He's definitely got the broken clock syndrome. And back in the day he was a strong defender of the environment.

I've got a family member and ex friend (both trained in science) and they drank the koolaid hard. A funny story about them -- both had stayed at my home (different times) and I had taken to heating the water for my coffee in the microwave.

Both of them were horrified by that and refused to use that water. Neither could give reason why, and artfully deflected when I pressed the matter. I think antivaxers caught a virus that melted their brains.

I think the worldwide disruption of the pandemic melted people's brains, and the recent surge in the anti-vax movement is a symptom. Along the lines of: if all this bad stuff happened and my life was significantly harmed, it must be someone's fault; all those doctors and scientists kept advising everyone on what they thought was happening and what to do, so they're probably the ones who caused the problem.

I say this as a committed fan of RNA vaccines and masking, who believed we could have contained covid with more serious lockdowns very early in the pandemic: In point of fact, it was someone's fault, and the someones whose fault it was - the ones doing gain of function research - were the same people who took control of lockdown policy in the US. That would be enough to melt a lot of people's brains, even if it weren't for the psychological effects of lockdowns, remote schooling, and the consequent arrested development of an entire generation. At a bare minimum, the concealment by the CCP of what they knew of covid was an act of war. The cover-up itself killed millions of people and caused untold economic damage to their adversaries, with the collusion of health officials in the US government who had offshored illegal research there.

From what I've read about GOF research, it's essentially explored in defensive posture, because viruses mutate and they're looking at how to get ahead of the curve (not a researcher, just my take).

But what is never discussed in the Lab Leak pursuit is: so what? I mean, yes, poor biosecurity and containment should be called out and not covered up, but the real value is in being the foundation of a conspiracy. "The government conspired to make you sick!".

Think about this: covid has mutated consistently since it's been tracked. Were those mutations coming from a lab or was it viruses doing virus things. Was Ebola made in a lab or did it come from a place we know viruses come from.

Was the Spanish Flu a Chinese plot? Was AIDS?

The handling of the outbreak was clearly bungled, but let's remember who was in charge in the US when it happened. The guy who shut down research and tracking teams because Obama had funded them (So had Bush -- until then, this kind of stuff was non-political and taken seriously as a non-partisan issue).

The failure for masking was again, on the then POTUS, and it's been conjectured by many (including myself) that he was against masks because it would mess up his makeup.

Yes, it could have been handled so much better, and sadly, could have been an incredibly valuable teachable moment that made us all safer in the future. But instead it was used to further divide us and foster the literal fucking insanity of antivaxxers. I have nothing but contempt for those people because they are a danger to humanity.

I don't think it was a conspiracy to make people sick. I also don't think the lab leak theory should be a partisan issue. I was in the camp at the time shouting that we needed to enforce masking and stay-at-home orders, and to say that the Trump admin bungled the response is too kind.

What was a conspiracy was the cover-up by health officials who knew that it had escaped a lab. And by the Chinese government, which knew even earlier, and which I believe saw an economic and strategic advantage in keeping the information and the genome of the virus to itself for a few months while it was already circulating in Wuhan.

One does not have to believe that the lab leak was intentional to believe that once it happened, the responsible parties conspired to cover it up.

As for the gain of function research itself, though defensive in nature and benign in intent, it was something that was deemed too risky to be performed in the US, and outsourcing it to a country with a much poorer safety record was wildly irresponsible. When it backfired, a cover-up naturally ensued.

I'm not a MAGA person (I've always voted Democrat, actually). This is just my take as to the most likely scenario given what's publicly known. And of course the virus has mutated in the wild, as viruses do. The question is whether the initial strain was given genetic advantages that were evolved under human guidance - defensively or not.

It's still conjecture. I'm well aware of confirmation bias (that we're all susceptible to), but a recent query of the Goog says it's unclear and leans towards a natural mutation.

This does a good job of painting that picture: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/933

But this also returns to the "so what" path. The conspiracy paints GOF as "evil government doing bad things" (which is not unreasonable conjecture in many contexts), but the work is primarily intended for defensive measures:

https://asm.org/getmedia/ef3e09db-a3c3-4eff-8e73-5d7edbcabb4...

Search Google for this: "did the us outsource GOF research into sars to wuhan labs in china"

I found the answer to be reasonable and credible. Again, governments lie but so do conspiracy theories.

To make this more HN aligned I'll share a story:

I was introduced to Chuck Peddle at a wedding not long after the turn of the century. I first learned assembly language on the 6502 so I knew who he was and was thrilled to meet him and hear his stories. At that point in time he was working on some hardware startup in Malaysia (IIRC), and was a seasoned world traveller.

The last part of our conversation was his observation through his travels that due to the nature of overcrowded cities in third world countries and the advent of air travel where people could disperse rapidly to anywhere else in the world, he shared a fear that a deadly outbreak would eventually happen and would travel the world in days, with horrifying consequences.

That came to mind when Covid happened.

Lastly, I'm not at all fond of these types of conspiracies because they spread like a virus and their value is primarily in giving people the feeling that they know what's going on and they know better than everyone else -- and it becomes such a part of their identity that trying to debunk that conspiracy is only perceived as a personal attack -- there's no room for reason.

All of this "the truth is out there" while we have real conspiracies happening in broad daylight and people just shrug like "oh, that just happens, whatever". I'm referring to the current US presidential administration.

Once again, I'm not an identitarian, nor was I trying to personally attack anyone, nor is my take on what happened an attempt to gain a sense of control over my environment (anymore than anyone's attempt to understand anything is an attempt to prepare oneself for future events). I find that your need to skew the conversation toward my personal psychology actually is a form of ad hominem, and your own anectdotes or what you found on Google have no relevance other than speciously attempting to increase your credibility in this conversation.

I think my point stands that once a gain of function-mediated virus escaped a lab, the incentives aligned in such a way that the people and the government responsible for that fuckup took steps to cover it up, and that is a perfectly logical and reasonable conclusion.

I'm sorry if it came across that way, I was addressing the issue and my frustrations with the community that pursue it -- I did not have you in mind personally at all, just the topic.

I absolutely agree that government coverups are absolutely unacceptable.

I state my conclusion as "it seems to be this way" whereas I read you as saying "no, it was this, case closed".

Intent matters. In the courtroom and out of it. My frustration is that (from my perspective) the intent behind the lab leak theory is to turn it into a government plot against the people (and yes, those can happen), and that the whole affair of dealing with Covid was a nefarious plot to harm the population and importantly to force vaccines upon the masses.

As the purported incident happened in China, there will likely never be any admission or redress. And the torches and pitchforks will continue coming for vaccine research. And I have every right to be less than happy about that.

The backlash against vaccines was/is idiotic, and tying vaccine fast tracking and (some) forced vaccination to some grand conspiracy notion of a virus being released in order to force nefarious vaccines on people, is completly unserious and falls into loony-bin conspiracy territory. I wouldn't even engage with anyone holding that theory. I actually think that, short-term pitchfork weilding reactionaries aside, covid was the best thing t happen since the mid-20th Century to advance both vaccine science and general uptake in the long run. In any case, I get my covid shot every year, and I own a lot of Moderna stock and feel fairly good about their platform curing other diseases.

I would say this about the purported incident happening in China: From the perspective of the Chinese government, it really didn't matter whether it was a lab leak or not, as their concealment of the problem for 2-3 critical months would likely have happened even if saving face was not an issue. It was a simple projection to say that an authoritarian regime with a top-down economy and an unlimited ability to lock down outbreaks would gain an edge in relative GDP growth over a disorganized, democratic adversary, which would compound for every day they withheld information even though they were attempting to contain the spread within their own borders. That's the economic calculation I called an act of war.

> And I have every right to be less than happy about that.

Sure.

Face saving in China is a cultural institution (not that it doesn't happen in the US and elsewhere). Ascribing that to an intentional act of war is a stretch. Coverups are virtually all motivated by CYA by their very nature.

China is handily winning the economic war without taking the tactic you suggest, and if we are unable to shake the current regime and it's scions, will mop the floor with us.

The reason I am so testy about this conspiracy is that it focuses all attention off the conspiracy that Grump did by dismantling the institutions that were built to protect us from such an outbreak, and then bungle the reaction to it actually happening.

Again: let's say China comes out tomorrow and says: "Sorry, we fucked up. Our researchers got sloppy and lied to us. We're sorry"

What does that do to either protect us from future events (which can be from out of the wild)? Other than the satisfaction of "I told you so", what do we get from that?

RFK Jr is running the show, and must appease his boss and his whims. They'd likely take that confession and use it as a parade and patting themselves on the back while they continue to destroy the science and institutions that are there to prevent future pandemics.

I see the same things you see, but I contend that the causes are reversed. I think Trump's election, and subsequent dismantling of our institutions and safeguards, was a direct result of our country losing a war. It began as an information war in 2015. The installation of RFK Jr is a further result of us losing a biological war, which may have not been started intentionally, but which by mid-2020 was being conducted as one. I'm not trying to shift any blame away from this administration, either for the specific mishandling of covid or for its broader corruption, authoritarianism, and traitorous destruction of our democracy. But I think this administration is merely an effect, not a cause. Most Americans don't realize that we lost a war. The loss of democratic governance in our country, a corrupt puppet who worships autocrats, the decline of living standards and life expectancy, the shattering of our institutions and the lingering effects of covid are all part of the price.

Even if you accept the lab leak (highly questionable) and buy into the conspiracy that Fauci was controlling the operation of GoF research that created covid this is wrong. Lockdowns were managed by local authorities and state leadership.

Yes, some states, like mine, had virtually zero lockdown. And we also have some of the highest population of anti-vaxxers and covid deniers, somehow. I still hear people talking about the effects of the lockdown. The lockdown that never happened. And the covid vaccine mandates. Which also never happened.

> I think the worldwide disruption of the pandemic melted people's brains, and the recent surge in the anti-vax movement is a symptom.

Anti-vax thinking was around pre-pandemic. An article from 2018:

* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6122668/

and 2015:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/health-33774181

2020+ was mostly about anti-vax 'contrarian' thinking merging with anti(-Democrat)-government thinking.

Before vaccines were created, Democrat and GOD death rates from COVID were about the same, but after they became available GOP rates became higher:

* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37486680/

* https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/study-finds-large-gap-in-...

I agree, but it goes much deeper than this. The pandemic provided a powerful distraction and an amorphous "other" to blame. Without the pandemic, after a first Grump term most voters would have seen his simplistic-destructive policies and ineffectual thrashing for what they were in the context of business as usual, and he would have been a one term failure.

The pandemic provided healthy doses of copium. It absolved Grump of responsibility for not achieving any of the reforms he promised in 2016 (having to deal with the pandemic instead). It created something that looks like a coordinated conspiracy, even though it is just people's obvious reactions to mitigate a pandemic. It created a whole bunch of "unprecedented" authoritarian actions by institutions even though you merely had to look back to previous pandemics to see precedents.

All of these effects also applied to Grump personally as well, as it seemed like the "deep state" was lined up against him (in the same way that one's entire family becomes "against them" as their dementia progresses), creating his obvious conclusion that the administrative state (ie the system that has brought us prosperity and stability in the post-WWII period) must be destroyed.

Ahem, let me try; the atoms are too excited they will bounce through my stomach lining straight into cancer.

They also tend to contaminate the raw milk bacteria you aren't using.

Close enough?

Broken clock syndrome is very easy to "pull off" in medicine because medicine is incredibly complex and it's all risk calculus. For even the most benign or life-saving drugs, you can conjure up examples of how they've killed people. That includes vaccines, unfortunately.

So these people have a leg to stand on. It's a wooden leg (arrrg) but they have a leg. Of course they, and their supporters, are never doing any kind of statistical analysis or risk calculus. The the "risk" part is the thing that really, really matters. I mean, we have chemotherapies which have a very high chance of fucking your shit up or even killing you. But untreated cancers are fatal, and sometimes very quickly. It's all nuanced.

> didn't realize that inflicting disease on people was their goal

I think the lesson here is just because someone is anti-something doesn't exactly mean they stand for something. Just because someone is anti-corruption it doesn't mean they are pro corruption etc. Because people always find it easy to run their mouths and be arm chair experts.

I had a chance to see the full 10 year cycle of an anti corruption candidate. He got elected into power and did nothing. Nada. Because all he knew was to fight and find someone to blame. He was just a weasel. 10 years later the place was worse off and corruption was even higher. When I pointed this out to some MAGA folks - they were like but how do you know until we try. Its like Americans want to tempt fate and want to see for themselves how institutions which took multi decades to get destroyed in few years.

RFK is similar case. He has a stance - whether right or wrong. But under pressure he just abandons them to save his own skin. He has never owned up to the issues his anti vax crusade causing the Samoa measles epidemic. And just like that Americans wanted to tempt fate with - "he is making good points about food". He is not. He demand accountability from others but owns up to nothing. He will weasel out of every issue is causing.