791–800 of 1001 posts
I thought they are mainly dealing in nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. What is the overlap between things nuclear and genetic research? The USA doesn't have a biological weapons program since 1972, says wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_biological_weapo...
Putting aside all the speculation here: What is the biggest possible gain we can get from gain-of-function research? Does it outweigh the possible downside of a gain-of-function experiment escaping a lab? I’m seriously interested in seeing a defense of this kind of research.
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We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop. You can't abuse HN like this, regardless of how stupid someone else's theory is or you feel it is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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> least shitty theory I read about CIA false flags in Cuba. Nordstream didn't blow itself up because the pipe was angry it allowed .de and .ru to engage in commerce. I guess a rogue western intelligence group bribed or compelled a Chinese lab worker to sabotage something. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rfk-ope... "The CIA had been plotting to assassinate Castro since the summer of 1960, even bef…
I really doubt this. The pandemic was bad for the whole world, not just China. I'm sure it was an accident.
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I'm not entirely clear on why the Energy Department would even be investigating this let alone issuing a controversial finding with low confidence at all. They mention specific intelligence that flipped their conclusion but didn't even characterize what the nature of that intelligence is.
“The DOE oversees several U.S. national labs, some of which conduct advanced biological research”
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It seems that lo these many years later all the theories are still full of holes. Lab leak is plausible but there's no public evidence to back it. Somehow the DOE thinks they have something but we haven't seen it. Just based on history, zoonotic remains most likely but no host has been found.
There’s evidence that it’s more likely than various other theories, but there isn’t a smoking gun. That’s the kind of nuance that’s easy to ignore in favor of your preconceived notions because weak evidence is rarely worth changing your mind over. At a practical level I don’t think there’s much difference between the lab link being a 7% chance vs a 70% chance. What’s more concerning is the potential of future leaks a…
None that I've seen.
And the possibility of a future leak is probably unrelated to the possibility of this one having been a leak.
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If it wasn't so transmissible, it wouldn't have been a pandemic.
The question was not "why was it a pandemic", yhe question is, why was it so transmissible when earlier outbreaks, like SARS, had relatively much poorer transmission? That's the typical profile of new viruses.