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Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

theintercept.com

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Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#431

Post by rhino369 »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #419
rhino369 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Refusal to investigate whether this is the biggest disaster in scientific history is odd. If dangerous research killed 15 million people we need to know.

Even if it did and we do know, do you honestly think it would stop rather than be moved to secret bio weapons research facilities?

Yes, because the type of research that would have led to covid-19 was public health research, not weapons research. Gain-of-function research is done to help learn about pandemics so we can prevent them.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#432

Post by mandmandam »

dang wrote: post #420
mandmandam wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... Egregiously? Really? Shit, what would a _mildly bad_ comment look like? It's also weird that you'd take issue with my comment and not the one I'm replying to. Did you read it? It's got literally 7 kinds of deliberately crafted misinformation.

Your comment consisted of nothing other than calling someone full of shit. (Doing it euphemistically doesn't change this.) That's obviously against the site guidelines and correctly flagged. Then you made sinister insinuations as if the flags weren't an obvious consequence of what you'd posted. Please read the site guidelines and don't post anything like that to HN again - you actually already did it again downthread…

First "egregious violations" and now "sinister insinuations"... You are a trip. Literally that guy and you downvoted me, it's doubtful anyone else even saw the thread.

And I stand by those "sinister insinuations", for the record. There is no way, none, that multiple commenters found this old dead thread, moved to the second page, and flagged my comment within minutes of its posting. Occam's razor would suggest that OP has the power to flag people single handed.

I notice that you say "we" asked you. Is this the 'royal' we? Are there multiple people behind this account?

Dang, feel free to take this the wrong way, but I think you could use a perspective check. I've heard that acting as a gatekeeper too long can inflate one's ego. Ask yourself if you're doing as much good here as you used to.

While we're chatting all friendly; do you ever wonder what the real life consequences of removing that story about Gina Haspel all those times are? I think about it a lot. I wonder if you give even a tiny little shit about helping cover for such a ghoul. My nightmare is that you rationalised that ghastly act so well, you don't even remember doing it.

Don't take that as pointing the finger to deflect from my own horrific actions, lol. I genuinely wonder how you live with doing that all the time, and now seems a good time to ask you - you must have a great view up there on that moral high ground.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#433

Post by dang »

mandmandam wrote: post #432
dang wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment consisted of nothing other than calling someone full of shit. (Doing it euphemistically doesn't change this.) That's obviously against the site guidelines and correctly flagged. Then you made sinister insinuations as if the flags weren't an obvious consequence of what you'd posted. Please read the site guidelines and don't post anything like that to HN again - you actually already did it again downthread…

First "egregious violations" and now "sinister insinuations"... You are a trip. Literally that guy and you downvoted me, it's doubtful anyone else even saw the thread. And I stand by those "sinister insinuations", for the record. There is no way, none, that multiple commenters found this old dead thread, moved to the second page, and flagged my comment within minutes of its posting. Occam's razor would suggest that O…

By "sinister insinuations" I just mean that you're imagining manipulations that didn't actually happen. The flags on your comment were perfectly ordinary, from quite a few legit HN users, none of whom (other than me) have been posting in this thread. Similarly, "that guy" did not downvote you, other users did; and plenty of users have seen this thread—HN has a lot of readers. Whatever concept of HN you have that suggests these things couldn't happen, it must be false, since they did happen.

Half a million stories get submitted to HN every year. Plenty get moderated in some way; plenty are in some way ghoulish. I'm afraid I don't remember them all; I hardly remember any of them. It feels like you may be putting too much weight on one data point, if you're asking "how you live with doing that" about a specific story from years ago. The answer is that the moderation principles here are clear and we try our hardest to apply them even-handedly.

Incidentally, you can't derive any political agreement or disagreement from the way we moderate HN - we moderate stories and comments all the time that we personally agree with and/or consider important. If you scroll back through moderation comments on HN you'll find that commenters from every political and ideological angle get moderated, because people on all sides break the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I'm not claiming that we have no bias, but certainly we work hard at this and have a lot of practice at it.

If you would please start doing a better job of adhering to those guidelines now, I'd appreciate it.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#434

Post by aga98mtl »

fsh wrote: post #243
stablechaos wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Zero evidence", huh? The epicenter of Covid-19 was the middle of a major metropolitan city (instead of a rural area near lots of animals), blocks away from a major virology lab which was specifically studying these viruses, collecting hundreds of wild strains from field operations, in research DARPA said before the fact endangers the local community and was banned by NIH, trying to specifically create this virus as…

SARS was first discovered in a major city too. This makes a lot of sense. If there is an outbreak in a rural village, the chances of it spreading worldwide are slim. It is quite possible that small outbreaks happen occasionally without anyone noticing. Who is going to test a few villagers that got pneumonia for novel coronaviruses? I would also argue that in the age of factory farming it is not so clear if more human…

>SARS was first discovered in a major city too.

How many major cities are there? hundreds. How many with a research center experimenting on coronavirus? (1 china, 2 in the USA) Just in China there are more than 100 cities with 1 millions people. Odds are 99+% that it has something to do with the research center. A very generous take would be that it has 1% chance of being unrelated.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#435

Post by indrax »

beowulfey wrote: post #360
resonious wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This novel virus started spreading pretty close to a lab that studies viruses. I think that counts as "actual evidence" that it came out of a lab. Of course, evidence != proof. And even if it did come from the lab, that in itself does not imply malice.

That is not evidence! It is at best a coincidence. An even stronger coincidence would be that this lab had a genotypically similar virus stored prior to its detection. But even that is not evidence of release; it is just a stronger hypothesis. If I was near a bank robbery at the time of occurrence, it does not count as evidence that I did it. Not even if I have a history of robbing banks. It must be combined with oth…

Friendly suggestion to all that Bayes Theorem is the right way to deal with this kind of weak evidence. We should not adhere to arbitrary legal standards in our own thinking about the truth.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#436

Post by lazyeye »

pfortuny wrote: post #295
twobitshifter wrote: post #86

Daczak serves on the WHO team to investigate the virus origins, but this did not get mentioned in any reports. Instead he warns other not to discuss it. He does not include notes that research was done on modifying bat viruses to make them infectious to human cells. These behaviors look like a guilty person, do they not? The wuhan and eco-health researchers had already started work on the furin cleavage sites and why…

Not necessarily guilt but a HUGE conflict of interest…

As much credibility as the executive team at Philip Morris releasing an open letter outlining how smoking doesn’t cause cancer.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#437

Post by lazyeye »

Aeolun wrote: post #392
marcosdumay wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that’s invalidated if your first point is valid right? No. There's evidence that COVID-19 was not created by direct genetic manipulation. If they did it, it's not COVID-19.

> There's evidence that COVID-19 was not created by direct genetic manipulation. There’s also evidence it cannot possibly (or well, with such a low chance it may as well be) have occured naturally. What am I supposed to believe here? Even the people on my side of the fence, even the people that research this stuff themselves all seem to have an agenda and when research turns up one thing, I can practically guarantee…

Yes the football players were on the field, they talked about kicking the ball, they requested to kick the ball but suggesting they might have kicked the ball is a conspiracy theory.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#438

Post by marcosdumay »

Aeolun wrote: post #392
marcosdumay wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that’s invalidated if your first point is valid right? No. There's evidence that COVID-19 was not created by direct genetic manipulation. If they did it, it's not COVID-19.

> There's evidence that COVID-19 was not created by direct genetic manipulation. There’s also evidence it cannot possibly (or well, with such a low chance it may as well be) have occured naturally. What am I supposed to believe here? Even the people on my side of the fence, even the people that research this stuff themselves all seem to have an agenda and when research turns up one thing, I can practically guarantee…

> What am I supposed to believe here?

Well, there are plenty of options that are not direct genetic manipulation and random evolution from a known virus.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#439

Post by salawat »

rualca wrote: post #411
madamelic wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> also the genetic engineering was slated to happen in North Carolina... This is honestly the most damning part of evidence. China has shown over and over their current strategy is to snap up resources, countries and partnerships that the West, and specifically the United States, refuse or ignore. China would have strong motivation to have SARS related research considering SARS originates in their country. So we have…

> This is honestly the most damning part of evidence. What evidence? There was a grant proposal, and the proposal was rejected. Why do you feel that the fact that the rejected proposal referred to North Carolina is supposed to be "damning" at all, or even remotely relevant? > China would have strong motivation to have SARS related research considering SARS originates in their country. It has. They fund their own lab…

You don't get it. just because tge grant was denied, does not mean the work was not done. The fact it was even written at all is evidence someone thought it'd work.

You're willfully blinding yourself to how the world actually works.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#440

Post by rualca »

salawat wrote: post #439
rualca wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is honestly the most damning part of evidence. What evidence? There was a grant proposal, and the proposal was rejected. Why do you feel that the fact that the rejected proposal referred to North Carolina is supposed to be "damning" at all, or even remotely relevant? > China would have strong motivation to have SARS related research considering SARS originates in their country. It has. They fund their own lab…

You don't get it. just because tge grant was denied, does not mean the work was not done . The fact it was even written at all is evidence someone thought it'd work. You're willfully blinding yourself to how the world actually works.

> You don't get it. just because tge grant was denied, does not mean the work was not done. The fact it was even written at all is evidence someone thought it'd work.

You should really pay attention to what you're claiming, specially as there is absolutely zero substance or evidence supporting your claim. Your accusation boils down to the same exact witch hunt logic that led angry mobs to burn innocent people at the stake: claim you believe someone happened without zero evidence at all, proceed to allege someone of having the means to do it, from a massive logical leap start to accuse someone who you alleged is capable of something of actually doing it in spite, again, of having zero evidence at all, and proceed to throw that victim to the fire.

I suppose our witch hunting days are behind us, but you're dragging them back to the present by repeating the same logical mistakes and in the process throw innocents into the fire.

Do the world a favor and cut out all the baseless accusations and unsubstantiated claims. It's one thing to argue that some bits should be investigated, but it's an entirely different thing to screw up logical and rational thinking so badly to the point that you make the same completely baseless and unsubstantiated claims you're making.

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