Hacker News Reader

Comment by pyuser583 | Hacker News Reader

> The false myth of a research-related accident being at the root of the COVID-19 pandemic has become endemic in society. Despite a large and detailed body of scientific evidence contradicting or disproving most circulating ideas, many proponents are reluctant to give up even the most unsustainable notions of genetic engineering or gain-of-function research. This gap between scientific knowledge and public belief is dangerous for any democratic society.

I thought this was still up in the air.

View on HN

From subpoenaed communications we even know that certain figures who publicly denounced the lab-leak theory, privately believed the theory was plausible or even likely.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-lab-leak-deception-an...

This article is part of what I like to call the narrative media. You decide what the facts are and don't give a damn about reality -- because that's what keeps your readers coming back for more.

I do always find this funny as a major support for the lab leak theory. At that time there wasn’t any of the genetic lineage information that we have now which is the strongest evidence for zoonotic origin.

Why does anybody’s public or private beliefs at that point in time matter? Politics have always existed in science but generally over time the truth wins.

"Truth wins over time" means 50 years after you die and none of this matters anymore, someone will bravely say the truth with no fear of consequences. Especially when there is such a huge conspiracy to cover things up and the facts are so inaccessible to ordinary people.

>Why does anybody’s public or private beliefs at that point in time matter?

If someone demonstrated a pattern of lying in their own favor, isn't that important?

There is more than enough evidence now to make a strong conclusion, as the OP shows. When the people were caught lying, only like 5% of the eventual information was known. It’s bad for their personal reputations that they were caught lying (or at minimum misrepresenting their own views), but their lies don’t change the underlying facts. I also think it is notable that the politically correct view turned out to be most likely correct.

I also strongly suspect a lot of lab leak proponents and/or anti-vaxxers are knowingly lying as well. But still it doesn’t change the underlying facts.

>There is more than enough evidence now to make a strong conclusion

I would disagree, all the evidence we have right now supporting zoonosis is circumstantial. The evidence being a mapping of early cases to around the market but given the shortcomings of this early evidence it's hard to rule out sampling bias: https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/a5102da1-9b47-4e11-...

But so far we have not found an intermediate host nor any closely related viruses in any animals yet. By contrast for the two previous spillovers SARS and MERS they not only identified an intermediate host, but they have found many closely related viruses in animals due to the fact the virus is circulating and thus branching off into many variants. Just take a look at the phylogenetic trees of MERS: https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-... and SARS-CoV-1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1212604/

There could be liars or foreign agitators among the anti-vaxxers. That's why scientists need to be extremely aboveboard, because if they can't be trusted then people will turn to charlatans. I am against mRNA vaccines and skeptical of some others, but I'm not against well-established vaccines in general.

>It’s bad for their personal reputations that they were caught lying, but their lies don’t change the underlying facts.

If your job is to advise the country about how to conduct research and how to deal with a pandemic, it's not just reputational damage. The lockdowns virtually destroyed the economy and cost more than WW2. Fauci lied about not doing gain of function research and the media has his back.

The guy in the OP paid somebody $100k to beat him a debate using a self-defined empirical system, which somebody did, and the original guy now believes the lab leak theory even more.

Honestly I think I’d prefer if it were a lab leak, since that seems easier to prevent in the future, sadly for me I think the overwhelming evidence points otherwise. A quest for the truth isn’t real if the truth can only be one thing.

But look I’m not going to convince you, your faith is your own and I hope it serves you well.

It's not faith, it's many years of research. I don't care if you roll your eyes at that. You're not smarter than me, I assure you.

It's not really. Odds are it was a lab leak. The Chinese and US governments both want to cover it up, because the coronavirus research was illegal in the US and they both had a part in creating a global pandemic. The absurdities that these scientists come up with to cover for each other are funny as hell. Too bad we still have people urging censorship and worse on this matter.

I thought too, I watched part of the debate and submitted evidence, I now know it isn't in scientific circle, it's pretty much closed.

Prior to the debate I thought it was likely a specimen leak (couldn't be an engineered virus, it used previously unknown, and inefficient, means to enter human cells, also to much randomness in its DNA). The debate was a schooling in statistics (which is sad cause I have an applied statistics bachelor), I know believe it was zoonotic. I don't really care either way now.

I thought so too. What I know is that neither winning or losing a debate, nor writing a substack article about it, proves or disproves anything. Which is why the whole business is silly. It either is or isn't the case, independent of how much money changes hands.

The author of this is presenting their view and you have hours of content to watch about this if you want to dig into it. One problem is that "lab leak," as Peter says, means a bunch of amalgamated theories. It's hard to discuss this without going through in depth, which is what this debate tried to do.

It's actually swung the other way with multiple US Government agencies and even former CDC cheif Redfield admitting that a lab leak is most likely:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/26/covid-virus-li...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisadellatto/2023/02/26/timel...

FBI Chief Christopher Wray: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64806903

Former CDC Chief Robert Redfield: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64891745

The best evidence is undisclosed classified intelligence which was considered "low confidence."

WMD in Iraq was also "low confidence" intel.

The intelligence agencies were behind illegal biological research in other countries, and multiple countries covered it up. It's amazing that they fessed up to the possibility of a lab leak at all.

Indeed. You have a) an outbreak of a novel virus in b) a city where "gain of function" research is being carried out with that very same family of viruses in c) a country that (to put it mildly) is not exactly famed for its high levels of quality control.

Does that mean that it definitely was a lab leak? No.

Does it mean that even suggesting that it might've been a lab leak is some kind of "truther" bullshit? Also no.

If I find zebra dung in my garden in Northern Minnesota, and Bob's Zebra Farm is just down the road, it is in no sense a "conspiracy theory" to suggest that one of Bob's zebras might have escaped, and making that suggestion does not make you a "truther" (God, I hate that word... it's just ad hominem nonsense).

Now, maybe someone else in the neighborhood has a zebra, or maybe a traveling circus passed through and one of their zebras escaped, or maybe there's yet another explanation.

But, you know, I'm still going to count Bob as a prime suspect, no matter how much Bob and Bob's buddies try to make me look ridiculous for even making the suggestion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com