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Comment by maskil | Hacker News Reader

"excuse to argue against it" is a very slippery slope.

There should be no excuses required to exercise free speech and free inquiry.

All you've attempted to do here is impugn the motives of those holding a position contrary to your own without addressing their arguments.

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So share the argument against if you are so compelled to reject it.

Please also reject all other scientific advanced that have made it possible for you to live a longer life no matter how small those advancements seem to be. For if you choose to reject the scientific community and their solutions than you should then refuse the rest right down to the safety of the roads you drive on now. Making this argument is a luxury of people who are privileged beyond their abilities.

In all honesty, we probably owe the existence of Covid to the scientific community doing gain of function research. We never did find evidence of it in a bat, either in a wet market or elsewhere in Wuhan. We do know it existed in the WIV lab though.

Do you know that the particular strain of Covid-19 was in WIV without a doubt or is it still speculation? You could argue that indeed this was a lapse of protocol through disposal of lab specimens but does that mean we need to condemn an entire group of people for the mistakes of a few within a group that was studying this gain of function? I just don't buy that we should somehow make this into a holy war against an entire country if indeed this was a mistake in the scientific community within that country. If this were to happen in the U.S. (I'm assuming you are American, but this can be applied to anywhere) than who would we have to blame? What about the mistake of dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima or Nagasaki? That in itself is a specifically horrific mistake. Even if it is proven that a lab was the origin of this virus will be ultimately forgotten like the people who dropped the bombs themselves and the people that made nuclear bombs a reality. We still pay the price for the mistakes of nuclear armament by the logistics of disposal and the logistics of multiple entities who are now proven to be unstable in the long run that hold that power. This is why biologic warfare is outlawed and why nuclear war is something to be avoided based on our first hand experience of what that could potentially look like for all of humanity. A mistake has many outcomes. Don't assume just because something may have happened it was with intent by proxy.

>What about the mistake of dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima or Nagasaki? That in itself is a specifically horrific mistake.

Thanks for the reminder, we can also thank scientists for nuclear weapons.

When the free speech and free inquiry is causing more harm to society than it's preventing, that is a good reason to prevent it.

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