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Comment by matt3210 | Hacker News Reader

Typical… during peace time nations often get complacent. During healthy time, nations often get complacent. I thought it would take longer given just two years ago most stuff was shut down.

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Why is yours the top comment when it's obvious you didn't read the article? Canceling this program is a move to prevent future pandemics by reducing the chance of gain-of-function research to go awry and result in accidental release of augmented viruses.

There are other types of research on viruses, zoonotic virus reservoirs, all sorts of topics that don't involve intentionally making a sample more and more contagious or deadly.

Obama also instituted a moratorium on US federal funding for this class of research during his tenure. This is a bipartisan issue. Nothing controversial for anyone other than grant recipients who need this money to keep their business afloat.

Still over 100 deaths per day in the US. And those are official numbers, certainly an undercount.

We haven't been over excess mortality since January according to the CDC. People will always be dying of something, today it's with covid.

How often do they update their baseline?

Their website has their charts and methodology pointing out the good and bad:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm...

Do they account for the covid deaths during the pandemic? Since a lot of vulnerable people died early, the number of deaths due to other causes like heart attacks, cancer, old age, diabetes etc. would be lower now than if covid never had happened.

I mostly look at the total deaths as a benchmark. The way they counted covid deaths changed and had new financial incentives which impacts numbers. Also, I would personally question the early accuracy of false/positive covid testing.

The numbers you suggest gets complicated by the fact that many people delayed care due to fear of leaving their houses, much less going to a covid-infested hospital.

2400 die every day from heart disease in the US, but those who are still terrified of Covid today generally aren't allocating 24x of their fear budget towards heart disease and starting a regular running habit or improving their diet to flatten that curve.

Life belongs to those who learn proper fear prioritization.

heart attacks don't spread in enclosed spaces

No, but they do spread via memetic infection of cultural norms that direct us as individuals to adopt unhealthy lifestyles.

which is certainly a problem worth solving, but it's still a different issue than a highly infectious disease that can be spread on elevators buses

I hate it when I catch an avoidable memetic infection from somebody a couple seats behind me on a plane because of the relaxed memetic infection rules.

Who cares? Everyone has been vaccinated at this point unless you're so deluded from reality you missed the vaccination campaigns in every country on Earth.

A few years ago I got the 'rona and recovered. A few weeks later I went to doctor who got me blood test to confirm antibodies. He wrote letter stating I had it, I fully recovered, and the vaccines are not recommended. On a lark I got another antibody blood test recently and the markers are as strong as the first blood test - no waning.

I'm not talking about a fear budget, I'm talking about actual money. In 20 years we had SARS, MERS, ebola, H1N1, and then SARS 2. It makes no sense to shut down a program that keeps an eye on potential pandemics.

Perhaps the complacency was assuming people would treat dangerous viruses as deadly weapons, and we've decided it's not worth the risk.

So not:

"Scientists working in this field might say—as indeed I have said—that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484390/

(Of course, common sense would say that if you're not willing to do this in your own backyard, you probably shouldn't let people with laxer standards and do it in theirs)

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