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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was no harm. It seems to be a pretty short jump from lab-leak, to engineered virus, to 5G cell towers giving us covid through our dreams. And even that starting step seems to have a lot of people wanting to shut down virology labs.

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I just want to comment to reject the equivalency of lab-leak hypothesis with absurd conspiracies. Humans make mistakes; it's known that contagions have escaped from labs. How does acknowledging these uncontroversial facts cause one to jump to intentional engineering, or not understanding how 5G works? I suspect that the majority of people who think "lab leak" is among the set of reasonable origin hypotheses are looking for better transparency and safety protocols in labs, not trying to end virology research.

I wasn’t saying it’s a slippery slope, i was saying (and it’s evidenced in any comment section this comes up in) that anything that lends credibility to the LLH is fuel for all those more extreme viewpoints.

It's almost like initially dismissing and censoring the lableak theory as a racist conspiracy has helped fuel all these other conspiracies. Conflicts of interests like these fuel distrust of authorities and vaccine hesitancy. It's self-inflicted

Meh. You’re putting a lot of faith in people. More transparency sometimes helps dispel conspiracy theories - sometimes it just gives them more data to pour over to find “connections” in.

I don't think so. Avoiding loss of trust is medical governance 101.[1]

"The agency organised a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign in Abottabad, Pakistan, in a bid to obtain DNA from the children of Bin Laden, to confirm the presence of the family in a compound and sanction the rollout of a risky and extensive operation. Release of this information has had a disastrous effect on worldwide eradication of infectious diseases, especially polio."

1. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Yes, absolutely - trust is key - but I don’t think that this was the moment where scientists and governments lost the trust of the people.

It's one of several major moments throughout the pandemic

Oh, i meant they’d lost people’s trust decades before the pandemic…

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