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Comment by cscurmudgeon | Hacker News Reader

> Given today's anti-free-thinker HN climate

You should champion China to be more transparent about the origins of the virus. Even if it did not originate in a lab, shining more light on its origins will help prevent future outbreaks.

China also actively prevented Taiwan from joining the WHO. This would have resulted in more free flow of information.

Curiously, I was a labelled a racist for making this statement.

> Please, China, Italy, Spain, everywhere, scoop up all the COVID-19 research you can find and act upon it to save lives. Copy

China does not do anything for free. Let us not pretend that China is angelic. Have you heard of debt diplomacy?

So we are excusing one of the most locked up countries in terms of information to hack into cutting edge research in a free society.

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Please stop taking HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. We've had to ask you about this before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have to decided to just stopping commenting on these kinds of threads.

No matter how objective I am it is going to piss violate some unknown law of the land here. Being logically correct in these threads usually ends up being politically incorrect.

Thanks for all your hard work moderating.

You didn't address what parent said at all. Parent said all COVID-19 research should be freely available to all as a matter of principle.

What China does or doesn't do has no bearing on this.

Doesn't the origin and initial spread of the virus fall under COVID-19 research?

Is it fair and ethical to ask country A to make free all research while being okay with country B hiding its own research on the same subject?

Let us not whitewash unethical behavior with broad strokes of "freely available to all as a matter of principle."

> Is it fair and ethical to ask country A to make free all research while being okay with country B hiding its own research on the same subject?

An American journalist toured the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Everyone he spoke to proudly bragged about the USSR and its accomplishments. But some things seemed off. He asked about the mass starvation, and his handler explained it was because the kulaks destroyed their food to spite the people. He questioned why newspapers would one day say one thing, and the next denounce the same as counterrevolutionary. His handler responded, there was no difference, he's just misunderstanding the context. Finally he asked about political opponents mysteriously disappearing when they stood against Stalin.

Exasperated, the handler shrieked, "And you are lynching negroes!"

How could you know that "country A is hiding research"? If its hiding it, you dont know about it, unless you are spying/hacking yourself.

FBI stance is we can hide stuff from you, and hack you, because we are the "good guys".

Given the posts earlier saying that the virus' origins are part of research and we know they weren't cooperating with the WHO in that research as of not that long ago, I think we do know at least that much.

> Is it fair and ethical to ask country A to make free all research while being okay with country B hiding its own research on the same subject?

This isn't about countries. I think it is unethical to hide research when it could save lives. If country B is hiding research, that doesn't mean country A should hide it as a revenge, and that doesn't mean the residents of country B deserve to take the brunt of the actions of their government policies. The civilians of B and the civilians of A deserve the best of science equally.

The virus doesn't care about where country borders are drawn. Even in the above situation where country B is hiding their research, if country A shares their research with B, it helps country A themselves because country B's people may be inoculated much faster and immigrants from country B to A will not be carrying the virus anymore.

The objective function that should be optimized is getting the virus eradicated from the world ASAP. There's a good chance that only some fraction of the world needs to be inoculated with a vaccine before the virus is nearly eradicated, and that will only happen if the vaccine is shared across borders. A good start, for example, would be to inoculate everyone who wants to take a flight or train, inoculate all doctors, and inoculate all service industry personnel, regardless of which of the 200 countries they are a citizen of.

> I think it is unethical to hide research when it could save lives

Why are you assuming the US is hiding research?

Are you aware that there are protocols in medical research against premature release of information as it will taint the results (placebo effects etc)?

There are blackout periods etc. just to make sure that the analysis is valid and not tainted.

Also a lot of research has lag time. Experiments can take a lot of time.

You are also assuming that China is hacking to release information for the greater good. You are discounting the following:

1) Hacking to corrupt results and data.

2) Hacking to patent possible cures first.

3) Getting to a cure first to use as leverage over countries. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/us/politics/coronavirus-c...

> There are blackout periods etc. just to make sure that the analysis is valid and not tainted.

This is an interesting potential debate. In some sense we are sacrificing lives for scientific validity, because it is potentially possible that we could deploy early, ignore blackouts, and have probabilistically fewer deaths + tainted data. But the world is apparently wanting to choose probabilistically more deaths + clean data.

> In some sense we are sacrificing lives for scientific validity, because it is potentially possible that we could deploy early, ignore blackouts, and have probabilistically fewer deaths + tainted data

This is spurious logic.

How are you saying that tainted science + bad data will result in fewer deaths long term?

You may end up with probabilistically more deaths + tainted data.

Why is that not a possibility?

Your parent specifically already covered #2 and #3. Even if they do it's better.

Secondly, patent where? If they do it to limit the use I doubt many nations would respect that patent.

So you honestly believe that China will be more generous with a hacked cure than the US.

With #3 you are just arguing for a form of debt slavery.

Thanks for conveniently ignoring #1.

> more transparent

TBH no matter how transparent China is you won't trust it until it turns out to be what you believe.

> actively prevented Taiwan from joining the WHO

Every WHO member can formally invite Taiwan and cast a vote, why didn't any five-eyes nation do that?

> does not do anything for free

I agree. It's simply ruthless geopolitics no matter how angelic a country pretends to be.

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