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Comment by bedhead | Hacker News Reader

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I'm pretty sure there was a conspiracy. Not a conspiracy to create a pandemic, but a conspiracy to hide an accident due to incompetence. Not all conspiracies are myths, just consider Watergate: there was a conspiracy to hide Nixon's shenanigans. The only difference is that one happened in a dictatorship while the other happened in a democracy with a free press.

Oh I agree, at a bare minimum there's nothing even remotely wacky about the lab leak theory. I'm just explaining why half the country has counterintuitively decided to brand it as lunatic fringe conspiracy rather than it being self-evidently plausible if not likely.

Well I'm guessing that because of your political ideals you're committed to the wrong position that masks are ineffective so studies like this won't convince you, https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-068302

No, it's my commitment to objective analysis and not bizarre herd behavior combined with religious/cult undertones that led me to this conclusion.

I always love when someone posts like one single "study" that almost always doesn't even qualify as amateur hour (eg data mining) and thinks it's some sort of mic drop, as if there aren't 25 disconfirming studies or data points for every one thing saying masks have even a faint amount of efficacy.

The link was to a rigorous meta-analysis in one of the top medical journals of several studies with combined n=389k that concluded that masks showed a 53% reduction in covid-19 incidence.

it's too bad this was downvoted because it's probably the best explanation.

I'm not totally sure about 3, my guess is that we have collected far more useful intelligence that our agencies have released, but nothing sufficient to make a geopolitical claim about China, and the cost of being wrong with such an accusation is huge.

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