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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

FYI, it took me two reads to realise that you weren't comparing the Wuhan's lab work to a biological weapons program. I see a fair amount of vehement downvoting on your comment, and I suspect at least some of that is people making the same mistake.

It is a bit risky to put "weaponised strain" and "Wuhan" in the same paragraph - there is no evidence that this is a bioweapon and while you don't claim otherwise it is an easy misreading to make.

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Agreed. Difficult to claim that this is a bio-weapon given its lethality of around 1.8% (lousy weapon) and that even this figure is highly age and co-morbidity related as we are all aware. Huge numbers of people are asymptomatic. 50% according to this: https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/journal-scans/2021/...

Not to add to the theories but a virus doesn't have to be lethal to be a weapon. If anything, MERS showed us that a more lethal virus is less dangerous globally as it burns itself out fast. To be an effective weapon the virus just has to cause economic disruption, or cause political changes, or impose some desired restrictions or limitations on opposing nations or the world economy in a way that is not as severe to the nation creating the virus. It should also be noted that this virus had the greatest impact on people that have been eating high carb, high sugar diets for a long time. Does that describe a set of demographics? But I am no expert in this area so certainly speaking out of turn.

I should also add the possibility that it doesn't have to be a government performing these actions. It could simply be one jaded semi-suicidal lab tech that is really mad at the world and realizes they are holding in their hands the power to F the world. Have people thrown their lives away for lesser causes? Or maybe even incompetence? Have lab techs ever mishandled dangerous material?

I don't think it's a weapon, but it doesn't need high lethality to be an effective tool. Terrorist attacks and school shootings are rounding errors when it comes to overall deaths, but it doesn't stop them from dominating the news and being used to scare people into accepting more restrictive laws.

High lethality isn't necessarily what a bioweapon is designed for. The US (allegedly) dropped tick-borne bioweapons on Cuba in the 60's with the goal of lowering sugarcane production.

If you want to use a bioweapon for clandestine economic warfare, you don't actually want to people to die, that draws attention. You just want everyone to be sick at crunch (harvest) time.

> lethality of around 1.8% (lousy weapon)

The worldwide average estimate (including asymptomatic) is 0.15% - right around the same as the flu (0.05% - 0.1% depending on the year, IIRC).

I assumed that was the intent behind writing the comment? After all, why does it matter where the virus came from unless you're more interested in assigning blame than fixing the problem?

I never understand why glib comments like this one aren't punished as long as they fit the mainstream narrative.

Would you extend the same courtesy to an oil spill? Just fix it and don't assign blame?

Or the Volkswagen emission scandal. Volkswagen was fined several billions.

Government employees mostly get away with everything, of course.

None of these are contagious and thus threatening to large numbers of people (far) removed from the problem. It’s like a big fire… Put the damn thing out before worrying about who started it.

Wait that long and none of the people who started it will still be around... probably because they made something even worse.

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