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Shekhar Gupta (One of India's foremost journalists and media people) did a great 30 minute analysis of this article covering who the cast members are and how th
by screye 5y ago
Shekhar Gupta (One of India's foremost journalists and media people) did a great 30 minute analysis of this article covering who the cast members are and how this ties back into various stories from the last year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlO8sKRynBY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlO8sKRynBY
So far, the lab origin story sounds the most plausible and has the least holes in it. Now innocent until proven guilty is a thing, but is not like the PRC would ever agree to a fair trial.
- elliekelly 5y agoSince there isn’t any evidence for either scenario I don’t think it’s at all accurate to say one possible origin is “the most plausible”. A lack of evidence for one does not give credence to the other and vice versa.
- adolph 5y agoBy observation of the night sky would you believe Copernicus or Ptolemy? Would you need to have evidence of the solar system's origins or is the decreased computation required for Copernicus enough to indicate it to be a superior explanation? https://farside.ph.utexas.edu/books/Syntaxis/Almagest/node4.html https://farside.ph.utexas.edu/books/Syntaxis/Almagest/node4....
- ProjectArcturis 5y agoTo say that "there isn't any evidence for either scenario" is willful ignorance.
- dang 5y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- fallingknife 5y agoIf I can't find my phone and I either left it somewhere in the house or on the Uber I took home last night, the longer I search my house and don't find it, the more likely it is that I left it on the Uber.
- swader999 5y agoThere is plenty of evidence. CCP cleaning house at Wuhan Institute and purging online references is one item to question.
- Paradigma11 5y agoNot really. The CCP is paranoid enough to do that either way.
- strken 5y agoYou think they wouldn't clean house if the virus had naturally hopped to humans but the WIV was still being publicly blamed? I think they responded to the accusation, not to the reality on the ground. That's not to say that I think it didn't come from the WIV, just that they'd act the same way regardless of where the first transmission occurred.
- swader999 5y agoI never really considered this point. Just assumed cover-up equals culpability. Thanks.
- Florin_Andrei 5y ago> the lab origin story sounds the most plausible and has the least holes in it You seem to ignore the fact that there's exactly zero evidence either pro or contra. The fame of the "media person" is the kind of argument you typically see invoked in Facebook and Youtube comments.
- jostmey 5y agoHow is this the lab origin story more plausible than the original hypothesis that sars-cov2 originated from the wet-markets? Both are places where human and exotic animals closely interact, where sars-cov2 could have jumped. Why do you think the odds of the virus jumping are higher in one place than another?
- splithalf 5y agoNot one single infected animal. No serious honest person believes the wet market nonesense. It’s not supposed to be believable.
- dang 5y agoPlease stop posting flamewar comments. You've done it more than once in this thread already. That's basically vandalism, if not arson, when the topic is this inflammatory. No more of this please. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
- chrisbrandow 5y agoI’m not in a position to say one way or the other, but the articles detail a number of suggestive evidence that in my mind makes the wild animal spread less likely. But as has been pointed out, it is NOT definitive one way or the other.
- alisonatwork 5y agoI don't know anything about virology, but I do know about wet markets. Every working class neighborhood in every city in China has at least one wet market. I would guess that hundreds of millions of people in China shop at wet markets every day. Even if you filter out all the wet markets that do not sell exotic animals like bats and pangolins, it still seems suspicious that this outbreak appears to have been centered around one of the few wet markets in China that happens to be situated in the vicinity of a major virus lab.
- prewett 5y agoThere was an article posted recently on HN with no discussion that outlined the evidence for the various theories, and had pretty solid evidence for the leak theory (assuming they didn't omit evidence for the other theories): https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/ https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
- dang 5y agoThere was a large discussion about that article: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 - May 2021 (536 comments)