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Comment by wronglyprepaid | Hacker News Reader

> The public health institutions in the US have an abysmal track record for accuracy and also knowingly lied to the public - e.g. advising against masks at the outset because they wanted to preserve their mask supply.

Their track record is flawless, they are just maligned by the right wing media. They stopped COVID-19 and saved millions of lives.

> Finally, just for fun, there's a significant possibility the US public health institute bear responsibility for the pandemic itself - to the extent they funded gain of function research and the Wuhan Institute where COVID possibly (likely?) escaped.

This is a racist anti-Chinese conspiracy theory and in part the reason for the anti-asian hate pandemic in the USA. They did not fund gain of function research in Wuhan, and there was no gain of function research there [1].

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/04/fauci-says-rand-paul-egregio...

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They totally did fund gain of function research and Fauci is weasel wording about that. He is a liar.

Creating mice with humanized lungs. Creating new viruses with spike protein to infect said lungs. Making virus more fit by passing through human lung mice. Not GOF huh?

> Their track record is flawless

There were clearly mistakes made. There were always going to be mistakes made in addressing a large scale disaster of a sort that we haven't faced in recent memory. Insisting that the response was flawless is idiotic, short sighted, and prevents from learning from those mistakes for the future.

The causes of the loss of trust in the US medical system are complicated and are due in part to all of: bad messaging from the CDC, reduction of personal relationships with doctors (especially in rural areas) and political opportunism.

Well played. This (and the preceding comments) is some high class bait. Congrats on hooking a few fish with it. FWIW though Hacker News isn't typically the best place for this kind of thing. >my karma now burns

Covid-19 has not been stopped at all.

The public health authorities in the US have a "flawless" track record? Really? So I was imagining how they said masks weren't useful at the start of the pandemic and later admitted they lied to conserve mask supplies?

The US public health institutions made many, many, many terrible and substantive errors with COVID. It's hard to believe they are as bad as they are. Everything from not shutting down travel from infected regions at the start, blocking testing with "unapproved" tests that were superior to their own, denying the airborne nature of COVID, knowingly misrepresenting vaccine efficacy, housing infected COVID patients in elderly homes, giving vaccines to young people who didn't want it over old people who needed it, half-hearted lockdowns arbitrarily destroying some businesses while not slowing the virus - this is off the top of my head and I could go on.

Finally, I'm short on time but it's not even possible to construe as racist the uncontested fact that an unsafe Chinese lab working on coronavirus gain of function research is at the geographic center of a novel coronavirus outbreak.

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