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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure "legitimate public debate" is warranted in this case. Too many people who are not qualified think they have "done their own research" and come to conclusions causing real harm to other people.

Even MDs are not necessarily well-suited to make expert opinions on pandemics and vaccine technology and such. A lot of MDs are qualified to diagnose conditions and recommend treatment and prescription medication... that doesn't mean they should act like they know more than people who specialize in infectious diseases.

The place for "debate" of the effectiveness and safety of vaccines is peer-reviewed studies, not YouTube videos.

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There is a certain legitimate distrust at this point over the lab leak issue. That's because of those two papers published in I believe Nature and the Lancet claiming that the evidence strongly supported a natural origin theory; those papers have now been discredited and some of the authors have deleted their Twitter accounts after exposure of their own emails that questioned natural origin theories due to anomalies in the viral sequence. That's very suspicious behavior for 'peer-reviewed research'.

So you're saying the system works?

The lab leak is still not known or accepted by the wider public. Even after vanity fairs write up.

1) The papers shouldn't have made it through any kind of honest peer-review process.

2) The papers to my knowledge have not been formally retracted, which is what normally happens after a peer-reviewed report is discredited.

So, not working very well.

The problem is that legitimate public debate has been fully warranted within the context of the pandemic response already - see the initial WHO recommendations not to close borders (closing borders was effective), the failure of the WHO to give useful advice about masks (even cotton ones worn without a tight seal work to a degree), and the failure of the media to accurately represent scientific consensus on whether there was a lab leak (it's very hard to find strong evidence either way).

There seems to be a common pattern where the media gets something wrong, scientists in the field aren't able to call it out, and there's a fairly long wait until someone has the visibility and credentials to point out the mistake. Banning discussion from more and more platforms could make it harder to correct real mistakes.

On the other hand, "do your own research" clearly doesn't work out well for a lot of people. I have no idea how to balance the competing factors. Maybe we have to accept some legitimate debate will be stifled by platforms, or maybe this is a problem for scientists themselves to solve.

While scientists have revised their advice in varying ways over the course of the pandemic, I would argue amateur armchair doctors have not been useful in that practice.

Also, some of your statements ignore context: Mask recommendations weren't withheld because they were believed to not be effective, but because there was a massive run on masks and the hoarding by people who didn't even yet need them was impacting the ability for health providers to get them in hospitals. Once cloth masks especially were plentiful and the supply of medical masks adjusted, the recommendations changed.

Public individuals trying to get ahead of the recommendations to put themselves ahead of the public good in that situation caused more harm than not.

The lab leak hypothesis has no bearing on public health, discussion of it right now serves political drama only. Investigation of causes and prevention of future pandemics is important... for the experts. I don't think it should be brought up in public circles at all.

The context was omitted for brevity, not ignored. It wasn't necessary to rehash the fine details of each example.

Have the WHO stated they deliberately withheld advice on masks to preserve PPE for healthcare workers? What you're talking about was one commonly held belief for why they did it, but a simple failure to give advice under conditions of uncertainty would also explain it.

The lab leak hypothesis absolutely has a bearing on public health in the future. You're right that even if the virus was leaked we can't unleak it, but debate about gain-of-function research and the safety standards of virology is critical to preventing future pandemics.

Can you go into detail about what harm public individuals caused?

> The lab leak hypothesis absolutely has a bearing on public health in the future. You're right that even if the virus was leaked we can't unleak it, but debate about gain-of-function research and the safety standards of virology is critical to preventing future pandemics.

I think you missed my point: There's no point to public discussion. Governments, health departments, infectious disease specialists, should all be determining the source of COVID-19, and if someone was at fault, making changes to prevent it.

But the public discussing their conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19 is solely there to drum up political drama about China, and move discussion from science into politics.

> Can you go into detail about what harm public individuals caused?

Beyond the massive additional spread of COVID-19 itself because of people refusing to take basic safety precautions like masking or social distancing, or refusing to get vaccinated based on dubious claims by people who know nothing about medical science, now we've got people actively poisoning themselves by taking "remedies" that people have come up with which have no basis in reality.

...When I picked up heartworm prevention for my dog today at the vet, I had to laugh that there are probably people trying to get their hands on it to "cure" their COVID-19.

Going back to the original point, public[0] discussion is vital for calling out other public discussion that's incorrect. We don't live in a world where the only people talking about covid are immunologists. Bodies like the WHO are subject to political considerations, the media approach covid from the angle of their existing biases, and that introduces a lot of potential for them to be totally wrong - as we saw in the original examples I gave.

[0] For a given value of "public" that only includes people who know what statistical significance is, read research papers, and don't confidently tell people to take antimalarials and dewormers on the basis of single studies with a low sample size.

"I think you missed my point: There's no point to public discussion. Governments, health departments, infectious disease specialists, should all be determining the source of COVID-19, and if someone was at fault, making changes to prevent it."

Is that not naive though? Without public discussion and pressure these entities would very likely sweep everything under the rug in the interest of their own careers, etc.

I think you'd have to be extremely cynical to believe there aren't informed parties with a vested interest in uncovering the truth. Obviously the United States would be very interested in knowing if misconduct in China created an extremely deadly and costly pandemic. Public health officials, believe it or not, probably mostly act in the interests of public health. And in the scenarios where systems fail, real journalists with a moral and ethical responsibility to responsible reporting should fill the gap... not crazy people running their own blog.

>Mask recommendations weren't withheld...

Withheld? That's not how I remember it.

>"There's no reason to be walking around with a mask," infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci told 60 Minutes.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/preventing-coronavirus-facemask...

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