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Comment by standapart | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

>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/

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