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Comment by r053bud | Hacker News Reader

Because what good does it do to actually dealing with the outbreak? I assume the government just made a decision that it was politically less desirable to do for a number of reasons. Mainly, probably the continuing attempts at thawing of relations with China.

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If China is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again. Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to the world

What they were doing was downplaying the severity of the problem until it was sufficiently widespread that it was not just a China problem. I'm not saying that was the plan from the start, but it definitely morphed into that.

The genie is more or less out of the bottle on that one. If it is a lab leak there is no stopping it from happening again and China is not doing anything special. There are hundreds of these labs all over the world, they have containment breaches all the time [1], and given the way of international politics it is effectively impossible to shut them all down. Probably undesirable as well given that labs like those are the reason we had the medical knowledge to create a vaccine.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecuri...

I strongly disagree that they are not doing anything special. They are literally going out into remote bat caves and harvesting coronaviruses and bringing them into large population centers to study.

If USA is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again. Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to the world

The money for WIV risky reasearch mostly came from the USA.

Totally agree. That should be and has to some extent been made public. The China portion of the story is a complete mystery.

I actually completely agree. We SHOULD know the true origin and causes; I just have zero faith anyone in the US will put pressure on China or accuse them publicly. That was more the gist of what I was getting at.

That lying about pandemic origins is the best course of dealing with the pandemic is an exceptionally bold statement.

That some bureaucrats might think that is a much less bold statement.

"At this point, what difference does it make?"

-- famous politician, responding to a question on a different issue

that's not all there is to it. there are deeper relations between the NIH and Wuhan.

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