> A Freedom of Information Request has shown that Daszak organized a letter to squash rumors that COVID leaked from a lab, in a way that did not link back to collaborations between WIV and EHA. Before his organizing role was revealed, Daszak called the lab leak theory terms such as "preposterous," "baseless," and "pure baloney," and claimed the WIV wasn't culturing viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2.
> It later emerged that WIV had been working with RaTG13, one of the closest know relatives of SARS-CoV-2. Daszak had denied WIV had been actively working on RatG13, telling Wired: "We thought it's interesting, but not high-risk... So we didn't do anything about it and put it in the freezer."
I'm surprised the calls are only that he resign. He should be under criminal investigation for unleashing one of the most disruptive contagions in human history.
It's easy to design a system that prevents the flagging in this particular case, but will it be better overall?
I feel that it's quite inevitable in a community like HN for this theory to get flagged. It's undesirable, but the alternative is worse.
Why? Because at its core, the HN community is a polite, considerate one. We try to apply the charitable interpretation when possible.
The postings about the lab-leak theory could be interpreted in a charitable way too, but unfortunately, the lab-leak theory has a dark undercurrent: "China is bad". Of course, lots of people on HN are smart enough to understand that the lab leak was a joint China-US fiasco (of stupendous proportions). But they also understand that these nuances will be lost in translation. "China bad" is the only thing that comes out.
For more than half a year there were numerous attacks on Asian people in the US. This was not just a theoretical exercise, it resulted in actual hate in the US.
So flagging the lab-leak postings was in line with the HN's tendency to go for the charitable interpretation.
It's an unbiased document that has aged pretty well, IMO.
FWIW, I also think many (not all) of the tweets from @EthicalSkeptic have aged well. But he's definitely not for everyone (and his - or their - pseudonymity does reduce trust, regardless of how understandable it is in this climate... after all, I'm using a pseudonym for the same reasons!).
You can’t make this up. Then they wonder how/why the people lost the trust in the institutions.
It's amazing how easy it is to control the narrative. Just plant a couple seeds at the highest level of media organizations and the journalists/social media companies, etc. do the social policing themselves.
"Calls to Quit"? Sounds serious. By how many people? More than 10? No?
