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Comment by krrrh | Hacker News Reader

This is such a bizarre comment and your thesis is nowhere near being “transparently obvious”. You’re trying to link the people whose lungs were harmed by vitamin E acetate in black market vaping cartridges to COVID?

Credible genetic analysis of the virus shows nearly incontrovertibly that it originated in Wuhan.

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It's generally understood that due to the major overlap in symptoms, the lung illness from the vaping disease could easily have been misdiagnosed cases of Covid. This due to the fact that Covid was unknown. Misdiagnoses are extremely common during outbreaks, which is well-known. I never claimed this as evidence, only as a possible indication which is consistent with the thesis.

Besides, vaping demonstrably leads to a higher risk of serious lung illness by Covid:

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/researchers-find-n...

Again, not evidence per se, but it is consistent with the thesis.

No it is not generally understood, the symptoms are quite different. There is no evidence that the thousands of people who suffered from vape-related lung issues in 2019 had a concomitant coronavirus infection.

The incidence of vape-related lung issues has been in decline since the issue was first raised, and black market manufacturers stopped using vitamin E acetate.

The symptoms are quite similar actually.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...

"The paper emphasises that EVALI remains a diagnosis of exclusion, highlighting the importance of thorough history taking, especially given that symptoms and clinical manifestations overlap with those of some infectious respiratory diseases, including COVID-19."

https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/consumer-pro...

In addition, vaping seriously increases risk of serious illness by Covid.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/08/vaping-linked...

> Credible genetic analysis of the virus shows nearly incontrovertibly that it originated in Wuhan.

What are you talking about? That's just not true. There is zero incontrovertible evidence that it originated in Wuhan.

"https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-who-china..."

'“The possible path from whatever original animal species all the way through to the Huanan market could have taken a very long and convoluted path involving also movements across borders,” Embarek told a nearly three-hour media briefing.

Embarek said work to identify the coronavirus’s origins points to a natural reservoir in bats, but it is unlikely that they were in Wuhan.'

- Peter Ben Embarek, who led the team of independent WHO experts in Wuhan.

You’re mixing up a debate of whether the first human cases of COVID in Wuhan came from an animal vs a lab leak. The same article you linked to contains this quote from Embarek:

“And the conclusion was we did not find evidence of large outbreaks that could be related to cases of COVID-19 prior to December 2019 in Wuhan or elsewhere.”

Not really. The lab leak theory was always dismissed by the WHO team of researches. However, I brought up the fact that the virus unlikely originated in Wuhan according to the WHO researches as an additional piece of evidence of how unlikely the Wuhan lab leak theory is.

That quote indicates precisely what I said, that researches are up in the air about the probable place of origin of Covid.

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