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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

Because it's completely untestable and short of someone "admitting" it we will never know for sure.

So whether you believe it or not depends entirely on you're prejudices. I'm prejudiced not to but others may feed differently.

And it makes absolutely no difference at all. You still need a vaccine, you still need lockdowns and quarantines and to manage your healthcare. And we should all be taking action on China whether it's incompetence (around food hygiene) or incompetence (around bio hazard management).

This is why I hate the whole Lab Leak thing. It's people "straining out a knat and swallowing a camel". It's a distraction and it unnecessarily complicates messaging and discussion that can be pretty vital.

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It absolutely makes a difference, because we need to stop this from happening again. We can't just accept that labs are going to continue to release dangerous viruses and then just deal with the effects every time.

The issue here is China. My evidence for this is that this keeps happening in China (SARS etc).

So if it's lab leak, the problem isn't the US or Russia or Butan doing lab work. It's China doing lab work insecurely.

And if it's a food hygiene thing, it's not a world food hygiene thing, it's a Chinese food hygiene thing.

So the action here is to sanction the fuck out of China. And that is true whether it's lab leaked or zoonotic or any other unimaginable source.

Uh... are you forgetting about a thing called H1N1? Granted, it wasn't as dangerous as COVID, but that originated in the good ol' US of A. I wouldn't be so quick to jump to harsh ideas just for the sake of it - this could have happened in any country really - all you need is human interaction with animals and enough time.

> Because it's completely untestable and short of someone "admitting" it we will never know for sure.

What a weird assertion.

It would be perfectly testable in any democratic country. Set up an independent commission, give access to the lab's complete files, perform a lot of tests on samples held there. That's exactly what would happen. Opposition parties would be demonstrating non stop demanding answers.

Instead this is China, a communist dictatorship with, on top of that, a strong culture of never losing face. It's only untestable because of that, not for epistemological reasons.

So it's testable, but only if we overthrow the CCP, make China a functional democracy, change Chinese culture to encourage openness, seize the records before they destroy them (which them might already have) and if we can't find those records or they say nothing incriminating, we accept tthat they're innocent because abcence of evidence is evidence of abcense?

Sounds untestable to me...

In the context of a scientific hypothesis, "untestable" means that it can't be tested, not that someone doesn't want it to be tested. The fact that someone really really really doesn't want it to be tested does not make it untestable. It makes it untested but eminently testable.

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