Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw_away | Hacker News Reader

It was also political because of the punitive measures sought by those pointing fingers to China— ranging from 10 trillion in reparations to war. Rather than saying hey, maybe this gain of function business was a mistake & we should just do it in the supercomputers like with nukes or something.

Personally, I don't really understand the focus on pinning down the exact reason this happened. Stop GoF research and shut down wet markets. Stop encroaching on wilderness as best we can while we're at it. Do all the things.

View on HN

Many reforms will be aggressively resisted. Wet markets are unlikely to be shut down unless they can be plausibly fingered as the source of COVID-19 (and maybe not even then). GoF research has been heavily criticized for years, but it is still funded because there's a lobby in favour of it. People saying "hey, this could cause a pandemic" wasn't enough. There's another in favour of encroaching on wilderness.

> Do all the things.

We're more likely going to do none of the things. Again, unless one of them can be shown to be directly related to COVID, and even then, it's questionable.

Maybe after 2020, the other side of those arguments have a bit more weight for everybody. Were we to focus more on those things rather than war and reparation, maybe we can survive as a species. But yeah, probably not.

Is it realistic to expect them to comply with demands that they should stop GOF research / shut down wet markets without a credible threat of (at least) an economic retribution?

The US does this kind of research, too. And, it seems like it even funded the Wuhan research at least to some extent. Would the US need a threat of economic retribution to reconsider this research? Or to change a practice of their food supply suspected of causing significant harm? Writing that out, I guess maybe it would.

Isn't a wet market just one that sells meat and produce? Like my local Kroger's and Safeway? Or do you mean something else?

I’m kind of interested how one nation thinks it’s going to convince another sovereign nation to pay that kind of ‘reparations’.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com