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Comment by LargoLasskhyfv | Hacker News Reader

You know? I thought about your 'nonsense' and recalled something rather old in 'internet time'.

Anyways, i just searched for russian bio lab accident and this came up first: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/decades-after-deadly...

I'm sure there is more to find about that, but for the purpose of rebutting your nonsense i deem it sufficient.

What do i mean by that? The theories aren't unfounded when looking back, because they happened! It doesn't really matter where, when, by whom, and what exactly. Just that it did happen multiple times.

Cheers.

edit: Well, it even has a wikipedia article if you prefer that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak

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I don't get it. Why are people knee-jerk adverse to this idea? We're not arguing with flat earthers or moon landing skeptics. It's entirely plausible. With people putting their reputation on it, too. Dany Shoham (Israeli biological warfare expert) put his name on the line point this out before a lot of people.

It's not out of the realm of possibility and shouldn't be disregarded out of hand like it has been. Could be from there or maybe not. We really need more information from China to settle some of these discussions.

> Dany Shoham

So the same guy that claimed ISIS have biological weapon? Other than public information, so what does he know that others don’t? this guy has no credibility to begin with.

The odds are fairly slim. Wuhan is a large Chinese city that has a greater population than most countries.

There is going to be an (X) in Wuhan for any value of (X) anyone cares to name. The fog of uncertainty is still thick; nobody has much of an idea what is going on. Anyone claiming that they have a theory on where the virus came from is fantasising. The knee-jerk people probably don't want them drowning out a weak signal with useless noise.

There is only one Biosafety level 4 laboratory in China, and it opened... last year in... Wuhan. I am not saying there is a link, but I would not dismiss it too fast.

What is the probability that in Wuhan exists the only X in the vast country and Y happens only once in a decade or so

There'd be a bunch of BSL-3 facilities all over the place. It isn't like the Black Death or the Spanish Flu needed a BSL-4 facility to incubate in.

It is possible; but a lot of things are possible. It is a mighty leap from a starting point of basically no primary evidence and all the people who have on-the-ground access to evidence are very busy managing a rapidly growing crisis.

The tricky part is that we have zero evidence. It’s not that it’s not a reasonable hypothesis, it’s that it’s nothing more than speculation. This is fine in general, but many people do not generally understand the difference between a hypothesis and pure speculation, and may attribute more weight to a guess than it deserves.

It is important to remember that there is zero evidence of this theory, and yet despite that it is spreading through the Internet populace faster than the virus itself.

There's also that time the USG tested the effects of bioweapon spreading on San Francisco and other US cities. It's not like countries don't have a history of this.

https://www.businessinsider.com/military-government-secret-e...

They have happened at some place at some point in the past seems pretty weak to go on. A lot of things have happened in the past, doesn't mean they're all potential causes this time around. Seems to me we need a bit more than we've had bio lab incidents before.

I mean by this measure any time someone crashes a car it could be an assassination attempt. It's happened before.

I didn't mean to say that something like this IS the cause, just that it could be. Right now we don't have enough data and facts to confirm or dismiss either.

What rubs me the wrong way are the people instantly dismissing something like this as unlikely, or even impossible ignoring history.

Because it happened before means it's happened again?

The amount of novel virus to have emerged from labs so far is probably very close to, if not zero.

Do you want to believe that, or do you know?

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