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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

Wait until you hear how the Wuhan lab and Peter Daszak’s Ecohealth Alliance are still doing NIH-funded virus research…

> still

It's worse than this implies. If NIH had taken no action, then the Ecohealth contract would have expired. Instead, Fauci made sure that one of his last acts as (the highest paid) public official was to renew that contract.

Wanna know what is real infuriating. Is the fact Ecohealth still to this day has refused to share any data or records from their decades of research. You'd think if the reckless research they were conducting was so vital (as they have and continue to claim), then sharing their research and databases would have helped fight the pandemic. But for some reason they have refused.

Shouldn't we be doing more research on viruses that come from bats?

What’s objectionable about that? Can you explain that to me. I’m afraid I really don’t understand.

The theory is the US through ecohealth funded the Wuhan lab in their gain of function research which brought us the virus which causes Wuhan Pneumonia.

That is a hypothesis. I just don’t understand why it should have policy impact since there is no evidence for it. It’s currently just a conspiracy theory.

No, it not "just a conspiracy theory". They were seeking research funding for a proposal to do gain of function research on Corona viruses. Function that would produce something very much like covid19. Whether they ended up doing it is not even relevant IMHO because the proposed result would have essentially been that virus. Lab leaks have happened before and will happen again. People are actively looking to make similar things for "research".

It's not that they make Covid. It's that they may as well have and wanted to (sans releasing it hopefully)

Depends on your definition of conspiracy theory I guess, but serious people take it seriously https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1463219980506439691 There may be no direct positive evidence for it, but that doesn't mean it's all that implausible.

If it were just a conspiracy theory, someone would have gone through the claims in the book "Viral" by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan and debunked its arguments one by one. Matt Ridley is a journalist who wrote numerous books about scientific topics (one about the genome in 1999). Alina Chan is a biologist who works at Harvard and MIT. When people say "trust the science", or "trust the scientists", why should we trust Peter Daszak, with his obvious conflicts of interests, over Alina Chan?

You asked what. I said what. What I said is why someone might find it objectionable that they're still going.

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