841–850 of 1001 posts
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The origin and the remedy are entirely uncorrelated (If anything, one would think that a manufactured origin of the virus would make "natural immunity" a LESS likely viable remedy).
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It took over a year to deploy the Covid vaccines. You want people to lockdown for 1-2 years when a new outbreak happens?
Depends on your goal. If you want to minimize deaths then you don't have a lot of options. If you want to maximize profit then letting people just die is cheaper, assuming you aren't counting medical expenses.
Just letting the disease run rampant doesn't necessarily maximize profit either: if all your workers get sick and a bunch of them die, that's going to cause a huge impact on your profits, even in the relatively short term, let alone the long term when there's a labor shortage and a decrease in demand.
There's a lot of bad headline-writing on this subject today. Here's the NYT's headline: Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says And then the sub-head (or dek, if you want to sound like you're in the know): The conclusion, which was made with “low confidence,” came as America’s intelligence agencies remained divided over the origins of the coronavirus. So we have a conclusion: 'lab leak most likely cau…
you're analyzing this like it's the press sensationalizing. This is an establishment walking back what they've said in the past, and allowing a pov that this same press and govt literally censored. We shouldn't expect they're going to scream "we were completely wrong because we were biased".
They're now admitting that there is no evidence at all for the hypothesis they've been treating as gospel, and admitting the evidence better fits lab leak (a view we know from Fauci's emails was floated early on and suppressed). That's saying a lot.
We'll still have to wait for "not natural in origin", but that's coming too.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but have the people here on HN who are poo-pooing this also taken stands in the past that allowing this would be a climbdown from? Because I remember when it wasn't allowed to discuss lableak here on HN either.
Yes, let me quote Zola, "J'accuse!"
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Of course there's a reservoir. That's why there was a lab in the first place. There are many more viruses in those caves. Many many. And tourists literally pay money to go into such caves, and look up to the ceiling to look at the bats. Bats that may at any time shit into their eye with one of these new viruses. And then on top of that people catch them and sell them live to slaughter them at home to eat. Again, this…
No there isn't. More than 50K animals tested an no animal reservoir for C19. Are there really reddit-ors who still think C19 was natural when ALL of the current evidence including genetic markers points to lab leak? Yes, we can't say with absolute certainty, but the case for lab leak is MUCH stronger than for natural. Plus, why has China still not released the nature and details of the experiments that were conducted…
Staring yourself blind on this specific strain of coronavirus misses the forest for the tree (yes, singular tree). There's literally a forest of nasty shit out there and you're saying "but the scientists couldn't find this one specific tree when they went looking in the Amazonas". Of course they didn't. C19 is highly contagious in humans, not in bats. For bats it's just one out of a million things that don't bother them.
> Anyone who doesn't see that lab leak is the most likely source is just being contrarian for their own ego or political reasons.
I disagree. I think those who can't accept natural origins as a hypothesis underestimate the size and variation of the viruses out there in nature.
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Would you please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar? You have a long history of doing this on HN. I don't want to ban you again but if you keep this up, we'll have to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is not a flamewar, it is what is called "counter reasoning".
There are people claiming that USA (and only USA) suffered because someone else's incompetence, but I lost a friend during COVID in the USA because of the undeniable underestimation (to say the least) that the Presidency of US showed.
He would have lived if he was in China.
So, please, if you have to ban me, do it, publicly, so a record will remain that in this forum criticizing the US leads to a ban.
There's no better way to prove my point: US is not better than China when their interests and their image is on the line. They would do anything to silent critiques, including killing innocents.
Like they have done to so many people in my Country, for no other reason than being not 100% aligned with their colonial plans.
Please, do what you have to do, I won't stop criticizing the US mentality whenever i deem it necessary. Because, you know, when I was young I was a supporter of the US because they fought against the "single thought", but now they have become it.
If the "hacker news" has become the place where an yet unproven mistake is proof of "incompetence" or worse "a genocidal plan", than HN is no different from VK.
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That's what China wants yes. But while this helps the CCP party save face, it doesn't help to move on with the investigation. It's not even about the blame. We investigate air crashes in such detail so we can prevent them from happening again. Of course with an even bigger event like this we should do the same. The pandemic has happened and no kind of blame or money can revert it. But we can try to learn everything a…
let's remember that the US contributed the the funding of this research https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
But the US could perhaps push for openness considering they contributed financially. Though I suspect they already have and failed.
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what should your ideal candidate think after reading these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/2649_665393/202... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_genocide
Thankfully I exist in 2023. I would not have, and will never, support apartheid or genocide of Black Americans. China is perpetrating this as we speak.
Unfortunately people in US don't even know where Yemen is or that there is a war that they are supporting together with a bloody dictator. Because they do not want to intervene directly, if a single US soldier dies, everybody at home will know about this war, started in 2015, with the excuse of the terrorism, it only created newborn real terrorists that have fallen in the hands of Iran and Al-Qaeda. They send drones though, at least 370 thousand people have died, mainly for the consequences of war (famine, lack of drinkable water, diseases, displacement). A war that the US have no intention of stopping.
You know who's doing one of the best jobs in the area? China and Russia. Yes, those China and Russia. They recognize the international recognized government and have no contacts with the factions close to Iran. They also haven't killed or armed anybody. Their diplomacies have been constantly at work together with EU members for a cease-fire. Unlike the US. They know that an unstable Yemen is detrimental for China, even though people are dying, they do not care: there is money to be made.
Thanks for reminding us how dangerous ignorance is.
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At the time trump and his people were first pushing lab leak/bio-weapon conspiracies it was without evidence (and Occam's Razor isn't evidence), and worse the actual evidence we did have at the time suggested it wasn't leaked from a lab. That didn't stop the "crazies" from insisting it was true though. Anyone can have their own theory of things, but what separates Trump and the "crazies" from the rest of us (includin…
Lab leak and bio weapon are two completely different theories, and conflating them means you don't actually bother to learn the argument of the opposing side(s), before dismissing them as "crazies". I think if you attempt to have serious discussion the minimum you should do is to learn what the disagreement is about. If you don't bother to do even that, then what's the point in it? Just booing the outgroup one more t…
No, they're not. The people who pushed the lab leak hoax originally (and as evidenced by several redcap troll accounts in this thread) all believed that covid-19 was engineered in a lab and released by the chinese government to harm them personally.
Even if it ends up being a case where a natural virus was studied in a lab and accidentally released, it does not validate their views.
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> It is talking about the relative likelihood of the possible origins. That's how you read it. GP is reading "most likely" as statement of absolute likelihood, making it false here, because the most likely thing is "any of the possibilities not under consideration", which takes most of the probability mass. IMO, GP's interpretation is the one that most people take for "most likely" statements, which in our opinion ma…
If you told most people you had 10 rolls of a dice to land a 6 and then suggested the most likely number of rolls you'll get it on is 1 I wonder whether they'd believe you...
Anyway, a different way of putting my point is: "most likely" modifies meaning of the thing it attaches to. "Lab leak [is the] most likely origin of" strongly suggests the absolute take. Relative take would be phrased "Lab leak [is the] most likely of hypotheses proposed for the origin of", or something to that effect - that is, attaching "most likely" to the body of proposed explanations (which, by definition, excludes "anything else not on this list" as an option), not to the origin itself.
A yet different way: NYT is doing the equivalent of me putting some object under a color detector, and announcing "Blue most likely color of Object", without mentioning that my color detector consists of separate R, G, and B color sensors, and that I'm just reporting which sensor gave the highest reading. Most people would read my announcement as "Object is some shade of blue, unless their machine is broken or something", whereas the object itself could be purple, or white, or yellow, or near-black, or any other color that just has "B" component stronger than "G" and "R".