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Doesn't matter if they understand the nuance. The lab leak theory takes a back seat for the following reason: Lets say it is found out with definite proof that

Doesn't matter if they understand the nuance. The lab leak theory takes a back seat for the following reason: Lets say it is found out with definite proof that it was a lab leak. Then what? Grandma's dead, china killed her and there is nothing you can do. We are not going to let this ruin trade relations even more ($$$ LOL) so you're just going to have to forget about it. Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of their head. The first stage of grief is denial.

Glyptodon 4y ago
A lot of people seem to think the lab leak premise is the same as the "engineered biological weapon" premise so if that become popular it'll probably only drive a perception of "weak government that betrays the citizens" even more than we've already got...
- BearOso 4y ago
  Yeah, instead it was sheer incompetence and arrogance. They screwed up because they poorly handled the virus while doing something they should never have been doing: gain-of-function research. We need to stop that research, and we can't let them defend it with any nonsense excuses.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 4y ago
      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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        I don't know what you're talking about. 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.
        dang 4y ago
        This sort of fulminating rhetoric is obviously not what HN is for. We've banned you for it many times and if you don't stop, we'll have to ban you again. It has nothing to do with criticizing the US or any other country or thing; it has to do with not following the site rules and consistently violating the intended spirit of the place. Plenty of other commenters manage to be critical without doing that, and that's fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- kodah 4y ago
  Lab leak involves bio-engineering because it involves gain of function research. Bio-engineering can be used in a testing setting but it could also be used to make a weapon. I highly doubt China was stupid enough to make a bioweapon and not immunize its citizens first. The significance of getting people to investigate, and if all things are true, confirm lab leak is that it puts an impetus on the importance of controls and second is a corrective measure for all the people who colluded to suppress lab leak being discussed. I am very interested in seeing those people held accountable in very direct ways, even if they were under false impressions at the time. That starts with all the names on that infamous open letter.
  - JoBrad 4y ago
    A lab leak doesn’t mean gain of function, bio-engineered virus, or other engineering. It just means that the virus was spread via a lab leak. > The October 2021 report said that there was a consensus that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program. But it didn’t settle the debate over whether it resulted from a lab leak or came from an animal, saying that more information was needed from the Chinese authorities.
    - kodah 4y ago
      In what way is gain of function not bio-engineering? You're modifying a virus and subjecting it to human-like tissue to observe the results. Lab leak and gain of function are inexplicably tied. I don't know what point the quote is getting to. I already said it wasn't a bioweapon.
      - JoBrad 4y ago
        You could bio-engineer a virus without gain of function, I presume. My point was that a lab leak does not also mean bio-engineering.
        shrimp_emoji 4y ago
        I heard that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had inserted furin cleavage sites into random types of viruses in the past and that SARS-CoV-2 is unique among coronaviruses for having a furin cleavage site, but this[0] says otherwise: ``` Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2. ``` 0: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33340798/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33340798/
TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
If lab leak is confirmed the correct course of action is to design new systems and protocols to prevent such a thing from happening again in the future. Failure to do so will result in more issues down the line. It's basic engineering. If this kind of research is so important then maybe the nations of the world should buy a cruise ship and implement extreme isolation protocols between interactions, if that's the only way to safely perform that kind of research. Just as an example.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  The US isn't capable of preventing its own citizens from acquiring weapons and performing terrorist attacks with them. The idea that we'll be able to enforce controls on labs in foreign countries seems pretty far fetched given that. And as the tech advances, I suspect it will democratize like any other technology so that a lone enthusiast can design their own viruses in a home lab. I'm not particularly an optimist about what it portends.
  - baja_blast 4y ago
    But it is in the best interest of all countries. Unlike nuclear weapons where the damage can be isolated to one area, highly contagious weapons are impossible to control and will end up hurting themselves as well.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      I suspect the world would be better off if all knowledge of nuclear weapons were eradicated. I doubt on a few levels that the damage can really be isolated given proliferation. Baby Boomers were found to have significantly elevated levels of strontium-90 in their baby teeth attributed just to atmospheric testing. That did result in a treaty to ban the practice, but nuclear weapon research continued and continues today. I doubt any country will willingly stop viral research; especially because there are legitimate medical reasons for such research, though I suspect weapon applications are inextricably intertwined as well.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of their head. only Americans were touched by covid I guess... > The first stage of grief is denial. At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes. Leak doesn't mean engineering a disease to kill some specific target, anyway, if China did it to kill Americans, it wouldn't be as bad as the Opium wars and the American invasion of China in 1900 The first U.S. multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, made part of his fortune smuggling opium into China.
- mwbajor 4y ago
  no one is going to care if the deaths were "intentional" or negligent.
  - B8MGHCBekDuRi 4y ago
    not Americans. They always need someone to blame. Remember when they went to war with Iraq on fabricated evidence? Remember when they wen to war with Afghanistan after 9/11, but Afghanistan had no responsibility whatsoever (again!) and 10 years later they handed the country back to Talibans? Can we consider 9/11 an accident? Would it be the same to you? You know when really nobody talks about it? When it's the US killing people out of negligence and incompetence and sheer arrogance. Are you aware of this? Do they talk about it in USA? They never apologized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 *** can we also talk about this? I'm quite sure how these poor people died makes a lot of difference for the families of the victims. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstrikes-pentagon-records-civilian-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstrikes... *** It's not China fault if during covid in USA Trump was President and people really believed that covid wasn't real and a lot of Americans died with a rate double than my Country which was already hit very hard BTW. China handled it much better anyway.
    - salawat 4y ago
      It's talked about in many circles in the United States, mind. Not one year has gone by without a rant in my sphere about stupid boutique or ulteriorally motived wars, and a pining for the day the U.S. focuses more on solving domestic problems than foreign. It just happens that for some stupid reason, neither the Republican or Democratic parties have a great track record of producing candidates that can manage to walk the line of foreign policy that minimally entangles us with very poorly advised foreign intervention. Which is made all the more difficult when allies don't do their utmost in terms of defense spending. The U.S. doesn't need to always be the first bunch of people everyone looks to when some autocratic idiot starts rattling the saber again. This may even be made easier if we don't export advanced manufacturing business to places that value human life and time at approximately zero because it makes the quarterly reports look better. After all, it's way harder to be an autocrat when no one will do enough business with you to keep the military sufficiently in your pocket. Or teach you how to make the machines that make arms or advanced weaponry. Or sell you said arms.
officialjunk 4y ago
let's remember that the US helped fund this research too https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
- zdragnar 4y ago
  And if it comes to light that it was not a natural disaster- that this funding contributed to it- then we should cut off said funding until better protocols, enforcement and accountability are in place If it turned out to be not a lab leak, fine, carry on. If it was a lab leak, why on earth should I be complacent about my tax dollars contributing to the next one?
brookst 4y ago
Are you suggesting that a more correct course of action would be some kind of punitive retribution so those of us who survived suffer in the hopes that those most responsible suffer a little more than we do? The idea that we would hurt our own economic future out of grief/vengeance is bizarre. So yes, everyone does know what you suggest, and we’re all OK with it.
pessimizer 4y ago
It's pretty sickening that a coronavirus lab in China that the US was completely involved with both financially and through scientific cooperation can be reframed as more nationalistic anti-China bullshit. The US isn't keeping things peaceful with China for the sake of trade relations, it's actually threatening China constantly. The US is keeping quiet about the lab leak theory because it was just as responsible for that lab as China was, and it wants to distract from that fact.

Glyptodon 4y ago

A lot of people seem to think the lab leak premise is the same as the "engineered biological weapon" premise so if that become popular it'll probably only drive a perception of "weak government that betrays the citizens" even more than we've already got...

BearOso 4y ago
Yeah, instead it was sheer incompetence and arrogance. They screwed up because they poorly handled the virus while doing something they should never have been doing: gain-of-function research. We need to stop that research, and we can't let them defend it with any nonsense excuses.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 4y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      I don't know what you're talking about. 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.
      - dang 4y ago
        This sort of fulminating rhetoric is obviously not what HN is for. We've banned you for it many times and if you don't stop, we'll have to ban you again. It has nothing to do with criticizing the US or any other country or thing; it has to do with not following the site rules and consistently violating the intended spirit of the place. Plenty of other commenters manage to be critical without doing that, and that's fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
kodah 4y ago
Lab leak involves bio-engineering because it involves gain of function research. Bio-engineering can be used in a testing setting but it could also be used to make a weapon. I highly doubt China was stupid enough to make a bioweapon and not immunize its citizens first. The significance of getting people to investigate, and if all things are true, confirm lab leak is that it puts an impetus on the importance of controls and second is a corrective measure for all the people who colluded to suppress lab leak being discussed. I am very interested in seeing those people held accountable in very direct ways, even if they were under false impressions at the time. That starts with all the names on that infamous open letter.
- JoBrad 4y ago
  A lab leak doesn’t mean gain of function, bio-engineered virus, or other engineering. It just means that the virus was spread via a lab leak. > The October 2021 report said that there was a consensus that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program. But it didn’t settle the debate over whether it resulted from a lab leak or came from an animal, saying that more information was needed from the Chinese authorities.
  - kodah 4y ago
    In what way is gain of function not bio-engineering? You're modifying a virus and subjecting it to human-like tissue to observe the results. Lab leak and gain of function are inexplicably tied. I don't know what point the quote is getting to. I already said it wasn't a bioweapon.
    - JoBrad 4y ago
      You could bio-engineer a virus without gain of function, I presume. My point was that a lab leak does not also mean bio-engineering.
      - shrimp_emoji 4y ago
        I heard that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had inserted furin cleavage sites into random types of viruses in the past and that SARS-CoV-2 is unique among coronaviruses for having a furin cleavage site, but this[0] says otherwise: ``` Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2. ``` 0: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33340798/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33340798/

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago

If lab leak is confirmed the correct course of action is to design new systems and protocols to prevent such a thing from happening again in the future. Failure to do so will result in more issues down the line. It's basic engineering. If this kind of research is so important then maybe the nations of the world should buy a cruise ship and implement extreme isolation protocols between interactions, if that's the only way to safely perform that kind of research. Just as an example.

hotpotamus 4y ago
The US isn't capable of preventing its own citizens from acquiring weapons and performing terrorist attacks with them. The idea that we'll be able to enforce controls on labs in foreign countries seems pretty far fetched given that. And as the tech advances, I suspect it will democratize like any other technology so that a lone enthusiast can design their own viruses in a home lab. I'm not particularly an optimist about what it portends.
- baja_blast 4y ago
  But it is in the best interest of all countries. Unlike nuclear weapons where the damage can be isolated to one area, highly contagious weapons are impossible to control and will end up hurting themselves as well.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I suspect the world would be better off if all knowledge of nuclear weapons were eradicated. I doubt on a few levels that the damage can really be isolated given proliferation. Baby Boomers were found to have significantly elevated levels of strontium-90 in their baby teeth attributed just to atmospheric testing. That did result in a treaty to ban the practice, but nuclear weapon research continued and continues today. I doubt any country will willingly stop viral research; especially because there are legitimate medical reasons for such research, though I suspect weapon applications are inextricably intertwined as well.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

> Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of their head. only Americans were touched by covid I guess... > The first stage of grief is denial. At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes. Leak doesn't mean engineering a disease to kill some specific target, anyway, if China did it to kill Americans, it wouldn't be as bad as the Opium wars and the American invasion of China in 1900 The first U.S. multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, made part of his fortune smuggling opium into China.

mwbajor 4y ago
no one is going to care if the deaths were "intentional" or negligent.
- B8MGHCBekDuRi 4y ago
  not Americans. They always need someone to blame. Remember when they went to war with Iraq on fabricated evidence? Remember when they wen to war with Afghanistan after 9/11, but Afghanistan had no responsibility whatsoever (again!) and 10 years later they handed the country back to Talibans? Can we consider 9/11 an accident? Would it be the same to you? You know when really nobody talks about it? When it's the US killing people out of negligence and incompetence and sheer arrogance. Are you aware of this? Do they talk about it in USA? They never apologized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 *** can we also talk about this? I'm quite sure how these poor people died makes a lot of difference for the families of the victims. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstrikes-pentagon-records-civilian-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstrikes... *** It's not China fault if during covid in USA Trump was President and people really believed that covid wasn't real and a lot of Americans died with a rate double than my Country which was already hit very hard BTW. China handled it much better anyway.
  - salawat 4y ago
    It's talked about in many circles in the United States, mind. Not one year has gone by without a rant in my sphere about stupid boutique or ulteriorally motived wars, and a pining for the day the U.S. focuses more on solving domestic problems than foreign. It just happens that for some stupid reason, neither the Republican or Democratic parties have a great track record of producing candidates that can manage to walk the line of foreign policy that minimally entangles us with very poorly advised foreign intervention. Which is made all the more difficult when allies don't do their utmost in terms of defense spending. The U.S. doesn't need to always be the first bunch of people everyone looks to when some autocratic idiot starts rattling the saber again. This may even be made easier if we don't export advanced manufacturing business to places that value human life and time at approximately zero because it makes the quarterly reports look better. After all, it's way harder to be an autocrat when no one will do enough business with you to keep the military sufficiently in your pocket. Or teach you how to make the machines that make arms or advanced weaponry. Or sell you said arms.

officialjunk 4y ago

let's remember that the US helped fund this research too https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...

zdragnar 4y ago
And if it comes to light that it was not a natural disaster- that this funding contributed to it- then we should cut off said funding until better protocols, enforcement and accountability are in place If it turned out to be not a lab leak, fine, carry on. If it was a lab leak, why on earth should I be complacent about my tax dollars contributing to the next one?

brookst 4y ago

Are you suggesting that a more correct course of action would be some kind of punitive retribution so those of us who survived suffer in the hopes that those most responsible suffer a little more than we do? The idea that we would hurt our own economic future out of grief/vengeance is bizarre. So yes, everyone does know what you suggest, and we’re all OK with it.

pessimizer 4y ago

It's pretty sickening that a coronavirus lab in China that the US was completely involved with both financially and through scientific cooperation can be reframed as more nationalistic anti-China bullshit. The US isn't keeping things peaceful with China for the sake of trade relations, it's actually threatening China constantly. The US is keeping quiet about the lab leak theory because it was just as responsible for that lab as China was, and it wants to distract from that fact.