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Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

Several were HOSPITALIZED with a respiratory illness, in a lab studying bat viruses on humanized mice.

The cognitive dissonance you are suffering is painful, I'm sure, but it's obviously clouding your judgment.

Crossing into personal attack is not allowed and will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. We've had to warn you about this kind of thing before. I don't want to ban you, so please fix this.

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

Those same people were tested for antibodies and they were negative. Or I guess that is also part of the cover up.

...yes? Listen, if you are prepared to seriously consider a lab leak, then you have to assume that any public statements from Chinese authorities are dubious. I’m pretty sure my own government makes dubious statements all the time so it’s not hard to imagine.

I’m seriously considering it and put it higher than 0%. But if you think your hypothesis is the most likely outcome (>50%), and your defense at any evidence that discounts your view is that it is a giant and incredible cover up by the Chinese government then I guess we have very different priors about how easy it is to pull off massive conspiracies.

And also remember the people that leaked that 2-3 employees were hospitalized without any additional details or evidence also had an agenda.

Are you familiar with the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak? The Soviets successfully blamed that on tainted meat, and the truth wasn't revealed until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Before that, the Western scientific consensus agreed with the Soviets, discounting speculation otherwise as a conspiracy theory, with reasoning similar to yours above.

(For emphasis, nothing above is meant to imply that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon. An accident in reckless but not malicious basic research seems far more likely to me, and natural origin certainly hasn't been excluded either.)

I’m not saying it is impossible, I’m saying it is not likely.

I think it is great for people to research the origins and dig into all the details and try to find the truth. But if the virus were of natural origin, which to me is the most likely truth, then all of this talk and speculation are just maligning completely innocent people. And many of the comments here are maligning left and right.

The tone of many comments is certainly unfortunate, and we certainly shouldn't go from unjustified confidence in natural origin to unjustified confidence in lab origin; I'd put the odds near a coin flip myself. That's perhaps a backlash to the last year, though, during which anyone pushing for investigation of this reasonable hypothesis was maligned as a conspiracy theorist or worse.

For example, here's a message from an academic virologist quoted frequently in the mainstream media with a wide Twitter following, who calls Yuri Deigin's summary of the evidence for lab origin a "Turner Diary-esque manifesto". (The Turner Diaries is a novel about a race war, popular among violent white supremacists including Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.)

https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/13462322082063810...

That kind of rhetoric is nothing unusual from anonymous Internet trolls, or even from politicians. It was strange to see from scientists, though. I don't think the backlash is good, but it's not surprising.

Finally, if the CCP wanted to stop this speculation, then they could allow an open investigation, giving international scientists full access to the WIV's documents and samples. Perhaps the reason that the CCP hasn't is just an authoritarian state's reflexive secrecy, and there's nothing to actually cover up; but if that's the case, then they have only themselves to blame for the suspicion.

There was an investigation! International teams went over data and samples! Researchers were questioned! All of this is public and in reports. The problem with saying it is a cover up is that no matter what is provided you can just say nothing is enough.

Can we get more details about how we know for sure that 2-3 researchers were actually hospitalized? Oh, it’s classified, eh? Well I can’t imagine the US ever falsifying intelligence.

I’m not suggesting that the US is lying and CCP isn’t. But I think if you rationally look at the data and the reports and listen to the people that did the investigation they do not believe in the conspiracy. And yes, they are biased, but at least they have arguments and actual data to defend their position.

Are you referring to the team led by the WHO's Peter Ben Embarek? If yes, please note that he said explicitly that it wasn't an "investigation", despite the media widely using that word:

https://twitter.com/Peterfoodsafety/status/13683225920635576...

They reviewed summaries of data provided by Chinese scientists. They generally did not review raw data themselves, let alone physical samples, and took no steps (analogous e.g. to a financial audit) designed to uncover deliberate attempts to mislead.

For a specific example, what is your opinion of the WIV's virus database? This is a database-backed website that went offline in September 2019. The WIV has cited "hacking attempts" as the reason for this. Do you believe their explanation? If so, why are they still refusing to provide it in a different format (e.g., a dump on a flash drive) that would obviously present no computer security risk?

You obviously have no idea how much control and influence the Chinese government exerts over its citizens. I really don't know how people can still be so blatantly naive about how communist parties operate and how they maintain power over their citizens.

I would say pulling off this massive conspiracy is looking less and less likely.

your view is that it is a giant and incredible cover up by the Chinese government

Really? My starting point is that the Chinese government would likely cover up being blamed for a deadly pandemic that has killed millions.

They haven't even admitted their COVID death statistics since early on last year: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/bda759474...

They stopped counting COVID deaths after the first 100k or so... in February.

> I guess we have very different priors about how easy it is to pull off massive conspiracies.

Is it that difficult when you manipulate the media and control the narrative? This is why the principles of free speech are as important as the law itself.

Covid antibodies may or may not be produced and if they are seem to fade quickly. This has been widely researched and documented [1]. T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 are a better indicator of exposure [2].

[1] - https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2025179

[2] - https://abcnews.go.com/Health/fda-authorizes-cell-test-game-...

If several people were hospitalized that means several dozen to hundred people in the lab actually had COVID (hospitalization rates are low, especially among people who haven’t reached retirement age yet).

Testing was done on those people and nothing was found.

This means we would be looking at a huge coverup, not false negative testing results.

That you, Daszak?

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