What does it matter if the lab leak hypothesis were true? No one can answer this except to quickly move on to blame, or fear mongering, or just other flat earth type circular reasoning.

Because exploring the truth is a worthwhile endeavor particularly in the face of an oppressive regime that made it very clear they did not want the truth to be explored.

Just to be clear what I posted seemed like Chinese people exploring what actually happened more than a blame based document or fear mongering based document.

I would really encourage you to give it a chance because it is very impressive investigative work and, really, an impressive exercise of investigative journalism from a country that hates investigative journalists.

I really think it is plain to see that even the most excellent of investigation that doesn't give us any new facts, and even if it were bore out to new facts and had a smoking gun, would still not make us any safer that directly talking about things that will make us safer going forward.

But even if this would be proven true, it would not do anything to bring down China. Even if scores of people testified it was a deliberate bioweapon, I don't see how that changes anyone's contempt for them.

I think you bring up a good ideal about sunlight exposing them, but this seems to be squinting into the fog and there are actual things to do to prepare for the next pandemic or to fight against their oppression and concentration camps.

The purpose of that article is not to bring down china. It's not ideologically opposed to china. It was not some conservative agenda article. It's a group of people who want to understand what happened. The article comes from a stance of curiosity. What I linked is very compatible with the HN mindset and not particularly ideological.

You clearly have not read it because your comment makes no sense in the context of that article.

If you don't want to be curious then don't be.

Why is it important to you? Or is that curiosity off the plate? Often people are drawn to never ending questions to escape from their own problems, or, conspiratorial stuff is attractive when people feel out of control in their lives, but a conspiracy is a cohesive idea that can be blamed.

Why do they think it can be found out what happened? Everything can be pressed forever. Let's go forward because you game theory it like HN people used to love to talk about, and it all leads to not much help.

You are spamming this thread. Looks like you are working for the CCP. Don't make it too obvious.

Lol. If the treatment of their own people wasn't bad enough and it took a pandemic conspiracy theory to hate them, then I feel like you need to read more.

Because if we're relying on the people who are funding bioweapons research in hostile countries to tell us how to treat said viruses, under the delusion that they'd learn something useful, it's the kind of thing we need to know about before waking up three years later and finding out (per the Northwestern study) that we could have avoided a lot of deaths by simply following the sort of treatment regimen we used for more common flu varieties and given the patients azithromycin.

Why not do something about this directly. This lab leak wild goose chase isn't required.

For one, if it was proven that a lab leak was the cause of such global destruction, that may encourage stronger lab regulations in the future.

We can and should do that anyway, why do we need a smoking gun, I mean, beyond the pandemic we had.

I'd avoid loaded terms like "smoking gun" in this discussion. My point is that if the pandemic was caused by a leak, then that would be a prior that could aid in future decision-making.

I don't understand your position that we should not seek the truth. Somehow knowing the truth about a past event can have no bearing on the future?

I don't think it is ultimately knowable in a way that is helpful. We need to act as if any of the possibilities happened because any of them could.

I guess I also don't see why articles like this are needed to work on pandemic prevention.

I can totally see why people need them for at the very least getting clicks and attention.

It’s possible aliens came from space and dropped the virus off to see how we would handle it. How much effort should we put into preventing that pandemic path?

Nearly every airline regulation that results in air travel being so safe today is because we spend such an enormous amount of resources investigating the root causes of accidents with the NTSB. Try suggesting to them “it doesn’t matter why the plane crashed, let’s just push for generic improvements to planes”. You’ll get (rightfully so) laughed out of the room.

The limit is five why's and often you can't even get that. Planes still crash. Perhaps we've pulled on this thread as much as we can. Especially with long ass articles like this that say nothing new.

Seriously, what are we expecting to learn. This is like a plane at the bottom of the ocean never to be found. We'll never know what happened to this plane, and we don't have to.

We know that situation was probably poor pilot mental health but pilots still have to lie about antidepressants. We don't need to find that plane to fix that.

> We'll never know what happened to this plane,

You've decided the truth is unknowable, no good would come from knowing the truth, and searching for the truth is itself causing harm.

Well we stopped looking for it though

Only after it became effectively impossible to find it or recover anything useful. That’s not anything like the Wuhan lab, which still exists and has many survivors and still has tons of evidence that hasn’t been corroded away by years of seawater.

You edited in your quip about antidepressants and it just made your point even worse. There was still a significant amount to learn about what he did to the copilot and what the actual flight route was.

There were multiple parties outside of the plane that had to be incompetent in many of the possible flight paths for MH370. Your solution of “stuff more antidepressants down everyone’s throats” will not work for the coverage gaps in ATC monitoring and handoffs between boundaries.

Your lackadaisical approach to “well we spent a few days looking into this and can’t see anything obvious or think there is anything to gain by knowing the truth” is far from acceptable in any root cause analysis related to loss of life.

How do you unequivocally know that this can’t be traced back to a manufacturing or design flaw in a piece of containment equipment used by many BSL labs around the world?

The answer is that you can’t because there is no investigation right now. Burying your head in the sand is never good enough, not even if it’s politically convenient.

> The limit is five why's and often you can't even get that. Planes still crash.

This is a shockingly ignorant statement or willfully misleading. Air safety has improved by at least an order of magnitude[1] because of the culture of seeking out the truth, regardless of how disruptive or inconvenient.

It is very rare to have a commercial airline crash now and significantly rarer to not understand exactly why (MH370 being a notable exception).

Wherever you got that “often you can’t even got that” is complete and utter bullshit.

1. https://news.mit.edu/2020/study-commercial-flights-safer-eve...

The fact that commercial airlines don't have many crashes is due to a completely vertical integrated system beyond just the analysis of crashes. Are you saying we need to integrate virology globally?? I'm for that, sure. General aviation is 3x as dangerous as motorcycles.

General aviation is irrelevant because the NTSB does not care about it nor does the FAA ratchet regulations based on it.

>The fact that commercial airlines don't have many crashes is due to a completely vertical integrated system beyond just the analysis of crashes.

It has nothing to do with vertical integration (or you don’t know what that term means). There are several manufacturers of airplanes, several different manufactures of the engines for them, and hundreds of airlines all with their own business models, flight routes, personnel, financing models (old vs new planes), crew models (contract maintenance vs in-house for various parts), fleet models (unified 737 like southwest, potpourri like the other majors), regional offload (skywest), etc.

The only thing consistent about airlines is that they have to follow a strict set of regulations set by the FAA written in blood root caused by the NTSB.

If the government took your attitude of not caring about the cause because “it’s too hard” or “we don’t think it will be useful” (despite not knowing it), commercial aviation would be just as dangerous as general aviation and nobody in their right mind would fly frequently.

Its a good compilation that I saw in mid 2020 that was one of the sources of data leading me to question the zoonotic spillover hypothesis that I had read in Zhou et al (RaTG13 paper) and Anderson et al. That the WIV was conducting exactly the type of research that could have led to a highly human infectious novel SARS-CoV was poo-pood and cast as a conspiracy theory. As Ian Lipkin stated following the Fauci teleconference "we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to deal with"

And helpful that it's hosted on GitHub. PRC can't block Github on a strategic level. So content can be hosted there that gets through the GFW that PRC netizens can see.

Can't they block the subdomain?