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Comment by riyadparvez | Hacker News Reader

Several top virologists have publicly tarred lab leak as racist conspiracy theory, while privately discussed that not only it is a possibility, some of them believed it's highly probable. Here's a very recent email that has been released yesterday [1]. So forgive me for not taking another virologist's take on why lab leak is improbable on redit seriously.

[1] https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1480930691919618051

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So now a single passage out of context that accounts for 4 out of 1000 differing nucleotides is proof positive that the author's mind was absolutely settled that it was a lab leak? Give me a break.

This is what I've written:

> while privately discussed that not only it is a possibility, some of them believed it's *highly probable*.

This is what you have written:

> proof positive that the author's mind was *absolutely settled* that it was a lab leak

Judge for yourself. I am not going to respond to any of your comment on this thread. Peace.

There is actually only one of these people that pronounced themselves about the implausibility of it being a lab leak. The only email attributed to him don't say that he thinks it was "highly probable", just that he didn't find at the time an explanation for those 14 nucleotides.

Do you have something about Mike Farzan saying, in public, that it was very unlikely that the lab leak theory was true? Or is it then incorrect to say that individual virologists were saying privately one thing and publicly another?

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