zlacker

They absolutely did. See this NYT article. Ben Thompson of Stratechery discussed it in an excellent article linked below. Key excerpt from the NYT piece. Doesn’t get more official than that:

> 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...

>>graeme+(OP)
The NPR article that your NYT article links to is more direct about this; I'll link to it and quote it here directly: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/951095644

> 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.

>>graeme+(OP)
That is addressing the theory that the virus was manufactured in a lab, i.e with the intent to release. Not the idea that it was released accidentally. It is very different.

>>beowul+D
It doesn't say anything about "intent". The hypothesis that the virus was modified in a gain-of-function experiment in Wuhan is plausible.

>>beowul+D
Do you just assume without clicking that every rebuttal to your point must be only addressing deliberate, malicious dissemination of the virus? I even went out of my way to quote the relevant parts of it here so you could immediately see the lack of "intent" without clicking:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26610037

>>beowul+D
The quote doesn’t say “with intent to release”. You’re writing that in. I’ll quote Thompson on ‘manufacture’

> 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.

>>datafl+x3
Please omit personal swipes and don't take threads further into flamewar. Those things don't help. If another comment is interpreting you inaccurately or otherwise in error, provide correct information respectfully. If you can't (or don't want to) do that, it's better not to post until you can (and do).