The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

Post by op00to » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 11:54 AM UTC

greenwich26 wrote: post #654

sbagel wrote: post #587

The amount of wildly delusional oppression complex in this thread is staggering, HN has really gone downhill. On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence. There were tons of ar…

Don't be absurd. Every single major social media platform banned even the most gentle suggestion that the lab was involved. And everyone who mentioned it was called "racist". Now that the scientific consensus is settling and lab leak does indeed seem to be true, they are all in major damage control. And you are trying to change the narrative by introducing some silly victim-blaming charade about "oppression complex",…

Post by gabaix » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 11:57 AM UTC

Jarwain wrote: post #539

teorema wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course that says little about SARS-CoV-2 relative to all the other viruses we don't know about, either sitting in a Chinese government lab, or in a bat cave somewhere. I guess I don't find the argument "we can't figure out how to reconstruct SARS-COV-2 from known viruses" very convincing on either side.

That's fair. I wouldn't say that it's "we can't figure it out" but rather that "doing so takes a lot of mutations and thus resources that may be difficult to do under the table" Sitting in a cave somewhere implies not being studied, right? Which is more the "natural mutation" thing. Sitting in some government lab is a different story and depends on belief in scientific institutions to do science and publish peer revi…

Post by glitchcrab » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 11:59 AM UTC

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #631

glitchcrab wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect given the new WHO guidelines https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/01/covid-19-varia...

I guess it's good that they realized that, but I don't really understand why this time it took half a year. We'll see if the newspapers follow it.

Post by geoduck14 » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 12:01 PM UTC

nkrisc wrote: post #693

harryf wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets worse - gain of function research was banned under Obama until the ban was lifted in 2017 under Trump - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... I can’t find sources for this right now but apparently Dr Anthony Fauci played a key role in getting the ban lifted. He’s also the head of the NIAID ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci ) which (apparently) is the ultimate source for…

In retrospect, and knowing what we know now, do you think his advice and direction has been inadequate?

Post by op00to » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 12:02 PM UTC

iforgotpassword wrote: post #605

gary_0 wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What actually can and should happen Not to mention fixing all of the other failures that allowed COVID to kill millions worldwide. Everyone's pointing fingers but hardly anybody's talking about improving epidemiology and public health policy (which the US is long overdue for a reckoning on). One of those failures, by the way, was the seeming assumption that whatever state a global health emergency started in would…

My takeaway was the huge denial most of the rest of the world put itself into. When it was still only Wuhan, everyone assumed it would go down like sars again, it's just "a Chinese thing" and could never happen in the developed world. We feasted on the images of overcrowded hospitals, people collapsing in waiting rooms, and felt good about or country. Then when it became clear that China messed up containing the spre…