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Comment by an_d_rew | Hacker News Reader

> Considering the devastating impact of SARS‐CoV‐2 and importance of preventing future pandemics, researchers have a responsibility to carry out a thorough analysis of all possible SARS‐CoV‐2 origins.

This is a downright misleading statement.

It is possible that aliens created SARS-CoV-2 as an experiment. It is possible that my body quantum tunnelled from the USA to China, through the earth's core, and picked up the virus.

But these events are exceedingly improbable. Therefore neither deserve the merit of future study.

Besides... Hypotheses must be falsifiable. That's how science works. Anything else is just click-bait. So I question that this article has any real utility at all except possibly fanning the flames of racism or sensationalism.

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You are making a strawman argument. "All possible origins", in that particular phrase, obviously means "with reasonable probability". If you have an actual BSL-3 lab, specializing particularly in SARS-like coronaviruses in the city of origin of the pandemic (there is such a lab, three labs actually), if the country has a bad track of lab leaks (it does, SARS leaked twice from Chinese labs), history of cover-ups of such leaks (again, SARS leak of 2004), generally bad track with information suppression - it makes the hypothesis actually worth verifying. And that would be domain of criminal justice and forensics, not only of life science.

This is a disease that will likely kill ~10 million people directly (0.5% IFR, 25% spread), a few more million due to lockdown (economic downturns lead to starvation for starters), and cost tens of trillions of dollars (world expenditure on just masks is looking to cost something like $200 billion this year).

We can prevent lab mistakes. If there's _any_ reasonable chance it was a lab mistake, that absolutely should be investigated thoroughly, so it doesn't happen again. And the fact is, gain of function research is already controversial, because of the obvious potential safety risks.

Second, most of us live in democracies. Even if it can't be proven, voters should absolutely know if a lab mistake is plausible, so we can make good decisions on what types of risks we're willing to take for scientific research, and what kinds of oversight are appropriate.

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