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Comment by MilnerRoute | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem is that America's Director of National Intelligence just isn't saying what people had hoped to hear.

"We continue to have no indication that the Wuhan Institute of Virology's pre-pandemic research holdings included SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic."

"All Intelligence Community agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon."

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Lab leak theorists don’t believe Covid was developed as a weapon. They believe it was an accidental leak from a lab doing normal, non-warfare virological research. The quoted phrasing makes me think that they know it was a leak but redirect the conversation by saying it wasn’t a biological weapon.

They address all of the possibilities. They aren't redirecting, they are being through. Summarizing it, the intro says, "Some agencies think that the first person to get the virus got it naturally, some others think that the first person to get it was exposed to it from the WIV. No agencies think that it was bioengineered."

What is the difference between being exposed to it from the WIV and it being bioengineered? GoF research vs. "lab leak?"

Many conspiracy theorists have claimed it was a bio-weapon, along with other batshit stuff like Bill Gates & 5G. Read both quotes, not just the last one.

When I wrote “lab leak theorists” I had in mind experts who think it was a leak. I was not thinking of kooks. I should have been more explicit. In general, I think it best for intelligence agencies not to write things to counter what looney people think. Such people can’t be convinced of anything that is contrary to their lunacy.

A public statement is for the public, kooks included, and when some of those kooks are political figures that makes it even more reasonable to make such a statement.

Apparently it was written with kooks in mind. I’d guess you are right in that they are writing for Congressmen. There are kooks there. Overall, I think it a bad idea for intelligence agencies to write public statements to combat nutty ideas (unless such ideas are held by Congressmen).

Okay, so I guess that means you're now okay with their public statements.

Poisoning the well. Not alot of people subscribe to the COVID is 5G sickness theory aside from Facebook boomers, while Bill Gates' ideology and history of dodgy dealings in foreign countries is not even remotely comparable.

No, there's no evidence of Bill Gate's involvement in the appearance of COVID. You're drinking from the same well as those Facebook boomers.

That's not what I said.

It sure seemed like you were saying the "Bill Gates wants to kill/control you with COVID-19/Vaccine" conspiracies had more merit than the "5G Causes COVID-19" conspiracies. Both of them were crackpot theories.

Professionals holding this believe it was probably an accidental leak. Conspiracy theorists and laypeople believe it's probably a bioweapon. It's hard to have discussions about this because the two positions get lumped together.

Lab leak proponents contain multitudes. Some believe it was developed as a weapon, and some believe it was being studied normally. Some believe the leak was accidental, and some believe it was a result of sabotage. Some seemingly can't decide what they believe, deploying arguments with no clear regard for which actual scenarios a given argument would support as long as it pokes a hole in the mainstream narrative.

> "All Intelligence Community agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon."

This strawman is getting old.

A tiny portion of people believe or assert it's a bioweapon. That is relatively unlikely and even less likely to be proven true, even if it is. Many people suspect it leaked from the lab. That's relatively likely. But let's just completely ignore that and focus on debunking a crazier theory that few people believe.

Is your strawman that only one of the quotes is what was said? Did you bother reading both quotes?

I think a biological weapon deliberately released makes more sense than an accidental release from a lab that happens to look exactly like it spilled over at a wet market.

SARS-CoV-1 had an accidental "lab leak" and instead of infecting a market it killed the mother of the researcher who was infected with it.

But it does not appear to have spilled over at the wet market. The Chinese CDC published a paper stating it was just a super spreader event. Plus the samples were taken way too long after the virus has been spreading. The market just reflects sampling bias.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

I just read the executive summary, but based on it I'm assuming this is just the bare minimum they're willing to do to comply with some congressional order.

the first quote is claiming an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.

we don’t really know which information actually was gathered here (it could literally be zero and that sentence would still be true), so there’s no way to turn that sentence into evidence of anything. it’s fairly meaningless.

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