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Comment by neodymiumphish | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it’s somewhere in this report, but I’m much more curious about why there was so much hostility toward anyone conveying the facts related to the so called “lab leak theory” than I am about the theory itself. It seems perfectly obvious that the most likely source of the virus could have been the lab that worked with variants of this virus and was very close to the first known infections.

The government (US and/or China) won’t actually suffer any meaningful consequences if it were known that they were involved in the accidentally leakage of the virus, so why all the effort to make it seem organic?

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Banal explanation: there is the red party, and the blue party, and when the red party started claiming it was a lab leak, the blue party doubled down on the opposite.

I have some sympathy for the blue party here, as the red party came up with the idea of "alternative facts" and the evidence for a lab leak, unless there was some top secret government material we don't know about, was sketchy at best so the red party was much more certain of their claim than the evidence would have allowed for. But that doesn't prove the claim either right or wrong.

It seems perfectly obvious to me that it came from Zoonosis: https://marketwise.substack.com/p/did-covid-19-come-from-a-l...

It matters because it affects who we prepare for the next pandemics. Should we tighten regulations for labs? Should we ban wet markets? Where should we monitor how closely?

That's not a good reason for mattering. All of lab leaks and wet markets and factory farms and free range farms and more are all plausible vectors for future pandemics. We luckily don't have enough pandemics for past ones to be particularly statistically significant, we must use modelling.

Perhaps you could enumerate the facts relating to the lab leak theory? All I have is:

1) A virus research lab was located in an area where novel viruses have tended to emerge.

There are several issues with the lab leak theory:

1) Creates a target for (racial?) hatred and blame - i.e the Chinese.

2) Absolves us from blame, 'a few bad people' (like in the movies), instead of general human encroachment on the natural environment.

3) Feeds the anti-science narrative.

There is a claim that a couple of researchers at the WiV got unwell with Covid a few days before anyone else. That would be an argument in favour of a lab leak. But I don't think it's established beyond doubt that this claim is true, and it's not a knockdown argument on its own.

The NSA might have access to Chinese top secret government records saying "oh shit, one of our experiments got out into the wild, cover it up!". Without seeing a smoking gun like this though, I remain on the pro-zoonotic side.

I think it's fairly safe to let go of this claim. The WHO did an extensive report in Feb 2021 into 92 cases of potential early COVID. This included staff at WIV and used COVID tests on preserved samples. They found that none of the cases were actually COVID.

I agree with you (and so does the ACX post I cited elsewhere). I'm just saying it is a claim made by the pro-leak crowd that, if true, would be more credible than "A virus research lab was located in an area where novel viruses have tended to emerge".

Are you referring to the "Joint WHO-China Study"?

https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-...

National health authorities are structured to communicate WHO health advice and policies. WHO in theory is an international health policy body but as many international institutions its mission gets distorted by bad actors who were granted membership.

I agree. OTOH, why does it matter to select one of the options? How is this more than a blame game?

I think it starts with recognizing that there isn’t a single theory but two: the simple one is that someone working with animals had a breach of safety protocols and got infected. That one was never controversial - literally everyone who works with lab animals has safety training about this – and a number of different scientific groups looked for evidence which could support or undercut that theory.

The second one is that it was a deliberately developed strain (a few variations: genetically engineered weapon, “gain of function” research gone wrong, etc.) which was released, often with claims that it was intended to attack the west or force government control of everyone. Those claims were not made scientifically and were often accompanied by racist and/or false political claims or abuse directed at political opponents which strongly suggested that the motive was not understanding but political damage control (Trump was running for re-election on economic grounds until this upset the race). The few people who suffered any consequences for this almost uniformly claimed they were being “censored” for the first part, but we know that it was the latter because many people who asked the same questions without the abusive behavior had no consequences - there were multiple scientific papers, for example, looking at evidence of human modification in the viral genome.

This divide lead to the dynamic you’re seeing: pretty much everyone who isn’t primarily motivated by exonerating Trump looked at the evidence, saw that there isn’t any support for claims of artificial modification or intent, and moved on. The people still banging on about it aren’t adding new information or insight, and that means everyone who isn’t politically aligned with them is tired of hearing the same old things.

the thing is, theory one could happen so often that it is quite strange we had just one pandemic like COVID while theory two fits much better the experience we had. If you apply Occam's Razor to this problem it is quite difficult to think the theory one is correct. It is the best one to keep society in a fear loop tho.

I can think of a few reasons why it was important to tackle misinformation around the lab leak hypothesis:

* Racism. In the wake of COVID, xenophobic attacks increased against Asian people - particularly the Chinese - in many countries including the US. The idea that the virus may have been created by people from China would only exacerbate this.

* Phobia of science. If virology labs are seen as a threat to society, they may well get less research funding and less entry to market. We see this in the EU where people are terrified of GMOs for largely misconceived reasons.

* General information quality and politicisation. The lab leak hypothesis is one of a great number of dubious conjectures and conspiracy theories that have their claws in political debate in the US. Other examples include climate denial, vaccines causing autism, the birther and truther conspiracies etc... . The collective consequence of this is a lot of wasted money, air time, and energy debunking increasingly bizarre and contrived claims, and a lot of political advantages gained by unscrupulous figures taking advantage of public gullibility.

> Racism

I haven't 100% fact-checked this, but I believe in late 2019 when the first claims started floating around that some new kind of SARS had started going around in China, a lot of people went around saying that's definitely not true and the only reason someone could be claiming this is to stir up racism against Asians.

No, people said it would not go outside of China, then that it wasn't _that_ dangerous, then when it decimated Bergame they said that it wouldn't stay for spring, then confinement, then mask are useless, then masks are ultra usefull.

I also remember that getting vaccinated would kill me in less than 3 years, so far so good, only a few month to go.

I agree, "racism" is often used as a scapegoat for the sake of diverting attention from certain details for the sake of reputation laundering. These organizations will stoop to any low because they could face jail time.

I never quite got how it was racist to say it was a mistake at a cutting edge lab in China doing research that went wrong but not racist to say it happened in one of those filthy illegal Chinese wild animal markets.

It's a good question. I think the fact that it's a state-funded institute lends credence to the idea that Chinese are collectively responsible. Also, it feeds into paranoias around secretive biological warfare and Chinese desire for world domination.

The main suspects if it was a leak did an active disinfo campaign to stop people accusing them. These being the Chinese government, Fauci and associates and Peter Daszak.

There's info on that and what went on from Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the time who naturally was involved in trying to control it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMlhvnMpRU0&t=119s

That mentions the Chinese and Fauci but not Daszak.

It seems a lot of the reason the weirdness is that back in the 1960s and 70s the US did bioweapons/defence research and then in 1975 ratified the Biological Weapons Convention outlawing that.

But come the 9/11 attacks Cheney and others thought oh dear maybe Bin Laden will do a bio attack next and transferred the defence budget to Fauci to keep on doing biodefense covertly. This continued until covid and then it was all a bit - how dare you suggest we were doing what we were doing.

There is also hostility towards Redfield for saying what happened but as well as being the CDC head at the time and about the only person in communication with the Chinese CDC when Wuhan happened, is a published virologist, a medical doctor and also he used to be in the military and run the US biodefence program so he's not your average crank.

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