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Comment by allovernow | Hacker News Reader

There is legitimate evidence of Canadian researchers working on coronaviruses in bats smuggling something to the Wuhan lab. Arrests were made a month before people across the world were taking the virus seriously.

Also the lab in Wuhan has leaked at least one SARS strain in the past.

>They're no more responsible for the virus

Do you understand the conditions of the ubiquitous meat markets in China? Do you realize how easy it is for pathogens to spread when you stack wild animals in cages on top of each other, torture and butcher literally everything, wild animals off the street, in open air and on the literal ground?

The reality is that most of China is third world. Sorry, sometimes specific cultural practices are harmful to people and societies.

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The virus smuggling thing cannot be linked to the outbreak. However the whole culture of consumimg exotic mammals really needs to stop. Wuhan had a flourishing underground animal market apart from the usual vast meat market where everything was consumable. This is bad. I do credit Chinese scientists for the fast gene sequencing that led to a test being developed but even if exotic meat consumption is a cultural thing it still needs to the phased out.

Eating exotic mammals would be less bad if the mammals and their meat were actually subject to the same health regulations as less-exotic mammals. That is: the problem ain't the animals themselves, but rather that they're being sold in a black or grey market instead of through more legitimate channels.

This is a pretty common theme with black markets in general, on that note. See also: black market drugs being "cut" with harmful substances, black market sex labor being a vector for human trafficking and STDs, black market medical procedures being more susceptible to adverse outcomes, etc.

There are other good reasons to not eat exotic mammals, of course (i.e. if doing so puts species at risk of extinction), but the sanitation issue seems solvable.

There's a chance the meat is cooked with recycled 'gutter oil' too

https://youtu.be/e7S7r31cjAQ

Got a credible source to link for your claim about Canada there?

I do not understand the reason for butchering wild life animals (e.g. bats). Is it belief system (e.g. traditional Chinese medicine) or they are just hungry?

Both. Folk medicine is extremely common in China and the idea is that certain body parts from certain animals cure ailments/improve performance. Total backwards voodoo bullshit - like suppliments and crystals and homeopathy in the west, except animals are literally tortured over it.

There's a reason you can find so many videos online of Chinese people torturing animals. There is a belief in China (and to a lesser extent in other nations like Korea and I believe Vietnam) that making animals suffer pre slaughter makes the meat tastier. And honestly it isn't a stretch that adrenal hormones released just before death can influence the flavor or texture of meat, but I don't know if that justifies cruelty...

Ah, citation bruh?

We've banned this account for flamewar posting. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22606977, and if you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

he/she shoudln't be banned, 's partly right:

https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=south+korea+bokna...

Being right and following the site guidelines are different things. The latter is what protects the community from destroying itself—assuming that's possible.

Fortunately, the two support each other, because if you're right, expressing your view in a thoughtful way makes the truth more apparent to others, while fulminating and attacking enemies merely alienates everyone who doesn't already agree with you. You end up discrediting the very truth you're advocating for. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/3853

There is evidence for this.

Anthony Bourdain (RIP) loved weird exotic food — he talked about it at length in his books. The weirder the better. (Not for me; I went vegetarian about 5 years ago.)

These wildlife markets are a particular problem. But virologists (see: Pandemic on Netflix) highlight not just the wildlife trade be our enormous animal agriculture production as an explosive situation.

Can you give a more substantial account of your 'legitimate evidence'? Until then, this is pure nonsense.

I'm on mobile so I don't have time to collate a bunch of sources for something you could search for online, so here's a link to a summary.

NOTE: before you dismiss the source, notice that it is merely a commentary on a collection of individual sources that you can verify yourself. Now I do not agree with the conclusion in the link below, that this is a deliberate bioweapon, but there is ample circumstantial evidence here to at least presume that the virus could have leaked from the only level 4 biolab in China, which happens to be less than 10 miles from Wuhan. It's likely they were conducting legitimate research, all I'm pointing out is that the evidence for this actually coming from China is pretty good.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/did-china-steal-coron...

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