It's also the demogrpahic of the internet. Internet is abundant with, for a lack of a better term, toxic people. Which makes sense if you think about it, since on the internet you can be toxic with very very little to no consequences. Lot of toxicity comes out in the form of criticisms. On a moderated forum like HN it's not easy to criticize a person, so you go for the next good thing - a company or a new area.
If one just reads the HN solely, they might get the impression that Google is the most evil company on the earth since the beginning of time. In reality very few people actually have that kind of view. It's mostly toxic people need to find a target to unleash their toxicity; on HN it's Google.
Since you are young, I'd advise to be very cautious on internet. Never take internet crowd as a proper sample of real world population. It's very skewed and almost always not in a good way.
The problem with this kind of requests if you comply with it, then you've set a precedence. Then who knows who else is going to get offended and then start demanding something else to be taken down.
And the worst case scenario in this attention hungry culture how many others will start making demands like this just for more publicity? I can't read minds. I didn't know this artist before this debacle. It certainly brought him a lot of free publicity. How many people are going to start doing the same now given the amount of free publicity?
The wild speculation that I've read that is somewhat related to the grant proposal, because it was submitted to DARPA. The speculation is following (paraphrasing):
> WIV is a dual research institution. What that means is there's been military research done by PLA at WIV. Ecohealth Alliance is a front for two different things: 1. outsource risky pathogens experiments, which is done by NIH, NIAID and other organizations 2. spying on Chinese military operations at WIV, which is done by US military and intelligence organizations. That's why Daszak is intricately linked to US administration and has been untouchable so far. EHA has been essentially voilating NIH grant terms and denied NIH requests to submit all the experiments data. That explains US govt's reluctance to have a proper investigation.
I am in no way claiming there's any evidence to it, especially EHA is partially funded by US intelligence operation. You be the judge.
I think the parent poster was talikng about BANAL virus discovered in Laos, which apparently is closest to SARS-CoV2, but it doesn't have Furin Cleavage Site.
> The Laos study offers insight into the origins of the pandemic, but there are still missing links, say researchers. For example, the Laos viruses don’t contain the so-called furin cleavage site on the spike protein that further aids the entry of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses into human cells.
From [1]. So yes, the claim made by the parent poster is patently false.
> Correction, October 25, 9:50 am: A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input)
First of all, if a transmission can happen at a wet market, it can also happen inside a lab. One doesn't need a virology degree to understand something this simple. As a matter of fact that's exactly what happened in a Taiwan lab [1].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.