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Comment by aquarium87 | Hacker News Reader

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1) That’s a big assumption you’re making, even if it was a lab leak (which is itself a big leap from what’s known today)

2) It also wouldn’t be “weird” at all. That’s like saying you find it weird that a firefighter got burned or a nuclear safety researcher caused a nuclear safety incident.

No it's not. Not at all. Everything risk is increasing exponentially. BSL-4 labs are expanding 1 per year, or around 2% extra risk. CRISPr and CRISPr cas9 are only 10 and 20 years old. How much added risk is that per year? 10,000%?

Then to send money to actively seek out bat viruses in the place thought to harbor the worse or most diverse viruses?

And to do all that in partnership with a hostile enemy who most certainly isn't going to tell you all the extras they have planned above and beyond the controllable.

No, I think you are dead wrong. The default assumption from now on is lab leak unless proven otherwise, because that's the risky world we live in. Period. No getting around it. And the risk gets higher every year.

There are literally tens of thousands of BSL-3 labs in the world. They aren't sitting empty doing nothing. They are busy trying to "save us".

I can't really tell what position you're arguing against here. I personally find the risk of GoF research to probably net out to "not worth it," but that's an entirely different conversation than "did Fauci cause this."

And no, it's nowhere near acceptable to just assume that every new virus is a lab leak. Especially when the subtext of this line of inquiry is usually that we're going to "hold 'them' accountable" somehow. Combine those two thoughts and you get something like, "anywhere that a novel virus appears in suddenly gets smacked by the international community," and I'm not sure you could create a stronger disincentive to early pathogen detection and alerting if you tried.

P.S. There's almost certainly not anywhere close to "tens of thousands" of BSL-3 labs. Probably in the few hundreds to maybe thousand or two, but that'd be a stretch, and "tens of thousands" is not supported by any data I can find: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/mapping-biosafety-le...

It would be weird, but that's not what happened at all!

Incorrect. Lab leak is de facto default from now on in the world we live in. Even if you disagree, it will be in 5 years. The tech, the databases, the labs, the money. It's all increasing. Every single year the risk of a lab leak goes up, to the point where we are expecting a covid per decade out of the labs. But hopefully the rest of the world is more ethical than the chinese and their new and novel virus creation strategy and we get relatively harmless versions of the flu etc. Rather than pathogens with zero prior human cohabitation.

Funny how all the datapoints, including new and novel to humans get ignored.......

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