed to come out of the woodwork and repeat the nonsense they heard from people like Bret Weinstein, using the correlation with a perfectly reasonable explanation as some kind of "gotcha".
