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Comment by abnry | Hacker News Reader

> First, the vast majority of people who insisted on the lab leak theory did it to deflect blame and target China as a scapegoat.

If China did have a lab that leaked the virus, they _are_ to blame. To say that we shouldn't hold their feet to the fire if this is the case, well, that's a fine political opinion you can have. It may or may not be prudent.

The essence of the argument why we shouldn't discuss the lab leak hypothesis is "people's feelings". In other words, feelings are more important than what is true.

Truth should be the highest priority, damn whoever's political interests it will help. It is so sad that thinking of truth as too dangerous is part of today's milieu.

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> If China did have a lab that leaked the virus, they _are_ to blame.

I think you’re misunderstanding the bit you are quoting.

Of course China is to blame if they had a lab leak.

The comment is instead making the point that most of those who are blaming China are not doing it motivated from a reasonable belief that there was a lab leak. Rather they are motivated by the opportunity to use China as a political tool to avoid blame for their own failures in dealing with the pandemic.

It still seems a bit silly not to investigate this fully.

After 9/11 there was a failure in airplane protocol to not have bolted pilot doors and to not aggressively fight hijackers. I wouldn't say investigating Saudi Arabia should have been avoided - even if there had been voices at the TSA who wanted to distract from their own failures.

Let’s for a second assume not only that it was a lab leak, but that it was on purpose, what do you propose the response be?

If they intentionally let out something that killed millions of people then it should be met with extremely hard sanctions or more to force change at the CCP.

If you let a country intentionally kills hundreds of thousands of people and enact no penalty they will only escalate.

Still - I'd say the chance it was intentional to be less than 1/1000. Chance it was by accident - and that they covered it up - to be fairly high.

I don’t think anyone disputes that they covered up the severity, that was clear in real-time.

The question is if this was an intentional lab leak as is being suggested, I’m curious to know what people expect to happen.

As you pointed out this has killed millions of people, seems like people are angling for a war.

That outcome is why the accusation that this is intentional is a very very serious accusation and not one that should be tossed around by a bunch of half cocked internet sleuths (not saying you are one, just in general).

If it were intentionally released, they'd have planted it at the CDC or somewhere else that studies coronaviruses so they wouldn't be the obvious ground zero. China intentionally releasing a virus in Wuhan makes no sense.

Totally agree, all this hullabaloo and these arm chair virologists remind me of this scene from the Simpsons https://youtu.be/BNpmJVa10PU

If every country in the world, who was affected, learned this, I assume there would be very appropriate discussions within the leadership of them all. Talking about this, and worldwide agreement to prevent it from happening again, would be a fantastic response.

If it was intentional, then they're incompetent. I don't believe they're incompetent.

You are perhaps better off asking a different question:

Not, “was it a lab leak?”

Rather: if proven it was a lab leak, what would the remediation be?

Would it be a) for tightening of biosecurity controls, b) toughening of wild animal trade, or c) war with China.

We will get a) and b) without knowing where it came from; as prudent steps to prevent this from happening again; they are already happening.

Perhaps we can avoid c) if we never “really know”.

That would be nice.

Why do you think "war with China" is a potential outcome of determining it was a lab leak?

This is not a strong argument.

Regardless of all these wild pontifications, those who have run interference on the truth need to suffer the reputational consequences.

Don’t be naive.

Having a immediate target that is clearly to blame and already an “enemy” isn't going to just result in a ideological slap on the wrist.

What consequences do you think there should be?

Pay for the damage to the US economy? To the world? Apologise and it’s fine?

What do think “holding them to account for what happened” actually means?

This isn’t some scientific journal where you lose magical reputation points.

There's already literally a response two comments down saying you would need to force change to the CCP. How do you imagine that's going to happen? Ask nicely? Sanctions? Well, that's worked just great so far.

Let's see, oh I can think of another way of forcing change... what could it be?

I'd much rather have China admit fault and explain how this won't happen in the future than the current situation. As it stands I assume they are hiding something. For all I know they're developing bioweapons they plan to use for military purposes. And if they have nothing to hide then they have nothing to apologize for, but as it stands nobody is allowed to investigate so I have little faith in this theory.

I'm not pretending this isn't a political clusterfuck. But I'd rather deal with a political clusterfuck than a bioweapon clusterfuck. And if they aren't developing bioweapons then great! If they are developing bioweapons then that feels like something that's better to know sooner rather than later. And if there wasn't a lab leak then even better! Now the world knows that it really was just a bizarre phenomenon. If there was a lab leak then they simply made a mistake, they can rectify that mistake moving forward, and the world moves on. If the world doesn't move on - what are they going to do? You think the US (or any country) will go to war (as in send in troops in huge numbers with the understanding most of them will likely die) with China because of an accidental lab leak? I don't.

It seems to me the dumbest possible thing to do is not investigate. I don't believe advocating for ignorance is ever a viable strategy.

Russia literally shot down a civilian airliner, annexed part of the Ukraine, and continues to assassinate/attempt to assassinate former intelligence operatives that turned on them decades ago on foreign soil.

We still haven’t gone to war with them, and we’re in a better position to do that as well.

Declaring war on China even if this was a lab leak, hell even if it was on purpose (Difficult to believe, but let’s go there) isn’t a workable or appropriate solution. Certainly not going to happen in the short term, blame it on globalism, but the global implications are bigger than ever and don’t make it practical.

It's naive to assume that the US would enter into a hot war with China, or that war is the only way countries oppose one another. The most obvious way to 'punish' an uncooperative CCP would be through trade sanctions. If the Chinese government is responsible and the G7 had any interest in coordinating a response, this would put enormous pressure on the CCP, which is dependent on a rising standard of living for its citizenry. Other possible responses would include strengthening China's regional competitors (e.g., India). At a minimum, it could mean the cessation of global research collaboration.

IIRC TSA was assembled because of 9/11. There was no TSA that failed back then since it didn't exist.

People often forget how dramatically things changed in the years after the attack.

Or I suppose some people just weren't alive to witness the changes! It was a long time ago, bizarrely enough. It feels recent. Perhaps in part because it's still so relevant.

More than a bit silly. It should be investigated fully. It’s a shame so much time has passed already.

Did something in my comment sound like I didn’t favor investigating? That was not my intention. The origin including lab leak should be investigated.

Exactly. In 2020, I didn't care if started with wild bats, bat soup, a lab leak, or Santa Claus. I cared about:

* Waiting a week after patient 1 to close the borders

* Intentional efforts to suppress testing

* "Covid won't happen here because we closed the borders" (a month into exponential covid case growth in the US)

* "...but if it does, it's barely worse than the flu"

* "...but even if it is, hydroxychloroquine is a miracle cure."

* "...but even if it isn't, we shouldn't lock down because it won't stop the spread"

* "...and even if we do, a silent first wave means we're all immune now that the first wave is slightly trending downwards and we should do a full reopen"

* Anti-mask

* Anti-vax

and more. Those fights had actual public health impact. "Whodunnit" had 0x the public health importance and 10x the flamewar potential, which is saying something, because we had plenty of flamewars as it was. Steering the conversation away from lab-leak steered the conversation towards things that mattered.

Did it actually steer toward things that mattered though?

I think politicizing rational inquiry, especially when China did a lot to help the virus leave its borders, was equivalent to trying to deflect, and just added more obfuscation to a meaningful dialogue about what we should do and what we should learn.

The inquiry wasn't political until Trump made it political...as a tool to distract from his ongoing desire to ignore the pandemic as an issue.

In 2020 the questions people wanted answers to were "what was the government doing" and "when was relief coming" and "we need masks and ventilators are you going to distribute them". The only people who seemed to think the answer to all those questions was "well firstly we need to consider if this is China's fault..." was the White House.

It wasn't just the White House though. The whole reason there is this resurgence of the issue 18 months after the fact is that all of the people asking the question who weren't Donald Trump crazy, were treated like they were.

I genuinely worry about all the people that believed it was a conspiracy theory, and still think they are on team science. They aren't.

It is a conspiracy theory, because there's no evidence beyond allegations of conspiracy that this is what happened.

It keeps being asked for the same reason that 9/11 truthers came into existence: because the idea that bad things can happen randomly to good people is a more scary idea then the one that bad things happen because someone planned for them to.

"It escaped from a lab" is an appealing idea because the very next conclusion will be "there should be no more virus labs!". Zoological origins, like SARS, or Swine Flu before it, offers no solutions - it's an ongoing problem.

I still don't care how it started. Until it's gone, the world needs to spend their cycles on getting past it. There will be time to point fingers and blame later.

It's like being in the middle of a house fire, looking for a way past the burning hallway to the door, and then someone else in there with you arguing "Don't worry about how to get out. What's really important is who started the fire!"

The Chinese dictatorship initially protested against countries closing their borders, calling it racist.

because closing one country's border doesn't work. Strict screening travellers do. While there were indeed recorded imported Chinese cases in west coast, US's epidemic mostly started off the east coast.

> While there were indeed recorded imported Chinese cases in west coast, US's epidemic mostly started off the east coast.

This seems like a distinction without a difference since both coasts got the virus ultimately from the same country.

No it wasn't. The Wuhan strain pretty much died in last April.

You have to do both, and this is clear in hindsight because of the challenges involved in setting up effective screening.

Eg, close border until effective screening is in place

Yeah nah it works.

> because closing one country's border doesn't work

Worked very well for Taiwan, Australia.

> Worked very well for Taiwan

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57153195

They were mostly unaffected for a whole year, things got bad only recently.

See, this is the real problem - it's not just the lab leak theory, the efforts to get Trump out of office seeped into and warped every aspect of the media coverage of Covid-19.

For example, border closures. Putting aside the fact that at the time the entire mainstream establishment insisted that imposing them at all was dangerous, counter-productive xenophobia, the US had the only remotely sensible early border closures in the Western world - and that was an infinitely bigger problem than whether Trump should've imposed it a week earlier. In particular, Italy massively dropped the ball and ended up with a huge outbreak spreading infections to the US and the rest of Europe whilst somehow reporting zero cases. (Even US testing wasn't that broken!) There is approximately zero chance that the US could've banned travel from them in time to stop this - there was absolutely no justification for this at the time, given they were reporting zero cases unlike the USA.

Then the American media pointed to the fact that Italy had banned direct flights from China (much too late) as proof travel bans didn't work. Of course it didn't - Italy has borderless travel with the rest of the EU, everyone could just fly in to a different airport, it's the equivalent of Texas or California banning direct flights in a futile attempt to keep the virus out. The US took the more sensible approach of restricting based on where people had travelled recently, regardless of where they were travelling from - pretty much everyone else now seems to have copied this approach.

The media also seems to have misled everyone about what went wrong with Covid testing in the US. As far as I can tell, the USA had the earliest, most aggressive attempted rollout of testing out of all the countries in the West at least, maybe in the world. There certainly wasn't any lack of enthusiasm for it from the top-level, politically appointed levels of the government. The problem was the non-partisan career parts of the CDC screwed up, first by contaminating the testing reagents and then covering it up and letting them ship out to labs anyway, causing confusion and delays as the labs couldn't work out why they failed quality checks.

> the entire mainstream establishment insisted that imposing them at all was dangerous, counter-productive xenophobia

Closing the borders before patient 1 or almost immediately after patient 1 (plus aggressive contact tracing) would have been good public health policy. Closing the borders after a week of exponential growth and lack of aggressive contact tracing was hopeless. Good for appearances only -- and the good appearances came largely from xenophobia because the public health cat was well out of the bag by that point. See the difference?

I'm sure you can find plenty of bad liberal media takes on the issue, but that's completely beside the point as they were not in charge of anything. The bad (xenophobic) conservative takes didn't just come from the media, though, they also came from the president. Repeatedly and persistently.

> As far as I can tell, the USA had the earliest, most aggressive attempted rollout of testing out of all the countries in the West at least, maybe in the world. There certainly wasn't any lack of enthusiasm for it from the top-level

Just one tiny little problem with that narrative: Trump said the quiet parts out loud, multiple times, confirming what would otherwise have "just" been rumors and leaks. He didn't just fight and stall the testing, he publicly bragged about it later.

"When you do testing to that extent you're going to find more people, you're going to find cases. So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.' They test and they test. We got tests for people who don't know what's going on."

The US did have contact tracing early on though, and as far as anyone can tell it did work pretty well at containing the cases coming in from China - maybe not well enough that it could've contained them indefinitely, though that'd be a tall order and we'll never know because this wasn't even the problem. Genetic tracing shows that cases in the US were driven by spread from Europe, almost certainly Italy given the circumstances, which no-one was really equipped to spot. The media just downplayed and omitted the contact tracing that happened in the US because it didn't fit the anti-Trump narrative.

Now, of course Taiwan had a lot of success until recently and they did ban travel from China earlier than anyone else - but again, the role of this was almost entirely omitted from the early US news coverage because it didn't fit into the anti-Trump narrative. Their success was attributed to their Covid testing and tied into to the story that this was something Trump screwed up due to his focus on border closures and travel bans. (Meanwhile in the real world, their Covid testing basically collapsed the moment the disease got a foothold - in May 2021 when this had become a mass-produced commodity.) They also didn't have the level of travel from Italy that the US and other worse-affected countries did...

In 2021 I care about:

* we only have to lockdown for two weeks to flatten the curve

* ok, two more weeks and then we can reopen

* well, we can't reopen, but we'll have vaccines soon so we'll be able to reopen

* ok, we vaccinated 70% of people so we can reopen now

* Vaccines work!

* Well, they don't work in that country because those are the worse vaccines

* Israel and UK having another surge? Oh it's only amongst unvaccinated people

* Uh oh, Delta Plus is coming, better stay home!

Chinese vaccines do work. It's bad reporting that says it doesn't. In those countries they did not reach the percentage needed for herd immunity with less effective vaccines.

They were still hugely protective against severe disease. So they work.

Isn’t this the problem? China knows there will be consequences if it was “China” who did it? Obviously a major ego bruising.

Who cares who did it, naturally it will be more evidence that communist dictatorships aren’t the best way to run things, but they’re never going to share the truth if that means a flogging.

I'd think the biggest consequence would be that another virus is released or mutates that isn't china specific, and the governments are just as unprepared as they were in 2019, since they fixed the lab leak problem instead of the being prepared problem

You mean it would just be more evidence that communist republics aren't the best way to run things for America. China seems to be doing fine.

Absolutely, no freedom of speech to say otherwise!

So if a restaurant worker in California happens to do a poor job of washing their hands and a diner gets sick, does that mean America is to blame?

There should absolutely be as deep as possible an investigation into the origins of the virus, but it needs to be dispassionate in all directions.

Yes. If the restaurant had a history of documented safety issues and the relevant regulatory government bodies didn't take action to rectify it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-officials-raised-alarms-a...

Btw, comparing a restaurant worker being sloppy and a supposedly BSL-4 lab functioning at the level of BSL-2 lab is not a good look.

Also, China's govt. has much much more control over a govt. lab than US has over a restaurant in California.

The analogy fails.

The US has complete control over a restaurant in California. Its got a huge military and could nuke the place if it wanted to.

Deciding not to is the same in both cases

> The US has complete control over a restaurant in California

No, it doesn't.

> Its got a huge military and could nuke the place if it wanted to

By this logic, the US govt. has control over every corner of earth.

Also, was the US govt. running the place and ignoring safety warnings?

Was the restaurant possible responsible for a global pandemic?

The analogy is stupid and not worth discussing more.

All I am getting from this is that people think a restaurant I n US has the same level of responsibility as the lab in Wuhan.

Wikipedia:

> The Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences is a research institute on virology administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which reports to the State Council of the People's Republic of China.

It would be reasonable by most people's definitions to blame whoever has oversight over a virology lab that leaked a virus. In this (alleged) case, that's the Chinese government.

The chinese government doesnt owe me anything though. Sure, it's bad that they killed a bunch of their citizens, but they do that all the time

The US outsourced virus research to this lab. The US will share some blame, because gain-of-function research is stupid in the first place.

Is this part of the misdirection? Both sides do not want to know. Or let's say powerful interests on both sides.

> a restaurant worker in California happens to do a poor job of washing their hands and a diner gets sick

If that worker causes a global pandemic the U.S. government covers up, yes.

Exactly this.

The cover up by is the problem

There is a difference between a restaurant worker (or a wet market worker) who slipped up and a lab worker that slipped up because we want lab rules to be idiot proof such that one worker would not be able to infect others/themselves - even if they tried.

The restaurant worker slipping up is bad luck if they happen to be first to contact a virus. The government that runs labs know there is 100% chance there are dangerous viruses there and have a responsibility to enforce the safeguards.

I think that only applies within their borders.

Once it's outside, sure, there's a duty to report, but other governments have a responsibility to their own populace to keep them healthy.

The US, for instance, should have more than enough spies in China to know everything china knows anyways, and took the chinese line that the virus didn't exist, or wasn't a problem up until Joe Biden got elected

The US spy networks in China have been "rolled up"[1]. They don't exist in a usable form (if the news is to be believed).

As for the "until Joe Biden" bit, er ... no. Trump was kicked out in large part due to his incompetent handling of the virus in the US (he thought it was an orchestrated attack by his political opponents, given that they turned everything into such an attack).

The virus was a problem long before Biden won. Not that he is more competently handling it (he isn't), but the news media can now largely let go of their Trump derangement to start focusing on important things again. So it shows up more.

[1] https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/905779/CIA-China-Jerry-...

Well the Truth is WMDs didn't exist.

This is the post truth world.

And in the post truth world, the 6 inch chimp brain under assault of an info tsunami it has no capacity to fully grok, has only one choice - to escape reality, deny responsibility, judge, blame and demand that an imaginary entities descend from the heavens to clean up the mess.

Guess what chimp troupe? It's not going to happen. Now get back to work.

> This is the post truth world.

Let's fight with our greatest might to make this a post-post-truth world.

I wouldn't consider china to be responsible for everyone else's shit response though.

Those responses are way more interesting, too. Taking another 20% chance off of a lab leak happening again doesn't fix that the US government will pretend a virus doesn't exist while it's killing people

> Truth should be the highest priority

This was the ideal for the Enlightenment, because the truth is good and from God. However we now live in the postmodern philosophy were truth is merely a political instrument and has no longer a holy status

If truth is unknowable next best thing to care about are feelings.

And you pretty much can't disprove lab leak idea at this point because there can't exist any sufficient evidence against it to convince people who believe in it.

Even if you just personally let them inside the lab and gave them access to all documents the only thing they would find would be next suspicious clues regardless of what would actually happened. And even if there was very little they managed to find suspicious they'd say it's because evidence was removed and they are being lied to.

> If truth is unknowable next best thing to care about are feelings.

The truth became unknowable due to feelings.

Sounds like they are succeeding in their intent then.

Truth in this case is unknowable because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And what we have after more than a year of people wondering about this idea is just absence of evidence.

In Science, one year is nothing. It will become knowable with international pressure. Giving up midway is not the solution.

Midway to what? If there was any conclusive evidence that they had a sample of covid or its ancestor in that lab before late 2019 it could have been destroyed without a trace right after.

You'll be always left with nothing more than accusations that can't be disproven (or proven).

The only thing that might put this thing to rest is further research on coronaviruses in animals and humans especially the ones that spread asympthomatically which are way harder to even find. And maybe some day we'll discover some ancestor of covid somewhere.

But it still won't put the lab leak hypothesis to rest if it's found in bats. Only if ancestor of covid is actually human coronavirus (other then the ones we discovered so far because they cause symptoms of common cold) and is detected in historical tissue samples from humans from before 2019 then maybe most people will rule out lab leak.

Meanwhile get ready for decades of blaming China for the pandemic.

I think I see where you're going here, but it's dangerously ambiguous.

People will believe feelings if they can't figure out the truth, sure, but that doesn't mean we have to tolerate fantasy over fact, and we shouldn't allow those people to make policy decisions. I mean, clearly we HAVE, but we shouldn't.

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