Dismissing the theory outright has never and will never be an option. I don’t like that this is what the team decided to do, and I suspect there is a lot of tension in this investigation.
You must've missed out on previous HN discussions. I remember these guys in particular being paraded around:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBQplOe8-LE
I did find their tone quite dismissive, and the verdict in the title leaves little room for interpretation.
> What was dangerous was pointing the finger at China and saying “this is all their fault!” without any evidence.
True, but that's irrelevant to the plausibility of the hypothesis.
> There STILL is not evidence, but that doesn’t mean it should not be investigated as a source.
Arguably, it's still dangerous to do exactly that.
There was at least one paper calling it "natural selection", and some folks who read it agreed that it ruled out laboratory accidents:
"The high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
https://twitter.com/ehundman/status/1246597925288816640
https://www.newsweek.com/claim-that-coronavirus-came-lab-chi...
> Hoaxes, lies and collective delusions aren’t new, but the extent to which millions of Americans have embraced them may be. Thirty percent of Republicans have a favorable view of QAnon, according to a recent YouGov poll. According to other polls, more than 70 percent of Republicans believe Mr. Trump legitimately won the election, and 40 percent of Americans — including plenty of Democrats — believe the baseless theory that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/technology/biden-reality-...
https://stratechery.com/2021/mistakes-memes-and-foreign-grou...
> The poll gave people a sort of test to see if they could spot misinformation like the coronavirus was created in a lab or that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.
> 40% of poll respondents believe one of the biggest conspiracy theories that's out there about the virus, that it was made in a lab in China. There is no evidence for this. And scientists say that the virus was transmitted to humans from another species. But I talked to people all over the country who responded to our poll and they still believe this.
That's literally what a gain-of-function experiment is. These are done to study how viruses interact with humans so that we can deal with them better. There's nothing sinister about it, such experiments are happening all over the world and they did happen in Wuhan.
The latter is simpler—it is reasonable to think a lab that maintains and studies viruses similar to Covid-19 accidentally allowed one to be released. It does not imply an intent to misuse the virus.
I have not watched the video, I’m sorry. I’ll try and get to it later.
Did you just reply to the sentence I quoted or did you click the links? The tweets are very obviously not limited to that: https://twitter.com/ehundman/status/1246598376377831425
And honestly, it's hard to go from "this happened via natural selection" to "nobody dismissed this coming from a lab". Even if it's technically possible, surely you can understand why readers' message from this is not "this could have come from a lab".
It doesn't imply intent to use as a bioweapon, much less release it in their own population.
The hypothesis that this was a gain-of-function experiment that went awry due to lax security still does put a lot of pressure on Chinese authorities, on top of the poor handling at the beginning of the outbreak.
> Wait, what was that last one? “The baseless theory that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab”? I feel pretty certain that COVID-19 wasn’t deliberately manufactured and deployed as some sort of biological attack, but where does “gain-of-function” experiments end and “manufacturing” begin? Even if it ends up being true that the lab-leak hypothesis is wrong there is actually zero question that the Wuhan lab was manipulating coronaviruses to make them more lethal. To that end, the primary evidence we have that the lab-leak hypothesis is false is that China says it is false.
This gives a new perspective to Roose’s recommendations (well technically, the recommendation of the experts he consulted, which all happen to align with Roose’s previously stated beliefs) that the Biden administration set up a “truth commission”, appoint a “reality czar”, audit tech company algorithms, and “fix people’s problems” with a social stimulus.
The lab was doing gain of function experiments, which most people would agree would constitute “being made in a lab”.
I don’t necessarily think the lab leak hypothesis is the truth, but it certainly is a real possibility. And if it was an accidental leak then it would very likely have been a virus modified via gain of function.