Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 664 posts

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#571

Post by silvestrov »

tremon wrote: post #555
mkolodny wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a real possibility that a gain-of-function experiment created SARS-CoV-2: "Lipsitch’s activists (calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group) sent around a strong statement on the perils of research with “Potential Pandemic Pathogens,” signed by more than a hundred scientists. The work might “trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control,” the signers said. Fauci reconsidered, and the…

there should be a global ban on gain-of-function experiments on deadly viruses and bacteria. Would you make the same argument for software vulnerability research? I think the arguments against both are the same, and with the same result: white-hat researchers will halt their work, leaving more of the field available to black-hat researcers.

It is much easier to contain bad software than it is to contain an virus that spreads using aerosols.

It is also much easier to stop bad software than bad biology. Software is much simpler than the human body.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#572

Post by berdario »

tremon wrote: post #562
berdario wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: "China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team probing the origins of the pandemic, according to one of the team’s investigators, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the outbreak began." The powerful people in our governments are reading the same propaganda that you and I are reading, and they can thus end up believing it. The reason why the US government…

A discussion in good faith does not begin with "[TFA] is twisting the truth."

If the agency that published the article is twisting the truth, shouldn't that be called out?

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#573

Post by tim333 »

amelius wrote: post #568

Why isn't there some regulation in place that says that any man-made virus should contain some specific sequence of junk dna so that we can at least trace it as such?

It's not that easy to do in many cases. The human manipulation is often infecting cells in a lab rather than entering a sequence in a computer and synthesising it.

However making it a regulation to keep samples and publish sequences would probably make sense.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#574

Post by amelius »

tim333 wrote: post #573
amelius wrote: post #568

Why isn't there some regulation in place that says that any man-made virus should contain some specific sequence of junk dna so that we can at least trace it as such?

It's not that easy to do in many cases. The human manipulation is often infecting cells in a lab rather than entering a sequence in a computer and synthesising it. However making it a regulation to keep samples and publish sequences would probably make sense.

Ok. Perhaps we should stop making viruses until we are more technologically capable then.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#575

Post by ljm »

mattnewton wrote: post #336
fiftyfifty wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of behavior you see in organizations where the penalty for making mistakes is overly severe, the only recourse for people is to lie and cover-up the truth at all costs. This is how projects at some companies continue despite being way behind schedule and overbudget until eventually the weight of the truth brings everything crashing down.

The old story of the Chinese general Chen Shen comes to mind: Apparently he was running late due to rainstorms and the penalty for appearing this late to the Qin emperor was execution. Since that’s the same penalty for open rebellion, he decided he might as well try that too. And that was the beginning of the end of the Qin dynasty. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_Wu_Guang_uprising If the penalty for lying…

The English idiom for this is "I'd rather be hanged for a sheep than a lamb."

That is to say, if the punishment for any kind of crime is death, no matter how serious or how trivial, you might as well go ahead and commit the much more serious one and try and cover that up instead.

Either way you're fucked, so why not go all in?

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#576

Post by snarf21 »

ttz wrote: post #53

First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground". My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them. Which is exactly what thi…

It is possible that we'll never know. However, remember that we also recently have SARS, MERS, EBOLA, etc. This isn't some isolated event. We've made the world small, there is no where too remote. Some animal from the remotest village on earth can be sold on the street in NYC in two days. Who knows what ancient pathogens are being re-released from the permafrost? I fear this is the beginning of mother earth fighting back, not the end.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#577

Post by Aeolos »

tal8d wrote: post #541
mkolodny wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a real possibility that a gain-of-function experiment created SARS-CoV-2: "Lipsitch’s activists (calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group) sent around a strong statement on the perils of research with “Potential Pandemic Pathogens,” signed by more than a hundred scientists. The work might “trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control,” the signers said. Fauci reconsidered, and the…

It is an absolutely braindead thing for a nuclear power to do - bio/chem weapon R&D. The reason why the US abandoned that course so long ago had nothing to do with morality - somebody in the DoD simply realized that they were furthering the state of the art in dirt cheap WMDs. If you already have nukes, you want to keep the cost of doomsday devices as high as possible - limiting the number of potential rivals.

> The reason why the US abandoned that course so long ago had nothing to do with morality - somebody in the DoD simply realized that they were furthering the state of the art in dirt cheap WMDs

Is there a reliable reference that the US is no longer researching biochemical weapons?

Wikipedia claims: "Both the U.S. bio-weapons ban and the Biological Weapons Convention restricted any work in the area of biological warfare to defensive in nature. In reality, this gives BWC member-states wide latitude to conduct biological weapons research because the BWC contains no provisions for monitoring or enforcement.[74][75] The treaty, essentially, is a gentlemen's agreement amongst members backed by the long-prevailing thought that biological warfare should not be used in battle.[74]"

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

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#578

Post by tim333 »

berdario wrote: post #560
tremon wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GTFO. The article is about the US government's stance, not about the WHO, so quoting random people that have no affiliation with the White House is completely missing the point, and I think intentionally.

From the article: "China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team probing the origins of the pandemic, according to one of the team’s investigators, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the outbreak began." The powerful people in our governments are reading the same propaganda that you and I are reading, and they can thus end up believing it. The reason why the US government…

As far as I can tell Reuters and the NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/world/asia/china-world-he...) are telling the truth. I'm not that convinced it's propaganda. What's in it for them to lie over this stuff?

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#579

Post by tim333 »

endisneigh wrote: post #21

Forgive my ignorance but even if it was lab created, so what? I don’t really understand why it matters or not. Didn’t the entire world basically have a nearly 3 month heads up on this either way?

As someone mentioned above it matters so you can stop it happening again.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#580

Post by pts_ »

msie wrote: post #394
ttz wrote: post #53

First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground". My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them. Which is exactly what thi…

I was thinking if a virus was first spotted in New York City and it had a virus lab, would that be immediately blamed? It’s like all there is in Wuhan is a wet market and a virus research lab and they are located next to each other. I think that’s how the world perceives Wuhan.

Entire movies and videogames are premised on such scenarios in western labs.
Post reply on HN