The reality is not so rosy. Many virologists know that if lab leak is true their careers will be over. So I am very skeptical of how much obfuscations and disinformation spread by virologists is for the good of humanity and how much of it is just to protect their self interest.
That would only disprove the genetic manipulation part, but not necessarily lab leak. A WIV lab staff can easily contract virus from a bat inside the lab. This essentially what happened in Taiwan, where a lab staff got infected with COVID from a mouse [1]. To disprove lab leak you also have to show either 1. WIV or any other labs in Wuhan didn't have any virus samples that can be an ancestor of SARS-CoV2 2. we can establish a very clear and well understood route how the ancestor of SARS-CoV2 arrived at Wuhan from Yunan province, where the horseshoe bats live, including how it became so good at infecting humans in a very short period of time.
With SARS original they found the source as infected animals at a local food market. Something like that would pretty much disprove a lab leak as the source as it did that time.
We don't, and that's the issue, we can't know unless we find an ancestor virus. It's also very possible if could have wiped out the original virus in all original reservoirs. It's very difficult to do this now and for endemic viruses in general, and it took a very very long time to do for SARS where this wasn't a problem.
Also Ecohealth Alliance and WIV collected viruses in Laos. So in terms of natural origin vs. lab leak the viruses found in Laos don't increase probability on either side.
"international harmony" is just a front for hiding self-interest. Many elites, including the said virologists and bureaucrats, have significant financial or other ties with China. That's why any discussion of China and pandemics is very quickly buried with bullying and force [1].
That doesn't stop at least few "I Hate Ads" (read "I Hate Google") threads popping up every single day. For some reason this "tedious" tag only applies when it comes to Lab Leak or any China related threads.
Snopes have made lot of dubious and misleading claims on lab leak [1][2].
Politifact literally retracted their claims on calling lab leak a conspiracy theory [3]. Reality is all these mainstream media is trying to control the narrative with rhetorical tricks.
This is a common tactic of left wing media. They use rhetorical tricks to mislead the audiences. Lab leak has been tarred as conspiracy theory because of political and financial gains through very dubious rhetorical tricks.
Snopes have made lot of dubious and misleading claims on lab leak. Reality is the whole Acitvist Industrial Complex and many elites, who have financial ties w/ China including HN favorites like Apple and Amazon [3][4], are trying to regain control of the narrative they lost because of internet.
Hi, I've been revisiting an old thread from way back in April of 2020, and you are the only person that replied to me that appears to still be active on HN.
In this specific example, given the context (that a virus would have a simple time going 400 meters from lab to market via some host), isn't the difference between 400m and 26km valid to point out?
In my experience, that's how left wing disinformation works. Using rhetorical tricks to mislead the audience. It's even more ironic when most left wing journalists and pundits are followers of Foucault and Derrida.
Interesting how when MS is on ad market justifications like this pop up all the time on HN. Meanwhile, quarter of HN is nothing but a jihad against Google for its advertising business.
Yes, there are two groups: pro-MS and anti-Google. And maybe there is a large overlap between these groups. Not some privacy warriors as many of these anti-Google jihadists claim or pretend to be.
