Did your comments back then add anything interesting that everyone else didn't already know or did you just fling mud at the wall? I absolutely did and still do down vote posts that try to point fingers without proof, no matter if it is for or against.
You and I both know that certain ideas just could not be entertained in any way shape or form. It had little to do with proof. And what would this proof look like exactly? We are all reading the same internet bs for the last year. All anyone could do was speculate, and certain speculations were off the table for political reasons. Discussion was shut down and now it's already been shown to backfire. You are trying to retroactively justify your agreement to silence certain opinions, which is wrong, dangerous, and you should be ashamed.
I'm not ashamed to not take part in the conspiracy theories and racism that is a part of all of these lab leak discussions and behind many of the comments. I see the situation the direct opposite than you: I have added proof to discussions about the virus and every single time it has been heavily downvoted if it wasn't anti-china or pro lab-leak. Only when adding sources that prove I'm right do HN stop downvoting (but of course by then most have moved on which is why it ends up in one-use account discussions). The ideas that couldn't and still can't be discussed is truth that doesn't agree with what most Americans believe and that haven't changed at all.
As it is now we have a huge majority in these discussions that believe that because we haven't found where the virus came from it must be from a lab for the simple reason that almost everyone "know" that we found the source in a few months last time (SARS-CoV) while in reality we have still not found the source after 15 years of hard work.
On top of that these discussions are political in nature when it becomes anti-china or pro-US or whatever and by then should be downvoted.
