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Comment by somewhereoutth | Hacker News Reader

Except of course that isn't what happened.

All evidence points to zoonotic spillover, aggravated by our encroachment on previously undisturbed natural areas and global warming.

Sadly, it was both political useful ('the Chinese did it!'), and ideologically useful ('a few faulty humans did this, like in the movies'), to blame the lab in Wuhan. By doing so, we can absolve ourselves of blame, and of need to take action - action both to mitigate the effects of this pandemic, and to prepare for the next. The next being an inevitability, just a question of when (within 10 years is my uneducated guess)

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It's not absolving anyone from blame. The lab leak theory blames all parties-- it points out that the US NIH funded the research being done in Wuhan, which is public record.

That's leaving aside the specious claim that there's no evidence of lab leak. The evidence of first outbreaks being near the lab are evidence of it being a lab leak, just as the first outbreaks going through a wet market are evidence of natural evolution. We have evidence for both theories.

It's absolving 'us' of blame - meaning our activities in causing the spillover event in the first place, and our failure to contain the outbreak - or even make it real for many in our population.

Much easier to identify a few bad actors (which can then be 'punished' so this 'never happens again') instead of the crapness of people in general (which crapness ensures that this will happen again, with bodybags and lockdowns, and probably quite soon)

There is ZERO evidence that it's zoonotic spillover. In almost 4 years they haven't found the source. There's actual hard evidence that it came from the Wuhan lab.

> All evidence points to zoonotic spillover, aggravated by our encroachment on previously undisturbed natural areas and global warming.

what evidence?

in any case, thats fancy language for: "Donald Trump was a proponent of the lab leak hypothesis so we had to come up with an alternate theory lest we appear to be in agreement with Donald Trump...so we've decided that it was people eating Pangolin Soup"

Because that is the way you'd get diseases like this normally.

The folks claiming that there is evidence only for their theory are incorrect.

Nobody who has any sense is even remotely interested in agreeing or disagreeing with Trump - he could not be part of any meaningful debate, anymore than a 5 year old, we are just disappointed he became POTUS.

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