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Comment by fasteddie31003 | Hacker News Reader

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1. I don't think allocating funds to reproduce research would be worth the cost of displacing other new research. The current way of discovering that research is wrong by trying to build on it isn't perfect either, but it is still more efficient than systematically reproducing a lot of research. In my experience, scientific reproducibility has gotten substantially better in recent years- the standard of evidence, and the quality and correctness of statistical analyses are both much higher than they used to be.

2. Experts don't consider that human research contributed to COVID because it is completely implausible to anyone that understands virology research. Moreover, current safety standards for doing research on infectious human diseases in BSL level 3 and 4 labs are incredibly rigorous- and although they carry non-zero risk, what we learn from this research more than outweighs it by improving our ability to treat and prevent disease.

See here for a discussion of what virologists think about the lab leak theory: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-special-how-the-pandemic-be...

The US select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic, under Biden, concluded that the virus most likely originated from the Wuhan lab

https://x.com/covidselect/status/1863637371624862163?s=46

That is a subcommittee of the House of representatives- I'm not sure why you didn't mention the House, or mentioned Biden instead?

It's a panel of politicians with an obvious political bias, and while some are MDs, none of have the technical background to have any type of informed opinion on virology or molecular biology related issues.

The virus is not closely related to any known wild viruses that have or were being studied by humans. The closest wild virus that has been identified branched off from whatever jumped to humans 40 years earlier[1]. The technology and knowledge to create a working virus like SARS-CoV-2 from known distantly related viruses does not exist- it simply could not be done accidentally or intentionally.

Evidence strongly supports the theory that a wild bat virus jumped through other non-bat species, and then was transmitted to Humans in the Huanan market sometime in November 2019[2].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35137080/ [2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337

> That is a subcommittee of the House of representatives- I'm not sure why you didn't mention the House, or mentioned Biden instead?

Fair point, you are right, it's irrelevant, I guess I was just trying to preemptively dispel an association to trump. The committee is bi-partisan, but it did have a republican majority at the time the report was released.

The senate report is of course not the only government report on covid origins. Most recently the CIA has commented that the virus is "more likely" to have leaked from a lab.[0]

> The virus is not closely related to any known wild viruses that have or were being studied by humans.

The closest known virus is RaTG13, collected by WIV in 2013[1]. WIV took down it's online database of bat viruses on 12 September 2019[4]. Potentially to conceal it's custody of a closer related virus.

> The technology and knowledge to create a working virus like SARS-CoV-2 from known distantly related viruses does not exist- it simply could not be done accidentally or intentionally.

Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance, applied for funding[2] to insert human proteolytic cleavage sites into SARS-like coronaviruses[3].

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd9qjjj4zy5o

[1]: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declass...

[2]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...

[3]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363729325_DRASTIC_-...

[4]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349073738_An_invest...

The paper I cited above that has an ancestor 40 years removed, is actually more closely related to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13.

"We find RmYN02 shares a common ancestor with SARS-CoV-2 about 40 years ago and RaTG13—about 50 years ago"

RmYN02 is only 93.3% identical to SARS-CoV-2 - a huge number of differences that could only occur from half a century of divergence in a wild population.

There is also another virus more closely related to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13, but still too distant to have been involved with the pandemic, BANAL-52.

I’m not going to systematically rebut what you cited because it has been done better than I can (see the TWIV link above), but I have heard all of what you cited before, and frankly it still appears to be just a politically motivated conspiracy theory that is extremely implausible.

I’ve watched the video now, and after watching it and reading more, I think you have changed my mind on the lab leak being the most likely cause.

I’m still not happy with the letter that Fauci and Daszak co-signed early on in the pandemic, nor with Fauci’s offices attempts to obstruct the foia process.

It’s disappointing that so little physical evidence was collected early in the pandemic, i don’t think we will ever have conclusive proof of the origin of the virus.

Yes, but this is not the way to go about enacting change. This is just carnage to prepare for tax cuts.

"Turns out that when you taint good programs like disease monitoring by putting them in a bag with all the color revolution funding and censorship and shaking it really hard, people want to burn the shit bag instead of picking out the good bits." - https://x.com/MrKapitalist/status/1886670873618473325

Check this $459 million opaque grant to [Redacted] in Nepal: https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_LOGNPL001COM_9543...

Everything's a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works. The MCC was a extremely well publicized program to build a HVDC line from the hydro dams in Nepal to the Indian border..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_Corporati...

USAID is the American equivalent of China's belt and road initiative and a bunch of incurious dilettantes are tearing it all down.

Yes, many people are impulsive and foolish, we shouldn't encourage that. Nor should we cheer on the attempt to create an all-powerful executive that can do whatever it wants with no checks from existing legislation, the courts, or Congress. Trump's goal seems to be an elective dictatorship, and we'll see how long the elective part lasts.

why do you assume there are no checks?

There are supposed to be, we'll see if they work. Right now, as the article says, the courts are issuing injunctions to stop these changes while the various lawsuits play out. I strongly suspect Trump and Musk will ignore them, and then we will be in a full on constitutional crisis.

what in Elon Musk's track record makes you "strongly suspect" he is there to cause a constitutional crisis? Is it possible that instead he is working in good faith?

Shut down all federal science funding on the off chance a conspiracy theory is true? Talk about an overreaction.

Similarly how are you going to reproduce studies by not funding anything?

>just run every paper through an LLM and check for errors as part of the peer review process

Oh, I see. Well, that at least explains the rest of your post.

yeah. just two days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910829

Reply on news.ycombinator.com