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Comment by indigodaddy | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, I've noticed there are plenty of people who will downvote my comments if they are even mildly, vaguely skeptical of "lab leak", "vaccines/lockdowns cause more deaths than they prevent", or the other anti-establishment narratives that have become culture war memes. These meme narratives seem to be cherished as sacred by a significant percentage of HN.

Sorry guys, but I call 'em like I see 'em, and sometimes -- definitely not all the time, but sometimes -- I think the establishment happens to be right.

And HN is supposed to be a place for that kind of genuinely independent thinking. If you want to fight the culture war, you can do that on the other 99.99999% of the internet where it's everybody's favorite thing to do.

> lockdowns cause more deaths than they prevent

Maybe some people are arguing this, but certainly not all anti-lockdown folks.

The more compelling (and more subtle) argument is that Covid NPIs don’t save enough lives to be worth their high costs.

Contrary to most people’s intuition, the value of saving one life is not infinite — it’s something like the integral with respect to time of the happiness they would have had for the remainder of their lives (plus second-order effects like their death making their loved ones sad, etc.)

Since this quantity is finite, it’s in fact possible that making N people’s lives worse by x for duration D is worse than shortening M people’s lives by duration E, depending on the values of the variables involved. But most people refuse to even attempt to estimate the values, because human intuition (wrongly, IMO) tends to reject quantifying the value of life in this way.

I've got no problem with debating this sort of reasonable thesis. I only have a problem when people push extreme conspiratorial meme narratives designed to gin up and spread partisan emotion while being systematically immune to disproof like a religion. If you point out their thesis has an issue because of some government mortality statistics, they immediately move to conspiratorial doubt of the validity of those statistics. These folks are just a baby step away from the mental diarrhea of 5G COVID, Bill Gates vaccine chips, etc.

FWIW, in my ideal world, the government would have had a stockpile of a couple dozen N95s for each person, and we would have distributed them immediately after the initial outbreak and enacted some serious rules with teeth about wearing them. That probably would have been good enough to keep the hospitals from getting overwhelmed. NPIs could perhaps have been limited to sit-down restaurants and similar activities.

I also think that, while anti-lockdown types may be right about some government mandates, they may be over-estimating the impact of those mandates. Most of the socioeconomic impact of COVID has been from individual people choosing to avoid their normal activities because they don't want to get COVID.

> the value of saving one life is not infinite

Nowhere is this more clear than in traffic.

There has been an overwhelming research all around the world on this since the 60s. We know fairly well how many lives are saved by policy changes, including installing railings, ice removal, the lowering of speed limits, lower blood alcohol levels, and so on.

Yet we ended up doing it partially and in controlled increments. Money talks.

This is a good point to bring up but kind of lands in a different place than the GP's argument. Cars aren't boosted because a rational analysis has determined that the negative externalities are worth it; rather, cars are boosted despite the evidence that the measures you mention are cost-effective ways to save lives.

The continued subsidy of cars is proof that emotion trumps reason.

I just don’t see the harm of being supportive of the scientists who are courageous enough to to investigate/research the origins in a way that doesn’t necessarily exclude a lab leak origin, or in general being open to the idea.

I wish there was no harm. It seems to be a pretty short jump from lab-leak, to engineered virus, to 5G cell towers giving us covid through our dreams. And even that starting step seems to have a lot of people wanting to shut down virology labs.

I just want to comment to reject the equivalency of lab-leak hypothesis with absurd conspiracies. Humans make mistakes; it's known that contagions have escaped from labs. How does acknowledging these uncontroversial facts cause one to jump to intentional engineering, or not understanding how 5G works? I suspect that the majority of people who think "lab leak" is among the set of reasonable origin hypotheses are looking for better transparency and safety protocols in labs, not trying to end virology research.

I wasn’t saying it’s a slippery slope, i was saying (and it’s evidenced in any comment section this comes up in) that anything that lends credibility to the LLH is fuel for all those more extreme viewpoints.

It's almost like initially dismissing and censoring the lableak theory as a racist conspiracy has helped fuel all these other conspiracies. Conflicts of interests like these fuel distrust of authorities and vaccine hesitancy. It's self-inflicted

Meh. You’re putting a lot of faith in people. More transparency sometimes helps dispel conspiracy theories - sometimes it just gives them more data to pour over to find “connections” in.

I don't think so. Avoiding loss of trust is medical governance 101.[1]

"The agency organised a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign in Abottabad, Pakistan, in a bid to obtain DNA from the children of Bin Laden, to confirm the presence of the family in a compound and sanction the rollout of a risky and extensive operation. Release of this information has had a disastrous effect on worldwide eradication of infectious diseases, especially polio."

1. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Yes, absolutely - trust is key - but I don’t think that this was the moment where scientists and governments lost the trust of the people.

It's one of several major moments throughout the pandemic

Oh, i meant they’d lost people’s trust decades before the pandemic…

A group of intelligent people downvoting a set of arguments that rely mostly on logical fallacy isn't bias, it's self-moderation. If lab-leak arguments had literature to stand on and didn't instead just invoke false-dichotomy to justify their existence I am sure they would find more fertile ground here.

There is no actual evidence for either, so both should be vigorously explored.

Sure. My problem isn't with the direction of the arguments but their lack of substance.

There's evidence that the lab was doing gain of function research on coronaviruses. That's not exactly a smoking gun but it's extremely compelling evidence.

NIH admits that Fauci lied about funding gain of function research in Wuhan.[1]

1. https://youtu.be/lRCowOPL5Vc?t=229

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAIsK9tosck

is there a point in 'exploring' these ideas on HN where its very unlikely someone is going to show up with any actual evidence? what is the value in repetitive circular uninformed speculation?

This article is about the origin of the Omicron variant, not SARS-CoV-2 itself. So the lab-leak theory isn't really relevant to the discussion.

Personally, I would like to see more investigation into the multiple mutations and which variant that Omicron evolved from. I find it plausible that a capable party could have engineered and released a milder variant, presumably to help end this pandemic. I say this as someone with no knowledge of natural viral evolution. It just seems peculiar to me that Omicron was not a variant of the presently circulating strain, at the time.

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