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Comment by codingslave | Hacker News Reader

This would be a really scary outcome. As has been commented elsewhere, there's confirmed events of at least four virus leaks from labs in Beijing.

Evidence/article on it here:

https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-lab...

Not only that, but just last year there was a case of a Chinese scientist who was banished from a Canadian bio lab level 4 for stealing virus samples, as well as a Harvard Academic found to be taking money from the Chinese gov to help develop the lab in Wuhan.

None of this proves the lab theory, but I do believe that with enough genetic analysis the truth will come out.

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I don't like how people are saying that theories regarding it being accidentally leaked are conspiratorial in nature.

Intentional leaking? Sure, I think it's fair to consider that a conspiracy theory. But not accidental.

It would be conspiratorial in nature because it questions the Chinese government's official narrative that the virus emerged from a seafood market, and implies they're covering up the truth.

Of course, people usually use the term "conspiratorial" to be synonymous with "untrue" or even "patently absurd."

We already know for sure that the initial cases did not originate in the seafood market and that the market was just an infection vector for subsequent cases.

Recently available data shows that the first few cases happened in November.

I know that specifically on reddit, most posts related to the lab theory are deleted on the main pages and subreddits for this virus. For me it's been fascinating to watch the curation and deletion of content that has been evolving over the last few days.

I agree that anything with intentional leaking is really far into conspiracy theory land, but the idea that it was a leak is not so crazy.

> None of this proves the lab theory

The attempted and partially continued cover-up and downplaying of the outbreak does add a significant amount of credence to the theory.

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