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Comment by Centigonal | Hacker News Reader

When Trump made accusations of a lab leak, there were few facts pointing to that conclusion. Furthermore, the statements he made were dangerous to Asian Americans in the US. Later, as more facts came to light, the lab-leak theory became more plausible.

Guessing right in the absence of evidence shouldn't grant a person any kind of vindication in retrospect

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I’ll never understand this take.

“The virus accidentally leaked from a highly sophisticated lab in China” is somehow racist and dangerous, but “Chinese people can’t stop eating weird stuff at a wet market and the virus jumped to humans from there” isn’t.

To be fair the lab leak theory implies those working at the lab knew what they were doing, had a decent idea of the risks, continued to do so anyway, then were incompetent enough to allow the leak to occur. Or worse, deliberately released it. Viruses spread from animals to humans with some regularity all over the world and such an occurrence doesn't imply incompetence among those who should know better etc.

Just clarifying my take (can't comment on what others think): I think the "Chinese people eat weird stuff" narrative is also racist and dangerous. It's not a dichotomy, and in the absence of evidence, I would rather avoid both.

My personal belief over the last few years has been "it could be zoonotic transmission through food, it could be a lab leak, it could be something else. I don't know, so let's wait and see."

Also, as a side note: non-Chinese people eat weird things too (and even worse - sometimes live with animals inside their homes). For example, the Black Death in Europe and the 1918 Flu pandemic which likely started in the US both had a significant zoonotic component.

“People eating weird things” isn’t the only alternative theory to “lab leak!!!”

A farmer handling infected guano (which is used for fertilizer) could’ve been patient zero. A scientist studying bats in a cave could’ve been exposed, and I guess that could count as a lab leak, I guess, but it’s not as sexy as “mad scientists were manually recombinating viruses for the interest of authoritarian regimes!”

Where do you people get briefed? The guy was fucking President

As president, the guy said a lot of things that were outright untrue [1]. By 2020, he had lost any expectation of credulity just on the virtue of his being president in my eyes, and in those of many other Americans.

Now, if he had claimed the virus originated as a Chinese lab leak, and the intelligence community came out supporting that contribution, then that would have been a different story. Information from these sources didn't start becoming public until 2021, and was still mixed at that point[2].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-fa...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/us/politics/covid-origin-...

Not everything a politician said was true, therefore if you read NYT and WaPo you're more well informed than the President. Amazing.

I love this reaction, because Trump, of all people, was getting some of the least useful briefings of any modern US president, due to his inability to pay attention.[0][1][2]

So it's entirely possible that just watching the news casually would leave you better informed than the US president during the years of 2017 to 2021.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/29/politics/trump-intelligence-b...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/29/donald-trump...

[2] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-fa...

Or someone at the briefings said there was a possibility that the origin of the virus was a lab leak and that was the only thing he actually heard and just said that the origin of the virus was a lab leak.

No, it isn't entirely possible(any more than anything else is technically possible). In the rolling stone article:

> "Clapper agreed with Gistaro, telling Helgerson, “Trump doesn’t read much; he likes bullets.” Instead, during the Trump administration, the briefer would summarize aloud key points since the last briefing and provide three documents (none more than a page) about new developments abroad. This was all part of an effort to make the PDB “shorter and tighter, with declarative sentences and no feature-length pieces.”

> “Trump had his own way of receiving intelligence information—and a uniquely rough way of dealing publicly with the IC,” Helgerson wrote, “but it was a system in which he digested the key points offered by the briefers, asked questions, engaged in discussion, made his own priority interests known, and used the information as a basis for discussions with his policy advisers.”"

> "These and other difficulties agencies encountered under Trump led Helgerson to conclude that, “The system worked, but it struggled.”"

He clearly had access to more information than any civilian, and was engaging with it.

I'm always fascinated by the dichotomy of the evil hitler hyper-competent sub 100IQ billionaire who became president illustrated in every one of these types of comments.

You could literally just read his executive orders to figure out what you said is false.

Having read a number of Trump administration Executive Orders and not understanding what you mean, could you elaborate?

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