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Comment by NDizzle | Hacker News Reader

Can we actually discuss this, or are people still freaking out? This was incredibly obvious, even early, early on. Suppression isn’t good, folks.

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This is not a real report. I very much suspected this is what happened but the trustworthy peer-reviewed studies have disavowed it. If you trust this study over those, you probably should refuse emergency medical care and read everything backwards.

Which ones have disavowed this (very real) reports findings? As far as I've seen, there is a false dichotomy between the first spreading event being source and lab being source. Angela Rasmussen for instance is well known for her detailed studies around the live animal market but it doesn't make sense to proclaim that because it spread there that it precludes coming there via a lab worker over a game hunter.

What is a "real report" by your definition? The word report is a very general one.

Peer-review studies are not exactly trustworthy on this topic, are they? The peers in question are virologists and others who directly enabled their work.

My understanding is that at the start of COVID19 scientists in related fields immediately assumed that a lab leak was the likely cause, and were dumbfounded to hear such a strong and immediate consensus (the Nature letter, for example) against such.

Unfortunately it became political, so all rational discussion became impossible.

No no, it's a combination of:

- impossible to have ONLY rational discussion

- Unfashionable points of view being suppressed on HN by those with the numbers/power.

Here's some rational discussion which I was originally unable to post because the submission had been reflexively flagged and killed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33370251

I agree with that point you made. For me personally, if it turns out to have been a lab leak then it wouldn't really move the needle for me much. Now, if it were leaked on purpose now we have a pretty big problem.

But absent a deliberate act, I still think it's valid to talk about whether gain-of-function research has sufficient value to outweigh the risks, and if so, what we can do to mitigate those risks. Whether covid was a leak or not. Next time maybe it's captain trips.

I agree that suppression isn't good. But there still needed to be thorough investigations. It being "obvious" isn't enough.

That being said, the corporate media and the politicians (mostly Democrats) who called this theory "preposterous" and a conspiracy deserve to be thrown out on their asses. Because those were talking points that had nothing to back them up. But when you're dealing with the "pandemic", what else is new?

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