Hacker News Reader

Comment by hairofadog | Hacker News Reader

It’s obviously important to understand the origins of the pandemic for pragmatic reasons but I don’t get why people seem to be so invested in one outcome or the other, as if definitive proof that it did or didn’t start in a lab will validate or invalidate their comprehensive political worldview.

View on HN

We're all locked inside a high-stakes thriller novel, we don't know if we're halfway through the book, at the start, or near the finale. We don't know how many volumes there are. We all want some answers. And for sure, how the story unfolds affects us all in the most direct of ways (lab leak or not). If this were a box set, by now everyone would have googled for spoilers, as the tension is unbearable.

So yeah, lab leak or not may not make much difference to the hard reality, but 18 months of lockdowns displaced reality, some time ago already.

I can see that the idea that it was a lab leak could be _reassuring_ to people; "this just happened and could happen again at any time" is a way scarier prospect than "this happened due to negligence and can be prevented from happening again with better procedures", and people do tend to over-index on explanations which offer solutions.

Notably, you got a lot of the same sort of thing (albeit way more conspiracy-ish, because HIV's origins were far clearer) for HIV.

> "The question of the origin of COVID-19 isn’t of merely academic interest. The answer could guide the world’s preparation for future pandemics; if the virus emerged from a laboratory, then improving lab safety measures will be prioritized. If scientific opinion continues to coalesce around animal-to-human transmission, that will underscore the importance of regulating contact between humans and wildlife."

So I think the difference is, in the lab leak scenario, that's relatively _easy_ to solve; it's just a case of increasing standards in a rather small number of facilities. If it's zoonotic transition, well, it's all very well to say "underscore the importance of regulating contact between humans and wildlife", but, er, good luck with that. That doesn't offer a real solution.

> I can see that the idea that it was a lab leak could be _reassuring_ to people;

To me its less reassuring. It tells me that us humans actively sought out pathogens in spaces where it was unlikely that humans would encounter them otherwise. Then took those pathogens to a lab, experimented on them a bit perhaps making them more deadly, have shitty security protocols for the experiment, and thereby releasing them accidentally into a large population.

A lab leak makes it our fault and speaks to the stupidity of us humans. A zoological origin makes it natures fault. I’d much rather nature kill me by accident (besides I think our odds are better).

Sure, but all of that is _addressable_, via improved standards. That is, if one buys the lab leak theory, it's practical to stop it happening again. But if it was normal zoonotic transmission, well, there are ways to make that somewhat less likely, but it will happen again; diseases make the jump from time to time, and realistically this avenue for new diseases can't be shut down.

Improved standards may help some, but that’s not the real issue. If I, a virologist, enter a remote cave system that no other human would likely ever enter specifically looking for an undiscovered virus to study, I have already tipped the scales significantly to the likelihood that the unknown virus will infect humans by a huge scale over nature.

Then, by experimentation, I make said virus even more infectious or deadly…I have even further increased that likelihood of it infecting humans by a huge factor.

Then, by performing that experiment in an area with a dense 11M population, I have further increased that likelihood of human transmission so far beyond where it was when that virus sat in that remote cave and had a unlikely path to humans.

So you better hope like hell that your lab security is bulletproof, because you have removed virtually every layer of protection that nature has provided us humans from the bug.

I'm not personally invested, but I think some people are motivated by wanting vindication. "I was right and the talking heads were wrong". I think it's more about that than about the issue itself.

And I mean, learning about which authorities are more and less reliable is important, and so is scoring track record points, so I don't want to be too dismissive of that attitude.

I think it's because people sense there's a big lie being perpetrated, and they want the truth. Or that they really hope there is no lie and people (especially scientists!) are always good and innocent afterall.

The article itself obviously takes sides, so I won't ask inconvenient questions like how the virus got from Laos to Wuhan more plausibly than from the two labs there. One of which is right across from the seafood market, where lab workers presumably would have shopped, as well as at other markets.

The only reason why the closest related coronavirus besides RaTG13 was found in Laos is due to the fact no researchers are allowed to sample any caves in Yunnan china due to government ban. And all research done by Chinese scientists must be reviewed and approved prior to publishing.

One thing I wish could be shared would be the formally publicly accessible viral database the lab had taken down in September of 2019 and refuses to share with anyone even scientists behind closed doors. Right now RaTG13 is the only known virus closest to SARS-COV-2 but no one is allowed to check and verify.

I think the article has a persuasive reason why beyond politics: not knowing the origin reason means policies might be written that don't actually prevent another pandemic. There's no reason to more stringently regulate wet markets if the belief was that it came out of a lab, and vice versa.

This doesn’t really make sense - irrespective of where this particular virus came from, we need to re-think regulations for all potential future sources.

Best policy is to do both. Ban dangerous research and regulate markets/factory farming and step up monitoring for potential zoonosis transfers.

America needs a big bad.

It's not even "political" in the sense of domestic conflict, it's the consensus.

It goes roughly like: It's the fault of the Chinese and possibly an anti-America bioweapon; therefore it isn't the fault of Trump for ignoring, minimizing and dawdling in the hopes it would preserve his electoral chances (and wipe out Democrat voting demographics in blue states).

The A, therefore not B structure of this isn't particularly valid, but this is excuse making, not sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com