I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory. How researchers who discussed it were shunned, tagged as racists, and in some cases had their posts banned from Social Media. About how almost the entire scientific community discarded the idea as impossible. How during the early pandemic years, no mainstream news media dared talk about the possibility.
Tech companies too had a role to play here. For the sake of free speech, what happened here is worth discussing.
The problem was that the epidemic started in the middle of the US election campaign. At some point the Trump team started to support the lab leak theory. And then it became political; Biden supporters started framing them as conspiracy theorists, anybody who dared to support the leak theory was labeled as a Trump supporter etc.
In China some people must have been amazed how the US was arranging such a thorough cover-up all by themselves.
> The problem was that the epidemic started in the middle of the US election campaign. At some point the Trump team started to support the lab leak theory. And then it became political; Biden supporters started framing them as conspiracy theorists, anybody who dared to support the leak theory was labeled as a Trump supporter etc.
You hit the nail on the head.
> In China some people must have been amazed how the US was arranging such a thorough cover-up all by themselves.
Exactly. Even in India we were amazed by the cover-up. I am pretty sure every Asian country knew it was a cover-up. The very first reports on Coronavirus I came across was not even in the media. It was on a Korean Youtuber who posted regular video updates on the virus leak in China even before the news was picked up in the West. He was warning how CCP was arresting scientists who put out information about the virus and even sharing videos of doctors who had recorded themselves warning about the virus itself (one of the first few who treated patients of the virus and fell sick themselves). I can't, for the life of me, find that channel on Youtube anymore. But yeah there was, and still is, a lot of censorship aided and abetted by Big Tech.
> He was warning how CCP was arresting scientists who put out information about the virus and even sharing videos of doctors who had recorded themselves warning about the virus itself (one of the first few who treated patients of the virus and fell sick themselves). I can't, for the life of me, find that channel on Youtube anymore. But yeah there was, and still is, a lot of censorship aided and abetted by Big Tech.
The death of the doctor was widely reported on throughout the pandemic[0][1][2].
I am talking about before the mainstream media took it seriously (few days before that video of the doctor became viral). If I could find the Korean Youtuber I would have linked it here. Can't remember the name. The other prolific one who was giving daily updates was "Koreana Jones". Was following these two Youtubers for updates.
I know, I live in Europe. But where I live in Europe we were simply following the pattern from the US; once the lab leak theory was linked to Trump, people supporting it were seen as Trump supporters.
Trump isn't very popular in Europe as you might know, so this was enough to make most people be quiet.
[Not] incidentally, around the world it's easy to find people who know more about American politics than their own local politics. I'm friends online with several Brazilians; they spend as much if not more time talking about Trump than Bolsonaro. Why is that?
I think this is for a few reasons; America is a [the?] global hegemon; so American domestic politics have some earnest global relevance. But more than that; reporting one country's news is more efficient than reporting N countries' news. Fewer stories means fewer writers to pay, less research and investigation to do, etc. Furthermore people have an appetite for news, but a finite appetite; sate people with news about America and you'll have them thinking less about local issues. Therefore, news organizations in other countries have both an economic and political incentive to report American news instead of local news. What's more, America encourages this because for America it is a form of soft power to live rent-free in the minds of everybody else.
Point is: when a narrative becomes taboo in American media, that's likely to rub off on the rest of the world. Particularly so in countries where a sizeable portion of the population consume at least some English-language media, participate on English-language forums, etc.
Chris Martenson did a lot of this as it was ongoing- of course his YouTube videos got flagged. As another commenter mentioned Dazik had a big role- he lead the delegation that went to China to investigate the origin even though he had an obvious conflict of interest. 60 minutes interviewed him without digging into the conflict of interest. There are now public emails between Fauci and others coordinating the NIH position that there was no lab leak. That silences much of the scientific community that doesn’t want problems with their grants. Not to mention Fauci constantly going on TV doing interviews to try to control the conversation.
I think Chris Martenson/Peak Prosperity goes too far on certain things (a little too-prepper/gold+silver) but I did find his videos for the first few months of COVID to be informative and well done especially when it came to the lab leak theory. His coverage of Hydroxychloroquine was well measured for the time it came out and I felt like he did an appropriate about-face once it was clear it didn't help.
> goose stepping along to lead the largest propaganda and brainwashing effort in our lifetimes.
It's crazy really. I wonder how many decades will have to go by before it becomes okay to acknowledge what a major fuckup the response to covid was. Currently, there is way too many people, at least on forums like this, that haven't woken up to how badly mislead they were.
Pure hysteria, politics and poorly interpreted data all bundled into one package. Shit was crazy.
It would be interesting to know the background of the infamous Lancet letter[1].
According to journalist Paul Thacker, the Lancet letter "helped to guide almost a year of reporting, as journalists helped to amplify Daszak’s message and to silence scientific and public debate." This affected reporting on the origins of the virus, "characterising the lab leak theory as unworthy of serious consideration".
At a high level, it's pretty simple. There was a very well coordinated and intentional conflation of the term "lab leak" with the conspiracy theories around China and the WHO intentionally developing and deploying bio-weapons as a means of global population control.
These conspiracy theories lead to a marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent in the US, and generally fed into the wet dream fantasies of western warlords looking for any excuse to enter that eternal war against Eastasia.
Any time that anything relating to information around Wuhan labs was released, there was a massive flood of how the "lab leak" theories were right all along, and China is, in fact, trying to kill us all. This is the sort of virulent hatred that no social media company wants to help propagate.
As a personal anecdote, living as an Asian in a US city with a population over 1M people, I definitely saw a change in peoples' stance towards Asians in general and Chinese in particular, and not in a good way. There was a lot more suspicion about Asians, their businesses, etc. It wasn't the same level of suspicion as during post-9/11 America but it had a similar vibe. A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like, "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people." (spoiler alert: it was both) Maybe that didn't result in violent crime, but it was not (and still isn't) a good time to be Chinese or display pride in one's Chinese heritage.
I hope one day we can look back at this period and think about how to better critically think about these things without applying personal biases and fears to a whole population.
Sorry you had to go through that. But I have to ask about this:
> A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like, "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people." (spoiler alert: it was both)
Did you have some extra context there? Or do you just assume that anyone criticizing the ccp is also criticizing chinese people? Because I feel like that's a reasonable stance towards any nation.
It seems like sometimes people aggressively read between the lines (probably because of real past experiences with shitty people), and it makes it so that reasonable people now can't express reasonable ideas and have other people understand what they're actually saying.
I especially notice this in online forums where some topics have been discussed in depth by a subset of the population. Through all that discussion, they've basically invented a whole field of study, and turned everyday phrases into jargon with unintuitive subtext.
Then someone new comes along, says something that seems completely innocuous, and the community jumps on them for the subtext that they're not even aware exists.
In what way did they claim to be criticizing the Chinese government but actually criticized Chinese culture? Because it is possible and valid to criticize the Chinese government and not the people. And it is also a possibility that your own personal biases could make it difficult to differentiate between the two. We have a surplus of Americans who take any criticism of America, the nation-state, as a personal insult, so I'm sure the same thing happens elsewhere.
>A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like, "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people."
This is a reasonable thing to say. I think mainland Chinese are oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party, and I hope I live to see the end of this cruel regime.
This may not be entirely fair but citizens of a country which is being shit to others feeling negative consequences due to their countries shitty actions is generally a good thing. It's up to Russians to fix their government and its up to Chinese to fix theirs - unless you are advocating for foreign invasion, which will probably make things a lot worse for you no matter where you currently live.
Add to that that there are many Russians publicly supporting the war and/or their government. The same goes for the Chinese and for corona specifically you had a lot of them travelling the world while the virus spread was heating up.
Ultimately, humans are pattern seeking animals and if you fit into a pattern of shitty people you better make sure that you make it clear you are not one of them. It would be better if people could be more discerning but I'd rather take this than not having any pushback for countries and other groups of people misbehaving.
This kinda just seems like an argument in favour of bigotry. I find it odd that you are so casual in your justification of it. This reminds me to always be mindful of the social norms of my current environment, because we could very easily be the oppressors/bigots/racists etc., and not even realize it until decades later...
Agreed, like the cold shoulder shown to white South Africans during Apartheid. Overall, it helped to change national sentiment and led to the end of Apartheid even though it might've harmed some people living abroad who were opposed to the system.
I don't think we've worked out a better way to deal with this yet, and it will always be a factor of the way populations are broadly responsible for their governments in democracies and even semi-democracies.
> A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people." (spoiler alert: it was both)
'Dog-whistling', meaning they don't overtly say it and you infer that they mean it. If they make it overt such that it doesn't need to be inferred, they're not longer dog whistling.
How do you know your inference is correct and that is their intent? How can you be sure that wasn't just an impression given to you by [social] media? The CCP has a vested interest in conflating any criticism of itself or the PRC generally with racist criticism of all Asians. They also say that criticism of their Uyghur genocide is dog whistling anti-Asian racism. The CCP say this of anything that criticizes them, and their narratives do not stop dead at their borders. I've heard it echoed by some of my coworkers, PRC nationals working in America, and even western media that might not endorse such narratives will still give voice to consideration of those narratives.
Now allow me to be frank; during the supposed surge of anti-Asian hatred ostensibly motivated by Trump and perpetrated by white nationalists, much of anti-Asian crimes that were being reported had been perpetrated by African Americans. It was probably crime motivated by class/social/economic inequality, and insofar as it disproportionately targeted Asian Americans at all (rather than selective reporting merely creating that appearance) it probably had nothing to do with any politician's covid rhetoric and was instead was an artifact of geographic proximity and inequality in policing (Asian American neighborhoods receive less protection from the police, making Asian Americans an easier target for crime.) In this last regard, you can easily show that racism against Asian Americans played a role, but such inequalities in policing are problems that go back many generations and have little if anything to do with covid.
I hope other readers will note that, in response to the above user’s account of sinophobia in the US, the comments here on HN have overwhelmingly attempted to invalidate those experiences. Responses have ranged from outright hostility to gaslighting behavior, even an attempt to deflect the discussion onto Black Americans despite the original comment mentioning no race other than Asian or Chinese.
The above commenter’s experiences will ring true for many Chinese living in the US, because we are the ones who experience and are impacted by sinophobia (this can also extend to other E/SEA diaspora to an extent). Whereas the commenters claiming that we’re biased or influenced by propaganda, as if they are uniquely exempt from such things, are not.
The comments rightly ask for clarification: did the user witness or experience discrimination or bias, or is the user equating criticisms of China with criticisms of individuals of Chinese descent. If the above user doesn't make that distinction, then it does invalidate the user's observations.
Criticisms of the Cuban government are absolutely independent of criticisms of individual Cubans like myself. If another Cuban person felt that they were being individually criticized when other people criticize Cuba, I'd tell them they need to learn to distinguish between the two - it's not the responsibility of the public to avoid any criticism of the Cuban government. This isn't an attempt to "deflect the discussion", it's using another country as an example to make it clear that this is a distinction we're perfectly capable of making for other ethnic group.
The point of using the term “sinophobia” rather than simply “prejudice” is that no, it does seem that some subset of people are uniquely unable to “criticize” PRC policy without injecting some trope about mainland Chinese people and culture. In fact, the point is to repeat the stereotype as if it were fact. The policy (whether it exists or not) is just an excuse.
For that matter, sincere requests for clarification are not immediately followed by attempts to dismiss the underlying concern as invalid. This inherently makes the request insincere.
If the criticism of the PRC were mixed in with Sinophobia, then doom2 should have expanded on that. As written, there's nothing to suggest that doom2 witnessed anything other than criticisms of the PRC. The idea that it's mixed in with stereotypes about mainland China would be a good example, but it's entirely your injection, not something stated in doom2's comment.
Remember, allegations of "dog-whistles" are really just saying "I'm assuming other people are implying XYZ." My conservative relatives think words like "diversity" or "inclusion" are dog-whistles for anti-white discrimination. They're earnest when they say the feel attacked, but that's entirely on account of their own assumptions and does not indicate any actual racism. If doom2 wants to make point, they should actually explain what they witnessed that was bigoted or hateful - don't just allege "dog-whistling" and do nothing to substantiate that claim.
Looks like there was a general increase in complaints as lockdowns eased. From the data, there were upticks in anti-jewish, anti-gay, anti-muslim and more. Asians still saw relatively more of an uptick than other motivations.
That could be an increase in reporting. After all you'd expect the uptick to happen in 2020-- it was COVID-19 after all.
Also worth to know that anti-asian hate was also a narrative pushed by the CPC to label things like supporting Hong Kong democracy protests or criticizing uighur genocide as "anti-asian hate", which happened after the CPC noticed the effectiveness of BLM protests in sowing us discord (mid-2020) so to trust any stats post 2020 it would at least need to segregate the two use cases.
I take it these are percentages of all complaints? Because the number of complaints for anti-Jewish hate crimes was 116 in 2020, but 198 in 2021, so a definite increase, but hate crime overall basically doubled as well, so the relative amount to the total is lower.
These are not the same thing and especially when comparing over time you need to take into account how the definitions for the categories themselves change.
Worth noting the west coast states with larger Asian populations were largely "locked down" in 2020. Schools didn't reopen until 2021. 2020 didn't have as many opportunities for individual interactions that could lead to such crimes.
How come those numbers could be used to support anti-ethical policies, to not say outright conspiracy, that prevented the elucidation of a pandemic that decimated millions?
> There was a very well coordinated and intentional conflation of the term "lab leak" with the conspiracy theories around China and the WHO intentionally developing and deploying bio-weapons as a means of global population control.
I don’t recall a single instance of this. A year ago, people were saying on this site and elsewhere was that the issue was conflating “lab leak” with “intentionally engineered”. A year before that, people argued that the issue was conflating “lab leak” with “leaked from WIV”, when WIV was established in that location due to the prevalence of novel coronaviruses in the region.
I saw the birth of r/WuhanFlu and other related subreddits that were created in early 2020, and accusations of it being a bioweapon were there from the start, and once someone looked up "Wuhan" on Google Maps and saw the virology institute, people were saying it was a lab leak.
You didn't see any 'Wuhan flu' bioengineering conspiracy theories about how china made covid on purpose to attack America? If not, you're either intentionally not seeing it or I want to use your media filter because it was literally everywhere.
> I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china
The likes of Alina Chan and Richard Ebright are "easy mode" counterexamples for your statement.
I'll swing for the fences: Even Tom Cotton was -- at least once, I am exceedingly uninterested in combing through all his tweets and media appearances -- careful to distinguish between "lab leak" and "intentional act", despite being brazenly political and probably inspired by anti-China animus.
"Let me debunk the debunkers. @paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus:
1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market)
2. Good science, bad safety (eg, they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred)
3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach)
4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in)
Again, none of these are “theories” and certainly not “conspiracy theories.” They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence, if the Chinese Communist Party would provide it.
We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either."
Last time I checked our democracies are still running on the premise of informed voters. If discussion of hypothesis needs to be suppressed during a 3-year-long "emergency" then we have an issue.
> If discussion of hypothesis needs to be suppressed during a 3-year-long "emergency" then we have an issue.
Unfortunately, we do have an issue. Ignoring that it is one will not solve it, nor will brushing it under the rug by the lame attempts at disinformation removal. We need to face the fact that a decent amount of our population is acting out of anger and fear, often irrationally and without evidence, and that they were used and manipulated for political and monetary gain and it has gotten passed the point where it can be walked back.
Social media is a vector but not the cause. I don't know what the answer is, but we certainly do have an issue.
I’d love “informed voters” though from what I see of social media, it does anything but inform through its creation of cliques and upvoting based on popularity, not veracity or even reasoned argument.
One example is the switch to paid blue checkmarks on Twitter. Prior to the switch, there’d be some semblance (not great) of debate on comments. Now, all the musk fans and RW-oriented subscribers completely dominate so all you see in response to a Dem or “RINO” tweet is reflexive comments calling the OP lies, incorrect whataboutism, conspiracy theory of the day, etc, with more reasoned fact checking buried way down.
This is particularly pronounced with any tweet about the Trump indictment with little discussion of the substance of the indictment. The crackpot hypothesis/meme of Paul Pelosi’s attack being a gay love spat is another example. The participants didn’t even want to read the police report before moving on to another conspiracy theory about the report’s generation. Reasoned discussion would be great. It’s just not happening.
That's probably because for the years prior the same people were bashed into the ground for their beliefs. Now that it turns out it's more true than not, they're probably mad.
i think you’d find that in just about every significant crisis of any significant timeframe plenty of examples of clamping down on witch-hunts in these very democracies.
am i advocating for this? of course not, however, we have countless examples where conspiracies and just plain paranoid thinking spun out and resulted in very very real atrocities. significant atrocities that were much more real and much more severe than “oh woe is me, i was muted on a social media site.”
again, i’m not advocating for this, but any conversational talking point surrounding this topic which ignores those issues is not a serious one.
"In the first four months of the pandemic, there were 145 reports to the NYC Commission on Human
Rights of coronavirus-related Anti-Asian hate incidents. That’s 12x the year before."
"⅓ of Americans report they have witnessed blame on Asians for the outbreak"
I'm sorry, is saying that Covid originated from China a conspiracy theory? Or do you maybe believe that this was caused by Trump calling it 'China flu' a few times? Now, that's a conspiracy theory.
Violence (including mass shootings and church burnings) inspired by replacement theory and incelism.
Anti-vax beliefs led to more deaths due to COVID, and greater economic and systemic stress than otherwise would have occurred had a significant number of people afraid of adrenochrome harvesting and the New World Order not purposely undermined pandemic control efforts.
Currently the "groomer" conspiracy theories seem to be headed towards some mass cultural violence event towards trangender people, with politicians openly calling for the "elimination" of transgerism, but that remains to be seen.
But let's ask what atrocities have ever been prevented by conspiracy theories? None. QAnon has been more of a hindrance to efforts to combat child abuse and human trafficking than a benefit, and they were entirely focused on "decoding" the Podesta emails and "exposing" satanic rituals in the Democratic Party while Epstein was going about his business.
It should go without saying that none of the doomsday scenarios the COVID conspiracy theorists predicted came to pass. All they accomplished was making the pandemic worse. And no doubt the seeds of paranoia and mistrust they laid will make the next pandemic worse as well.
Hell, even MKUltra wasn't uncovered by conspiracy theorists - it was exposed by accident through an unrelated FOIA leak. NSA spying? The Simpsons did a bit about that before Snowden, but conspiracy theorists were going on about mind-control rays being beamed through televisions and mass hypnosis.
These people want the world to believe they are the the ones constantly telling truth to power, the only ones who can see the dark truths hidden behind the curtain, and they'll insist they are always right. But at best they only coincidentally appear to be right, in the same way as a stopped clock, and always in a way that does more harm than good.
The canonical example is January 6th, in which a bunch of unarmed QAnon conspiracy theorists, along with embedded agent provocateurs from the FBI, committed the following atrocities:
1. Larped as a Viking
2. Stole a podium
3. Placed feet on a desk
4. Broke a window
5. Caused a woman, who was not in the same building, to cry
There were several other terrible acts committed by these evil people, but these were the most commonly cited ones. Sicknick's death was widely publicized at first, but then magically got blackholed later when it turned out that a group of QAnon-influenced platelets formed a blood clot that killed the poor patriot.
Fortunately for us, these evil insurrectionists were denied their due process rights for years, and our hallowed and beloved Congress members spent a full month of their valuable time on hearings to get to the bottom of this genocide.
> It's trivial to find people inside your echo-chamber being well-behaved --- this doesn't answer what a platform's moral responsibility is to society.
I am not a Republican, Tom Cotton is incredibly far away from anything which could be considered my "echo chamber", and I never claimed he was well-behaved.
I chose him specifically to make the specific and narrow point that even brazenly political actors were careful to explicitly distinguish between accidental/unintentional release and an intentional release; and also made clear that "intentional release" was the possibility they regarded as least likely. This was in response to the comment I replied to, whose author said "I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china".
I think most people -- political leaders and otherwise -- are perfectly capable of distinguishing between "high-risk research goes tragically wrong" and "a bioweapon was released on purpose".
If anything, these hamhanded efforts (equating a prosaic "people and/or equipment messed up" scenario to "intentional release of bioweapon", making spurious accusations of racism, claiming that the case for a natural origin is ironclad, government agencies refusing to hand over relevant documents to Senators with the right to see them, etc) to censor discussion and impede investigation of the former has fueled incredibly noxious conspiratorial thinking.
Strange, I have the exact opposite experience. I have personally have felt ostracized multiple times for suggesting it was likely there was an unintentional lab leak. I often got criticized for suggesting it was a bio-weapon, while I never thought that and never even said those words. Sometime in the past 12 months this disappeared.
What "weather balloon incident"? China intentionally sent a spy balloon into US airspace to gather intelligence and test our response. You can't seriously expect us to believe that it was for weather observations.
Yes, true. Based on what we're told about it, it does sound like a legit spy balloon.
What gives me pause is that our collective national security apparatus saw fit to let it traverse the entire fucking country before doing anything about it. And in the end, America even acknowledged that it was blown off course-- which is what the Chinese were saying from the start.
I don't trust the Chinese-- at all. I don't trust America either though. I remember the certainty with which they said there was evidence of WMDs in Iraq.
In Canada, China "interfering with our democracy" is all the latest rage... At one point about a month ago, 11 out of the top 20 posts on /r/Canada had some negative reference to China (most being related to the democracy interference story, but a few others I can't remember the topic of).
What I don't get is that people automatically equate a lab leak in China with a lab leak by China. It's uncontroversial that American funding was involved. The most likely intentional scenario would be a leak caused by the United States to harm the Chinese economy. If it hadn't spread beyond China's borders, the epidemic would have been a massive win for the US.
What's not to get? Trump, Fox news, and a vanguard of the Republican party framed Coronavirus as a Chinese attack on the world in an attempt to boost their support.
Why some people are willing to believe the nonsense spouted by both I don't understand, but the fact that people do explains why so many view it as an intentional act by China.
That is nonsense. Even highly qualified people like Alina Chan were pushed in the conspiracy camp during the first year - just for saying that the lab leak is one (of many) possible sources of the virus.
I think this says more about you than others. "every single instance" is a gross exaggeration. This is your personal bias at play so that when you read "lab leak", you perceive "racist conspiracy theory"
In this post and the one it is replying to, we see an example of how dichotomization gets in the way of discussing complex issues, and anecdotal dichotomization doubly so.
> I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china
You must have a very conspiratorial group of friends / contacts !
I followed the whole covid story pretty closely, and as I recall "lab leak" was taken by almost everyone as "accidental lab leak". Was the lab perhaps doing some type of "gain of function" research that they were not meant to be doing? TBD, but the massive (as it turns out) initial over-reaction to covid in China certainly doesn't look like something they intended to inflict on themselves (as well as eventually the rest of the world).
Hi me! And a veritable ton of Hacker News folks back then. I have plenty of misgivings about China but I am also a reasonable person. Turning this into an everybody weaponized it against Asians argument is handing a lot of us a weapon we never picked up.
bizarre. it's even in the name, "leak". very weird to pretend there weren't a lot of people who thought a lab worker contracted it and passed it to the food market
I think you overstate how much the lab leak and the bioweapon stories were being conflated. I recall that most people were able to distinguish between them, and that the most prominent figures raising red flags about a potential leak weren't talking about bioweapons.
In any case, the most alarming aspect of the lab leak hypothesis is that gain-of-function research is STILL being done, and that the same thing could happen AGAIN. Since this risks creating another pandemic, suppressing the story because of concerns about street crime is very misguided.
> the most alarming aspect of the lab leak hypothesis is that gain-of-function research is STILL being done, and that the same thing could happen AGAIN.
This right here is an example of why we can’t have reasoned discussion around the topic.
You can explain one of the many reasons why gain of function research is necessary: anticipating next year’s version of the flu, designing drugs and vaccines such that resistance mutations reduce evolutionary fitness.
You can explain how it is done: lots of computational simulations, and some benchtop with results feeding back into computational methods.
You can explain some of the safeguards in place: BSL 3/4 facilities, regulatory / institutional oversight, security services, etc.
And then someone will stand up on a chair and yell “SUPER VIRUS!”
Anyway from my perspective, the “lab leak” theory tends to be people pushing an unsubstantiated theory to either (1) blame China for an “act of god/nature” or (2) argue for a moratorium on infectious disease / vaccine / therapeutic research.
Please note that no one here is calling you a racist. But I think calling parts of your comment uninformed or misinformed is fair game for discussion.
> the “lab leak” theory tends to be people pushing an unsubstantiated theory to either
For me it's just common sense. It probably came from the coronavirus lab with a bad safety record it popped up next to. Duh. And I "push" it because I value the truth and want to live in a rational society where the truth isn't gamed for emotional or political reasons. And that's probably the same for most of us.
It's so obvious that an appeal to common sense is all that's necessary. How many markets do you think are in China? 100,000? 1,000,000? And how many of those are within driving distance of the one lab where:
- They study novel coronaviruses
- They sampled the same regions where the closest relatives to the virus were found
- They applied to put a furin cleavage site in a coronavirus before the pandemic
- They were cited in diplomatic cables for poor safety standards
- The database containing records of the viral sequences was taken down right before the pandemic
- A scientist working at the lab at the time of the origin disappeared
- A scientist who patented a coronavirus vaccine a few months into the pandemic "jumped off the roof"?
Does a lab accident not immediately jump out as the obvious leading possibility to you?
>It's so obvious that an appeal to common sense is all that's necessary. How many markets do you think are in China? 100,000? 1,000,000?
This is why "common sense" is very often wrong and we have to refer to data instead. You're making assumptions that are very wrong.
The wet market was over 50,000 square metres in size and one of the largest in China. The idea that there are hundreds or millions of these things is completely backwards.
The conditions were unsanitary, animals were slaughtered on site, and large numbers of wild animals were sold.
This is exactly the sort of place you'd expect a zoonotic spillover event to occur. It was flagged beforehand as a danger site.
It's not impossible that it could have been a lab leak, but consider that this market had hundreds of thousands of animals being kept, slaughtered and sold, in unsanitary conditions, shitting and pissing on each other, bleeding everywhere and biting humans and each other.
Now compare that to a secure biolab holding a small number of samples whilst following biosecure protocols. Even if they weren't perfect, which environment provides the best chance of a spillover event?
Well, according to a quick search there are 40k wet markets in China. How big do you think the average wet market is? Even guessing 1000 square meters, which is very conservative, the wuhan wet market only represents about 0.1% of wet market square footage in China. By this back of the envelope math, the chance that a zoonotic spillover at a wet market would occur so close to the lab is less than 0.1%.
And sure, the wuhan market is a great place for a zoonotic spillover to occur, but any wet market would be, so the wuhan market in particular isn't the exact place you would expect. In fact I would expect it to occur at a market much closer to where the most similar viruses were found.
However, since the wuhan market is the enormous unsanitary market near the novel coronavirus lab, it is the exact place I would expect the first super spreader event to occur following a leak at that lab.
'Common sense' says that the thing which has occurred periodically throughout human history (plagues and epidemics) completely naturally and is occurring around the same period after the last one ('Spanish' flu of 1918-20) would have the same causes as those before it, but with accelerated time frames due to ease of travel and population density.
There have been more cases of 'almost epidemic but for action by health officials' with SARS and avian flu etc which makes it 'common sense' that these things occur pretty frequently and would be happening more often naturally if not for luck and structures in place to mitigate them. Those structures also happened to be dissolved by the US leaders in charge at the time, which seems to fit the puzzle.
So, 'things happened before' are heavily tilted towards 'nature did it' in any case.
So tell me, looking at history, of all outbreaks that have occurred within 20 miles of a biolab studying the same disease family, how many were zoonotic versus lab accidental?
My common sense doesn't have that information on hand. Sounds to me like 'common sense' is a terrible way to try to investigate complicated things, eh?
No, I am saying that relying on 'common sense' is stupid because it can take you in any direction you want since you aren't going past a surface level evaluation. You just proved it by having to dig a little to try and refute my 'common sense' take.
It’s absolutely not common sense, we have tens of thousands of years of evidence that viruses can evolve to cause human illness, and zero documented examples of a man-made novel virus doing so.
It would be an extraordinarily rare and noteworthy event in human history. The bar to prove that it happened to cause COVID is very high and the direct evidence (not circumstantial) for it is so far very low.
Did GP imply if a virus was leaked it must be man-made?
Obviously the fact that the exact virus hadn't been seen before is suggestive of that but it's not inconceivable the lab happened to have samples of a never-before-seen naturally occurring virus that they were planning to do research on.
That wasn't the same lab that released the first genome sequencing of the virus though (I gather it was in Shanghai). Not sure how virus research is usually done but I would have thought genome sequencing would be one of the first procedures you'd undertake, and there's no suggestion the Wuhan lab had done such sequencing (implying if they had, it was covered up).
Btw this seems to be a pretty thorough and technical overview of the various hypotheses: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00583-23
It concludes zoonotic origin to be the most likely, though certainly doesn't rule out other alternatives.
> Did GP imply if a virus was leaked it must be man-made?
This is what the “lab leak” theory is. It’s why every conversation of lab leak is tied up with comments about gain of function, etc.
The interesting thing about SARS-COV-2 is that it can infect humans and cause illness (unlike the vast majority of known viruses). When people talk about the origin of the pandemic, it is the origin of this property specifically that they mean. The lab leak theory is that this property originated in a lab.
The paper I linked to above has as one hypothesis that it was a naturally occurring virus, cultures of which had been stored or worked on at the lab, and "leaked" by way of infection of workers there. Seems just as plausible as some source virus having been manipulated to increase its infectiousness to humans.
Not all the early cases could be traced back to the wet market, so there is no reason to suspect it started there if you don't already suspect a zoonotic spillover origin. And exponential curves ramp up slowly at first.
fwiw... there were posts floating around at the beginning of 2020 claiming that the epidemic was well established in Wuhan by December, and that cases were seen back to September, October.
It's unfortunate in so many way - admit a mistake was made, acknowledge the problem, and clean it up is so much more respectful of everybody's time and resources. Between Asian traditions of saving face, and US traditions of lawyers suing anything that moves, that approach never stood a chance of course.
Yes, covid was in the US months before we bothered to check and count cases. There were rumors of a virus spreading months before it was officially acknowledged
Most likely, Covid19 was introduced into USA from World Military Games[0], or from Russia in October-November 2019.
If someone went to Novosibirsk to check situation after blast at BSL4 lab "Vector", then (IMHO!) he may contracted the virus and spreaded it in USA after return, which (IMHO!) explains why USA three letter agency covers that blast.
> You can explain one of the many reasons why gain of function research is necessary: anticipating next year’s version of the flu, designing drugs and vaccines such that resistance mutations reduce evolutionary fitness.
None of these require gain of function research.
> You can explain some of the safeguards in place: BSL 3/4 facilities, regulatory / institutional oversight, security services, etc.
All of these have a long history of failures [1,2]. And those are just the acknowledged, some have actually been covered up [3].
> None of these require gain of function research.
Please elaborate on this. How should I go about anticipating which mutations in which genes / protein will result in resistance to a candidate therapy / molecule / mechanism that I am considering advancing into phase 1 trials?
I think a lot of it comes down to: if it has happened once, it is likely to happen again. If it was indeed a leak from WIV, which ended up killing millions, then what can we do to prevent that kind of thing from happening again in the future? Surely some more transparency would be helpful toward that goal.
I think real risk is testing these chimera viruses on mice with humanized cells.
Letting viruses evolve in-vivo is the problem especially when they are so viral.
There needs to be limitations on what R is allowed to be produced in-vivo, even more so because calculating the risk of virality of the outbreak is trivial if in-vitro studies are done.
Chimera virus. You mean like a spike protein expressing VSV? Do you think that (pseudo virus) requires a higher or lower BSL certification to work with than bonafide Coronavirus? Why?
And why are you worried about humanized mice and not human cell lines like HEK or CALU? Why not primary cells or organoids? Somewhere the “Outbreak” monkey is crying.
I admit that I am being a bit snarky and passive aggressive here; but for the past few years I have watched people butcher bioscience in online discussions. Imagine being a classically trained pianist and having to watch people misattribute all of Mozart’s work to Brahms. It is enough to drive anyone mad.
A classically trained pianist's profession does not carry the risk of killing millions of people! There is zero proof outside of circumstantial conjecture that SARS2 has a natural origin. Up to 20 million people have died due to an animal virus modified to be highly infectious towards humans and you expect everyone to just take your word for it?
I mean it sucks if it hurts your career or impacts your profession, but highly dangerous work needs to be reviewed and banned if need be!
I'm honestly under the impression that people are just too irresponsible to do some things. People are not machines who go into a bsl 4 lab and do proper safety precautions each and every day without slipping or becoming lax. If you have a lab making viruses, eventually, it will escape. If the viruses they are making are capable of shutting the whole world down for a year, then we really need to ask whether we should have them.its not a question of "is doing this useful?", because I'm sure it is. It is a question of is this worth doing even though we know it will inevitably go bad? You can talk about all the precautions and regulations you want, if people are involved then eventually someone or a group of someones will do something idiotic or malicious and break everything. There's literally an entire Wikipedia page about lab outbreaks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecuri...
> You can explain one of the many reasons why gain of function research is necessary: anticipating next year’s version of the flu, designing drugs and vaccines such that resistance mutations reduce evolutionary fitness.
If this research indeed caused the pandemic (and might cause more), do those things make the juice worth the squeeze?
A chance at a better flu vaccine doesn't seem like enough reward for what we all went through.
> You can explain one of the many reasons why gain of function research is necessary: anticipating next year’s version of the flu, designing drugs and vaccines such that resistance mutations reduce evolutionary fitness
A few problems with this. First modifying wild animal viruses to be infectious towards humans is different than modifying human viruses to model potential mutations. Modifying animal viruses to be infectious towards humans has done nothing but cause risks. Despite this research being conducted for almost a decade it has yet to predict or prevent any pandemic and probably started this one.
Additionally the idea that modifying animal viruses to easily transmit towards humans will allow us to develop vaccines is absurd. You can't test a vaccine that is not circulating in humans, so trails can not start until the pandemic has already started.
So yes, there should be moratorium on research that modifies infectious diseases! The public has a right to consent on whether such research is worth the risks.
To be fair, vaccines can be created in a matter of days now so the benefit of gain of function research to anticipate the virus that will cause the next pandemic is modest at best.
Temper this proposed modest benefit with the potential cost in terms of human adapted viruses being accidentially/intentionally released in the wild given the vagaries of both biolab security protocols in the labs accross the world conducting this kind of research and individual human psychology makes the justification of such research a pretty hard sell.
By this standard, the only people sufficiently qualified to make policy regarding this research are the people currently cashing checks to perform this research.
I've said the same thing since the beginning. "It would be weird if the world superpowers that develop nukes and other weapons of mass destruction wouldn't research biological warfare(and stuff)".
There was a lot of conflation, but it was almost entirely from the people attempting to debunk it, using the bioweapon one to claim no leak could happen. It was like they just couldn't understand those were two different things no matter how much people said "no, that's not what I'm saying".
I find it deeply disturbing that excuses as flimsy as "hate" or "possible hate crime reaction" would be used as justification to suppress the truth, especially with a situation as grave as COVID-19. Who is to say whether the uptick with Asians is causation and not just correlation? Meanwhile, thousands of Americans were dying daily during the peak of the pandemic. Everyone was scared, needed to know what was going on.
The average person was much more worried about the potential harm to millions of citizens than a much smaller uptick in one particular sector. It's of paramount importance that we don't repeat the mistakes that led to the pandemic in the first place. The only way we can do that is getting to the bottom of what happened.
If "possible Asian hate crimes" was the best excuse that the censorship industrial complex could come up with, then it is clear to me that any excuse would have done, and the conclusions I draw is that the suppression was 100% politically motivated. I want to know who was involved in making the decision to suppress, and to what ends they were trying to shape public opinion. At the minimum I want to know who I should be working to vote out of office.
How can I know who to vote for when we're normalizing lying as a justifiable policy up and down the chain of government communication and mass media?
It wasn't just the lab leak theory going around though, it was extremely tightly coupled with the "COVID bioweapon" conspiracy which really tainted it especially in the early days when there really wasn't much more info available other than it was first detected as a big outbreak in the same city as the coronavirus lab. In an ideal situation they'd be separable but they were so closely deployed trying to address the bioweapon conspiracy caught a lot of less out there discussion of the lab leak.
Also important though is it never really went away. For all the talk of censorship and suppression the possibility of a lab leak never left the investigation. It's also a very difficult thing to investigate without access to the labs to see what strains they were working on looked like which we still don't have afaik. It's been a process of eliminating other possiblities to some extent as other vectors that could be looked into were and turned out to be less likely.
> Also important though is it never really went away.
Sort of true -- but only because you can't kill the idea, the need to find the cause of the pandemic to avoid a repeat.
This is cold comfort to the people who were getting banned had their accounts cancelled for suggesting things that turned out to be actually true.
There's was a lot of collateral damage here, all in the name of... well I'm not sure. Trust is hard to build, and once broken takes a long time to regain.
The point is, as a society we're heading in the wrong direction. Freedom of speech is becoming freedom for those who keep their mouths shut.
Why? Because China was behind on vaccine development, and when they finally produced on it was not only late, but barely functional.
Late is one thing - if you release a bioweapon, it's far too suspicious to release a co-developed vaccine simultaneously.
But ineffective?
When it got out the WHO was parroting China's talking points from day one - it's not airborne, that's just a racist conspiracy. It was nuts.
And from the same group that was ignoring the big red flags from Taiwan's early warning system (Taiwan, who incidentally is refused membership as part of the world's China appeasement policy).
Then China shutdown domestic travel from Wuhan, while still allowing it internationally.
They didn't develop it as a bioweapon - but that did not stop them from weaponising it after the fact.
> Then China shutdown domestic travel from Wuhan, while still allowing it internationally.
Lie[0]:
> On April 21, Ferguson provided an “update” to his April 5 column in which he acknowledged, “Data from sensors tracking actual flight paths would seem to indicate that no flights left from Wuhan itself to other countries in the world after January 23.”
The Chinese government responded to Covid the same damned way they responded to SARS; with a cover up - no joke, they were arresting doctors.
The biggest difference was that we didn't have someone like Gro Harlem Bruntlant [1] to competently handle the WHO's response [2] and call them out for their bullshit.
Both China and Taiwan looked at the SARS outbreak, and made efforts to prevent it from happening again.
Taiwan set up a robust early warning system in order to detect and contain such outbreaks in the future.
China on the other hand, set out to inject themselves into the WHO to protect themselves from future embarrassment [3].
It is funny how you say it so nonchalantly that the reason for not discussing lab leak theory is it lead to "marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent". However none of this applies to rhetoric against Russia, Middle East or any such country where US is at War with right now. How come no US citizen is attacking Russians, or Middle Easterners (Libyans, Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans etc) in US soil when the Media is 24 x 7 discussing how these countries are the "Enemy" of the United States? Do you not see the dichotomy here?
It totally feels orchestrated. Someone somewhere in the US establishment needed an excuse to not discuss about the lab leak theories. So the attacks on people of Asian descent turned out to be the perfect excuse. That's what it comes across to me as an observer of US politics. There is literally no reason for censoring information on discussion of a lab leak that did not even happen on US soil but in Wuhan. If you can discuss Russia, 9/11, terror attacks in various parts of the globe, without US citizens going bonkers and attacking people of those races, I am pretty sure discussing lab leak theory would not piss US citizens off that much. But bring in race attacks angle and you have the people by your side asking for and justifying censorship.
Let me ask you another question: How do you think people in Asia discussed the COVID pandemic? Did people in China not question their own government (CCP) and its role in the pandemic? How sure are you that they all believed that the virus did not come from the Wuhan lab but, as per CCP, came from the West?
As Putin’s invasion of Ukraine intensifies, some Russian-themed businesses and Russian Americans in the United States are suddenly getting a frosty reception — and in a few cases, experiencing outright hostility. A Russian restaurant in Washington, D.C., called Russia House, was vandalized and the owner indicated that he thought anti-Russian sentiment might be to blame. Some Russian Americans say their children are being bullied at school.
“Americans were encouraged to sympathize with the people of Russia rather than the government. And that seems to me to be what is really different from what we’re seeing now, where you see people at protests with signs saying all Russians are to blame for Putin’s aggression,” he said.
Thulien pointed to another incident in which the parents of a close friend, a couple in their 80s, had their car scratched and vandalized overnight this week.
Also note that in the context of the US culture war, Russia is seen as an ally against the 'woke left', leading to the bizarre situation where Putin himself made references to Harry Potter author JK Rowling in a speech about the invasion of another sovereign country. This might shield Russians against at least some antagonism from that part of the political spectrum.
Okay and have these attacks stopped coverage against Russia in the US media? If the argument for censoring lab leak discussion is "attack on Asians" then why isn't coverage on Russia censored for "attack on Russians"?
There's a whole lot of Russian expats who have been quite vocal in supporting the war against Ukraine by Russia.
When Russians complain they're being victimised, it might behold you to consider that "Russian" is pretty much not an identifiable group amongst the wide range of eastern Europeans who have immigrated - including Ukrainians.
So when Russians complain they're being mistreated, is worth asking what they were doing at the time. Because it tends to be vocally supporting the Russian invasion[1] or the whole idea of it is being straight up invented and pushed by Kremlin propaganda agents[2].
The point I was making is not whether Russians feel mistreated or Asians feel mistreated etc. That is a separate debate. I am only making a limited point on "Lab leak theory was censored because it lead to rise in Asian hate crime". This makes absolutely no sense to me. Investigating possible lab leak theory that lead to one of the worst pandemics in recent times should be done irrespective of whether there is hate crime or not. Both have no correlation. And investigation can be done behind the scenes too. The problem is that there was absolutely no attempt at doing proper investigation. Whether it leads to conclusion or not is secondary.
Are you sure there was absolutely no attempt at doing a proper investigation? I wasn’t super fixed on the news at the time, but I do remember a number of reports, fact finding trips, etc by international and governmental bodies trying to investigate the origins.
There is absolutely not attempt at doing a proper investigation of blast in BSL4 lab "Vector", Novosibirsk, Russia on Sep 16 2019 and following epidemic of unknown origin in Siberia, which caused hospitals overwhelmed
Wuhan was hit by strain B in December. Strain A, original virus, was released about 2 months before that. Where it was for 2 months?
It is 100% equivalent. You are saying we will censor A topic because it will hurt X race. In the same breath, you will not censor B topic even if it hurts Y race. That is hypocrisy. Everyone sees through it. Some may choose to be blind to this hypocrisy. And that is not my problem.
Again, I'm not saying anything about that. I am saying that public opposition to some Russian persons is not because they're Russian it's because of their direct public actions and statements - as cited in my original post.
Claims of an anti-Russian bias or set of hate crimes is literal Kremlin propaganda which amongst other things was used to justify the Ukraine invasion, the South Ossetia invasion in Georgia, and has been a general talking point as to why Russia should consider invading many other of its neighbours.
I don't believe the main reason for suppression (insofar as that happened) and ridicule of the lab leak theory was a reasoned evaluation of any negative consequences. Rather, it became a partisan issue, and instead of being seen as an independent hypothesis that one should evaluate on its own merits, it became part of a whole package contentious issues (masks, vaccines, ivermectin, ...) that divided people along party lines. That the lab-leak hypothesis was pushed by the conspiracy crowd of course did not help.
Because you can't blame dear grandpa's death on Russia maybe however you try ?
I am pretty sure 9/11 - War on Terror saw a rise in aggression of muslim looking people
even though it concerned less people than covid did.
You're pretending there was no such thing as people on TV blaming it on people eating "bat soup" and stuff like that.
When lab leak hypotheses were able to rise above the conspiracy theories thanks to reasonable argumentation, it was finally heard. At first only on HN, thanks to which I first gave credence to the hypothesis and now you here you have it in mainstream media.
It all takes time and debate, it's normal.
The only conspiracy I see is from people, whether in the state apparatus or the scientific community that really did not want people to look too much into Gain OF Function research. I think the existence of such research and democratic control over is the debate now worth having.
> Because you can't blame dear grandpa's death on Russia maybe however you try ?
I am pretty sure 9/11 - War on Terror saw a rise in aggression of muslim looking people even though it concerned less people than covid did.
And yet there was no censorship on conspiracy theories about the CIA being behind 9/11, for instance.
> Because you can't blame dear grandpa's death on Russia maybe however you try ?
And what does it have to do with State censorship of information? The State has no societal relationships (like grandpa/grandma/brother/sister/husband/wife/son/daughter etc) that can pressure it to shutdown flow of information. We are talking about State apparatus censoring information here. With Big Tech actively aiding it.
> You're pretending there was no such thing as people on TV blaming it on people eating "bat soup" and stuff like that.
I am not pretending anything. Also people blaming people eating "bat soup" has nothing to do with lab leak theory. Both are totally different issues altogether. I don't see how they are related?
> At first only on HN, thanks to which I first gave credence to the hypothesis and now you here you have it in mainstream media.
Many of us knew it from the very beginning once the censorship started that it has to do with lab leak. The only ones interested in suppressing information are the ones who have something to hide. Age old adage.
> It all takes time and debate, it's normal.
No it is not normal. Even post 9/11 no conversation was censored in US media. Even conspiracy theories were not snubbed or wiped off. Censorship was rampant only post COVID. It only tells me, as an observer of US politics, that the people high up in the US establishment, who had a stake in the Wuhan lab, had something really nasty to hide.
> The only conspiracy I see is from people, whether in the state apparatus or the scientific community that really did not want people to look too much into Gain OF Function research. I think the existence of such research and democratic control over is the debate now worth having.
Exactly. But having a debate now is mostly useless anyways. Whatever window of opportunity we had to investigate lab leak theory is now long gone. All the actors who wanted to cover their tracks have now had enough time to do so. So even if you are able to prove that lab leak did occur (to some degree) it won't lead to any indictments. And with an authoritarian CCP, good luck getting any leads directly from the labs itself.
Most post COVID conspiracy theories have actually come true. Be it mask mandates, lockdowns, GoF, harmful vaccine side effects or lab leak theories. In a couple of years we will have even more information about why information was censored and who were behind this censorship. Such things cannot be hidden for long. That's a given. But what we lose out now on is the scale of the things that went on behind the scenes. Now that these nefarious actors have had enough time to clean their evidence, even if you find any evidence it would be really weak leading to no indictments/charges forget prosecutions and convictions.
> No it is not normal. Even post 9/11 no conversation was censored in US media
No true. 9/11 was a nearly perfect military industrial play and no one could publicly question the US actions post the event. It felt like a lockstep war machine with vengeance at an all time high. You must’ve not lived through it.
Was born in late 80s. Lived through all of the major events post that. And no you could publicly question everything back then. There were no calls for cancellations or boycotts just because you believed in controversy theories.
Look up 9/11 Truthers movement and "Bush Did It!" to get an idea of the conspiracy theories that emerged right after 9/11. The "Bush Did It!" rallies took place in September 2002, just 1 year after 9/11.
Personally I don't believe in the 9/11 Truthers movement but I wouldn't even know about it if COVID level censorship was adopted back in 2001. Mainstream media was very different back then. Compared to what it has devolved into now.
> And no you could publicly question everything back then.
You're remembering things through rose-colored glasses. Ellen DeGeneres and Laura Dern, Bill Maher and the Dixie Chicks can tell stories of what happened in the 90s and 2000s when you went against the mainstream. In fact, people were cancelled over the silliest things (remember nipplegate?). Government censorship was also alive and well: Under the Bush junior administration, NASA and EPA scientists were not allowed to use the phrase 'global warming'.
State is mainly concerned with public order as far as I can tell.
What you call "State censorship" I call State asking politely CEOs who are in the same social class as most politicians to stop the spreading of (alledgedly false) rumors. And rumors, howevever false, have often cause a great deal of social unrest.
The reason it happens now and it did not happen it 2001... Well had you heard of Youtube in 2001 ? Facebook ? Probably not, I know I didn't.
All powers have somewhat regulated information, the US is a society where you can say almost anything except calling people to go and kill ${group).
I haven't heard of a lab-leak these proponent having been arrested, nor websites taken down etc... This my friend is state censorship.
Now if your concern is that most media is owned by billionaires and private law is law on their platform, well ok, but that's another concern.
> Also people blaming people eating "bat soup" has nothing to do with lab leak theory. Both are totally different issues altogether. I don't see how they are related?
Because the bat soup people where the first one to jump on the lab-leak theory. That did not help the cause. We use network of trust to digest information. I don't have no trust in people saying crazy stuff even though they might sometimes be right.
> Exactly. But having a debate now is mostly useless anyways. Whatever window of opportunity we had to investigate lab leak theory is now long gone. All the actors who wanted to cover their tracks have now had enough time to do so. So even if you are able to prove that lab leak did occur (to some degree) it won't lead to any indictments. And with an authoritarian CCP, good luck getting any leads directly from the labs itself.
I don't agree. It didn't matter more at the time to know if it was a lab-leak or not, situation had to be handled. Now that there's less urgency maybe we can investigate the dark corners and do something about it so it won't happen again. It m
atters more than ever.
> Most post COVID conspiracy theories have actually come true. Be it mask mandates, lockdowns, GoF, harmful vaccine side effects or lab leak theories
How are mask mandates and lockdowns conspiracists predictions turned true... ?
The real conspiracy was not telling people they should wear masks to protect others because there wasn't enought for everybody.
How was lockdown a conspiracy rather that government trying to pretend they were doing something ? I don't think the economy benefited fromt that\
Harmful vaccine side effects ? What about getting covid side-effects ? Listen you would have caught it no matter what and it would probably be worse. The discrepancy between deaths of vaccinated and unvaccinated people should tell you much.
GOF was known before too, it just wasn't in the public eye
At the time the US had a president that routinely used race-baiting as a divisive political technique. He admired Vladimir Putin and defended Russian actions, so the Russian people weren’t a subject of his attacks.
That's a weird way to defend censorship of lab leak theory. Whatever floats your boat I guess.
> At the time the US had a president that routinely used race-baiting as a divisive political technique
What exactly did the US President, at that time, say specifically that exacerbated attacks on Asians, after breakout of COVID, and more importantly could be used as a justification for Worldwide censorship of lab leak theory? Don't forget that the lab leak theory was being suppressed on behest of the US Government by Big Tech and that suppression of information was not limited to just the US but entire World. As far as I remember, Trump was only the President of USA. He wasn't the President of the World. So you can't blame Trump if Big Tech is doing a Worldwide censorship of lab leak theory. I don't buy that argument at all.
I’m not defending anything about a lab leak. I’m addressing the previous poster’s question about why there were attacks on Asian Americans and not Russian ones.
The lab leak theory and weaponization theories were never squelched. The right wing in this country fantasizes that their viewpoints are marginalized while having their most extreme viewpoints broadcast on the top watched news programs in history. The idea that the lab theories were squelched was floated by those very same programs as part of their promotional formula.
> These conspiracy theories lead to a marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent in the US
Where? Can you back this up with clear evidence? And assuming this claim isn't simply made up, in what universe would it be a good strategy to address a USA specific problem by systematically and globally destroying the credibility of the entire scientific, media and public health establishment? The solution to violence is police; no one in their right mind would decide the best solution to this would be to establish a global conspiracy.
No, the above is all retroactive justification. We have the emails from the virologists as they planned the letter that claimed it was all a conspiracy theory. They weren't motivated by violent attacks. They were worried about being blamed for it, and that maybe it'd be harder to fund work in China in future. They say that, in writing.
The news was reporting on anti Asian feelings prior to covid. When covid hit this automatically became racist. Wearing a mask was racist. Bizarre. It caused many to ignore media/leaders because they were so obviously off base and constantly proven wrong and backtracking they lost credibility.
“There was a very well coordinated and intentional conflation of the term "lab leak" with the conspiracy theories”
Only by those wishing to shutdown legitimate discussion.
So back to the original question. Who was behind trying to change the narrative.
Dr. Fauci’s emails have shown he orchestrated deceiving the public. I’m not sure that is sufficient to explain the total media backlash against a lab-leak.
I don’t think people attacking Asians had that nuanced of a motive. More like: it came from Asia so they resented Asians, regardless of whether it was designed or leaked or whatever.
I can, and will, continue to advocate and affirm that criticizing the Chinese Communist Party - and people with Chinese descent - are 2 very different things, and that the former is acceptable.
“conspiracy theories lead to a marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent in the US,”
Extremely dubious.
Your first paragraph was on point. Then you descend into ideologically driven speculation. You also seem to not grasp the basic chronology of how the early pro-China slant of the WHO plays into the whole gestalt. And overlook the fact that social media companies are filled with government workers who are paid to manipulate (censor) views that don’t align with those of the government, a government who in this case funded the research that caused the pandemic.
Hiding the truth because some bad people might do bad things is a pitiful excuse. Absolutely shameful to anyone with even a teardrop of integrity.
Few people want war with China. But I know of plenty that think China should be footing the bill and paying the entire world damages for their incompetence (or malice) in mishandling their bioweapon.
Communists have no integrity. ChiComs blamed the US for the virus, which is ironic, since the NIH knowingly or unwittingly (incompetence) funded it through Eco Health Alliance.
We need the same for the complete 180 on lockdowns. From universally against to forced lockdowns. I think people forget how strong the consensus (including medical) against lockdowns was.
I was in China during the outbreak. All western media and healthcare experts had to say about lockdowns was that they were counterproductive and have never been part of the medical playbook. And that it violates civil rights. A month later this seemed to be completely forgotten.
Personally, I believe this is all a function of the states ability to enforce it. It wasn’t possible before, but they found that it was possible now. But it was summarily rejected on principal prior to that.
There was never a consensus for or against lockdowns. Cant speak for the US and it's utterly broken media landscape but in Europe experts were asking for this from day one. It is also a known tool of any epidemic/pandemic management, it just has rarely been necessary at such scale given the intensity and wide distribution of COVID.
This is revisionism. The only place in Europe that didn't lock down was Sweden and they were viciously attacked in the media for it, additionally Anders Tegnall was also attacked by other epidemiologists.
I followed it all very closely at the time. Tegnall and his mentor stood alone. With the exception of the Great Barrington crew and maybe Ioannidis, all the other so-called experts were loudly and vocally demanding lockdowns as a strategy. Great Barrington meanwhile was viciously attacked, described as fringe, non-consensus, would kill millions etc.
The attempts to rewrite what happened in this whole thread are incredible to witness (not just your post, many others). It was only a few years ago! Our memories aren't that bad! And the internet is full of receipts on this. The idea there was robust academic debate about lockdowns or masks or the lab leak or anything else is a fantasy.
> all the other so-called experts were loudly and vocally demanding lockdowns as a strategy
This is not true. Denmark, Finland, Netherlands and UK [1] had their own versions of "Tegnell". That is, epidemiologists who recommended the let-it-rip, "herd immunity" strategy. In these countries, politicians finally decided to follow the majority consensus among countries, and ignore those epidemiologists who were among the "herd immunity" school of thought.
Even in New Zealand it was a somewhat close call, would the government listen to Michael Baker [2] as they eventually did, or Simon Thornley [3].
> Great Barrington meanwhile was viciously attacked, described as fringe, non-consensus, would kill millions etc.
Maybe because it was somewhat fringe, definitely non-consensus, and would kill millions?
[1] "For a time, he advocated a herd immunity approach."
Vallance is in no way comparable to Tegnell. Valance and the other UK/SAGE "experts" were quite happy to invert their advice overnight on the basis of nothing. Like all the others they were making decisions based on politics and ideology, not a mature of understanding of science. Tegnell picked one position and stuck with it because there was no reason to change it, in that he was virtually alone.
> Maybe because it was somewhat fringe, definitely non-consensus, and would kill millions?
It's amazing how many people still never got the memo that lockdowns and masks had no effect whatsoever. This isn't even up for debate anymore, the data is openly available and has been analyzed to death. These interventions simply did not work, and it was known from the start that they wouldn't work. Heck the idea they wouldn't work was the consensus right before 2020, which is why a "consensus" of these idiots is worth less than the electrons used to transmit it.
It's amazing how many people still never got the memo that lockdowns and masks had no effect whatsoever.
Do you have a source for that? It's been a while since I've looked at Covid numbers, so the only research I know off the top of my head that claims there was no effect is a meta-analysis by some economists, which originally claimed lockdowns only prevented 0.2% of deaths. After criticism, they had to re-evaluate their approach and arrived at 3.2%. However, not all objections were addressed, so who knows if there isn't another order of magnitude hiding somewhere.
Personally, I've been leaning towards lockdowns having the potential to be effective based on excess mortality in the nordics: Sweden was the only nordic country that did not lock down in March 2020, and it's also the only one of these countries that saw significant excess mortality in April 2020. There could of course be another reason for that, but until someone offers such, the lockdowns seem to be the obvious factor...
Perhaps your April 2020 number is correct but I think it's irrelevant because it is too time-boxed. I did an analysis (matching those by others) using the OECD excess deaths data and if you extend the time period through last fall, Sweden did either best (according to other's analysis) or second best (according to mine). Excess deaths actually continued after the pandemic has subsided in many countries (US and UK at least I recall) and I think it reasonable to assume the pandemic and pandemic policy had something to do with it. To judge overall success of policies you need to look at the whole time of the pandemic and its aftermath and the Swedes did better than almost everyone
Due to large numbers of immigration, Sweden has younger population than comparable nearby countries. Too many excess death analyses just take the average of 5 previous years (2015-2019) as the baseline, to compare yearly or weekly deaths to. But in countries with ageing population, number of yearly deaths have been on a slowly increasing linear trend already for a long time. If you ignore the trend, and only compare to the 2015-2019 average, all countries with ageing population would show continuously increasing excess deaths.
Also, Sweden has a peculiar bookkeeping system, and a surprisingly large number of deaths are recorded without precisely known date. If you only look at weekly death statistics, you will miss the "week 99" deaths from the yearly total.
All valid things to check but would also need to be checked for other OECD countries. I would not assume the OECD methodology does not take account of the aging. Also I would not assume this had much of an effect. The way it might would be if a lot of younger people moved to Sweden during the pandemic . In general cross border movement slowed during that time
> I would not assume the OECD methodology does not take account of the aging.
And here you would assume very wrong.
OECD does indeed estimate excess mortality simply by comparing to the 2015-2019 averages:
"The expected number of deaths is based on the average number of deaths for the same week over recent years (in this case the previous five years, 2015-19). This baseline could be considered a lower estimate of the expected number of deaths since both population growth and an ageing population would be expected to push up the number of deaths observed each year."
"Importantly, given the impact of COVID-19 to the overall number of weekly deaths in 2020, the
average deaths for the period 2015-2019 continues to be used to calculate excess deaths in 2021,
and still applies as the base for 2022 and 2023 excess deaths."
From their: Methodology_All-cause-Excess-and-COVID-19-deaths_OECD.pdf
> Also I would not assume this had much of an effect.
Also here you are assuming somewhat wrong.
For Finland, the 2015–2019 average annual deaths is 53723. 2022 deaths were 63219. Thus the simple, OECD-style, estimate for excess mortality is 9496.
Whereas an age-structured model from Statistics Finland estimated 56158 deaths for 2022 from pre-covid trends. So the age-structure-aware excess mortality estimate is 7061 for 2022 for Finland.
Curious. At the time, I also made a pretty picture comparing deaths in 2020 to the 2015-2019 average (ignore the drop off at the end, as the data was incomplete at the time):
Early on Sweden had more deaths which led people to argue lockdowns worked, but then things subsided and other countries caught up and then surpassed it, leading to Sweden ending up near the bottom of the COVID death league tables (in Europe).
It's also important to remember in all this that the lockdown policy wasn't predicated on making a small difference you need powerful statistics to find. It was advertised as: anyone who doesn't lock down will experience mass deaths and full blown collapse. Epidemiologists claimed Sweden would experience double the usual death rate due to COVID, i.e. as many deaths from COVID as from all other causes combined! Their actual death rate:
There's a tiny bump in 2020, but at least part of that is simply noise due to 2019 having an unusually low death rate, so you'd expect it to be higher than normal in 2020 even without COVID.
Yes if you look exactly at the early pandemic then Sweden did worse than its immediate neighbors (but not worse than the rest of the OECD countries). But the real measure of success in policy has to include the rest of the pandemic and its aftermath. The others caught up.
But severity and timeline of lockdown measures varied from country to country, ie there was some diversity of opinion. Also note that even Sweden eventually implemented policies such as restricting opening hours of bars and restaurants, limiting the size of some gatherings, etc. for a time.
A scientific consensus is significantly different than media opinion.
Second, there is no "debate" regarding efficacy of masks and limiting exposure via quarantining. Masking reduces the likelihood of contracting SARS from others, and staying home reduces the spread to others and strain on hospitals. Unsurprisingly, the people attempting to debate this typically had no medical background whatsoever.
Millions died in the US alone, and a non-trivial percentage of them would likely still be alive if our public officials did a better job of respecting the medical professionals and their recommendations.
Oppositions to lockdowns were never about whether they would reduce deaths or not in the short term. Anyone with a brain could understand that if people weren't in a position to breath on each other, the virus wouldnt spread as quickly.
Oppositions to lockdowns were always about tradeoffs and whether they were worth it. Its just such a boring critique.
My main question still remains, what would your plan have been if we still didnt have a vaccine? From my perspective lockdown supporters got completely bailed out by one of the greatest medical/scientific achievements in human history (developing and deploying an extremely effective vaccine within 1 year).
The only thing lockdowns do is push cases into the future.
Pushing cases into the future was always the stated goal of lockdowns. That was what "flatten the curve" meant. The idea was to accept some temporary consequences in order to prevent deaths until vaccines could be made.
I also don't think it was any stroke of luck that resulted in vaccines being made quickly. Our scientific establishments correctly devoted their resources to developing vaccines. A lot of us were closely following their development and knew that they were just around the corner. Even without advancements in MRNA technology, other types of vaccines were being made that could prevent the majority of deaths.
> Pushing cases into the future was always the stated goal of lockdowns. That was what "flatten the curve" meant. The idea was to accept some temporary consequences in order to prevent deaths until vaccines could be made.
The idea we needed to "flatten the curve until a vaccine" was obsolete the day many states closed their completely unused field hospitals. That should have been the indicator that covid wasn't nearly as bad as predicted. That was the day everything should have gone back to complete normal.
These lockdown "experts" never had an end game. They kept pushing the goal posts further and further until they completely lost the plot. That was one of my first objections to such mitigations. There was zero success criteria. Fuckers were just winging it. Which might be okay for some minimally invasive crap like enhanced handwashing protocols but it is absolutely bat-shit insane for something as impacting as lockdowns.
What we did was insane. I still have no idea how people look back, given all the data, and say "yup, what we did made sense". None of it make a single ounce of sense at all...
When "flatten the curve" came out as a slogan they told us 2 weeks. Absolutely no one in public health believed that would be true. It doesnt make sense on any level whatsoever. i mean it just beggars belief that they told the public that with a straight face. the only person i recall in early days of 2020 saying this was going to be many months if not years was Mike Osterholm which i respect for not gaslighting the public.
heres an article in the NYT about managing vaccine expectations.
also you argument falls apart when lockdowns (restrictions, npis, whatever you want to call them) continued way beyond vaccine rollout. I was first in line to get vaccinated and im very glad i did, because they promised us that would be a return to normal, but it wasnt for at least a year afterwards and i still havent been given an explanation why.
I'm just guessing, but an obvious reason would be because the vaccines were not as effective against the new variants? As in, while the vaccines still protected the vaccinated person, they did not effectively prevent spread of the disease, so other ways to do so remained relevant...
About a year after vaccines became available, only 60% or so of folks had received two doses [0]. Public messaging from the initial administration is an obvious contributor to the remaining 40%.
County / MSA hospital capacities, percent available ICU beds, ventilator use, admission increase rates, deaths, and various other stats were factored into restrictive policy decisions. However, this varies city by city and state by state (I suppose as an effect of federalism).
im sorry, but people who chose not to get vaccinated knew what they were doing and governments and public health officials holding everyone else hostage cause some people wanted to engage in risky behavior is not justifiable under any ethical framework i can think of.
“im sorry, but people who chose not to [follow the speed limit] knew what they were doing and governments and public safety officials holding everyone else to a [speed limit] cause some people wanted to engage is risky behavior is not justifiable under any ethical framework i can think of.
no because this is a terrible analogy. Speeding endangers others who have not consented to that danger, not getting vaccinated has absolutely no societal risk in this particular scenario with covid.
If I could make my car crash proof (me getting vaccinated in this analogy), i would have no issues with people wanting to drive as fast as they like (they already do it anyway).
that was published in 2021 about data from march 2020 to nov 2020, its completely irrelevant. I mean can you at least try?
also, even if vaccines did stop transmission your argument still doesnt make sense. I can protect myself by being vaccinated. I dont give a shit if the person next to me is unvaccinated, im already protected myself. If you decide not to, you are consenting to increased risk.
Who would win - a peer reviewed article from the New England Journal of Medicine with published methodologies and citations? Or some internet rando with no medical background simply saying “that’s irrelevant”?
Also, you’re misreading the article; please review.
> Oppositions to lockdowns were always about tradeoffs and whether they were worth it. Its just such a boring critique.
Fully agreed; saving lives / community responsibility is the noble choice. Unfortunately, many folks in states with poor education (e.g., Texas), would make remarks questioning the actual existence of the virus - even after Trump contracted it and was treated at Walter Reed.
But, work on a vaccine began almost immediately, no? I trusted that shifting the focused lens of US policy toward medical research would produce some incredible results, especially with the private sector pharmaceutical behemoths battling it out, so to speak.
yes "started." there was literally no guarantee we would even have a vaccine at all. There was absolutely no historical precedent for development and deployment of a vaccine with a year of virus discovery. it was incredible achievement and government official literally bet the entire world economy on it for some reason i still cant understand.
> Anyone with a brain could understand that if people weren't in a position to breath on each other, the virus wouldnt spread as quickly.
This can be rephrased as "it's just obvious/common sense that lockdowns work" and it's a really common argument, but wrong.
Unfortunately there's nothing really obvious or intuitive about viruses. The Diamond Princess cruise ship showed right at the start that lockdowns would be ineffective. They locked down everyone on the cruise ship the moment the first outbreaks were confirmed, confining them to cabins. In the transmission model that lockdowns rely on that would have ended the outbreak immediately. But it didn't, instead people kept coming down with COVID completely at random, scattered all over the ship. From this two things could be concluded:
1. SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, that is, it can move long distances in gaseous clouds, i.e. through air ducts, by hanging in the air for long periods and other ways that lockdowns can't affect.
2. The clouds must have circulated through the ship, yet not everyone was susceptible.
This wasn't a terribly surprising result because investigators had concluded the same things about SARS-1 back in the day. SARS-1 clouds were able to move within apartment buildings even when everyone was locked down in their apartments, apparently via air ducts.
Some people pointed out at the time that this would render lockdowns irrelevant right back in March 2020, and were ignored, but time has proven them right. There's no correlation between lockdown severity and results.
I have a medical background and when the pandemic started I did a literature to see if masks had helped with other respiratory virus epidemics (as masking had been common for years in many Asian countries ). the results were decidedly unimpressive and I concluded masks might to something but it was not a big effect at a societal level. The mistake that many smart people without medical backgrounds make is assuming that if a measure "makes sense" from a basic science point of view, it must have a real effect in a patient or a society. Counter-intuitively this almost always turns out to be wrong.
I did a study of mask based on self reports early in the pandemic and I did show a significant slowing of the progress of the pandemic in states that had a high claimed rate of mask use. I had (I thought) some clever ways of eliminating other differences between states in my analysis and was surprised to see so much slowing. However, I am not sure which way the causality runs. I can easily see heavy masking making it such a bummer to go to bars (e.g.) that the lack of socialization caused the slowing.
But in summary, to your point, to the medically knowledgeable there was a lot of evidence before that masks would not do much (not nothing) and there is a lot more now that masks didn't do much
Please share your background so we can more accurately asses your credibility; saying that masks are ineffective is, at this point, painfully ignorant.
The nurses who thought so are either fired, dead, or updated their thinking.
No, saying masks work is the ignorant position here. There is no robust evidence that community masking has any effect, and people have looked hard for it. You can easily confirm this yourself because mask mandates had no impact whatsoever on case growth as can be seen by literally anyone who looks at the public test results data.
But if you don't trust your own eyes, maybe the Cochrane Collaboration is enough for you? They published a meta-review of mask studies.
Remember, you don't get to claim you're right because you fired everyone who pointed out you're wrong. It's painful to accept this, but masking was a lie from start to finish which is why the position of all the medical staff at the start was that masks don't seem to do anything and there's no evidence community masking would help. That position was correct. They changed it later for ideological reasons and the politician's fallacy.
These data showed statistically significant lower averages of SARS-CoV-2 daily infection in counties that passed mask mandates when compared with counties that did not.
The difference-in-difference analysis revealed a 16.9% reduction in predicted COVID-19 cases at the end of 30 days.
You might want to look into why meta reviews, particularly those plucked from popular COVID forums, aren't the bees knees you seem to think they are.
That paper isn't robust evidence, it's the kind of joke quality that typifies masks-work papers actually. RCTs are how you try to decide whether a medical intervention works, they're considered the gold standard for a reason.
Problems with this paper:
1. It's just a study of public data so should be trivially replicable, but they picked data points "via Microsoft Excel’s random number generator function" so it's non-replicable by design. Right up front this makes it incompetent work because there'd be no way to detect P-hacking.
2. Because it's not an RCT they can only show a correlation, not a causation, yet their claims are causal. An obvious confounder is that going out with a mask is no fun so you'd expect people to socialize more in places without a mandate, yet this isn't mentioned.
3. The effect size is tiny: ~4 cases a day! In counties with tens of thousands of people! This is NOT how mask mandates were advertised to the population.
4. "We did not record compliance with mask mandates". Yes I'm sure the residents of places like Anderson County Tennessee followed public health orders meticulously.
5. They ignore all the contradictory evidence.
Again, I cannot stress this enough, we know mask mandates don't work because of the times they were introduced with no change in case trends. Here's a single example:
Because the claim is "mask mandates always reduce transmission", it only takes one counter-example to disprove the claim. There are hundreds of charts like that one, but only one is required. That's the nature of falsifiability.
To conclude that mask mandates work you have to be able to explain the times when they didn't. Crap studies like this one (cited 3 times, well done for finding it) are produced by academia all the time, but they get ignored because they can't explain that, and the authors are invariably biased. These guys even cite a claimed 0.5% reduction in cases and call this "effective"! Imagine if governments had stated up front when imposing mask mandates for the first time, "we think this will be effective because it might reduce case counts by half a percent". What would people have thought of the sanity of this cost/benefit tradeoff, exactly?
> Unsurprisingly, the people attempting to debate this typically had no medical background whatsoever.
You don't need to have a "medical background" to debate lockdowns or masks. The decision to use those should never have been made exclusively by people with "medical backgrounds". It isn't their job. Just because the "medical people" say it's gonna work, doesn't mean it is worth the cost to society. And it isn't at all the place of people with "medical backgrounds" to figure out what those costs are and if they are worth it...
"Experts" shouldn't be decision-makers. They should only inform decision-makers. A good decision-maker should take input from everybody who will be impacted. This was never done at all. Had it been done openenly and transparently we'd never have done lockdowns, school closures or anything else. Such things are completely insane no matter how much "medical experts" suggest to use them.
> A good decision-maker should take input from everybody who will be impacted.
You’re right; I’m really glad I polled thousands of fellow employees before forcing multifactor auth, or that time I chatted with a sysadmin to make sure they really did mean to open RDP on a public server before taking it offline.
Sarcasm aside, in a time of a medical emergency, it is the job of medical professionals to make decisions, because public safety supersedes individual freedoms. It’s why we have speed limits. It’s why you have to wear a seatbelt. It’s why you can’t shoot fireworks off during a drought. It’s why products are restricted from being sold. The concept is fundamentally the same.
It’s also the same reason I’m glad cybersecurity policy, strategy, and operations are not a truly democratic process.
> Sarcasm aside, in a time of a medical emergency, it is the job of medical professionals to make decisions, because public safety supersedes individual freedoms.
This might be true for like the first week or two of march but after that... the response should absolutely not be solely in the hands of nothing but "medical experts". Those people were never elected, are not accountable at all for their actions, and were granted virtually unlimited control. That is what we call a dictatorship.
I would much, much rather have a diverse party of people calling the shots and not just one very specific niche class of "expert". Without a diverse set of people involved you'll wind up where we got... an extremely myopic fixation on exactly one single respiratory virus for two+ years to the complete disregard for the damage it caused to our children and communities.
I used to think technocracy would be awesome. What better than to have a bunch of experts doing things "the right way". But covid opened my eyes to how incredibly bad of an idea that is. Experts are only expert on one specific thing. All their advice and mandates are made through that narrow lens.
> You’re right; I’m really glad I polled thousands of fellow employees before forcing multifactor auth, or that time I chatted with a sysadmin to make sure they really did mean to open RDP on a public server before taking it offline.
But you also chatted with business people to get insight into the costs of forcing multifactor auth on people would be worth the security gains? Right? Because forcing 2FA is absolutely not something a security expert gets to decide. A good security expert would realize they are an advisor and not the person calling the shots. They know their role is to outline "what would happen if we did blah blah" and then let the business people know the pros and cons so said business people can make a decision. The business people, if they are any good, realize that there are multiple often conflicting requirements and have the hard work of deciding what the right tradeoffs to make are. Experts don't get to decide those tradeoffs at all...
I mean, could you imagine if the only input you got for a product, say a car seat, was just from a bunch of lawyers? The product would be absolutely lawsuit proof but I bet it would suck as a car seat.
> the response should absolutely not be solely in the hands of nothing but "medical experts"
This wasn't the case, and to say so is a blatant misrepresentation of the past. Did Fauci issue a travel ban, enact the Defense Production Act, or redirect the supply of medical equipment? Did the CDC somehow supersede congressional authority and directly fund research via the CARES Act? Were appellate courts no longer hearing cases regarding COVID and civil liberties?
> you also chatted with business people to get insight [...]
this reinforces my point: anyone who happens to be impacted is not entitled to input. Conversations between medical professionals and public officials were occurring every single day. But - do you think Trump was genuinely listening to his advisors?
> there are multiple often conflicting requirements and have the hard work of deciding what the right tradeoffs to make are
that's exactly my point, again. No one knew it was going to mutate that quickly and stay an issue. The tradeoff for doing less was more people dying.
Quarantining people who may have been exposed is a whole universe away from the lockdowns being discussed here, where whole cities, states and countries proactively prevented the free movement of their people who they had no reason to suspect had been exposed. Don't conflate these two.
It seems you may be looking to only discredit an argument instead of arguing the merits.
FTA:
> However, the use of quarantine and other measures for controlling epidemic diseases has always been controversial because such strategies raise political, ethical, and socioeconomic issues and require a careful balance between public interest and individual rights.
Here’s a list of about 30 examples since the 15th century where various governments have prevented the free movement of their people (because even then, they recognized that public health is more important than individual travel).
In the face of a never-before-seen rapidly spreading and mutating virus, what the hell do you think medical professionals and governments ought to do? Stand by idly and let people die?
> Here’s a list of about 30 examples since the 15th century where various governments have prevented the free movement of their people (because even then, they recognized that public health is more important than individual travel).
You mean those centuries before we truly recognized individual rights? Not a compelling argument. Again, quarantine of people who had possibly had exposure is very different than the proactive lockdown approach taken during COVID.
> In the face of a never-before-seen rapidly spreading and mutating virus, what the hell do you think medical professionals and governments ought to do? Stand by idly and let people die?
Inform the public and let them personally assess the level of risk they're willing to accept. You know, like they do with literally every other health question. Expanding protections for people facing dangerous working conditions because of the virus to opt out of work, and mandatory sick leave, is perfectly reasonable as well.
I don't know why people act like this obvious answer is completely out of the question. Will it result in more death? Quite possibly. Giving governments moral authority to limit people's rights in such a fashion is never the right answer though. Would you support the draft too?
> Individual rights have been recognized long before the founding of the United States, though.
Yes, and? Is it not true that we have progressively recognized more rights over time, often at the cost of blood? That our "rulers" do not and should not have de facto power over our lives to impede our movements, that they should not have power over what we choose to believe or decide with whom we may associate?
Furthermore, in none of the examples cited in the link you provided do the quarantine measures impact whole cities, states or nations, so I fail to see the relevance. Where quarantine measures were broad, they were widely recognized as shameful and discriminatory in retrospect (like imprisoning 30,000 prostitutes to stem venereal disease).
> This is impossible and irresponsible when you cannot accurately assess the risk.
Irresponsible? Do you think you have some responsibility to manage other people's lives for them? This really gets to the crux of the issue doesn't it, you think some people should have the right to make such decisions for others because those "others" aren't intelligent or well-informed enough to make these decisions for themselves. It's patriarchal, condescending and anti-democratic.
As for whether it's impossible, that's literally untrue. Sweden is proof by counterexample: they did exactly this and it turned out just fine. By the time the first lockdowns happened, we already had a reasonable assessment of the risks.
Instead the heavy-handed, duplicitous and authoritarian measures made the whole issue partisan, and so the US had one of the worst outcomes of all developed countries.
> The question of a draft is so unrelated I'm intentionally ignoring it.
Except it's not unrelated, it's just another example of curtailing civil liberties in the name of some ill-defined "collective good". People advocating for these positions simply take it as a given that their vision of the collective good needs no justification.
Editing to remove my comment; I’m done arguing with narrow-minded libertarians about effective government. It’s like arguing with a carnivore about why they should eat vegetables.
I'm not a libertarian, but do go on with your unjustified assumptions. We've gone through three rounds of you claiming you're right with no principled arguments or evidence, that it must be your way or the highway, and that the government responses were "effective" without considering obvious the most obvious counterexample that I cited.
You think the general public is equipped to quantify risk for a novel viral outbreak, and the government has no responsibility in attempting to keep its people alive. That’s about as libertarian as it gets. You have supplied no evidence that measures taken were ineffective, because every developed country had some plan.
I’m the one that supplied multiple citations. How about you go find some to support your assertions, instead of trying to snipe and mince mine?
> You think the general public is equipped to quantify risk for a novel viral outbreak, and the government has no responsibility in attempting to keep its people alive.
It's interesting that you experience no cognitive dissonance between what I cited as a good example of what I'm talking about, Sweden, and this strawman of my position.
The article is conflating quarantines with lockdowns. They're not the same thing. Quarantines are more like the much-derided Great Barrington Declaration.
> It is also a known tool of any epidemic/pandemic management, it just has rarely been necessary at such scale given the intensity and wide distribution of COVID.
That must be why all the pandemic planning guides from various national health agencies specifically said do not do lockdowns, do no close schools and don't force masks...
It was never a "known tool" to anybody. It was an insane, unproven pharmaceutical intervention that somehow, suddenly, became something "we always knew about".
> That must be why all the pandemic planning guides from various national health agencies specifically said do not do lockdowns, do no close schools and don't force masks...
Could you provide a citation? I’ve read the opposite from NIH, CDC, NHS, etc.
In Canada we wanted lockdowns pretty quickly and our prime minister said no and even refused to close the borders because he considered closing the borders to be racist. They tried to say border closures would have no effect on stopping covid.
It was an election year. Trump really didn't want to do anything that would upset the economy, and he gambled all his chips on "ignore it until it goes away." Public officials were begging and pleading to take measures to get R under control from the very start of exponential growth in the US, but they were not able to break through the political stonewall. Conservatives will say & do anything to get you to forget how hard they went on the wrong side of history.
People came to their senses when the following level of urgency was reached: "if you don't lockdown NOW, in two doubling periods -- one week -- every hospital will have a parking lot full of people slowly dying for want of a respirator. Do you want that news story as your legacy?"
It turns out that mechanical ventilators weren't very helpful. They did more harm than good for many patients, and overuse was a factor in the unusually high infection fatality rate seen in New York during the first phase of the pandemic. Ironically, some patients walking around today probably survived only because there was a shortage of ventilators.
The Dems didn't make Trump bet everything on "ignore it and it will go away." He could have pushed for public health measures in February 2020 ("Stop the China Virus, wear a MAGA mask!"). He didn't. He squandered the opportunity to use gentle R reduction, so we had to jump to strong R reduction with lockdowns.
I know that following the science doesn't come naturally to Republicans, but this is basic shit. If you had figured it out then, you wouldn't need to be on Trump daiper duty in 2023.
EDIT: Disclaimer, this was for one of the most principled politicians I've ever met. To this day, he will say he is an anarchist in public. (Although, he would say it in a pleasurable way)
Sure, so to change 0.5% of the vote, we would find people with demographics that people vote for.
For instance, if there is a women on the ballot, run another women because at least 0.5% of people vote for a women, so this splits the vote. Or find someone with similar/same names, bonus points if their signage only has their last name.
Anyone with the enemy's yard sign, gets the negative ad. Each neg ad was tested considerably.
There is a huge database of every voter, their petitions they signed, odds of being dem/gop, odds of voting, their pet names(if registered), etc... You go up to someone's house knowing they support guns because they signed a petition. Heck, the candidate would pretend they remembered the dog's name from a few years ago.
Lying and plausible deniability is like a daily thing. Looking back on it, I would have been sacrificed in a second for putting neg ads in people's mailboxes illegally.
Those are some heavy hitters. I feel like I forgot like 2 major stomach churning events, maybe I blocked them out. (Oh gosh, when I went to the enemy's campaign rally and put neg ads on everyone's cars, got followed by their staff, jumped over a fence/bush area to escape...) Okay, I'm only missing 1 stomach churning event from my memory. I think it was strategy related, maybe it had to do with old people.
Those sound like basic things that politicians or even salespeople do. You sound like you went in naive, got your mind blown, and now believe anything is possible. I hate to break it to you but you haven't uncovered any shocking secrets and your 'destroy the economy so we can beat Trump even though he is defeating himself with his handling of the epidemic' theory doesn't water.
Democrats are not some monolithic entity. A 'democrat' is basically someone in the US who votes who has empathy for others and/or isn't in favor of Christian religious doctrine as a basis for legislating morality and/or thinks that making it super easy for anyone to buy a gun makes gun violence exponentially more likely.
I really doubt they all coordinated to destroy the livelihood of millions of American's to make the president look bad when he was doing it just fine by himself day after day.
If you are going to go the conspiracy route why not look to Republican politicians? They are much more unified and they universally hate Trump (do you even remember the primary debates? He literally insulted other opponent's families) and they only got in line because he demonstrated he could destroy their career by motivating his base to action. They wanted him gone just as much as anyone else -- they just couldn't say or do anything overt about it.
But no, that didn't happen either. A idiotic narcissist who refuses to listen to anyone and is obsessed with how he looks under stage lights more than welfare of the American people can lose an election just fine on his own.
The question makes no sense. What democrats? What scientists? About what?
Do you think that men aged between 30 and 35 ignored wives?
Can you answer such a vague and useless question?
'Democrats', 'scientists', and 'ignored (about subject)' and 'at which point in time' are not things that you can just assume and the fact that you think you can group all these things into one question is baffling.
There's nothing to debunk. That's the entire point. He's trying to prop up his claims with more claims. If we cannot determine the veracity of his anecdotes, they are of no use to us in determining the validity of his conclusions.
His entire response could be boiled down to "Trust me, bro".
I get the feeling he knows he cannot defend his position based on either commonly known information or on reasoning about the situation. So he has to purport to have special information that most don't. And that special information, which you cannot have, is enough to turn everything around. But he also won't give you enough information to independently verify. He won't tell you which campaigns he did these things for, which politicians he worked for. But they were top men. Top. Men.
We've "convinced" you of the thing you came into this thread with. Or is this just a thinly veiled attempt at making others backtrack their words or apologize for impugning your integrity?
If you were truly concerned with "Science and Data", you would realize that vague, unverifiable anecdotes are only persuasive to those who are already persuaded. They are not a valid way to make a point.
This is a weird topic to me, because I'm unsure if I live in a different bubble, or we're all just kind of playing the euphemism game (with a bit of self censorship on top) or what. Because what happened is hardly ambiguous. One thing, more than any, that the Twitter files provided evidence of was various governmental organizations, and individuals, pressuring at least one large tech company to censor for often arbitrary, and sometimes overtly fake, reasons. I think the chances of that behavior being limited to Twitter, or even tech companies in general, are zero.
The tech companies are obviously, at the minimum, complicit. Because "pressure" is just that - pressure. When the 'Russian trolls' narrative was being built up in Congress, Twitter knew it was entirely fabricated, and even referred to the requests as coming from "Congressional Trolls", and then they gave those said trolls nearly everything they wanted, and remained absolutely silent about what was happening. That strongly reflects upon the character, or lack thereof, of former Twitter leadership - but the source is the government.
The large scale centralization of speech has created an angle shoot of the 1st amendment. Pressure a handful of companies into censoring whatever you want censored and you likely achieve even more than a law would have, since you end up censoring it on a far larger scale than just domestically. Expecting politicians of a country to actually care about the intent of the constitution of that country is clearly no longer a reasonable expectation to have.
It wasn't taboo - the associated conspiracy theory about the leak being a deliberate release of a bio-weapon was rightly dismissed.
The idea of it being an accidental release though was discussed a lot; it merely lacked strong evidence (no doubt partly due to Chinese obfuscation) to take pole position against the meat markets theory.
Additionally there was definitely a ridiculous and likely harmful "anti-racist" thrust by the usual censorious suspects, including those you mention that tried to control conversation, as they do.
Unfortunately the merging of the two theories at the time (which I think is continued here by wrongly suggesting the accidental-leak case was "taboo") has never helped clear discussion.
The latest poll from the public opinion fact tank shows that misinformation around the virus is still king, even as fact checkers and public health officials work furiously to dispel it and save American lives.
A total of 23% of adults polled said they believe the virus was created intentionally. This is almost certainly not true, according to the genetic detectives studying the virus’s origins.
The theory that the virus originated in a lab was one repeatedly shared on One America News Network, a far-right channel favored by President Donald Trump.
From the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, conspiracy theories about the origin and scale of the disease were spread on online platforms.
Among these were the false claim that the virus was part of a Chinese covert biological weapons programme.
The claim that the virus was man-made has been pushed by numerous conspiracy groups on Facebook, obscure Twitter accounts and even found its way on to primetime Russian state TV."
Now what we read is that the virus was man made and the WIV was doing secret military work for the PLA, with the idea being to create a virus and vaccine simultaneously so the attacker controls who survives i.e. a bioweapon. That's the same as what the BBC called a false claim and conspiracy theory.
The reason this investigation was initially done by anonymous people who found each other via backchannels on Twitter is because suppression of this discussion was near total.
> Now what we read is that the virus was man made and the WIV was doing secret military work for the PLA, with the idea being to create a virus and vaccine simultaneously so the attacker controls who survives i.e. a bioweapon. That's the same as what the BBC called a false claim and conspiracy theory.
In a tabloid, recycling claims that have already quite questionable without any additional evidence (ie. the Mojiang mine stuff is not nearly as cut-and-dry as this article makes it out to be).
The Times isn't a tabloid either, jesus christ. Have you ever actually lived in the UK? It feels like you're just making things up to try and muddy the waters here, in the hope of making all this stuff go away.
To assist: The Times was founded in the 1700s and was the first newspaper in the world to use that name, a name that has been copied many times due to its reputation. In 2004 they switched to a compact paper form of the size used by tabloid papers, but that didn't affect the content or style and didn't make it a "tabloid paper" in the sense you're trying to use here.
Was it really taboo? I didn’t get this feeling where I live (admittedly not the USA). It’s just that it became clear pretty quickly that the investigation was going nowhere as China wasn’t going to honestly cooperate. That didn’t leave much to discuss.
For the official response, it was to be expected. The UN does plenty of compromises with authoritarian countries for the sake of being able to operate. It would have been surprising to see the WHO press China.
Jon Stewart was the first to call this into question publicly, which was brave at the time. Watch Colbert push back on Stewart’s line of reasoning: https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8
Honestly questioning anything covid-related was taboo at that time, including the vaccines, masks, ivermectin, etc. Please note, I am not making any claims about these things, other than it was taboo to question anything “official sources” stated.
Lots of people thinking you are an idiot does not mean you can't say it. I saw plenty of people saying things about vaccines, masks, ivermectin.
But yes, when hundreds of thousands of people are dying globally, I think patience for those things wears thin in a personal capacity.
But I would seriously question whether something is really 'taboo' if ~half of the country is watching media outlets where they ask these questions regularly, which is the case in the domestic US.
It is exactly the attitude you are still exhibiting that was the problem. “We’re in a crisis, no time to ask questions. Fall in line or you’re a far right conspiracy theorist/idiot.”
It is a legitimate opinion and not censorious that if you are going and telling people to take ivermectin for covid you are legitimately harming people.
Having that attitude is not "a problem", having opinions on dumb stuff people say is not censorious.
This new interpretation that freedom of speech means freedom from having people criticize you is novel.
> He doesn't fall into the left or right dichotomy.
I am a fan of Jon Stewart, but the fact that I have never heard someone on the right-wing claim that Jon Stewart is non-partisan while I hear it frequently from mainstream democrats should tell you something about the veracity of the claim.
He's never run for political office or anything like that so most of what we can glean is from his shows, which for sure attack the right more than the left but don't advance their own policy proposals.
The most overt stuff he has done politically is the late 2000s rally with Colbert which was very middle-of-the-road decorum-focused Democrat in tone, I don't think there's a lot of evidence for him being "hard left". If I had to guess, I think he'd be more in line with the Obama / Biden type camp than Sanders.
Very sorry about your Dad, but you have no evidence vaccination was related to his ALS. Hundred of millions of people were vaccinated in short period of time, and there is obviously a group of people who were always going to develop ALS within that time frame. Given the large n of the first group, overlap was inevitable. Temporal proximity doesn't establish causation when there's an overlap.
It is possible you are right and it was just a coincidence - but it is also possible that the vaccine was the trigger for ALS to develop. We don’t have enough evidence yet to confidently say
Based on all available evidence, it is probable I am right. We have no evidence of increased rate of incidence of ALS, which you would expect to see given how many people were vaccinated.
You linked to a single case report. It does not establish any type of causal link at all. That single person was most likely going to develop ALS at the time whether he had been vaccinated or not.
> We have no evidence of increased rate of incidence of ALS, which you would expect to see given how many people were vaccinated.
What data do we have on the incidence of ALS between 2019 and now?
Even pre-2019, there appears to be a slight increase in incidence of ALS over time, although not statistically significant [0] – which could mean the increase isn't real, but could also mean it is real but studies thus far have lacked the statistical power to confirm it.
So, if it is true that ALS incidence is increasing anyway, the question then must be–has the rate of increase accelerated since 2019? I'm not aware of any published data on that topic. Furthermore, there is also some evidence that COVID-19 infection can be a trigger for onset of ALS in susceptible individuals, [1] so even if there is some pandemic-associated acceleration in incidence increase, it may be difficult to disentangle to what extent it is due to infection versus vaccination.
> You linked to a single case report. It does not establish any type of causal link at all.
A case report – even a single one – is evidence. Only weak evidence, but even weak evidence is evidence. Certainly not strong enough to establish anything - but a single case report is enough to increase the epistemic probability, even if only by a little bit. Establish is more systematic review of multiple high quality studies territory, which is at the opposite end of the strength of evidence spectrum from case reports.
I think we are likely talking about something with a rather small effect size. With a sufficiently small effect size, something can be entirely real but also impossible in practice to statistically demonstrate.
As the other commenter said, I'd like to add an example because I think it's worth it adding this to the discussion given that you are angry about a death in your family.
Just imagine, there are - to pick an example - new cancer cases (or anything really) every single day. Therefore, the vaccination will coincide with the diagnosis perfectly for a pretty large number of people.
But as should be obvious, that is not because of the vaccine. For there to be no diseases exactly following vaccinations there would have to be a stop of all disease for a week or two for anyone getting vaccinated. Now that would be an outlier.
If you want to see if a disease cold be because of vaccination you would at the very least have to show that among those getting vaccinated statistically significantly more people get the disease than normal.
Just remember, normal life and normal things - including all kinds of diseases - go on all the time. Vaccinations take place in this context, not "outside the environment" (to use a quote from a famous sketch).
What are you saying? It has nothing to do with what I wrote. Please remain constructive - and respond to what I actually wrote, not to imagined slights. Thank you. And the "hand wave" is what you are doing - read what I wrote, it is normal to have many such things coincide in timing. Timing alone is not proof of anything, since it is completely normal and expected with a constant stream of new disease. You have to show a (statistically) significant rise in numbers - as a first step, that alone still would not be proof either. Others have pointed that out too.
Given the scale of both normal disease occurrence and of the vaccination campaign, it is expected and normal for a very large number of people to get sick after vaccination - simply due to chance.
If you read into that purely statistical statement a claim of vaccinations not having any side effects than you need to read what I wrote, not what you think I wrote. One has nothing to do with the other, and I'm only addressing the one thing. Of course you can have problems due to vaccination, but you can not "hand-wave" any single random event into that category, especially when it's obvious you fail to even consider the large amount of "normally sick" cases that are bound to happen simply by random chance of them occurring all the time either way.
The fun thing about claims about Hacker News opinion is that you can actually fact check it on Algolia. [0]
Most of it is either people saying that we can't know whether the lab leak is true or not and people who are claiming persecution on "Reddit/the Media/etc" because "they" are keeping the lab leak theory from being discussed.
> I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory
It was politicized.
At the same time, it was a "theory" based on little to no evidence early on. Rather than let scientists work through and figure things out, people were shouting it through the roof as if it was confirmed. Basically, it was an answer in search of evidence, rather than using the evidence to direct the answer.
There was a lot of pushback against that sort of talk, especially here.
Couple that with a divisive administration here in the US that caused confusion and chaos, there was little to no hope for it being anything other than taboo.
In the beginning of the pandemic, I fell for Fauci's lies. I saw him as a pillar of truth and science against the backdrop of Trump's idiocracy. So, I can empathize with those who still think he's a good person, they have not been exposed to all the evidence of how he orchestrated lies and smears to cover up the lab leak theory, and how he funded the gain of function research that likely lead to the pandemic (even though gain of function was outlawed in the US). He even lied about it under oath. And why has nothing happened? Because big pharma is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic and they are the biggest advertisers on corporate mainstream media. The whole thing is sick and twisted. And I know this sound like a conspiracy nut to those who have not looked into this deeply, but it is what it is.
It’s ridiculous that your comment has been downvoted. This is a great article. Those who defend Fauci and the establishment narrative do so with a religious fervor. No amount of reasoning or logic seems to get through to them.
Matthew Yglesias wrote a whole thing on how the idea initially became politicized in the US. The short of it was that when Trump was downplaying the danger of human-to-human transmission early on because his friend Xi told him that wasn't happening Senator Tom Cotton started talking up the idea that the Chinese government might be lying about because it escaped from a government lab. But then there was a game of telephone and it turned into the idea it was a Chinese bioweapon.
Jim Geraghty of National Review has written a lot about this, as he pretty early advocated for the possibility of the lab leak. Because he writes for a right-leaning publication though, there are lots of ad hominem attacks thrown his way that are pretty baseless.
Not from the US, but i don't see how it was ever a "taboo". The general gist was "we don't know" or "unlikely". However, what i did see on Social Media, was a bunch of nutjobs pushing their nonsense about "deep state", "population control" and so on.
I believe that these 'nutjobs' were promoted to the forefront of popular discussion for purposes of sensationalism and to discredit more careful dissenting voices by association.
In many ways, it makes sense to try to get the entire population on board with a single narrative, in order to have a coherent response to an emerging situation. On the other hand, it opens the doors to corruption by leaving those in charge with no credible voices willing to criticize or draw attention to the holes in that narrative.
>I believe that these 'nutjobs' were promoted to the forefront of popular discussion for purposes of sensationalism and to discredit more careful dissenting voices by association.
That just sounds like an unfounded conspiracy theory.
More likely is that extreme statements on social media generate more reactions, which is more engagement, so they get more traction in feeds because that is what social media is optimised to do, irrespective of what the content is.
And these nutjobs routinely invoked the term "lab leak", which organically led to an association in most people's minds between the term "lab leak" and crazy conspiracy theories.
These nutjobs were all over Twitter, Facebook & Co. Usually platforms that reward engagement with more visibility. The people who were pushing this narrative were relying heavily on a mix of gullible people, fake accounts and bots. Many accounts being merely a few weeks or up to a month old. This is essentially the reason i left Twitter in the first place. I'm observing the conspiracy milieu for over 10 years now. This tactic isn't new, they already used this in 2009 to push comments on certain websites to their side. Back then, it was mostly manual work. Also, thanks to social media, they don't need help from trashy news agencies to be seen.
> I believe that these 'nutjobs' were promoted to the forefront of popular discussion for purposes of sensationalism and to discredit more careful dissenting voices by association.
It's interesting that this social media promoting action was so coordinated that it is happening on this very thread in Hacker News.
The problem was that almost nobody was saying the source 'might' have been a lab leak - they were saying that the source was 'definitely' a lab leak and then usually adding that Fauci sponsored gain of function research into viruses and then into conspiracy theory land.
Most of us were open to the idea of a lab leak but the disinformation was so hard around the topic that sensible people had to push back and the loser was the legitimate 'theory' that a lab leak was a possible source.
No no no. The problem was that talking about a lab leak in any way was considered deplorable. So much so that the only people who still dared to speak about the lab leak in public were outcasts, lunatics, and people who didn't have a reputation that could be destroyed.
In times of crisis a large fraction of the population will latch on to authoritarianism. This is universally true, and there are many historical and contemporary examples. The world is messy and complicated and people desperately want simple answers. People will cheer on the collapse of hard-won civil rights and the advent of military rule if they believe it's necessary for the greater good. Thankfully it didn't come to this during covid. But not because there was an invisible line in the sand that nobody dared to cross. People were not held in check by their principles, covid just didn't "necessitate" an even harsher response.
This is why many people are so upset about the censorship surrounding the lab leak theory. They got a rude awakening. One, that fundamental rights like free speech can curbed very effectively, and two, that it's the citizenry itself that demands their rights be taken away. It's scary to be suddenly robbed of naïve notions about rights and process and governance.
You guys can actually just search old Hacker News discussions and also look at old media reporting to see that this narrative of "media suppression" is just blatantly false.
GP is absolutely correct - people reacted negatively (and remind that someone not liking what you say does not mean you are censored) because people (including now in this thread) are saying that there is 'definite proof of lab leak' when that is just bull?
The best book I've read on the topic of the lab leak theory is "Viral" by Alina Chan & Matt Ridley. It goes into the nitty-gritty scientific detail as well, but also covers some of the things you mentioned too.
Another good book is Dark Winter by epidemiologist Raina MacIntyre. Touches on COVID origin and similarity of the inital market excuse to the Sverdlovsk lab leak coverup by Soviets
I HN-submitted the parent article originally. By way of demonstrating topic familiarity, I have a track record of submitting origns content to HN. (It usually founders or gets user-flagged). I didn't guess that this one would garner quite so much attention.
>I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory
IMO part of it was a lot of self-preservation instinct of biomedical research scientists, operating in the context of a calcified monopsony of a national funding organization. In other words, any biomedical scientist's legitimizing LLH too stridently would not necesssrily have healthy to one's grant fundng prospects.
Caveating that 'none of the content of this comment necessarily reflects the opinion of BiosafetyNow', I also serve on BiosafetyNow's leadership team. BN was formed in the wake of the wagon-circling & gaslighting of the lab leak hyp.
https://biosafetynow.org/
(Richard Ebright, mentioned elsewhere in the comments, is also on the leadership team. More familiar names are Colin Butler, & Milton Leitenberg).
We recently released a petition to ban ePPP research (i.e. 'GoF')
It just passed 1000 signatures yesterday. I would love for concerned visitors to these comments to add their name.
Despite that we advocate a simple ban today, our org has in its mission statement to see a moratorium on ePPP research until sufficent biosafety measures are put in place whereupon it becomes (highly) regulated ePPP researxh instead of out-and-out banned. The definition of 'sufficient' is not left to scientists alone to determine, and I contribute toward representing the non-scientist public to advocate for what should be considered sufficient biosafety measures.(Pro-tip: More representation of the non-scientist public remains needed here :) )
The nonprofit still operates on a shoestring budget, so if readers were inclined to help with that, it would be most appreciated. (Can also find origins censorship-themed merchandise which some folks might find fun :) )
If you'd like to volunteer your talents - software and otherwise - to BiosafetyNow's advocacy effort, it would be similarly most welcome.
I think the problem is that moderates think you can have democracy without having to participate in politics which can sometimes become costly. Extremists already accepted the costs and reap the rewards (control, influnce, power) because people won't stand up to them.
There seems to be a tendency for many to believe that academics, researchers, and physicians are above personal and political bias, particularly when it comes to their fields. But as far as I can tell, it largely stemmed from the fact that some of the earliest insinuations around the origins came from fringe right-wing talking heads, and particularly people surrounding Donald Trump, immediately caused many in positions of power, either in academic or media circles, to shut down such notions as racism, xenophobic, anti-intellectual conspiracy theories not based on facts. This despite those same people were largely coming to that conclusion in an anti-intellectual manner also not based on facts.
There was a brief window at the beginning where it would have mattered to know the origin of the virus. Intervention at a wet market or in a wuhan lab could have happened. However, this theory was circulated and promoted to inspire hatred and distrust of many authority figures. Authorities who put significant resources forward to save lives. Even today we're still seeing thousands die from what may very well be a conspiracy theory.
Both can be true: It originated in a lab, and the distrust that inspired is still killing many. It's dangerous to talk about it because it's still killing people.
If we found out 100% the lab theory is false, you'd still have millions who want it to be true and who want to be enraged. You have millions who want to put themselves at risk. There are larger problems with society than this virus. That's what this conspiracy uncovered.
Uh if it came from the lab we could still today have a shot at finding out what went wrong and then use that to improve safety at other labs worldwide. Assuming relevant records weren’t destroyed, anyway. If we can tell that they were destroyed, then USA et al should immediately stop supporting Chinese virology research in any way and pressure them to close the facilities via sanctions etc. In order to find out either of these things, we need an investigation. This all seems pretty straightforwardly true, and it totally drowns out any other second order concerns IMO.
We're too far removed from the time and place to accurately determine what happened. Even if we had first-hand witnesses or documentation, the disinformation 'aura' around the whole thing makes it impossible to get the honest truth out. There's no chain of custody for evidence that you, yourself would trust. That's what I mean that at this point it doesn't matter what the reality was, the damage is still compounding from it. The absolute worst thing out of the last 3 years is the terrible messaging from authority figures to unify around public safety. To say 1 thing and impress upon everyone the legitimacy of the danger, without distracting from that message and leveling conspiracies. From an objective historical point of view we want to know what happened, but no one will be able to confirm the legitimacy of that now.
It's still killing people. I directly vaccinated thousands in Los Angeles, I had several family members die, and 1 of my aunts - an RN - is getting reinstated after 2 years because she was fired for telling people "the jab will kill you". This was after she tried to convince my other aunt - another RN - that she should not get the vaccine while being in a risk category.
Never have we seen disinformation used to harm so many. It's too dangerous to talk about, and if we found the truth no one could corroborate it or convince others of it. It is done, millions are dead.
As a sidelong thought, I'm convinced in this information age that there is no truth. The truth is anything you want it to be if you can inspire a viral cult around a contrarian thought. I'm sorry if I just sound so jaded.
I still remember assisting a woman who /wanted/ the vaccine while her husband screamed at us outside the tape line with officers nearby - screaming about how the government was trying to kill black Americans and citing events like Tuskegee. We earned that, and I still see the fear in his eyes when we swabbed her arm.
You might want to look into what disinformation you were personally subjected to that brought you to your own perspective. People who aired their own personal vaccine adverse event experiences were maligned, shamed and cancelled. What makes you think you have the correct information on vaccine adverse events?
I personally know 3 people who have had life altering negative effects due to the vaccine, including myself. You no doubt think that is a lie or a statistical anomaly. What you've missed is that it is ridiculously hard to register an adverse event, due to procedural process, and the negative bias of medical practitioners such as yourself who are unwilling to attribute an event to a recent vaccine, or blame it on the virus itself (without any symptoms of course).
The 'Trusted News Initiative' is one mans life-saving purveyor of truth, and another mans very obvious propaganda network.
I would encourage you to look at an Israeli study "Survey of reported symptoms after a third vaccination Of Pfizer against 19-COVID".
4% of men experienced chest pain after vaccination (page 16)
7% of women experienced chest pain after vaccination (page 16)
A survey based approach is more likely to get better statical results IMO because it removes the laborious reporting procedure as well as medical practitioner bias.
I'm fed up of self-righteous do-gooders who think they have an exclusive view of 'the truth'. I wouldn't care so much about it were it not for the negative effect those do-gooder's actions can have on other people's health, as it did in my own case.
Also, the team lead I worked with for 3 months was 1 of the 100,000 or so that saw adverse effects. Last day of our deployment in LA county, he received the vaccine in preparation to go home. He was in the hospital for 2 weeks because fluid started to pool in the sac that contains your heart. He nearly died before they could get that under control. He went home for a month and then went back out again on another deployment.
I think this goes to the "is 1 life more important than 100,000" argument. The vaccine saved millions and we are barely celebrating that fact. Even if you say "well there are long-COVID effects" -> the alternative is death. The alternative is nothing happens to you and you become a vehicle for someone else's death. Unless you were planing to isolate for the rest of your life, you became an inherent risk to others for a virus that was spreading too fast.
My great uncle was put into an old folks home to sequester with the others in that risk category, and 1 of the nurses spread it among the staff. 13 people died. Disinformation convinced reckless people that there's reasons to not get the vaccine, and then they went out and did reckless things because they doubted the legitimacy of the danger. People who walked into hospitals without masks, who spit at others taking their own precautions, people who violently attacked service staff in supermarkets because they felt the whole thing was an attack on their livelihood and freedom.
I remember being in Marana, AZ the week that Pfizer was cleared for kids 12 and up. We were stationed outside a school, and for the last 2 days we had watched teachers going in and out of the facility back and forth to their cars to get random things. Every time 1 walked past we asked if they had questions for us, if they wanted to know about the vaccine, and that they could talk to us without committing to anything. Surely these educators were interested in protecting their students? AZ was a strange place. They were more concerned with recounting the election for the 2nd time. The state gov was actively hostile and tried to keep us out so the county we were working within took them to court citing a clause in their constitution that they could request assistance if it was a health concern. We moved from that site a day later, we had vaccinated just 27 people.
To put things in perspective, in LA we did nearly a million vaccinations. In AZ we reached just under 13,000 over 3 months.
I am acknowledging that we were both surrounded by propaganda/disinformation, and both affected by it. You will not find the objective truth to any of this 3 years later, so far from Wuhan, and with this much political influence behind investigating it.
The deaths were right in front of them, but the party told them to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. The org I work for was actually responsible for vaccinating my own grandparents. My grandpa still caught covid and seemed like he was coming out of it. Then he got pneumonia as a complication from it and died that July 4th weekend I got home.
I'm glad I have a monopoly on truth as a self-righteous, do-gooder it really helped me preserve my family tree . I hope in posterity people understand how amazing it was to see the world support this humanitarian mission, for all its faults. May you live a long life.
I'm not sure where you got the 1 in 100,000 from. As I mentioned in the previous post, an Israeli Ministry of Health survey of 2000 people found that 4% of men and 7% of females experienced chest pain after a booster shot.
Additionally a Pfizer report dated Aug 2022 showed the company observed 1.6 million adverse events covering nearly every organ system:
This company has been fined billions for their shady practices. Not sure why anyone would trust their data. Plenty of information available about how dodgy their initial trials were conducted and reported for anyone who cares to look.
Huge incentives to hospitals for reporting any deaths as covid (around $30k per person if I remember correctly), and huge disincentives to report adverse events (threat of revoking medical license, difficult reporting procedure, biased doctors etc). As a result, the stats are skewed extremely in favor of vaccination.
Add into the mix lockdowns causing huge collateral damage. While you pat yourself on the back for protecting your family, it is entirely plausible that the vaccination campaign along with the lockdowns caused more deaths than they actually saved. Reports from John's Hopkins and the Fraser Institute found this to be true.
Good intentions are well and good, and I'm glad that you're proud of your achievements. Next time I hope there's more humility amongst proponents of mRNA vaccines and lockdowns, and that they consider the possibility that they could be wrong, and their actions may actually cause more damage than if they did nothing at all. Humility was missing.
Why did, an educated RN, believe this? And why was she trying to spread the idea? Is this RN also (generally) an anti-vaxxer? I'm not sure if it is the location of so many media outlets, but Los Angeles County (and Orange County) does seem to be the epicenter of anti-vaxxer culture in the US.
> 1 of my aunts - an RN - is getting reinstated after 2 years because she was fired for telling people "the jab will kill you". This was after she tried to convince my other aunt - another RN - that she should not get the vaccine while being in a risk category
It's crazy how many nurses don't trust science and news reports. Here in Belgium it was a big problem too. So many of them seem to be very cynical about and have serious distrust in big pharma while they themselves administer drugs that make (most) patients better. How they can just overlook that and keep their jobs is beyond me (no offense meant to your family)
They do get to see how the sausage is made. Are you sure that the reality around patient drug experiences is so positive? Is it more likely that such nurses are completely delusional, or that they have information or experience that you or I don’t? Keep in mind that everyone in medicine has a financial and career incentive which points towards aligning with and advocating for the system they are so invested in, so there would be a tendency for this point of view to be under expressed, if anything.
Not sure what sausage they see being made. They're trained to evaluate patients, carry out emergency procedures, take measurements and administer medicine as instructed by a doctor. It's a hell of a job, hard, stressful, thankless and underpaid. But that's irrelevant.
> Are you sure that the reality around patient drug experiences is so positive?
Well yes, by definition. Generally, and simply put, a drug can't enter the market unless it's better than the current standard treatment.
Hundred years ago a simple infection could kill you, or result in a limb being amputated sans anesthesia. The difference between then and now is the work of research and pharma companies.
I worked in pharma for a few years on clinical trial systems. What I learned of the dishonesty in the industry made me decide to only take anything they produce if it’s an extreme emergency and I have no other choice. The FDA is a revolving door of pharma execs with financial incentives so they can’t be trusted either.
> I worked in pharma for a few years on clinical trial systems
Same here. What did you see that didn't make you lose trust?
What I saw if anything was the rigorous work required to get a drug on the market. FDA inspections were feared because if you've made mistakes in your trial everything risks going to the trash.
> to only take anything they produce if it’s an extreme emergency
How high would you toddler's fever or painful your tooth ache have to be for it to be an extreme emergency, before you administer some paracetamol? What about anxiety? What about illnesses your ageing parents may have? There's a very large gap between comfort and near-death.
Lying was absolutely commonplace about anything, software validation testing included. Our company 'managed' their relationships with the FDA so we didn't have to fear them, so bribery basically. When I worked there, it was less than a decade since all the rules regarding bribing doctors had changed, so there was still a lot of that going on. All expenses paid trip to Hawaii for doctors and PI's for a week to optionally attend your 2 hour talk on a new drug, that kind of thing. Golf was a big carrot that was used. This was in an area that was a pharma co. hub geographically, so most people had worked at the other companies and all knew each other as well the the FDA people and this helped to grease the wheels. Our company did most of their trials in India, where it's apparently legal to do things to humans with drugs and therapies you can't get away with in the states, so we really leaned into that. Might not have been legal, but it's what was happening anyway.
I don't force my own preferences on my family. I'd not go to a doctor complaining of pain again - they're in over-correction mode over killing so many people with opiates that you can't get help with that for the time being. I'd never personally take any of the medication peddled for anxiety - too many of those meds don't have long term studies or the AE's were swept under the rug for approval.
>However, this theory was circulated and promoted to inspire hatred and distrust of many authority figures.
Don't forget that some people just want to know the truth, and don't like being lied to. I don't think it's a good principle that whenever the truth is used as an excuse for bad things (insofar as "distrust of authority figures" is even a bad thing), it is justified to lie.
>Even today we're still seeing thousands die from what may very well be a conspiracy theory.
And how many past and future deaths can be attributed to the lack of trust caused by trying to cover up the truth? Many more, I'd wager. There's a crucial irony in trying to maintain trust by hiding the truth. Many people just can't or don't want to understand this.
> There was a brief window at the beginning where it would have mattered to know the origin of the virus.
This is such a fatalistic and cynical way of looking at the world. It mattered then -- as it matters now -- because we can act on information. Everything that happened after that "window" was not overdetermined.
To me fair the folk dying today are tangential to the origin story.
I'm not sure the origin story mattered a whole lot along the way, other than being a useful political distraction. I don't think it informed personal or medical behaviour.
Of course discussions around vaccines, masks, social distancing etc did have a huge impact on personal behaviours, so those are far more impactful both than and in hindsight.
The different strategies applied, the messaging, the outcomes, from New Zealand to Sweden and everything in-between will be disected by anthropogists for decades to come.
The actual origin is a red-herring, it really doesn't matter. Viruses come from lots of places. We can't prevent that. What we can control is our response. As long as our first question is "who to blame" our outcomes will be similar, or worse, the next time around.
Absolutely. Perhaps it was grown in a lab, perhaps it was released, or perhaps it escaped. All happened before, all will happen again.
Given that I don't think we -can- control human behavior, there are good labs, there are bad labs, etc, I think the ability to -respond- I paramount. While the origin is interesting in an historical way, lessons from the response will be more useful going forwards.
We need to respond in a way that is independent of origin. That will ultimately lead to better outcomes, and incidentally reduce the risk of bio-terrorism.
[Aside - if it was lab grown I don't think it was released on purpose (it wouldn't have been released locally). Which means some sort of failure in the safety protocols, which likely means human error. General discussion on that topic I useless except for a tiny sliver of people doing that work. I'm not sure discussing it on social media really achieves anything. ]
Well if it did come from a lab, there is the obvious question of whether the type of research that lab was doing had benefits commensurate with the risks, and also whether the middle of a dense city is the best place to conduct that kind of research.
The origin story matters because we had the authoritarian bureaucrats who helped create the virus AND LIED ABOUT IT running the virus response in this country and they took all of their new powers and produced one of the highest per capita death rates from the virus in a so-called advanced country.
You don't say which country is "this country" - but from the context I'm assuming China? And sure if it was created in a lab then that opens the door to lots of political questions.
But the source of the virus remains less important to the folk that died from it. They're no less dead because it escaped from a lab than if it came from a wet market.
Responses in every country were different. Which ones were the right ones are valuable lessons moving forward, and anthropologists will be studying that data for decades.
I think OP meant the US. Anthony Fauci was one of the main individuals in the government responsible for sponsoring gain of function research, including funding some of it at the Wuhan institute. It was incredibly odd that a virologist with no public health background (and a very questionable role in past HIV policy) effectively commandeered the CDC's job here, but it makes sense if you think about it as a " cover my ass" move from him.
The origin 100% does matter. It demonstrates that some kinds of virus research pose an existential threat to humanity if not handled properly. That seems relevant, especially when simultaneously Covid demonstrated that such research is also really important to do. Like the origin actually does pose some serious, non-trivial ethical questions about disease research that the public absolutely has a right and obligation to participate in.
>> some kinds of virus research pose an existential threat to humanity if not handled properly.
I mean, I'm not trying to be a dick, but ... duh. This has been the primary plot point of a zillion movies for forever.
Oh, and accidents at labs happen more often than you'd like[1].
And the frequency seems to be going up, not down.
>> the public absolutely has a right and obligation to participate in.
I'm sure the "public" (by which I assume you mean random people on social media) are not qualified in the slightest to participate in this discussion. If you feel that you have an "obligation" to weigh in, then by all means feel free. No-one is stopping you. It's completely possible to have discussions on lab safety without having to point fingers at a specific incident.
As you point out there's a really strong tension at play here - it's very important to be able to do virus research. Working with viruses is dangerous. It can be made as safe as possible, but it's still dangerous. There is a very fine line here, which is best walked by people highly qualified and working in this space. Given they are the most likely first victims of any accident, I'm sure they are highly motivated to be safe.
Perhaps it matters so that we can hold those responsible to account to reduce the chances of it happening again? Wouldn't you want to know if a rogue group had a gain-of-function project rejected by DARPA and then secretly moved it to China to avoid oversight and then that project caused a pandemic?
And perhaps the people that did that shouldn't be in charge of how to handle the pandemic and shouldn't be in charge of determining how the pandemic started?
Matters to me. If it was made in a lab I want to know how it will prevented next time and if it can’t be prevented I want that type of research stopped.
It's very arrogant to take your understanding of the benefit of the truth, finding it lacking, and then assuming that this is same negligible benefit the truth will have for everyone else.
With some of these controversial topics, there always seem to be people who prefer disinformation over truth for the reason that the general public can't be trusted with the truth since it might motivate them to do bad things.
The question then is, does it apply to yourself, or are you special? What knowledge motivates you to do bad things? Do you wish that was hidden from you so you weren't such a harmful person?
There are folks who were speaking out early despite harsh criticism. RFK JR (who happens to be running for president on the democratic ticket in the US) has another book coming out soon that will likely be very thoroughly researched around this topic.
> We’re building a community of doctors and patients affected by medical tyranny. Our goal is to rebuild the sacred trust between the medical community and those they serve.
> Our goal is to rebuild the sacred trust between the medical community and those they serve.
Sure but looking at just one of the GHP people (Molly Rutherford) shows a Twitter timeline promoting conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers, Epoch Times, anti-LGBTQ, etc. It doesn't engender much confidence in her reliability as a narrator.
> I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory. How researchers who discussed it were shunned (...) and in some cases had their posts banned from Social Media.
I would like exactly the same about anti-vaxxers but excluding those people who are against any other vax. Anti-covid-vaxxers in other words. Covid is not a pox and all the strict measures were happened just because our digital world just allows such a blatant declassification of freedom people. Compare the peak number of deaths from Covid with the average deaths from alcohol and you realize that this is just a normal year. BTW mass deaths from non-violent reasons is not something totally bad in obviously overpopulated world. And I do not see much discussions about who sets the borders to our government's behavior in such a situations.
The good news is that everything else the US government suppressed really was outrageous lies that are only supported by racists, like the mRNA vaccines being completely ineffective and often fatal.
How did it become taboo to discuss biological sex, race, the effects of migration on society and other topics in democratic, liberal countries?
How did it become taboo to discuss the pros and cons of a specific vaccine or the complex geopolitical background of the Russo-Ukrainian war?
An ad-hoc coalition of political parties, NGOs, activists and journalists has hijacked public discourse, are manufacturing an official narrative and selling it as as unassailable truth while bullying and mobbing any dissenters.
When did people start conflating people disagreeing vehemently with them and censorship/suppression?
I've been called a moron for saying that I don't think the evidence is fully there yet for lab leak, does that make me a victim of a counter-censorship?
I can't speak for "people", but I can speak for myself as the grandparent comment, and I take no issue with disagreement. It's how the disagreement is expressed. Using words like "conspiracy theory" and "disinformation" are the keywords to justify censorship/suppression (see Hunter Biden laptop. See lab-leak theory).
No excuse for the Hunter Biden thing, but lab-leak theory has been covered quite extensively in the media & discussed all over the place since the start and hard for me to really see ivermectin stuff in any light other than conspiracy theory, you are theorizing that there is some very effective drug against Covid that others are 'conspiring' to prevent you from having.
No, that right there is how I remind you that if you want your hypothesis to be taken seriously you need proofs or at least a very compelling argument. There was neither.
Nonsense. There were plenty of arguments from the very beginning for the lab leak theory. The alternative "bat cave" hypothesis had plenty of implausiblies (e.g. huge distance) and was far from being "proven".
There is, however, quite a bit of precedent for bat coronaviruses eventually infecting humans, most likely through zoonotic spillover via an intermediate species (e.g. HCoV-NL63, HCoV-229E, SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, SADS-CoV), and thanks to humans shipping animals all over the globe, huge distances aren't necessarily a deal breaker.
The difference between previous spillovers like SARS1 and MERS was these viruses rapidly mutated as they adapted towards humans allowing for the identification of the intermediate species within months. SARS2 on the other hand was already pre-adapted towards humans, had almost no adaptive mutations and no intermediate host has been found. And guess what when a virus crosses into humans the virus does not suddenly go extinct in the intermediate species, it continues to circulate, for example we still to this day find camels infected with MERS. But SARS2 we just can't seem to find this progenitor virus circulating.. . . very strange isn't it?
As far as I'm aware, we still do not know the first intermediate species of SARS-1 (cf Wikipedia: "Infected palm civets at the market were traced to farms where no infected animals were found. It is unknown whether the virus was originally introduced to the market by civets, humans, or another animal." and "Phylogenetic analysis of these viruses indicated a high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets.") So no, it hasn't been months, but 20 years...
The palm civet found infected in the market was infected with a virus 99.9% similar but unique to palm civets. The issue here is they have found animals infected with an ancestral strain at a market that's a 29-nucleotide difference. SARS2 none of this has been found, which stands in stark contrast to all previous coronavirus spillovers.
And the fact the virus not only was extremely well adapted towards humans, but also is more adapted towards human's than other species. Nothing about SARS-2 is typical.
I mean I get it, lots of people's careers/reputations are on the line so it's hard to accept, but it is vital we do.
The same kind of arguments as for the bat cave theory.
Anyway, your argument here seems circular: Academics must not take the lab leak theory seriously, because only non-academics discuss it, because academics don't take the lab leak theory seriously.
I didn't say non-academic, I explicitly said "crazy people".
The lab theory will be taken seriously when there will be serious evidences. If they exist they will come out. Believing in conspiracies because enough people believe in them without any actual, tangible, verifiable evidence is worrying.
The option "intensive farming+poverty+open market full of crap+random bats, all in extremely unsanitary conditions" seems a way better theory, needing way less evidence (also hard to acquire in this case), if you compare it to the random lab doing experiments full of incompetent researchers.
Well it's not my hypothesis, it's a hypothesis of which the Director of National Intelligence in the United States during the pandemic, the executive head of our intelligence community, stated to congress under oath:
"My informed assessment, as a person with as much or more access than anyone to our government’s intelligence during the initial year of the virus outbreak and pandemic onset, has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense."
Say what you will about politics and intentions, my statement holds that joining the group that calls people "crazy" and "conspiracy losers" is not a form of healthy discussion, in fact, is a form of propaganda itself.
Not all of the early lab-leak voices were racist. Some people went for that conclusion because of the proximity of the outbreak to the Wuhan lab which was researching that sort of virus. They may have been a little quick to do so but they guessed right. It wasn't that big of a leap, and it wasn't anti-Chinese to think that, just sort of obvious. I know that because I felt that way at the time. And then there were the Tucker Carlsons who called it the "Chinese coronavirus" and all that, and you're probably right about them.
> Not all of the early lab-leak voices were racist.
That sort of statement is always true, but that doesn't negate the real dangers of the Right using it for political advantage. Their general approach is to drive a wedge between different groups in the US (and abroad), pit them against each other, and have them take out their rage on each other as a means to distract them from the real issues going on. It was clear at the time that the Trump administration wasn't after "the truth" but more after a way to keep people occupied - and if that puts a lot of people in danger, they don't really care.
And before anyone tries to defend the Right, take a look at these basekless attacks on drag queens. Meanwhile we have school shootings happening all the time and they don't do anything about it. It's a big shame because the a large portion of the USA isn't about trying to make things better - they just want to rage and cause damage towards others.
It's not about what you believe, it's WHY do you believe it.
It's better to start with logic, reason, and scientific evidence - not with guesses, fear, or conspiracy theories.
Sometimes the conspiracy theories are true!! The US government DID test mind control and psychadelic drugs on people. They DID forcibly sterilize thousands of african americans. But was 9/11 an inside job? Doesn't seem like it.
Don't forget, most of the same people screaming Lab Leak were later screaming Horse Worm Medicine.
>Don't forget, most of the same people screaming Lab Leak were later screaming Horse Worm Medicine.
So what? You just said we should only look at "logic, reason, and scientific evidence". What some of the same people are screaming shouldn't be a factor at all, by your own reasoning.
At the beginning they were screaming Lab Leak, and the rest of us looked at the evidence and said "Well, yes, that's certainly suspicious and should be investigated. But we don't have evidence for it yet, so the reasonable thing to do would be to wait and see." And the Lab Leakers screamed "NO, it was CHINA, don't you see? We need to put tariffs on them!". And we said "uh huh. OK. Yes, your certainty that it's China doesn't make it more logical."
And then later, when new evidence came in we said "Huh. OK. Well that's interesting. That's definitely more likely now. OK"
Anytime anyone starts talking about left or right in a scientific discussion I instantly discount the rest of their view, because we aren't talking about science anymore. Nothing is gained from making this discussion part of that asinine tribal tug of war.
You ignore the tribal tug of war at your own peril.
You become a useful idiot to those that would manipulate science for their own needs.
In a broader sense, when one side wants to make change, and one doesn't, the "centrist" position benefits the side that doesn't want to make progress.
The scientific reality is that at this point in the pandemic cycle, the best evidence now suggests credibility to the lab leak theory. In 2020 it did not.
What the heck are you writing about, this was discussed in all mainstream media I ever cared to look at, since almost beginning of lockdowns. Maybe you watch some strange subset of those?
Sure, the overall narrative was that this is just an unproven theory and nothing more, but it was out there, people were discussing probabilities of some lab employees error who went to nearby wet market afterwards.
I am not saying this didn't happen in scientific community, I don't follow them closely enough to claim that. I recall few cases in Europe where paranoid scientists were claiming this, on top of quite a few other crank theories about various topics, also ie pushing hard for high doses of Ivermectin, dismissing all vaccinations etc. Understandably, with just throwing around various claims without backing them up with facts, they were not received well in community.
Leaving aside the question of where and how the virus emerged, it's interesting to note that the lab was nigh useless during the pandemic, despite its main specialty was investigating Coronaviruses! It looks like a lot of dangerous research went on, and even if nothing bad happened because of that research, nothing was gained. A lot of risk for nothing.
Yes, the whole virus hunting grift that Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance and PREDICT tout has been exposed as ineffective. Now they are doubling down with further funding and blanket denials that it could have come from a lab accident. They never mention the nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. And that happens to be where WIV sampled.
I'd like for high risk biological research to be done under the same security arrangements as nuclear weapons research. Covid and influenza have together killed several orders of magnitude more humans in the last 150 years than nuclear weapons/accidents have. Thus GoF research presents a potential human cost much higher than nuclear weapons, and should be treated as such.
If that makes it "too expensive and slow" then so be it. Perhaps there are some things humans should not be doing.
Well, historically, you know, nuclear weapons research involved a lot of cavalier scientists doing dangerous things with limited knowledge, and of course in the early days, there was plenty of above-ground range testing; is that something you want included as well?
If my information is correct, I believe that nearly all nuclear testing these days is 100% simulation on supercomputers, which is as safe as safe can be, as long as you can trust supercomputer simulations to render the correct answer to those trusting researchers.
They're not implying anything. They're nearly making the observation that the supposed reason this lab existed was to research dangeours viruses like covid, and yet the lab itself did nothing to help during the pandemic.
> yet the lab itself did nothing to help during the pandemic.
Which people in this thread are somehow believing as truth instead of the bald-faced propaganda it is.
Do you actually think a virus research lab in the epicentre of an outbreak would not be put to use?
From Wikipedia:
> As the virus spread worldwide, the institute continued its investigation. In February 2020, a team led by Shi Zhengli at the institute were the first to identify, analyze and name the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), upload it to public databases for scientists around the world to understand,[28][29][30] and publish papers in Nature.[31] On 19 February 2020, the lab released a letter on its website describing how they successfully obtained the whole virus genome.[32]
Gene sequencing is table stakes with modern tech, and many countries did that during the pandemic. We don't need a BSL-4 level lab in the middle of a large city to do a gene sequence. It happened that they published early what many other labs would have done (and did do). On the other hand, the vaccines and effective cures had nothing to do with their work. The benefit/risk ratio seems very poor here.
Afaik they weren't even applying BSL4 security to their coronavirus research. On top of that, before the outbreak, the Pasteur institute, who was incidentally supposed to be a research partner but was kept at arms' length, raised an alarm on their apparent general lack of safety compliance.
That and the fact that the Chinese dicatorship blocking any inquiry into the matter are enough to put the blame on that lab until proven otherwise.
> It looks like a lot of dangerous research went on, and even if nothing bad happened because of that research, nothing was gained. A lot of risk for nothing.
Your previous comment is clearly incorrect as shown by the parent, something is a lot more than nothing.
You really missed the whole point of their post didn't you? If we are going to allow a BSL-4 lab to exist and introduce the risk of possible leaks or other problems, we need to get something in return. That "something" needs to be more than what other lower security labs can already do. It is fascinating that a lab which was supposedly researching coronavirsuses for so long (and which may have led to the outbreak, but regardless) was unable to do anything that other labs could not.
HN should limit the rate of comments per user per post. This user is seriously worked up to mute this discussion and spams in every comment thread. Edit: this user wrote 26 out of 88 comments here.
HN already has a rate limit. You get the message "You're posting too fast" when you exceed it. Though I think it's also tied to karma and might not trigger when all those comments get upvoted. And if you try to downvote them all, you'll run into the protections against mass-downvoting. Tuning the feedback loops to encourage good discussions while damping flamewars is a difficult problem.
Once you have some post history, I’m pretty sure the harsh rate limit, the one that would stop someone from posting in every comment thread, is only triggered manually by the mods if you’re a prick (personal experience).
The basic new account rate limit and the one you get from getting downvote quickly are too weak to stop what they are complaining about.
No it is not an ad hominem attack to say that your argument is childish and stupid. You're not even having a debate. You're just spamming the forum with drivel.
We will know, eventually, hopefully. I think it really matters. To better prevent future pandemics and to establish frameworks for restitution. And it definitely matters for future economic reparations.
If negligence is the cause of a multi-million death, multi-trillion dollar response it needs to be corrected to prevent future similar errors.
> Witnesses are said to have told the US investigation that Zhou fell from the roof of the Wuhan institute, although this has not been verified.
This guy who published a suspiciously early patent on a covid 19 vaccine fell off a roof three months later?
That’s kind of buried in the article a bit but was this claim been made anywhere else?
Also, the section on activity at the lab at the time of the outbreak does not mention analysis of private app data.
IIRC, one of the early discredited reports suggesting lab origin had relied, in-part, on commercially available app data. The kind of adware built into “free” apps that violate user privacy.
This data supposedly showed clear activity supporting a temporary shutdown of the Wuhan lab.
This information always seemed the easiest to latch on to. Not to prove origin but at least offer an important fact for a pattern.
US military bases have had their locations and perimeters out on the public web thanks to fitness apps.
Was the WIV associated app data not real? If it was, why isn’t it included in this article?
The article relates a study “by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid.”
How would this be more compelling than raw app data showing movement of employees or security workers in and around WIV?
>This guy who published a suspiciously early patent on a covid 19 vaccine fell off a roof three months later?
>That’s kind of buried in the article a bit but was this claim been made anywhere else?
As someone who's followed the debate closely, (with the submission history to demostrate that), I can tell you that the parent article is the first time the assertion that Zhou fell from the roof has ever been made in tbe public-facing side of the debate.
I haven't checked the "publicly available references" but many who inssist on a natural cause read about the bat theory in the first few months and then haven't updated & aren't willing to update their models.
If you find any faults that can really change the results in the analysis Rootclaim made, I would be interested.
> If you find any faults that can really change the results in the analysis Rootclaim made, I would be interested.
This is an interesting way to analyze the problem but the set of criteria and weights applied at each step are made up.
The flaw is that you can use this form of analysis to reach any conclusion you want.
For example, the "Already well adapted" section -- a "2x" factor for lab escape. We wouldn't even be thinking about this virus if it wasn't well adapted to spread among humans. So that's baked into the ground and isn't a factor of anything.
Then take "Furin cleavage" -- a whopping 8x factor for lab escape relative to zoonotic. This is the same thing as already well adapted, so now we've got a combined 16x for something that should be 1x.
The weight for "Chimera" -- another whopping 8x for lab escape relative to zoonotic -- seems really high for something that is found both in nature and in labs that merely "seems less likely to combine in nature". We should probably be arguing about whether this is 1.5x or 2x.
The real conclusion is we don't know. The Chinese probably do, but it would be a very closely guarded secret and obviously they would never admit to a lab leak. I lot of people hate ambiguity and want an answer, but in this case it doesn't seem that we are going to get one.
> it would be a very closely guarded secret and obviously they would never admit to a lab leak
A complicating factor is that some (much?) of the funding came from the US. Which means admitting to a leak is against the interest of not only Chinese but also the US government which would have a hell of a time explaining to taxpayers how pandemic was engineered on their money doing research banned in the US. (Though I don't think US government played any part in resisting the research tbh, CCP probably did all that at their accord.)
I think all in all we shouldn't give up, and even if we don't find the actual data I don't see the world can be okay without big fat follow up over not some lab making a mistake (humans make those) but all obstruction of research into the origins of what could have been an extinction level event if the virus was a bit better engineered, whether it came from Chinese communist party or US scientists scared for grant money.
Community / site for collective truth-seeking. Possibly integrated with Metaculus.
One can submit new pieces of evidene which would be commentable (in threads), votable, and programmable (to toggle / affect of other submitted evidence threads).
Users can adjust the weights, vote on them (to generate a certain consensus / prediction), and even toggle of pieces of evidence manually.
The site automatically gives the probabilities for different scearions. I don't have an instant vision on how "all" possible scenarios would be chosen.
It's intended for any one user to evaluate ther priors and see how they stack up all together. like that your idea woukd aggregate & have comments & a voting mechanism,
resistance to manipulation can probably come from things like more substantial evidence + personal reputation or identity confirmation.
By the way, why do people weigh zoonotic spillover so high relatively to lab leak accident? There were lab leaks before even in Beijing, eg. of the original SARS when it was researched. That SARS kills faster so it didn't get to infect too many people... And that's only what's documented, considering it's China there could've been any number of other times.
Intentional leak chance is low but accidental leak is so likely it's surprising this pandemic didn't happen before considering security practies that were known and raised questions before the pandemic. But everyone magically forgets about it. All because some US scientists wanted grant money too much and so laughed everyone who disagrees out of the room.
Regardless of the merits of the lab leak theory, David Martin is a NWO-level conspiracy theorist who thinks that Pfizer colluded with Bill Gates and the US government and infected the whole world with a virus, on purpose, just to push their vaccine on people. The conference that you allude to has nothing to do with the European union. It was organized by two equally nutty far right EU-politicians in one of the parliament's public rooms to give a false legitimacy to their "conference" and mislead people to think that it was an official event.
He seems to have worked on projects that are questionable in importance / authenticity but likely to have made profits. Claiming that the video filmed in EU was from an "official EU conference" would be uniformed or mispresenting him, indeed. But I think it's worth watching; Phizer's patent application and other claims he made are interesting and haven't been repeated elsewhere (from my perspective).
I remember when this was first released, everyone clowned on it (including me) for a few reasons the biggest one being the classic problem with these sorts of Bayesian analyses. That being, the individual weights per piece of evidence are pretty arbitrary.
Meanwhile, it seems quite likely to have produced the correct results so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That Rootclaim analysis seems sloppy as hell. From the "Show More" of the outbreak location section:
>Thus, the ratio of zoonotic:bioweapon:zoonotic collection:modified lab escape is 2:5:100:50, or a reduction of a zoonotic origin by 50x, a bioweapon origin by 20x, and a lab escape by 0.5x.
Those aren't the same ratio.
>To account for the possibility that there is a yet unidentified reason why Wuhan is a more likely location for a zoonotic outbreak, these numbers are
generously
adjusted to a reduction of a zoonotic origin by 20x and a bioweapon origin by 15x, with lab escape remaining at 0.5x.
But what they actually apply is a reduction of a zoonotic origin by 20x and a bioweapon origin by 15x, with zoonotic collection at 2x. Which isn't the result of applying that adjustment to either of the original ratios, so apparently they've just applied the lab escape factor to wrong category
> But why do you think it is important to prove a lab leak?
Perhaps because it is slightly interesting what caused the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu? Because millions of people died? Because knowing the cause could perhaps prevent something similar happen again? Perhaps prevent millions of deaths?
You can't in one comment complain about investigations using "made up priors" and then in another complain that we are investigating something which could actually provide a measured prior.
Could! But hasn't... Otherwise yes good points. I don't see how they measure all the rest of the probabilities and the article seems to be designed to settle arguments among dumb people or something? It is not even remotely scientific.
> I think the whole premise that arbitrary priors and dreaming up probabilities and then washing them all together isn't applicable to a unicorn type event.
Now I believe you said it. Maybe not exactly "made up priors" so pardon me for the misquote. But I'd be interested to see if you can make a distinction.
> You infect the mice, wait a week or so, and then recover the virus from the sickest mice. Then you repeat.
From The Hardware Hacker (2017) by "bunnie" Huang:
> So, a single base-pair change--simply flipping two bits--might be all you'd need to turn the H1N1 swine flu virus into a deadlier variant... for just over $1,000.
> [Influenza] packs a deadly punch in 3.2 KB... and we [still] haven't eradicated it. Could influenza do hacks like the one I just described on its own already? The short answer is yes.
> ... on average, every copy of an influenza virus has one random mutation.
> [H1N1] was probably just a couple of mutations away from being a bigger health problem.
> ... novel H1N1 acquired a mix of RNA snippets that gave it high transmission rates and made it something humans weren't innately immune to. That's the perfect storm for a pandemic.
> If there were a computer analogy to this RNA-shuffling model, [random relinking of virus "files" at runtime]... would also proliferate a diverse set of viruses in the wild...
Fortunately for swine flu at least,
> ... a patient [had] a novel antibody... to confer immunity to all 16 subtypes of influenza A.
Against Covid, research by Dr. Weismann and Dr. Karikó led to the development of the mRNA vaccine:
It's going to take a long time before the mainstream is ready to think critically about the COVID narratives, but it's good to see first steps toward the recovery of rationality.
But there's still a lot to cover:
- Lockdowns did little to prevent the spread of COVID and lead to increased deaths by other causes, egregious violation of people's fundamental rights, massively destruction of the economy, and many people's mental health.
- Cloth masks were pointless security theatre
- The vast majority of people except the very elderly and obese were in very little danger
- The vaccines never prevented transmission
- The vaccines only offered very limited protection for a brief period
- The rate of side effects (including serious side effects up to and including death) is a lot higher than anyone wants to admit.
- To most segments of the population, the danger of death by vaccine side effects is greater than the danger of death by COVID-19
I'm hoping in a decade or so, we'll get towards something approaching a "sorry, you were right", like we did with the Iraq war, but there's still a long way to go.
Your positions, if these are all yours, are quite maximalist in one direction, and in some cases I have read pretty credible studies that contradict you. So, you may not get your Iraq moment.
Agreed. His first position on lockdowns is a GBD talking point that is strongly opposed by Sweden vs Norway through mid-2021 (the end of major vaccine rollout) when they had different positions on lockdown but shared many other characteristics. Sweden had 10x more deaths during that time period, about 1200 extra deaths per million people. It also completely ignores the morbidity introduced by all the extra cases while focusing on non-COVID morbidity.
That vaccines never did anything to prevent transmission is a pretty ridiculous contention for the initial wave.
That vaccines posed more of a danger to most of the population compared to COVID-19 itself is also ridiculous. The US had the largest vaccination drive in its history in early 2021, peaking at 3.5 million jabs per day in April. Excess death dropped dramatically throughout the rollout and kept falling past mid-2021.
> I have read pretty credible studies that contradict you.
Studies cannot show if something was the right course of action. This isn't something that can be accounted for by some peer-reviewed research paper.
The fact of the matter is, the response to covid was a massive disaster that did far more harm than good. And that is an absolute fact and one that will take a long time for people to swallow. It's hard to realize you literally wasted several years of your life for absolutely nothing at all.
I'm hoping that in a decade or so, people will stop using "vaccines never prevented transmission" as an argument since it has been said at least a billion of times since the beginning, VACCINES PREVENTED SERIOUS ILLNESS. Same thing about the imaginary widespread side-effects or the mask being useless.
Depressing.
Personally I'm more worried about the people that went full retard about covid alternative views and conspiracies, I've lost a few friends to that. Sometime I wonder if you will be able to integrate into society ever again.
It’s depressing that public institutions mishandled this so badly that a huge segment of the population has lost trust in them.
I can agree that the messaging I got was that the vaccine was meant to prevent serious illness. Regardless, the absurd policies, suppression of information and discussion on vaccine side effects was unforgivable.
People went full retard because the institutions meant to provide them with good information instead treated them like children and suppressed detailed debate. The only alternative was to go online and risk the lunacy that is internet research, so people did so.
Now more people are anti-vaxers than ever before, and not just for mRNA vaccines but old-school shots like measles.
At a minimum many institutions need change of leadership after this fiasco, and maybe complete reform of others.
Yeah, the handling was not great but sadly I'm not really sure if the population was ready for detailed debate, considering that a good chunk of it ended up misunderstanding most of the official notices and falling for the most stupid conspiracy theories.
We need to improve education, by A LOT. And it's everyone responsibility.
the issue is that the conversation is so polarized and religious its literally impossible to discuss any of these issues. the poster you are responding to states some things which are reasonable and others which are complete nonsense. Its like people cant help themselves once picking a side to just wholesale accept every position all the way to "covid isnt real" on one end and "no one should ever leave their house again" on the other end.
The initial batch of vaccines were explicitly marketed as having a 95% effectiveness against transmission for the original strain. This was the entire basis of the herd immunity narrative and it was true for about 3 months until delta happened and the medical community did an egregiously bad job of communicating that.
Cloth masks are objectively useless for personal protection.
> as having a 95% effectiveness against transmission for the original strain.
95% reduction of serious illness. The objective of the mass vaccination was having as much people as possible survive the pandemic. Herd immunity was just noise. There were a lot of noise and nonsense.
> Cloth masks are objectively useless for personal protection.
Proper masks are effective as measured multiple times, tons of statistics on it.
Notice how it switches between SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19? That's because they're very specifically saying it prevents sickness, and not making any claims about infection/transmission. That came months later, per your links, from media and politicians who either didn't understand or were just straight lying. The 95% they're claiming came straight from the press release which was only about sickness, not infection.
It's pretty amazing just how hard this got memory-holed.
Of course it was tested for preventing infection. It was tested for that as well as efficacy against severe disease:
"Efficacy against laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 (with an onset of >= 7 days after receipt of the second dose) and against severe COVID-19.. was assessed among the participants 12 years of age or older."
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2110345
You seem to be conflating the vaccine having efficacy against infection and whether a vaccinated individual who still catches COVID-19 (since protection against infection is obviously not 100%) can transmit it. The efficacy against original COVID-19 strain infection was high (91.3% for the Pfizer vaccine).
Your first link speaks to the situation of a breakthrough infection being further transmitted. Since it wasn't clear HOW MUCH it curbed infection (under non-ideal/trial conditions), quarantines and caution were reasonable.
Here's a chart that showed the original test results across a number of vaccines. The efficacy vs infection dropped quite a bit with variants though the efficacy vs severe disease holds up better:
Do you know why it's "laboratory-confirmed"? Because they didn't test anyone until after symptoms showed.
Your confusion here is exactly what I'm talking about. The press release didn't conflate SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) with COVID-19 (the disease, as defined by a combination of symptoms and the virus). The line you quoted is measuring people who got sick, filtering out those who got sick due to a different virus, it's not measuring people who were infected. They didn't test all participants, so they couldn't make any claims against infection.
Edit:
> and whether a vaccinated individual who still catches COVID-19 (since protection against infection is obviously not 100%) can transmit it.
Getting infected does not mean you caught COVID-19, it means you were infected with SARS-CoV-2. You didn't get COVID-19 if you didn't get sick. Treating the two terms as the same thing is a media conflation people have just accepted, and an annoyance I have to explain every time this comes up because Pfizer was using the correct definitions in that press release.
Yes, you are correct that I should’ve said symptomatic infection (or COVID-19) because they were only trying to power the study for what they needed to clear EUA and not measuring ability to block transmission. The second paper I linked made the same mistake in its table header.
A lot of people were extremely confused during the pandemic and that's why they couldn't differentiate between actual verifiable information being shared and some random newscaster saying, wrongly, that vaccines prevented infection. A few years later they don't even know what is true anymore.
> The 95% they're claiming came straight from the press release which was only about sickness, not infection.
Yep, I repeated this so many times that toward the end I started just insulting people for not knowing.
Actually I was not sure which kind of masks you meant so I pointed out that real masks worked, but yes, obviously cotton/silk/lines/whatever masks without any kind of filter are useless.
Don't post random "he said this, he said that" links please, there has been 0 doubt in my mind that since the release of the vaccines the only effect they had was to reduce the probability of serious illness, as repeated multiple times above.
> or are just gaslighting me as covidians have a tendency to do.
Not exactly sure how you got confused by the term "cloth masks" but ok. I also dont care about what was going on in your mind. Im just providing you evidence that they marketed the vaccines as being effective against transmission and any attempt to claim that was never the case is simply gaslighting.
> I'm hoping that in a decade or so, people will stop using "vaccines never prevented transmission" as an argument since it has been said at least a billion of times since the beginning, VACCINES PREVENTED SERIOUS ILLNESS.
No. They said vaccines prevent transmission. Over and over.
You may have forgotten what was said at the time, but we won't:
It's the reason I was prevented from entering the US until just a couple of weeks ago. It's the reason why my mother-in-law lost her job as a nurse. People who refused this medical treatment, were treated as dangerous because officials claimed that we presented a transmission hazard.
This was a lie, which you are further compounding with more lies.
I don't forget anything. As I can't forget all the times that I had to explain, since the beginning, that the only statistics available where about reducing to 0 the risk of serious illness. Don't try to change history, please.
And don't link me some random idiot's tweet as proof, we are better than this.
Just stop now and accept reality, it's a good thing that they got rid of your mother in law, I wonder in how much more pseudo science she believes in.
Where I live, people that refused the vaccine were treated as utter idiots but still welcome in hospitals, most of the famous local covid denier died there too.
> And don't link me some random idiot's tweet as proof, we are better than this.
Watch the video clip in the tweet. It shows a montage of officials and talking heads claiming that the COVID vaccines would prevent you from getting COVID and transmitting it.
> Just stop now and accept reality, it's a good thing that they got rid of your mother in law, I wonder in how much more pseudo science she believes in.
No it isn't. The NHS now has chronic shortage of nurses.
If there were a problem with pseudoscience, then they should have fired her for that, not some vague proxy.
You're rather proving my point. So many people are just not ready to have a rational conversation about these narratives. It's all just tribalism and dogma, and we will have to wait years for people like you to calm down to the point where you are able to have reasonably conversations on these topics again.
Why? Because it's not an attractive profession nowadays. Not for the few hundreds of deniers that were fired.
> You're rather proving my point. So many people are just not ready to have a rational conversation about these narratives. It's all just tribalism and dogma, and we will have to wait years for people like you to calm down to the point where you are able to have reasonably conversations on these topics again.
I haven't seen any rational or unique point in everything you have written, only spitting the usual covid deniers nonsense.
You know what my real fear is? The fear that people that have this kind of opinions regarding the pandemic will apply the same reasoning to the next one or to the next crisis. I have a different opinion of preppers now.
If so, please admit that you were wrong when you made this comment:
> I'm hoping that in a decade or so, people will stop using "vaccines never prevented transmission" as an argument since it has been said at least a billion of times since the beginning, VACCINES PREVENTED SERIOUS ILLNESS.
My montage showed you (if you had watched it), many talking heads and officials at the time accusing the unvaccinated of increasing transmission.
The rest of your remarks about "covid deniers" are irrelevant to the point.
So many of you people have become so emotionally invested in the false narratives that you have believed, that you can't cope with any evidence that threatens your narrative even slightly.
At least we can talk about the "lab leak theory" now. This was the original point I made: it will take years for people to climb down these positions they have taken, but at least we are making small steps in the right direction.
Man, you are talking about yourself, you literally started this subthread with the basic set of round of the mill covid contrarians BS that have 0 ground in reality and survive only thanks to the emotional attachment of people like you.
When asked for evidence you post the usual cherrypicked random stuff that aligns with what you believe (the only valid sources).
My recommendation is to just stop with this imaginary fight for the truth, when everyone is moving on and no one even cares anymore about these creative reinterpretations of reality. You lost any credibility with the first message of this chain, too much BS. Free yourself.
Wow, there're a lot to parse here, and it looks like you're coming at this from an "I've already decided" and "axe to grind" angle.
> - Lockdowns did little to prevent the spread of COVID...
<citation needed>
> - Cloth masks were pointless security theatre
<citation needed> - and most rational people (and countries) immediately switched to N95 masks as soon as supply chains could support the demand. That said, I'd bet that even less-proven masks would have some lesser but still positive impact.
> - The vast majority of people except the very elderly and obese were in very little danger
...except there are plenty of examples of fit, young people having life-altering acute and/or longer-term symptoms. On a population-level, you're right that the numbers are small(er), but I'd argue that each individual case to the contrary is a disaster for the indiviudal involved.
As Stalin said: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.”
You appear to be looking at the statistics; I was happy to accept changes to my lifestyle to diminish risk of harm to individuals.
> - The vaccines never prevented transmission
That's a straw-man argument - that's not the primary purpose of a vaccine.
> - The vaccines only offered very limited protection for a brief period
Nah. Vaccines offered significant protection against severe disease for a period of months (which itself is a factor of how the human body function). With widespread vaccination, the world was able to 'get on top of' the pandemic, and its effects of healthcare over-utilisation.
> - The rate of side effects (including serious side effects up to and including death) is a lot higher than anyone wants to admit.
<citation needed>
> - To most segments of the population, the danger of death by vaccine side effects is greater than the danger of death by COVID-19
> With widespread vaccination, the world was able to 'get on top of' the pandemic
The world never "got on top of" COVID. It never had any significant control over it. Omicron came along, and spread through the population with mild symptoms, leading to widespread natural immunity.
> its effects of healthcare over-utilisation.
That never happened anywhere in the world.
>> - The rate of side effects (including serious side effects up to and including death) is a lot higher than anyone wants to admit.
In randomized control trials of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines here in the UK, we now know that the risk of serious adverse effects from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated i.e. a ~1 in 800 chance of serious adverse effects.
>> - To most segments of the population, the danger of death by vaccine side effects is greater than the danger of death by COVID-19
> <citation needed>
The UK government has now published its estimate of the number of people needed to vaccinate to prevent a COVID-19 hospitalisation:
It might also just be because most of those claims are wrong. Unless you use 'prevent' to mean 'fully eliminate', every single one of those claims is wrong except for potentially the last one, which I am not sure of because I haven't researched.
The sourcing and style will raise eyebrows. The revelations are valuable, and clear enough to be verifiable through one channel or another.
And given that we are at 7 days remaining before the 90-day WIV intel disclosure deadline, old journo hands expect that info leaks are more likely to happen.
After a quick read of the article, it presents no new data, and is replete with innuendo pointing at the Wuhan lab, rather than any direct evidence.
Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any ill-intent. Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab. Further, genetic clocks show that RaTG13 and SARSCoV2 diverged almost 50 years ago.
The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab [0]. Furthermore, several different isolates were found in the market, indicating that SARSCoV2 had been circulating before the epidemic took off.
Actually, the closest natural viruses to covid were sent to Wuhan for study. I mean, that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built to do right?
The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming frankly. And it doesn't require any malice. No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.
Gain of function research is real, scientists intentionally make viruses which could start a pandemic. They do this for the purposes of knowledge and preparedness for the inevitable natural spillover events that will happen. It isn't nefarious.
But it is risky, and there many people now and before who thought it was a practice that should be curtailed because of the risk.
> No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.
To add to this, most countries have turned away from infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control. The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself. It is like trying to cut off your enemy's leg by cutting off your own arm. It ends up kinda being like MAD except you're also the aggressor. The threat of a infectious weapon is not from other nations, but from a terrorist organization (which of course dramatically reduces risk). Not to say that this can't happen, but it is well known enough that were a contagious disease to get out, it would be more likely accidental. It would also be odd to release the disease into your own community first. I'm not saying it was or wasn't a lab leak or bioweapon, but if we're discussing weapon vs accident, there's good reason to believe a weapon is unlikely. Gain of research has significant value outside weapons and this also shows you why the weapon arguments against GoF aren't of high concern to those that are close to the work. Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances).
It is quite clear that they did amplification research as they’ve planned. And had inserted the furin site into the coronavirus . And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread. This had caused a lot of damage, in particular the deaths, economical damage, long-covid damages, mental illnesses and diminished IQ (covid brain fog). There’ve been some positive sides: diminished air travel, diminished carbon emissions, transition to work from home, more pedestrian zones in the cities, mRNA vaccine technology. But the negative side from the pandemic is still overwhelming.
Arguably this lab should be sued out of existence for damages.
> And had inserted the furin site into the coronavirus
A claim was made about that, but it’s far from settled. One could argue it has been debunked. See “SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was not engineered”: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119
> And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread.
That’s speculation. Irresponsible speculation, in fact, which has been pushed by people who should have known better. But they pushed it for jingoistic reasons.
> Arguably this lab should be sued out of existence for damages.
That’s an emotional reaction which you’re not examining rationally. If you remove the confirmation bias you’re applying to the evidence, there’s simply no substantial basis for the conclusions you’re reaching.
Engineered is a very careful word choice. None of the properties they call out are things you would not expect from research involving gain of function by evolutionary means.
There is a lab that had planned and did the research. This is well documented. The virus spread had started nearby. There is nothing else that you need to know.
There is evidence that the Chinese authorities were suppressing information about the leak (information about that virus had leaked accidentally, by an ophthalmologist that saw cases spreading in his hospital).
Yes, it is not clear exactly, how the furin site got there. Was it a long series of mutations and a recombination with another virus in a lab animal? Was it spliced? We’ll never know, unless the scientists responsible would decide to tell how it had happened.
But I’m not particularly emotional about that virus. If you read the above, you’ll see that I see positive and negative after effects. Viruses and mistakes happen.
But it’d be a good idea to make a point and get rid of that lab. Failures like that should not be rewarded with continual existence.
The citizens of China have suffered, but that doesn't really matter to the CCP. Covid has been great for strengthening their central government and all of the technology tools of suppression.
> [...] infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control.
You mean contagious, not infectious. Biological weapons which are infectious but not particularly contagious, such as anthrax, are much easier to control and have been the focus of most biological weapons research. Biological weapons are banned and aren't, used not because they don't work, but because other things work better and with less political fallout.
And FWIW, very contagious pathogens could be used as weapons for strategic effect if you had reason to believe they would hurt your economy less than your enemy's. For instance, if you believe your authoritarian government will allow you to flatten the curve but liberal governments will have a disordered response that precludes this. I'm not saying they did it, but the possibility isn't patently absurd.
> To add to this, most countries have turned away from infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control.
Most countries ( small to mid-tier ) lack the expertise, will or reason for it. But most major countries are working on biological weapons. If you think the US, Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, etc aren't running bio-weapons labs, then you are being too trusting at best or too naive at worst. Or maybe I'm just being too cynical.
> The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself.
Never prevented intentional disease warfare throughout history. What makes you think leaders aren't willing to hurt their own countries to hurt their enemies? More importantly, what makes you think these countries will develope bio-weapons, but not vaccines for them?
> The threat of a infectious weapon is not from other nations, but from a terrorist organization (which of course dramatically reduces risk).
Every major terrorist organization is or was created, funded and controlled by major nations.
> Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances).
And yet, all weapons labs in history were created by big/rich countries. You so desperately want a world without bio-weapons that you are blinded to the contradictions in your argument.
> But most major countries are working on biological weapons. If you think the US, Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, etc aren't running bio-weapons labs, then you are being too trusting at best or too naive at worst. Or maybe I'm just being too cynical.
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch... covers this in some detail (it's geared towards chemical weapons, but biological weapons are the same boat). In short, chemical and biological weapons just aren't useful. For any platform you put it on, conventional explosives will do more damage. For major militaries, there's no point in using them, which is why the "big" military powers have all signed up to the anti-chemical weapons and anti-biological weapons treaties, but not the anti-nuclear or anti-cluster munitions or anti-landmines, etc.
> For major militaries, there's no point in using them, which is why the "big" military powers have all signed up to the anti-chemical weapons and anti-biological weapons treaties
If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them? Makes one wonder? Is there are treaty to ban feathers as weapons? The fact that there is an anti-biological weapons treaty is proof enough that countries are working on biological weapons, just like the anti-nuclear weapons treaty is proof that countries are working on nukes.
The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs. Take it from someone who has read too many silly blogs and watch too many silly youtube videos.
Also, pretty much every treaty ( international and intranational ) has been broken. Some even say treaties are meant or created to be broken.
> If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them?
Serious question, are you surprised governments do things that aren't useful? That they'll focus more on signaling than utility? That's literally 80% of politics: show.
> The fact that there is an anti-biological weapons treaty is proof enough that countries are working on biological weapons, just like the anti-nuclear weapons treaty is proof that countries are working on nukes.
Now that we got the above out of the way, maybe notice that China, Russia, and the US have all signed the Biological Weapons Convention[0] (outlaw bio weapons). All signed during the cold war. Then maybe notice that China, Russia, and the US have NOT signed the ban on the use of nuclear weapons[1].
> The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs
I agree. I mean just the dichotomy of [0] and [1] really tells a lot. You make a good point that governments are difficult to discuss because you can't take anything they do at face value so you have to dig in and think about their actions and what signals they are making.
Your attempts at "gotchas" here are unpersuasive. If the point of treaties is to be broken, why bother signing up to them in the first place? Perhaps more interestingly, why would a country sign up to some treaties banning weapons but not others, if its intent were to use all those weapons?
Yes, countries can break treaties. But there is a real cost to doing so. The point of treaties (especially the anti-war treaties) is essentially to break a prisoner's dilemma: all parties can agree to do something that is mutually beneficial for everybody, but only when no one defects. The first arms control treaty was the Washington Naval Treaty, which was signed when most countries were literally unable to find the resources to keep up with the naval arms race and proposed by the one country that could.
If you read the post I linked (I suspect you did not, as you are only reacting to my comments and not other material within the post), you'll see that there are many other lines of evidence we can use to ascertain the inutility of chemical weapons, not least of which is the lack of its use in conflicts after WWI, even in existential state conflicts like WWII or the Arab-Israel wars.
> If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them?
The same reason why we have laws against murder. The existence of the treaty isn't to keep people from doing something useful (indeed, if you look at which treaties are acceded to, it's the treaties that keep people from doing something useful that don't get the signatories). Instead, it's to signal the unwillingness to use it and to pressure others not to consider its use. And if you know sufficiently few people are willing to use it, then you can avoid spending the money on countermeasures to chemical weapons.
> Your attempts at "gotchas" here are unpersuasive.
It's not gotchas. It's just history and reasoning. Logic. It's persuasive to people who are willing to think. But no amount of reason will convince someone with an agenda.
> If the point of treaties is to be broken, why bother signing up to them in the first place?
As your buddy godelski pointed out, governments do things for optics, political grandstanding, etc. Why did germany and the soviet union sign the nonaggression treaty? Also to appease the naive masses who believe in fairy tales. So that naive people can say nobody is working on chemical or biological weapons since a treaty says so. See, this nonaggression treaty is proof germany and the soviet union will never attack each other. Genius logic.
> The first arms control treaty was the Washington Naval Treaty, which was signed when most countries were literally unable to find the resources to keep up with the naval arms race and proposed by the one country that could.
No. It was proposed by the one country that had isolationist political pressure against naval buildup due to our history and founding fathers warning against standing armies. It was proposed by the one country to kneecap british attempts to enforce navy limits. Also, the Washington Naval Treaty was a complete failure? It set the stage for japan to build more resentment which led to ww2.
> not least of which is the lack of its use in conflicts after WWI, even in existential state conflicts like WWII or the Arab-Israel wars.
Chemical weapons were used in iraq-iran war. In the syrian war just a few years ago.
> The same reason why we have laws against murder.
There are laws against murder because murder exists. People murder. So the treaty against chemical weapons must exist because chemical weapons exist?
It would be great if chemical, biological, etc weapons are never used. But you'd have to be absolutely naive to think that every major nation isn't working on chemical or biological weapons. It's like all the naive people who claimed that government agencies stopped collecting our data after getting caught in the 70s. Of course they didn't stop collecting data. They increased the gathering of data.
I live in a country where biological weapons wiped out a significant portion of the native population. Do you think such a country is working on biological weapons? If one major country is, then so is every major nation around the world.
The real world isn't an utopian fairy tale. No matter how much one wishes it were. But it's a free country. Believe whatever you want.
> Also, the Washington Naval Treaty was a complete failure? It set the stage for japan to build more resentment which led to ww2.
1. Attributing the whole of Japan's imperial ambition to the Washington Naval Treaty is farcical.
2. This chart of battleship displacement by date of construction plainly reveals that the Washington Navy Treaty was a massive success. Yes, treaty-breaking ships were constructed, but you cannot look at this graph and conclude that the treaty did not succeed in substantially disrupting the arms escalation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty#/media...
FWIW, I agree with you that the development and research into chemical and biological weapons never stopped. However it is likely that most countries no longer maintain up-to-date stockpiles of these weapons. Research continues for game theory reasons, but the treaties (and moreover the general public sentiment against such weapons, particularly the sentiment that use of those weapons would constitute the use of "WMDs" to which a nuclear response would be warranted) had the effect of greatly reducing the risk that such weapons would be used en masse. To this point; these sort of weapons have not yet been used in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, despite most late-cold war analysts believing that the Soviet Union would use chemical weapons during their anticipated war with NATO.
> If you think the ... aren't running bio-weapons labs, then you are being too trusting at best or too naive at worst.
No, they are. But that's a bit different. Though I understand the confusion. Gain of function research can be classified as weapons. You got to develop weapons to defend against them. And of course, momentum. Especially in politics, where once funding is given it is hard to take it away, though not hard to reduce. I'm more saying if they would seriously deploy such a weapon and how serious the research is.
> What makes you think leaders aren't willing to hurt their own countries to hurt their enemies?
Some yes, some no. I think most countries have learned that the Russian strategy doesn't lead to great outcomes. Then again, you think Russia would have learned it too. But most countries realize that you can't rule over the dead. But you're right, that I may be too trusting. As far as vaccines, it is hard to keep those secret. Especially if we're talking about a country like China with a billion people, where you have to distribute at least a few hundred million. You don't think a few are going to fall off the truck? There'd be a lot of money for such a situation. Or even just the recipe. I mean vaccines don't confer 100% immunity so it still comes with big costs to yourself. But you're right, Russia keeps doing the Russian strategy. Though this is more easily done in an authoritative country. This is a lot of what jcranmer is pointing to. One more thing to consider, it is hard to invade this region after. You might think the same thing about nuclear but there's a reason they've focused on increasing the explosion and decreasing the radiation. Same reasons.
> Every major terrorist organization is or was created, funded and controlled by major nations.
Not quite true, but if they were, then the above arguments would apply there so that no terrorist organization would get the bio weapons from the big countries. You might want to ask why there haven't been any dirty bombs, despite that this should be easier, especially after the collapse of the USSR where many nuclear materials went missing. They all went somewhere (smaller countries and probably bigger countries too, to keep away from smaller countries), but we'll probably never know the full extent.
> And yet, all weapons labs in history were created by big/rich countries.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. Not all weapons were created in big countries. But weapons like nuclear, bio, and others were from big countries because to have such a program is quite expensive. Currently bioweapons, of the kind we're discussing, are still fairly expensive. This may change as things become cheaper. But regardless, these types of weapons are more attractive to the crazy anarchist who wants to watch the world burn than the angry dictator. They just aren't practical in the modern globalized world.
But there's got to be a logical reason for well over a century of research in the area and not seeing it used in practice. If it were a good weapon, it would have been used.
If some are, then "everyone" has to, especially major powers. Just think about it.
> This is a lot of what jcranmer is pointing to.
I debunked what he wrote.
> the Russian strategy
What's that?
> Though this is more easily done in an authoritative country.
No. It's done more easily in a democracy. An authoritative country never developed nuked and used it on innocent civilians. It was one of those wonderful democracies. Just like a wonderful democracy and our democratic friends overthrew the ukrainian democracy and now another wonderful democracy is invading ukraine. Most of the horror in this world has been done by democracies. Funny how all parties involved in ukraine are democracies...
> Not quite true
No. Absolutely true.
> I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here.
You wrote "Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances)."
And I was pointing out that all "contagion weapons" were created by big/rich countries. I was simply debunking your claim.
> But there's got to be a logical reason for well over a century of research in the area and not seeing it used in practice.
Has it not been used "in practice". Biological weapons have been used since ancient times. Biological weapons have been used more often than nuclear weapons.
The blind and naive were adamant our agencies don't collect data and spy on us. And were absolutely shocked when it was revealed they do. Of course they do. As I said, people who are too naive or too trusting believe otherwise. I guess the third option are state actors or those who brainwashed by the media. Or maybe I'm just too cynical.
I'd link it to you, but you said you don't want to read "silly blogs". So I'm not sure how I can communicate anything to you. I don't feel like it'd help. I think we're done here.
No. It's game theory. It's geopolitics. It's why russia, britain, france and china developed nukes. It's why india and pakistan developed it.
> That's a strong word for what you wrote.
Not strong or weak. Just reality.
> I'd link it to you, but you said you don't want to read "silly blogs".
No. What I actually wrote: "The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs. Take it from someone who has read too many silly blogs and watch too many silly youtube videos."
What do you think "take it from someone who has read too many silly blogs" means? You aren't going to link to anything I don't already know.
As I said, wishing there was no biological weapons is a noble thought. But believing nobody is working on biological weapons is naive. No serious rational intelligent person could believe it. But like I said, maybe life has made me too cynical.
Hey chief, these white men aren't going to take any more of our land. Here's the treaty we signed with them proving that. Hey stalin, germany isn't going to attack us. Look at this non-aggression pact we sign with them.
So do you. But you've got an agenda and a worldview that prevents you from accepting it. Imagine being naive enough to believe that there isn't chemical nor biological weapons in this world. Believe what you want. This discussion is getting pointless and I'll end it here.
> The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming frankly.
There was some indirect and even some more direct evidence of Iraq doing nuclear weapons research in some capacity at some point too, this is incredibly dangerous line to go own without being 250% sure. Indirect evidence simply doesn't cut it.
> No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.
It may not be someone 'credible', but within the current context of the U.S. preparing for what increasingly looks like a direct confrontation with China, it sure suits a lot of neocons in Washington, who seem to always be failing upwards in the ranks despite having lost all credibility over a dozen times in the last decade alone.
Saddam intentionally let the WMD claims be made unchallenged because he wanted Iran to be reluctant to attack while Iraq was too weak to defend itself.
No, it doesnt. All the “indirect evidence” of the lab leak hypothesis could be interpreted multiple other totally reasonable and likely ways, and it would be irresponsible to motivate foreign policy on that “indirect evidence”.
"Reasonable" could be simply truly accidental like someone carried a vial, drops it and then someone gets sick from that?
The point the parent comment is trying to make is all we have is speculation and you can speculate either way. Just make whatever you want up in your head that doesn't include malice.
Oh you're right, i'm supposed to support "not lab leak".
Bats -> humans in the market.
Point remains the same. We're all speculating because I agree with the statement that trying to create foreign policy based on speculation creates so many problems - Iraq war for one (but, being fair, supposedly that was credible).
The fact that we only have speculation is due to yet inability to find a natural source of covid and China's refusal to be a decent member of the world and instead chose to obstruct and hide as much as they could.
But, I'm sure china would admit to the world that their research lab was the fuck up that killed millions of people. It isn't like china would ever try to censor and control information that makes them look bad.
You're complaining to a thread that already knows this. We can complain all we want about lack of transparency and truth.
But, it's from where we stand, not where we want to be. We stand in pure speculation, and cannot create foreign policy based on "we're, like, pretty sure you did it... in our heads!"
This kind of system of policy creation leads to guantanamo bay and the iraq war. We hold people against their will swearing they have information. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. So we resort to torture and have murdered plenty in the name of it. What if they actually don't have the information? Then we're just torturing/murdering innocents.
Is it worth it? Personally I say no. But it won't stop us from parading around the success cases screaming "the ends justify the means".
In my opinion, gain of function is too dangerous with current security measures, and we should consider a moratorium. Lab biocontainment is exceptionally hard.
More specifically there were a few lab escapes of coronaviruses (SARS) in China that Beijing copped to in the early 2000s [1]. It happens to everyone, way more than it should. Yes, including America. [2]
[edit] To be clear, I'm not saying this definitely did or did not happen, I don't know. I'm saying if it came out later that it did, I wouldn't be surprised.
In the mid 1960s, my mom worked in an infectious disease lab. One day, her and her colleagues were tasked with cleaning out a freezer full of samples. Shortly thereafter her and everyone else in the lab got a flu-like illness that did not clear up for many days.
It really makes me wonder how many lab leaks may have happened during this time period when we started collecting and storing samples but we didn't yet have the ability to track diseases like we do today.
Back in 2009 I used to date a girl in Connecticut. She was attending Yale. She was a very nice person but very sloppy. She would always break something or spill something, it was her nature. One day she told me she's running late with school stuff so "meet me at the lab". I came in, got thru security and went to her lab. There she was feeding some 200 mosquitoes sick with malaria, buzzing in a rather small jar, all packed there nicely. This was her assignment for 3 weeks that she had to do twice a day. I could never get over the fact how little security was in place and how, if jar would break, there was absolutely no way to catch them all, in the middle of summer, with all windows wide open. I will never forget this story...
I saw an interview with a virologist, but I don't remember where (somewhere on YouTube). He said that there _is_ a moratorium on gain of function research, but that it's a joke because virology is pretty much about studying gain of function.
Even better: modern gene therapy is done with lentiviruses which were derived from HIV. This is commonly done; thousands of research labs around the world do this as a regular practice. We typically call them lentiviruses, rather than HIV-derived, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lentiviral_vector_in_gene_ther...
Lentiviral vectors are engineered to make them less harmful (and hopefully beneficial) to humans. They're also tested to ensure they're replication-incompetent, so that even if they did turn out to be harmful they couldn't spread from patient to patient.
The gain of function research of concern takes viruses already capable of sickening and killing humans (or their close relatives), and deliberately makes them deadlier and easier to spread among humans. This is a tiny fraction of virology, and has yet to deliver any practical benefit.
There's a legitimate concern that an overbroad ban on gain-of-function research could restrict safe and beneficial activities. The WIV's work was pretty far at the dangerous extreme, though--Ralph Baric's work was already controversial, and the WIV was working with a greater diversity of viruses, at lower BSL.
While many people define gain-of-function in virology as "enhancing existing attributes which would promote virulence", molecular biologists in general are more open to the idea that other functions, such as gene therapy, would also qualify as gain-of-function.
Either way my point was that we actively use a known highly transmissible virus, with some parts removed, under the general assumption that it's safe, and it's been demonstrated to not cause large issues (compared to other problems in gene therapy). I think people should be aware of that and in some sense I am surprised there isn't more attention placed on this practice.
I said "gain of function research of concern", which is vague but seems to have become the standard phrase to convey that narrower sense. There's definitely some grey, but the WIV's work was pretty deep in the black.
I'm reading more about lentiviral vectors now, and not totally comforted to see all the ways the earlier generations could regain replication competence. That still seems much less frightening to me than GOFROC, which is deliberately just one containment failure away from a novel pandemic.
There was a NIH moratorium, but it was lifted in 2017.
I don't agree about the point of virology being just about studying gain of function. There are tons of things you can study in virology without needing to create novel viruses.
> No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus
Half this very thread. "you couldn't mention the lab without being called a racist" and then they proceed to talk about china bioengineering weapons instead of an accidental lab leak.
The constant "the news suppresed this because of trump" is also a pretty loud dogwhistle.
The idea that a lab could have a leak was studied, there were multiple papers on it. The evidence did not add up to much, other than the circumstancial. The zootropic evidence had a bit more weight but still came up with "we might not have enough data to come up with a conclusive answer".
Because scientists said they leaned on that evidence the popular science outlets explained it as "origin is a bat not a lab leak" which should have had more nuance in the headlines but popular science outlets try to summarise hard science into easy to understand articles and they are fairly guilty of clickbait (how many times have we cured cancer, or some physics experiment done something close to a black hole). And between that and a number of bad actors starting conspiracy theories about the lab being a hidden bioweapon lab and China releasing it intentionally the discourse got all sorts of distorted.
The problem is Bioweapon dudes hid behind lab leak concerns and the lack of evidence from a scientific prespeective gave the wet market Patient 0 more visibility. To this day, half this thread is people with conspiracy theories hidding behind the lab leak. Makes a conversation about it almost entirely useless when you engage with someone and a few messages in they say the media is jewish and wanted to destroy the economy with lockdowns to make trump lose (this is a comment on this very thread further up, although i think they have been shadowbanned already)
Half of this very thread is saying that China intentionally released this virus? Let’s grant you that half of this thread is saying that China likely engineered Covid as a weapon (very arguable). Are you unable to distinguish that assertion from the assertion that the engineered weapon was intentionally deployed? I don’t understand why you’re conflating the two.
> Half of this very thread is saying that China intentionally released this virus?
I was being slightly hyperbolic. A good chhunk outright said it, another good group was using plausible deniability, which means if pressed they might say thats not what they meant. Makes separating them quite hard
> Are you unable to distinguish that assertion from the assertion that the engineered weapon was intentionally deployed?
I am not. The issue is not that either. The issue is "The origin of COVID-19".
When it came out two main theories appeared. Either the wet market where it was first noticed, or a lab leak in a lab over an hour away that was studying coronaviruses.
The two were studied by the scientific community, china put a lot of hurdles and the best availeble evidence pointed towards the wetmarket.
While this was happening, a number of conspiracies started, many of which pointed towards China as a bioweapons manufacturer (something that is very illegal). Those theories included that china was not studying viruses but manufacturing them (that is a very key distinction) and the theoreis then spawn over if China leaked it to test it, or infected its own population etc. Theories adjacent to this were heavily repeated by a number of news outlets, mayorly OAN a far right news station. The great smoke screen was that when pressed they could always fall back on "the lab leak theory" which is way more sensible.
Essentially the problem is the lab leak theory meant two very different things. It should have been called the accident leak and the bio weapon theory, but both were called lab leak and people who mean bioweapon hide behind the larger, more defensible lab leak umbrella.
> Actually, the closest natural viruses to covid were sent to Wuhan for study
Please don't "actually" something with an uncited statement without backing it up with any sort of detail. A news article? Anything, honestly.
> that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built to do right?
Really? It's "Wuhan institute of virology". Not "coronaviruses". Right?
I have no specific horse in this race but I feel like I'm losing my mind every time I read any discussion on this subject because there's always folks throwing around random statements as if they're established fact and I feel like at this point, on this specific subject, on this website, we should know better, geez.
> The institute has been an active premier research center for the study of coronaviruses.[6]
> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[17][21]
The evidence is pretty damning, and points to way too much to be coincidental. It's not solid evidence, but that would be impossible to get since China blocked anyone from visiting or doing independent investigations.
My major and Msc are related to microbiology (which is highly related to virology), and I'd estimate it's a 95% chance of having originated from the lab.
I've got a PhD in infectious disease epidemiology who got his start in researching respiratory pathogens and whose work on coronaviruses has been cited 387 times.
I'd both put my estimate at much lower than 95%, and I'd be substantially less confident in it, since my expertise kicks in about two weeks after an initial spillover event occurs.
It is fact that a group that funds research in Wuhan (Eco health alliance) submitted a grant request to DARPA to fund research to engineer a coronavirus which could infect human lungs by inserted a specific cleavage site. Covid has that mutation exactly where the grant proposal planned to insert it. And no viruses in teh wild have been found to have that feature. This grant proposal was submitted in 2018.
For covid to be natural it would have had to mutate in the same way as planned in the grant proposal within 2 years of the grant proposal, and then travel hundreds of miles not infecting anyone on the way until it got to the city where this research was planned to be done.
Did you consider that maybe the reason this proposal was written was because this mutation was the most likely way this kind of virus could mutate to infect humans?
I don’t understand why people keep throwing around all kind of unsubstantiated facts like if they suddenly made things clearer.
The facts are not that complicated. Could the pandemic be linked to an accidental leak from a gain-of-function study at the Wuhan lab? Most certainly. Do we have evidence that it did? No, we don’t. Could it come from somewhere else? Sure, it can. Was there a properly done inquiry with full collaboration from the lab and the host country? Absolutely not, China was extremely uncooperative and did all it could to control the narrative surrounding the pandemic.
From that, I conclude that it’s highly unlikely we will ever learn anything definitive. Therefor, discussing this is pretty much pointless.
Discussing this isn't pointless just because we don't have definitive proof. We need to determine what happened based on what we do know. 7+million people are dead. Gain of function is happening in labs all over the world. Humanity can do something here to reduce risk.
Despite rather intense searching the closest strain to C19 in the wild split ca 50 years ago. Please tell how do you introduce this famous mutation not into any of the commonly found covid viruses but create C19 differing from these.
Who in a right mind (just leaving for a moment how) would do that? As: create a separate strain of coronavirus just to introduce one specific mutation.
It's an appeal to Occam's razor. The most simple explanation of why a novel virus started infecting people in a city with a virology lab is that the written plan to make covid in that lab was executed.
I read this in a non-paywalled source a while ago, but this is all that easily came up in my search now. Maybe you think the title is sufficient to back up my claim, maybe you don't, IDK.
>> No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.
The latter is what the article above is suggesting, that the Wuhan lab was working for the Chinese military to develop a virus for biological warfare research. For example, if you look at the ridiculous hero image of the article, you'll see someone who looks like they might be a Chinese military officer holding a clipboard and wearing a mask, while the Chinese flag's star is surrounded by what look like little stylised coronaviruses.
Why is the gain of function thing always thrown in? This makes the case much harder to prove and seems entirely unnecessary. The family of viruses is already very contagious and potentially dangerous with covid19 hardly being the worst combination of the two properties.
Because the virus was never found in the wild, so it seems likely.
Also because gain of function research is risky as hell with seemingly little benefit. The same lab had requested funds to do it on viruses that were much deadlier.
It doesn't appear that there is a clear zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-1 and MERS either. The case is circumstantial in a similar way to SARS-CoV-2. Yes there are several animal reservoirs that carry similar viruses, but there wasn't a specific one found from which any of the 3 strains came.
Covid has a novel mutation never seen in any natural coronavirus. Further there was a grant proposal from 2018 to insert the identical mutation as found in covid. There was a plan to engineer covid 2ish years before covid existed.
But I'm sure nature evolving this exact mutation coincidentally in a relatively short period after scientist documented their plans to engineer it is an equally likely outcome.
"But what was really notable about this grant proposal was that they proposed to insert cleavage sites, similar to the mystifying furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence, and to insert those into their coronavirus sequences to see if it would make them more infectious. And to many people, when that was exposed, that DARPA grant — and it only got exposed, I believe, last year — that really looked like a kind of smoking gun, which was that the research that was being proposed in the DARPA grant looked like a kind of directional arrow to a SARS-CoV-2-like virus. So that was quite significant."
- https://theintercept.com/2022/05/06/deconstructed-lab-leak-c...
"Farzan was “bothered by the furin site and has a hard time explaining that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely).” On the question of whether the virus had a natural origin or came from some sort of accidental lab release, Farrar reported that Farzan was “70:30” or “60:40” in favor of an “accidental-release” explanation and that “Bob” — an apparent reference to Robert Garry — was also surprised by the presence of a furin cleavage site in this virus. Farrar quoted Bob saying: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. … it’s stunning.”
- https://theintercept.com/2023/01/19/covid-origin-nih-emails/
I'm not qualified to evaluate the claims either, but I'm not convinced the authors are trustworthy. They say:
"Harrison and Sachs (1) allege that scientists at NIH and elsewhere, including myself and colleagues, conspired to suppress theories of a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. This is false. A possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 was discussed in our earlier publications"
But there absolutely was a conspiracy to suppress the lab leak theory. This conspiracy is why the infamous letter published in the lancet that admonished the lab leak theory as a 'conspiracy theory's was retracted by the lancet. Peter daszak was one of the signers of the letter, but it came out he attempted to avoid signing the letter even though he arranged the entire thing. The reason he didn't want to sign it? In his words:
Why might he feel that way? Well for one his name was on the DARPA grant proposal from 2018 to engineer a coronavirus with the same mutation covid has.
Refutation contains what I also noted: "For the ENaC hypothesis to be true, UNC or WIV researchers would have had to possess the direct SARS-CoV-2 progenitor isolated from another animal—not a bat."
COVID-19 is not "some previously known coronavirus strain with furin cleavage site".
There are a number of details about it which are the same as the plans from 2018. I don't think it's reasonable to think the plans of scientists don't get revised as they work. And as soon as the virus starts spreading, even in test mice in the lab, it will start to mutate. So it is entirely possible that what leaks from a lab is a natural mutation off of an engineered virus.
Trying to use difference in details in this case to sow doubt isn't reasonable in my opinion because it's details that are realistically impossible to nail down.
This is an interesting line of thinking. We can have all the evidence imaginable that scientists did a thing that caused a pandemic, but since they were trying to predict the next pandemic you just dismiss the evidence as meaningless.
It seems like the standards applied in this discussion by some are essentially that nothing short of irrefutable proof even qualifies as evidence.
"""However, with analogy to influenza, it was shown many years ago that the simple insertion of a polybasic site into an H3 virus does not result in a high pathogenicity phenotype7 and is likely to only function in the context of a series of other genomic changes provided by a process of natural selection."""
Because if it so happens that gain of function research accidentally caused a global pandemic, we need to know so we can properly evaluate the risk of continuing such research. Which could also be part of the motivation for governments to cover that up. I'm not saying that's necessarily true, but I haven't seen that it's false either, and the way China and other officials and related expecrts have acted, trying to dismiss the lab leak theory as just wild conspiracy theories or politically motivated, makes me suspicious.
There were serious attempts to completely shut the conversation down and prevent investigations into there being a lab leak.
So it would be okay if it was a lab leak where gain of function was used because similar viruses almost caused a pandemic? I doubt the general public would see it that way.
The discussion isn't whether labs need to be secure, or if a lab leak is bad. The discussion is whether it not it's likely that SARS-CoV-19 was a lab leak.
There is a huge difference though between “lab leak” meaning “a wild virus collected and stored at the Wuhan lab escaped”, vs. “biomedical engineers manufactured a super weapon which escaped.” I think the evidence, or at least the plausibility, of the former is excellent. For the latter, it’s poor.
That's not correct. There's evidence of genetic engineering in the genome of the virus. There's a 2018 DARPA DEFUSE proposal from scientists at WIV/UNC/EcoHealth Alliance which essentially predicts what SARS-COV-2 would look like.
The map showing the clustering around the lab is not labelled in the article. It looks like the map from the senate report which used internet search history. I recall that their point in the original report was that there was a cluster of internet searches for flu-like symptoms clustered around the institute, rather than the market.
There is no new direct evidence in the article, simply the weight of existing indirect evidence synthesized together. There does not seem to be another hypothosis for how the virus emerged that has as much indirect evidence pointing towards it?
The main gist of the article is:
* The institute applied for funding for a specific piece of research (inserting a furin cleavage site).
* The institute claims it did not perform the research.
* Covid is what we would expect if somebody did perform that research.
* The research would have been performed at the time and place where covid emerged.
It is not direct evidence, but under a weaker burden of proof (e.g. balance of probabilities) it is fairly convincing.
• WIV added FCS's to coronavirus(es?) exactly as described in DEFUSE, according to a US lab collaborator.
• Zhou Yusen "fell" off the roof of the WIV in May 2020
• WIV was working on a 'closer [than published] unpublished variant'
• Of all caves/mines, only scholarly attempts to access the Mojiang mine made touched off access denial and confiscation of samples from other mines from the authorities. While alluded to in the past, (https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-coronavirus-pandem... ) this is the first time to my awareness that the Mojiang mine has been uniquely & unequivocally associated with the authorities' clamp-down efforts, that too with attribution to Alice C Hughes, PhD
• an item covered that isn't strictly new but is probably unfamiliar to many even so, is:
Of the researchers who the Jan 2021 State Dep Fact Sheet described as having fell sick with 'Covid-like symptoms' in Nov 2019
• they were taken to hospital, desoite being in their 30's and 40's (age)
• one of their relatives died
• they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory
The WaPo journalist Josh Rogin who is known for maintainibg quality confidential sources in DC, had long ago tweeted the above. While some aspects may have been covered in intervening press, this is the first time to my knowledge all of tbese items are asserted explicitly with a quote attributed to one of the anonymous investigators.
---
my take fwiw:
While intriguing, vis-a-vis a seasonal illness null hypothesis, it's never been discussed whether they were unique cases at that time with such symptoms (more likely covid), or if many others both in and out of the WIV had similar symtoms at the time (more likely seasonal illness)
Just updating my above comment that the observations about the sick researchers did actually make it into print in 2021 thx to Ian Birrell in DailyMail:
> Zhou Yusen "fell" off the roof of the WIV in May 2020
I mean, this is a pretty significant and concerning new finding right? Someone associated with the lab researching COVID early on just mysteriously disappearing
in China?
This was news in the summer of 2021 and still seems a concerning (albeit not new) finding as he had reportedly filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine in Feb of 2020 prior to dying in May of 2020.
> It is not direct evidence, but under a weaker burden of proof (e.g. balance of probabilities) it is fairly convincing.
- We have a bunch of evidence of WIV engineering SARS-1-like viruses because they talked about it before the pandemic.
- We have zero evidence of them ever doing experiments on live SARS-2-like virus
- We have zero evidence of the existence of a SARS-2-like progenitor virus
- Before the pandemic they had no reason to be more secretive of any SARS-2-like work than their SARS-1-like work
- The spread of SARS-CoV-2 looks exactly like it originated in the Seafood market.
- If it was transported to the seafood market by someone who worked at the lab that is highly coincidental that the place they infected first just happened to be the most likely place for zoonotic spillover
- The hypothetical infected labworker didn't spread it all over their residence or create any other superspreading incidents clustered elsewhere around Wuhan
On the balance of probabilities I'm going with zoonotic spillover. The coincidence that the lab happened to be in the city is much less of a coincidence than the lab causing a leak of a virus that there's zero evidence the lab ever had, causing a pandemic that looks exactly like it came from zoonotic spillover.
The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. The only known link to Wuhan is the Wuhan Institute of Virology sampled both areas.
They refuse to share their records with WHO or the NIH. That's a crucial caveat when saying there is no evidence they held a precursor. We don't know as they have refused to share their database.
The Times article is interesting as it suggests the work in DEFUSE to add furin cleavage sites went ahead and they passaged the virus in humanized mice. This would explain the furin site not seen in other sarbecoviruses and why humans topped the list for binding affinity from the outset.
Note the cases near the market are based on what David Relman described as "hopelessly impoverished" early case data. There was also sampling bias in retrospectively counting cases as market link was often required. WHO hasn't accepted market origin in part as there were likely much earlier cases than those in December linked to the market where no animals tested positive.
> why humans topped the list for binding affinity from the outset
This is an unbelievable coincidence that makes the zoonotic spillover hypothesis laughable. To a biologist, the likelihood of this happening by chance is clear: virtually 0. But explaining the size of the space of optimal solutions to a given binding problem versus the space of good solutions to the general public, well, that's really hard too. So an obvious and completely non-circumstantial piece of evidence is the last one in the public's mind. And we are still acting like there is a question of where the virus came from, and we will be for decades, or at least until the average level of biology education is raised by a few sharp degrees.
That's untrue. Viruses which spillover may spread across humans at a low level of efficiency for months, mutating for higher affinity towards humans, and only becoming pandemic once a high level of affinity has been achieved.
All viruses which have higher affinity for humans spilled over, didn't they?
That's what happened with H1N1 but we know that hasn't happened with Sars2 because Sars2 only spreads efficiently with a furin cleavage site but the furin cleavage site also makes it more pathogenic so it would definitely not spread undetected.
Studies have found that people living near bats in Yunnan have immunity against this class of coronaviruses due to exposure, which would strongly blunt pathogenicity. There is also more to pathogenicity than you let on.
> If it was transported to the seafood market by someone who worked at the lab that is highly coincidental that the place they infected first just happened to be the most likely place for zoonotic spillover
If we're going with highly coincidental pairings, it seems like we can't ignore "the disease originated in the only city in China to have an institute that specializes in virology, viral pathology and virus technology."
I'm not convinced of any particular conclusion as to COVID's origin, but I don't down-weight the coincidence of the city of origin hosting WIV nearly as much as you appear to.
Which one do you mean by “the denial argument”? (and why do you use that term instead of something unambiguous like “lab leak” or “zoonotic origin” hypotheses?)
As to which of the two hypotheses is more predicated on politics, I think there are more generally left-leaning people who are swayed by the lab leak (circumstantial) evidence, than there are right-leaning people who are swayed by the zoonotic origin (circumstantial) evidence. This perception may be mistaken, but assuming I’m correct, this would suggest that the zoonotic origin hypothesis is more likely to be predicated on politics.
Also, zoonotic transfer happening naturally in any particular time and place is extremely unlikely, even in places where the conditions are optimal.
I always thought this was a good test for whether someone can apply Bayesian reasoning. It turns out not many can, including a lot of highly educated people.
Without hard evidence to contradict it, lab leak should have always been the default hypothesis. That it hasn’t is a case of political propaganda winning out over basic statistics.
Your prior should be that it was just like the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak which happened in a different city without this research lab and also involved in a spillover in wet market of a virus whose closest known relative was found hundreds of miles away in bats (in close to the same area that RatG13 was found).
Where's the part with the virus being collected and brought to a lab in Wuhan where gain of function research was done prior to the outbreak? Feel free to include that in your formula.
There is no evidence SARS-COV-2 was being studied.
But even if you were to accept that, the bayesian reasoning would be that you'd say that the probability it's from Wuhan it's a leak is 100%, and 0% for any other city. You could go further and look at the viruses that have caused zoonoses in China in the past (the evidence is that hundreds of SARS-like coronaviruses have) and compare it to what was being studied. Even then, if you apply Bayes' formula, you'd have overwhelming odds towards a natural origin.
> The spread of SARS-CoV-2 looks exactly like it originated in the Seafood market.
Huh? No it doesn’t. The discussion of a possible SARS outbreak started weeks before the seafood market incident. The lab leak theory started in China BEFORE the seafood market was pinned as the cause.
Research applications, in particular to obtain funding.
It is common for researchers to apply to grants/funding for work they are already doing. They tweak the research application to meet whatever the funding criteria is using knowledge they have from existing experiments.
I’m sure most of this is true or at least true-ish but to be appropriately skeptical, all evidence which has a Chinese source here should be considered as potentially made up.
Regardless of whether or not there was a coverup, the Chinese government has certainly acted like it was covering something up.
The circumstantial evidence is sort of ridiculous here though. An institute with weak safety controls experimenting with creating novel pathogens has an outbreak of a novel pathogen next door? No no, it’s because of climate change (an actual argument I have seen).
They may cover up something completely orthogonal to Covid. For example, they may cover up a corruption scheme, to steal money granted for research, or they acted as proxy for Russians, to spy at USA, or they mismanaged facility and leaked virus from the lab in Wuhan second time, AFTER the initial outbreak (1.5-2.5 month of delay between projected start of epidemic in mid-September-mid-October and start of epidemic in Wuhan in December must be explained somehow), etc.
I’m reading this as sarcasm, am I wrong? If so, it is such a bad faith response. It is well reported that China was highly uncooperative in providing records about the research that was occurring at WIV.
No its quite serious. China covered up the existence of susceptible animals at the market. If you want to take the actions of a cover up as being proof, then you have to look at that cover up as well. What people do instead, though, is pick and choose -- the actions surrounding the lab are evidence China is hiding a lab leak, while the actions surrounding the market are not evidence China is trying to hide a zoonotic spillover. There's nothing "bad faith" about that at all, unless you're so bought into the lab leak theory that any question of it is bad faith.
Do you have a link showing that China suppressed evidence of the presence of raccoon dogs? I just looked and couldn’t find, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
It’s a fair point that if suppression of evidence is to be considered an indication of guilt, it has to work both ways.
The “circumstantial evidence” is only novel if the event in question is novel, which the emergence of a new strain of a virus is not.
It is certain that a new strain of some virus is emerging right now next to a lab that works with viruses, because that is a thing that happens continuously in nature, and labs exist within nature. It’s also likely that such a new strain will not cause human illness, as most viruses do not.
SARS-COV-2 only looks novel to humans because it made a lot of humans sick. There were tons of allegations that HIV was created in a lab too. This says more about our self-regard than about the virus itself.
This would all be more compelling if the WIV were not explicitly experimenting with creating viruses like SARS-COV-2! If HIV had emerged proximal to a lab experimenting with creating viruses like HIV then that lab origin theory would be much more credible!
Saying “viruses like SARS-COV-2” only makes sense for broad applications of the word “like.”
As other comments have pointed out, while that lab was working with coronaviruses, none of the strains were genetically close to SARS-COV-2. Coronavirus is a broad category of viruses.
Betacoronaviruses with SARS-like attributes and natural reservoirs in bats is supposed to be a “broad application of the word ‘like’”? Bit of a stretch, no?
No, not all labs working on viruses do research on dangerous viruses. Bacteriophages for instance, are a deep research topic, and (aside from potential effects on our microbiome) are completely benign to humans. That's just one of many counterexamples.
The Huanan Seafood market paper has been heavily critized.
Especially the fact that covid was not found in a single animal sample does make the evidence rather weak.
In addition it seems that the lack of sampling from outside the market and the fact that the market is a busy place in the center of the city where the virus would likely be once it's spreading from person to person , does not really lend support to the conclusions in the paper at all.
Just to be clear, there weren’t animal samples available for testing. It’s not that they tested a bunch of animals and didn’t find covid. I know that’s what you meant but not everyone is familiar with the paper and it’s important to be meticulous here.
I don't actually think that is what they meant. If there are no animals to even sample, you don't describe that as "that covid was not found in a single animal sample". No one would phrase it that way.
>The Origins of Covid-19 — Why It Matters (and Why It Doesn’t)
>More than half of the earliest Covid-19 cases were connected to the Huanan market, and epidemiologic mapping revealed that the concentration of cases was centered there. In January 2020, Chinese officials cleared the market without testing live animals, but positive environmental samples, including those from an animal cage and a hair-and-feather–removal machine, indicated the presence of both SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-susceptible animals.5 Recently released findings included raccoon dog DNA, pointing to a possible SARS-CoV-2 progenitor.
> Humans brought the virus to the market. It's screamingly obvious and always has been.
Well of course, the racoon dogs et al all come in via human transport.
Testing infrastructure was poor, and maybe it still is. Chinese government interest was not in finding facts, but in taking action to 'solve the problem'. It's hard to find facts when the people with power just want the problem to go away. IMHO, that doesn't weigh in favor of either explaination. The wuhan local government and the chinese national government would have likely taken the same actions regardless of the source, because they're both not very interested in facts.
US health authorities pushing on the market theory are just doing their typical behavior of taking what little information is available and pushing it with no nuance. I enjoyed seeing the cdc stickers telling me not to use a mask out in public areas when the cdc was requiring them; the congitive dissonance was so palpable.
Raccoon Dog DNA was still found at the market. That was previously denied.
I'm not making the argument that the DNA samples indicate that the Raccoon Dogs that the samples were from had SARS-CoV-2. I'm just arguing that previously it had been stated that there were no Raccoon Dogs in the market at all and that has been proven wrong.
> Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses.
That is completely untrue. Agricultural labs for instance research plant viruses which are _incompatible_ with humans completely. Still these plant virus would have to be researched under stringent isolation because of the damage they may pose to crops.
> Most importantly, the general reader should know
> Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any ill-intent.
What exactly are you trying to say here anyway? If they were researching some other virus type it wouldn't be getting a look. But they were researching coronavirus.
There is no reason to suspect Ill intent. Accidents happen. It is well known the WIV were doing gain of function research on SARS-related CoVs. It is also known that the WIV were partners in a proposal to insert human specific cleavage sites into SARS+related CoVs
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
The probability that a novel SARS-related CoV would emerge naturally in the city in China that was used as a seropositivity control -and the location of the worlds largest SARS-related related research lab, and which had very low wildlife consumption compared to Southern coastal cities is < 1/1000
I don’t think ill-intent is the accusation, I think the argument is that the lab has poor safety protocols and made errors. I haven’t studied the “lab leak theory” extensively, but everything I read seems to be about lab failures resulting in a leak, not anything purposeful or ill-intentioned.
Unfortunately, the article states explicitly that there was ill intent and extensive PLA involvement with the lab.
The military was also given positions of responsibility in the Wuhan institute, according to a US Senate report. A book published in 2015 by the military academy discusses how Sars viruses represent a “new era of genetic weapons” that can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed”.
The authors are PLA researchers, and one of the book’s editors has collaborated on numerous scientific papers with Wuhan scientists. They discuss how Sars can be weaponised by fusing it with other viruses and “serial passaging” the resulting mutant to make it more dangerous.
The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.
If true, it's probably good that they were incompetent in leaking the virus and incompetent in making a vaccine to front run the virus. Wonder if that would have started world war 3 of they successfully vaccinated their population then either accidentally or on purpose released the virus.
Given how people are reacting here, they could literally release it at the same time as mass vaccinating their own population with pre-stockpiled vaccine, assert that it was simply the massive superiority of Chinese science that allowed it and western governments/media would immediately swallow this story whole.
The evidence about what was happening is not only overwhelming but notice how not a single government is going to lift a finger about it. The NIH just refunded this work and the Biden admin doesn't give a shit. They're all deep in denial at this point and will never even admit to what has happened, let alone start WW3 over it.
The article claims that Chinese army researchers were at the lab researching viral weapons. That sounds like ill-intent to me.
It also states that Covid-19 is the only Coronavirus discovered with a furin cleavage site on the spike, and that the lab had applied for funding to research the insertion of such a site.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that the lab deliberately launched a pandemic by deliberately releasing the pathogen on its own doorstep.
Well, no one knowledgeable about the field. I have, unfortunately, heard otherwise intelligent people saying that the Chinese government doesn't mind sacrificing it's own people, and did launch it in its own city on purpose (which is, to be clear, ridiculous).
"Never ascribe to conspiracy, what is adequately explained by incompetence".
I think the evidence is pretty clear that at least the Chinese government believes that the covid-19 virus came from their lab (they could, of course, be mistaken about that).
The article is only facts and direct evidence. Where is the innuendo? It covers specific experiments they were doing, in order and in detail, complete with specific biological information and funding sources. It also provides extensive evidence of constant coverups by the lab, like this one:
There was also no mention of the mouse deaths in the grant renewal application Daszak filed to the NIH later that year. In this account, he said the mice had experienced “mild Sars-like clinical signs” when they were infected with the mutant virus. It had actually killed six of the eight infected humanised mice.
Daszak eventually provided details of the experiment’s deadly results to the US authorities in a report after the Covid-19 pandemic. He now says his 2018 statement about the “mild” illness was based on preliminary results — even though the experiment in which the mice died had taken place several months before he issued the statement
So these people are all known liars. The US Government banned GoF research, they got around it by claiming their work was urgent and safe, they ignored reporting requirements, when they finally did report what they said was a lie, and now they're still lying to try and cover previous lies.
So when these people say they want to insert furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses, a coronavirus appears right next door that has a FCS - the first one ever seen - and they say, oh well we changed our minds and never did it, well, with overwhelming probability they're lying again.
And of course Daszak is known for loudly proclaiming that no one is allowed to even think about whether Covid-19 could have been leaked from a lab. His credibility is reduced, to put it mildly.
The thing with Wuhan Institute of Virology is they were particularly studying the spillover risk of SARS-related coronaviruses. The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. One clear link with Wuhan is the fact Wuhan Institute of Virology sampled both locations.
You can't read much into the early case data that David Relman described as "hopelessly impoverished". There were likely much earlier cases based on excess mortality data (a key reason WHO haven't accepted market origin). Also, there is a clear sampling bias in the cases in the article cited above.
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23
>They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
That procedure is pretty much exactly what you'd have to do to make covid in a lab. Assuming that's true, it's pretty much a smoking gun.
For a smoking gun, I'd expect evidence. This is just reporting on a diffuse claim of hearsay, allegedly by what might be labeled a party with geopolitical interest in the public narrative. It may be disinformation just as well. (Especially, as similar claims were already repeatedly made based on what turned out to be false links, like the Wuhan Institute being just around the wet market.)
Well yes, is the claim true or not? The article has:
>The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. They said the Wuhan scientists...
So presumably The Times has the names of the researchers and someone like the FBI could investigate and see what correspondence if any they have with Wuhan about it.
> Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab.
Maybe I'm deeply confused, but the Wuhan lab was reported by NYMag to be the one that discovered RaTG13.
> How Did It Get Out? 1. The Tongguan Mine Shaft in Mojiang, Yunnan, where, in 2013, fragments of RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARSCoV-2, were recovered and transported to the Wuhan Institute of Virology; 2. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Shi Zhengli’s team brought the RaTG13 sample, sequenced its genome, then took it out of the freezer several times in recent years;
> Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses.
I'm curious how you came up with this heuristic. It seems to me that there's plenty of incentives to study benign viruses: the primary one being to develop a deeper understanding of the biology of viruses in general.
Those viruses are slightly more related to SARSCoV2 than RaTG13, however note 1) that they were found even further away from Wuhan than was RaTG13 and 2) that they still remain too different from SARSCoV2 to be its direct ancestor.
One of the things we know for sure is that that about 50 years of evolutionary changes separate RaTG13 and BANAL-52 from SARSCoV2, so they are not its direct ancestors.
>50 years of evolutionary changes separate RaTG13 and BANAL-52 from SARSCoV2
Do you have a source for this?
Also, I'm no biologist, but is comparing the base rate of evolutionary changes still relevant if SARSCoV2 wasn't of natural origins? E.g. through creating chimeras or 'serial passaging' as described in this article? Wouldn't that create an environment where 50 years could pass in a way shorter timeframe?
>Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID- 19 pandemic
>Divergence dates between SARS-CoV-2 and the bat sarbecovirus reservoir were estimated as 1948 (95% highest posterior density (HPD): 1879–1999), 1969 (95% HPD: 1930–2000) and 1982 (95% HPD: 1948–2009), indicating that the lineage giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating unnoticed in bats for decades.
You should also know that SARSCoV2 1) is not a chimeric virus, and 2) that the present study includes viruses linked to RaTGP13 but more distant from SARSCoV2, i.e. it includes evidence from viruses unassociated with the pandemic.
> You should also know that SARSCoV2 1) is not a chimeric virus,
There is no basis for this claim. Genomic evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a chimera of any two previously-known viruses. No possible genomic evidence could exclude a chimera of two previously-unknown viruses, and the WIV was the world's leading collector of such novel sarbecoviruses from nature. They proposed to make chimeras of them in DEFUSE. That proposal wasn't funded, but this article now reports explicit claims they did such work:
> They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
You're basically rehashing Andersen's "Proximal Origins" here, and even he has moved on to more sophisticated (though still unconvincing) arguments like Pekar. As David Relman wrote almost three years ago:
> This argument [that SARS-CoV-2 must be natural since it doesn't use a known backbone] fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.
We know SARSCoV2 is not a chimeric virus because similar viruses have been identified from other locations, and the pattern-matching (sequence alignment) shows that SARSCoV2 does not have any insertions or deletions that have a different evolutionary origin compared to its close relatives.
That doesn't make any sense. I'm assuming by "chimera" that you mean, for example, the spike from natural virus A on the backbone of natural virus B. The WIV could have taken the spike from a virus similar to BANAL-20-52, the backbone from a different, unpublished virus that they'd sampled from nature, and a human-designed FCS. This is basically what they proposed in DEFUSE (in collaboration with Baric at UNC), and what this Times article is now saying they did internally after DEFUSE got rejected.
Of course such a virus could also have evolved naturally by a similar path; lots of sarbecoviruses are just a single mutation away from that FCS, and perhaps there's some yet-unknown natural animal host where that gets selected for. The point is that no genomic evidence can distinguish between these two cases, though.
For emphasis, it seems like you're assuming that we know all the natural viruses that the WIV was working with. Sampling of novel coronaviruses from nature was a core part of the WIV's research, so that's not a reasonable assumption. RaTG13 was sampled in 2013, but not fully published until 2020. At least one novel coronavirus was identified in contamination of rice samples sequenced on the same equipment that the WIV used:
That's a merbecovirus, so it couldn't possibly have any relationship to SARS-CoV-2; but if they had one unpublished novel virus, then it's hard to reject the possibility that they had more.
What about Ralph Baric's method for splicing viruses? It's apparently really hard or impossible to detect, and that's plausibly something that could be used to make a chimeric coronavirus.
I don't understand this line of argument. The facts are that 1) the virus outbreak was in Wuhan, 2) that there ws a local lab working on virus samples that come from all over the world and 3) as far as we know, the particular strain that affected Wuhan is not local. Altogether, this should add confidence to the lab leak theory, not detract from it.
The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. Both areas WIV sampled prior to the pandemic and they haven't shared their records with WHO or the NIH.
Ok but in that scenario, a natural emergence would have come from a strain from Wuhan, while the lab leak theory explains why a virus from relatively far away had an outbreak in Wuhan.
Yes, the article suggests they had a closer precursor. The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. They are both areas WIV sampled in studying the spillover risk of SARS-related coronaviruses. They haven't shared their records with WHO or the NIH.
The distance from Wuhan of the discovery site of RaTG13 is irrelevant, if (as the article implies) a senior team at the Wuhan lab were working on RaTG13.
The article is not suggesting that Covid19 evolved from RaTG13; it is suggesting that Covid19 is a chimaera made with RaTG13.
The NYT is a reputable organ, known for checking it's sources. Unlike Wikipedia, newspapers don't generally cite their sources; but if a reliable source states something like that as fact, they've probably checked. You're right: they haven't said they can prove it.
[Of course, it could be propaganda, government or otherwise; or it could be a damned lie concocted by the reporter or editor. They've said they have sources, they haven't named them, so it's not unreasonable to suppose they have sources that don't want to be named.]
IIRC, this is still true if you exclude the spike protein and use a higher similarity threshold.
Why would one do that? Well, two reasons. First, the spike more variable as it is subject to greater evolutionary pressure as the major component of the viral surface. Second, in coronavirus reverse genetics typically the virus is segmented into multiple pieces, most of which compose the non-spike backbone and a subset which compose the spike protein. This is intentional to enable the swapping of spike proteins. So, if SARS-CoV-2 is spike-swap or spike variant assembly, a RaTG13-like virus could be the "backbone" of SARS-CoV-2.
Moreover, a hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 backbone could exist in the viral sequences list the WIV took down in Sept. 2019. They sequenced RaTG13 a few years prior. The lab's raison d'etre is collecting and sequencing coronaviruses poised for spillover. And, with modern DNA synthesis technology, it's not difficult to print out arbitrary backbone contigs for a viral assembly.
The Times is not a great source. It’s just tabloid style journalism targeted at a higher ‘reading age’. Can’t remember the exact figures but something like 16 compared to ‘The Sun’ which targets 10. A better source would be The Telegraph, if you like your opinion pieces right leaning. The Economist, The Financial Time and The Guardian are also good sources if we’re talking about British newspapers here.
It is excusable for a lab to accidentally leak a contaminant. It is not excusable to cover it up and prevent a full investigation, like China has done.
The NIH terminated the Wuhan Institute of Virology's subaward for continued refusal to share records last year. WHO is still pleading with the PRC to share data on both the animal trade and Wuhan labs.
May be a good idea to get acquainted with inference to best explanation, and to understand that 'direct evidence' should not automatically be awarded epistemological primacy over 'circumstantial evidence' (or what you're calling 'innuendo').
> all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses
There should be more attention on this. We're busy worrying about AI that can troll at a college level, while scientists are still busy making frankenviruses after a pandemic plausibly caused by a lab leak.
You've jumped from "do research" to "making frankenviruses" - which beyond being a sensationalist term with no formal definition, isn't necessarily the sum totality of viral research. Just the bit that the popular press likes writing lurid articles about.
Fair enough, but I'd file gain of function research in that category, it's common, and seeing a possible outcome of it, it's something we need to rethink very carefully.
In that regards, I actually agree with you. It's been the better part of a decade since I saw a talk by a colleague I immensely respect arguing against it, and I think it's value (whether it caused this outbreak or not) is speculative at best.
But I should not that not all viral engineering is gain of function, and while it gets a lot of attention, even in laboratory virology is relatively rare.
> genetic clocks show that RaTG13 and SARSCoV2 diverged almost 50 years ago.
Converting the distance in phylogenetic analysis to evolutionary distance is based on natural gene drafting rate, which does not consider passaging with human selections.
“Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
The rate of hospitalization among 18-49 year olds with flu in the US was 54.1 per 100K in 2019-20. It’s rare, sure, but that kind of absolute statement from an anonymous researcher doesn’t instill confidence.
It really shouldn't be phrased as an absolute. But read charitably, when you have low N combined with rates that low, to expect that you wouldn't see noticeable illness in a small group of young, healthy people.
> The point is the young and healthy don’t get very sick. You get it, have the sniffles for a day or two, and move on with your life. Same for covid.
We could have just embraced that blessing and let children continue to go to school and not experience massive declines in intelligence. But here we are.
“Think of the really old people” was truly hilarious. Indeed, all we could do was “think” when my grandpa died alone because visiting the nursing home was banned.
One thing to consider is not so much an individual's health and risk of getting serious ill, but rather that as the numbers grow geometrically, health care systems like hospitals can (and in fact, did) become severely overwhelmed.
What really happened, as stated in the very source you gave, was that if you had a heart attack at home an ambulance would come to “deal with you” (because of course they would), but if they attempted to resuscitate you for 20 minutes and you still didn’t recover they wouldn’t then take you to the hospital.
You should know the survival rate of a heart attack is far far lower than most expect, especially after 20 minutes of failed active attempts to resuscitate. The only real reason to take someone into a hospital after that is if they’re hypothermic or just so you can say “we did everything we could”.
> What really happened.... an ambulance would come to “deal with you”
At one point, LA had to resort to Fire Trucks because ambulances were unavailable.
If you don't think health care services were severely stretched, in some cases beyond breaking point (incl. staff unavailability because they themselves were sick), I really don't know what to say. This happened in New York as well.
Of course there are also other places where that wasn’t the case, so there you could be less conservative with restrictions, but you may not know the risk in advance.
Fire trucks and ambulances both feature staff trained as EMT’s. The provisioning of the vehicles might be slightly different, but the medical training is the same. And I’m sure the provisioning could be adjusted based on the circumstances.
Staff being unavailable because they’re sick is quite literally “normal day to day operations” that every company must be able to account for, not “beyond the breaking point”.
But if you “don’t know what to say” beyond vague emotional appeals unsupported by the very sources you claim to cite, I’m glad we agree on that at least.
There are many [1] many [2] many [3] many [4] many [5] many [6] many [7] examples of people who died as a result of our hospital systems being overloaded and being forced to ration care. This is what was meant by the geometric growth of hospital patients and how many hospital systems were close to outright breaking. You are ultimately factually wrong and extremely unaware of how much stress this put on our hospital systems and how many people died because of what you were suggesting. Now imagine how much worse it would've been if we did nothing.
And how many millions of children have ongoing severely stunted development in both academics and social skills? More than 7 million. By some estimates 77 million, in fact.
The real question is how many more will die as a result of our horribly irresponsible treatment of our most valuable national resource: the children.
Stats say nothing of relative severity, why do you think they’re relevant in any way?
Edit: is your argument seriously “uhm actually, event X happens 0.054% of the time, so when you said {more rare version of X} doesn’t happen you’re wrong”
Um, those are the numbers for hospitalization. So yes, there’s information about severity there.
And yep, that’s my argument! The frequency of deadly viruses escaping from a bio lab is even lower, so if we’re going to eliminate possibilities based on percentages there are a few others that should get thrown out.
It’s a minor point but, as I said, it’s sloppy reasoning. If the anonymous researcher had said “low probability” I wouldn’t care. Instead, this reads like someone who’s willing to hand wave specifics for the sake of rhetoric.
Hospitalization doesn’t mean severity. It has more to do with your confidence in your immune system and health insurance than anything else, though the hospital’s extra capacity and desire to make a buck off you is up there too.
But if you’re here to be put off by the smallest use of rhetoric, sure pop off on that.
If I reversed it and said “this can’t be a lab leak because lab leaks never happen,” would that be okay? They’re certainly rarer than serious cases of flu among adults in the age range.
It’s a contentious, difficult debate. I do actually think it’s bad to dismiss arguments you disagree with with casual rhetoric.
If that rhetorical device led me to research and discover reputable data suggesting the frequency of such occurrences was indeed so minuscule as to be disregarded entirely, I’d welcome it upsetting my preconceived notions.
> The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab
Is this a case of yet another heat map being a population density map? I assume the wet market is a popular local destination and gathering place, while the lab is not. You would expect there to be more cases where there are more people.
I speculate in ignorance of the actual social dynamics in the city of Wuhan.
The problem with Wuhan lab is that the Chinese dictatorship blocks any independent inquiry into it. If they had nothing to hide, they wouldn't be hiding everything. If that was a criminal case, this kind of behavior would be taken as a evidence of guilt.
> If they had nothing to hide, they wouldn't be hiding everything. If that was a criminal case, this kind of behavior would be taken as a evidence of guilt.
No, it would not. First, dictatorships hide things all the time, whether there is something or nothing. It's just how they operate. (Many democratic governments do to btw. How often do we need freedom of information requests just to find out that it was totally benign, the government just stone-walled because they could).
Second, not saying anything is not evidence of guilt in any criminal case in the civilized world. Everyone has the right to silence.
They have witheld records from the NIH which funded some of their SARS-related coronaviruses spillover research. They eventually terminated their subaward last year as a result. WHO has also been asking for lab data. Given the nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos where the WIV sampled it seems fairly clear what happened here.
Governments have neither rights nor duties, so saying they don't owe you anything is essentially the same thing. Governments do what they can get away with doing.
Countries and governments are not individuals. The fact that a virus emerged in China and proceeded to kill millions of people globally and the Chinese government has completely obstructed any independent investigation is outrageous and criminal. You don't get to throw your arms up and say "No Entry" when millions of lives have been lost.
"Your honor, you can't blame my client for messing the victim's body, he's a known necrophiliac, and since the evidence is tainted you can't prove he was the murderer."
My position hasn't changed for years: if covid was really a lab creation we'd know, because someone would have told us. An email dump, a memo, a document, an interview. Something would have leaked out. The incentives are just too high and the access is too pervasive[1] to believe otherwise.
Is it possible? Sure! Is it likewise possible that some of the circumstantial claims about WIV are true? Sure! But if someone made this thing, someone else would have told us by now.
[1] This is science! There are notes and logs and backups and email and chat and whiteboard photos and conference attendees and visiting scholars, all spread around a population all trained to compete with each other.
What is the time limit a secret of this magnitude could survive without being revealed by someone? A year, two years? If we look at our history, we will only see secrets that were revealed within that maximum period?
Snowden revealed quite shocking information, and I think it is safe to say the secret of mass surveillance was going on for much longer than 4 years.
And if such information pops up, I will (with great surprise) re-evaluate my priors. Nonetheless I think history bears out my intuition here. The overwhelming majority of conspiracies likes this, especially ones in fundamentally civilian organizations like science labs, don't survive a year if that.
I have no certainty, that's the point! The evidence for natural evolution is pretty reasonable (it matches every other pandemic ever -- these are hardly unknown!), the evidence for lab genesis is at best circumstantial and frankly pretty heavily spun by everyone dealing in it.
You want the fact that I can't prove you wrong to be evidence that you're right, and that's not how logic works.
"The overwhelming majority of conspiracies likes this, especially ones in fundamentally civilian organizations like science labs, don't survive a year if that."
How do you know that the overwhelming majority of conspiracies don't survive a year if that? It's like sampling sick people and concluding that all people are sick. Without an estimate of the number of conspiracies that actually are kept hidden (which to me seems nearly impossible), how could you possibly know the proportion as you claimed?
It's an intuition based on a lifetime of watching dumb bureaucrats try to hide stuff and failing. But your logic is symmetric: where are all the successfully hidden conspiracies then? Obviously your response will be "we don't know by definition because they're hidden", which sorta makes your point non-falsifiable, doesn't it?
I'll put my money on bureaucrats being dumb over globalist nation state super autocracy every day.
His point would be non-falsifiable if he claimed to the opposite of your claim. He didn't. What he claims is the logic flaw of yours and argues deductively.
And I repeat, that logic is specious because it works both ways. The same unfounded assertion (that there are conspiracies we can't know about) wrecks the math "deductively" in both directions.
I don't think it's very much a stretch to believe that pervasive observations of bureaucracies leaking and making mistakes serves as evidence that genuinely true Hidden Conspiracies are vanishingly rare. But you do you.
> And I repeat, that logic is specious because it works both ways. The same unfounded assertion (that there are conspiracies we can't know about) wrecks the math "deductively" in both directions.
You're still missing the point: GGGP didn't argue in any “direction” at all; all they said was you can't know for sure what you claim.
> I don't think it's very much a stretch to believe that pervasive observations of bureaucracies leaking and making mistakes serves as evidence that genuinely true Hidden Conspiracies are vanishingly rare.
Sure. But don't then put your “hopefully not a stretch” guess in such cocksure terms.
It took over a decade to confirm the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak was the result of an outbreak. In that case intelligence did suspect an accidental cause although scientists argued contaminated meat was the cause. Information can be tightly controlled under authoritarian regimes. Recall those who even reported the outbreak in the community faced recriminations.
What is known is the nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. Both areas WIV sampled and they refuse to share their records with WHO or the NIH.
There has been stuff leaking out. The DEFUSE paper for example. As to why someone in the Wuhan lab wouldn't leak direct info, you are dealing with a military related lab in the country with the highest number of executions in the world. That could be a disincentive.
Sverdlovsk was instantly and correctly interpreted in western intelligence communities as evidence for a weaponized anthrax program. It wasn't admitted to be so until the 90's. It's true this wasn't a "leak", but only because there was no one to leak to (the civilian world was mostly unaware it had even happened). I'm not sure I understand why you think this is evidence for the ability of the USSR to keep it secret or otherwise control perceptions?
The civilian world was quite aware of the incident; they just mostly swallowed the cover story whole. A Harvard prof (Matthew Meselson) went to Russia to investigate, and came back with a public report agreeing that the anthrax came from tainted meat. Obviously some people doubted that, but until the fall of the USSR there was no incontrovertible evidence, just the same circumstantial patchwork as we have for SARS-CoV-2 now.
Even closer to the SARS-CoV-2 case, the 1977 flu pandemic killed ~700k people and near-certainly arose from a research accident, probably a failed vaccine trial:
> The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event, as the genetic sequence of the virus was nearly identical to the sequences of decades-old strains.
That article argues that vaccine trial accident doesn't count as a "lab accident", which seems like legalistic wordplay to me; but I believe the historical context is good.
But in 1978, the WHO wrote:
> Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time.
It took decades for the consensus to change, and there's still been no official admission (though note the unverified personal communication from C. M. Chu via Peter Palese in Gronvall's paper, 27 years after the accident).
>I'm not sure I understand why you think this is evidence for the ability of the USSR to keep it secret or otherwise control perceptions?
The USSR successfully manipulated many prominent Western civilian scientists (and subsequently Western newspapers) into buying the "bad meat" Soviet cover-up story, hook, line, and sinker: to the point that they publicly chided the American military for still believing in the "anthrax factory leak" theory:
> But Dr. Alexander Langmuir, a former director of epidemiology at the United States Centers for Disease Control, who presided at the session, said Tuesday that based on what he knew so far, "the current position of the U.S. military needs thorough re-
examination; that is clear.'
> Dr. Philip Brachman of Emory University, a U.S. anthrax expert who has advised the Central Intelligence Agency on the incident, said the Soviet talk was a "landmark report" providing "a pretty good indication that this incident was an outbreak of gastrointestinal anthrax" from eating contaminated meat.
> Dr. Alexander Langmuir, a former chief epidemiologist for the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, agreed that the Soviet account was "very credible so far" but added that he hoped to obtain further details during the Soviets' weeklong stay.
How did this happen? Why did this work so well? Because scientific methods designed for operation in adversary-free environments are catastrophically unfit for drawing dependable conclusions when intelligent motivated adversaries have tampered with the available data. The Western civilian scientists were thinking like...scientists, so they got easily manipulated into producing and disseminating literal Soviet disinformation while believing they were furthering the causes of science and of fighting anthrax. Oops:
> Three Soviet officials came to visit the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on 11 April: Pyotr Burgasov, retired deputy minister of health; Vladimir Nikiforov, infectious diseases chief at the Moscow Institute for the Advanced Training of Physicians; and Vladimir Sergiyev, director of the Institute of Parasitology and Tropical Medicine. They gave the same explanation as in 1980, but provided many more details, convincing some long-time doubters that the account was true. U.S. intelligence officials still maintain a military facility was involved.
Spoiler alert: Pyotr Burgasov was part of the response to the leak and part of the Soviet biowarfare program.
The argument for a natural origin of Sverdlovsk anthrax is tragically familiar: establishing a highly plausible way it could have been zoonosis, along with providing evidence consistent with a zoonosis. From the _Science_ article:
> The citizens of Sverdlovsk did not have to look so far to find the bacillus. It has been endemic to the region for centuries.
> The source of the outbreak was traced to a single 29-ton lot of bone meal (cattle feed) sold in March from a factory in Aramil, 15 kilometers to the southeast of Sverdlovsk. It must have taken in and ground up the bones of animals who died the previous year of anthrax. Its product clearly contained live anthrax. An official investigation found that the factory did not follow the prescribed heating and pressure treatment methods. The feed it produced went to a state farm, where veterinarians inoculate the animals, and to private owners, whom state veterinarians often do not bother to visit, according to Burgasov. On the approach of the May Day holiday, animals are slaughtered, generally the weakest (in this case, the sickest) first. The meat from the private butchers is thought to have triggered the outbreak, Burgasov said.
It's only collapse of the USSR that enabled the truth to come out in public. Two Soviet pathologists, against KGB orders, had kept some autopsy samples, which (along with a defector's testimony) annihilated the "bad meat" cover-up story. Turns out the outbreak of airbone anthrax that happened in the same city as the industrial-scale weaponized anthrax spore factory was indeed caused by the industrial-scale weaponized anthrax spore factory! https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/11/sverdlovs...
Shouldn't an oppressive regime change the math here? The ability to suppress potential whistleblowers means the absence of whistleblowers isn't all that convincing. Compared to moon landing conspiracy theories, where this argument is very convincing imo
Again, these are scientists. You really don't think one of them could move to a post at Stanford or wherever and spill the tea? No one has an old copy of an incriminating memo they can forward to a friend in Taipei? And regardless, the PRC does not in fact have a great record in the opsec department even within its military and espionage arms. How many "Chinese spies" get arrested every year?
Part of any conspiracy theory is positing a great totalitarian enemy who is able to keep all these important truths from The People. The PRC is economically large and somewhat questionably ambitious. It's absolutely not the kind of super state people want to imagine.
> You really don't think one of them could move to a post at Stanford or wherever and spill the tea?
When? There's a pretty short window where a WIV scientist might have known the subject they were studying had escaped the lab before the PRC did. Certainly by January 2020 the PRC could've clamped down on those scientists.
Spies caught outside the country don't tell me much about internal operations.
ETA: I think my thinking here is pretty colored by Tank Man, whose name is unknown. The CCP claims they don't know anything about him. Even if that's true, presumably he had friends, family, and fellow protestors who have decided it would be a very bad idea to even give his name.
> You really don't think one of them could move to a post at Stanford or wherever and spill the tea? No one has an old copy of an incriminating memo they can forward to a friend in Taipei
Not after the top PLA vaccine researcher, Zhou Yusen died, allegedly "falling off the roof of the WIV" in May 2020. That sends a loud message.
If the military was indeed involved, then it seems highly plausible that they would have been able to keep communications under control and that they would be able to repress a few dozen workers. Threats against them and their families would probably work pretty well.
Yikes. I mean, yes, in this sense you're right. We've never found conclusive disproof of the various conspiracy theories around the assassination and have been forced into a consensus that, y'know, Oswald shot him. But you don't believe that. And nothing is going to make you. So from you're perspective "we still don't know". WIV is going to be the same. You'll never get the disproof you demand, so you'll continue to disbelieve the consensus opinion.
Yours is a world where disproof rules, and conspiracies are assumed true until proven false. I'm sure it's entertaining, but it's not "true" any more than mine is.
In my world, Oswald probably shot JFK and covid was probably a natural virus, because those are the hypotheses that demand the least of the existing evidence. I'm willing to change my priors with more evidence, but not because of the lack of disproof of an entertaining counter-hypothesis.
We also did not know that Cuba housed missles from Russia during the crisis. We also did not know to the extent that Cuba's leadership explicitly did have plans to strike the US alongside their Soviet allies.
It took until 1992 for what appears to be the truth to be discovered, 3 decades with far more people involved in the process, and a much darker outcome than a man being assassinated.
The us had credible satellite evidence of soviets building housings for nuclear warheads in Cuba during and before the crisis.
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/photos.htm
(perhaps I misunderstand your argument; 1992 was when our knowledge was formally confirmed, IIUC)
The article implies (but doesn't state) that RaTG13, although discovered in the Mojiang cave, was worked on in the Wuhan lab. It does state that it was being worked-on by Shi Zhengli ("Batwoman") and her team at the lab.
Also, before one draws conclusions based on the _kind_ of virus that is researched, coronaviruses aren't even uncommon. So better evidence is clearly necessary than innuendo.
It's not just a coronavirus, it's a sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site never seen before in sarbecoviruses. The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. The only link with Wuhan is WIV's sampling in both locations.
In 2018, WIV was part of a proposal with EcoHealth Alliance and UNC to add furin cleavage sites into novel SARS-related bat coronaviruses. DARPA declined to fund it. This investigation suggests the work went ahead. Something Nick Patterson suggested often occurs even when funding is declined. WIV had both NIAID and CAS grants to study spillover risk of SARS-related coronaviruses. They were also doing classified work with the PLA from 2017.
It may just be that they went looking for covid cases there and found them. If they looked around the institute they may have found clusters there too.
> Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab.
The article says that the viruses from Mojiang were transported to the Wuhan lab and studied there.
Reference the statement that several employees were ill in the months leading up to the outbreak, these were tested and (reportedly) did not have Covid antibodies - this also seems to be missing from the article.
Right? As if any handling or safety gear and equipment is 100% perfect. Never any needle stick or glove failures. Respirators and protective clothing always 100% perfect. Everyone perfectly followed all lab safety precautions with no absent minded failures. Just perfect all the time forever.
I’ve always thought it was a handling contamination that got into community spread. It’s a very parsimonious explanation.
If they were doing experiments with serialized passage through so-called humanized mice and they escaped you'd have the engineered virus suddenly showing up being carried by many different species at the wet market in spite of natural viruses jumping species much more slowly.
>the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab.
> Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab.
As others have noted, this is mostly wrong. The WIV is the only lab in the world ever to publish a genome for RaTG13. They'd published a portion (under a different name, Ra4991) before the onset of the pandemic. The similarity to SARS-CoV-2 made it obvious they had something relevant, so they published the rest after. Perhaps you meant there's no evidence that the WIV ever had live RaTG13, and that's true--indeed, there's no evidence that anyone ever has, and some highly speculative claims that it might be an in silico fraud.
It's also not the closest relative anymore. From your other comments here, I believe your knowledge is about a year behind; you're repeating many old arguments that even those arguing most strongly against a possible research-related origin have long since abandoned.
> The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab [0].
The market was the first big cluster, but the earliest cases show much less structure. See the paragraph beginning "A later study by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid", which I believe is intended as explanation for that map (though that's not completely clear to me).
In any case, there's no reason to expect the first identified cluster in the same location as the first introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 must have been introduced into other continents at airports and seaports; but the first clusters were elsewhere, at nursing homes, choir practices, and other locations where the (a) the virus spread easily, and (b) the patients are likely to get sick enough for people to notice.
> Furthermore, several different isolates were found in the market, indicating that SARSCoV2 had been circulating before the epidemic took off.
I guess you're referring here to Pekar et. al? Their "different isolates" are literally just two SNPs apart. Roughly 1/10 of human-to-human transmissions result in two lineages at least that different, so this seems intuitively like it could easily evolve in cryptic human spread. Pekar did some complicated epidemiological modeling that claims otherwise, but I don't think it means much; see for example the criticism at
It's against the site rules to accuse other users of being shills in this way. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again. Instead, if someone is wrong or you feel they are, please explain how they are wrong and provide correct information without taking swipes.
Only three labs in the world had Coronaviruses and this lab specialized in it. Yes the first cases were traced to the market, but it's in the same town as the one lab in the world that specializes in very similar viruses (which were never naturally observed nearby). It is objectively quite a coincidence if the virus didn't leak from that lab.
Source? Coronaviruses (e.g. SARS and MERS) have been researched all over the place as it was years ago (before COVID outbreak) already stated as one of the major virus groups with potential for pandemics.
Prolly you'll have a hard time finding a metropolis which wasnt researching corona viruses.
Exactly. The lab leak theory is a story of cherry picking evidence to match your conclusion.
Why was the wet market on the other side of the city the only identified outbreak site if it came from the lab? There were/are many markets on the other side of the river that would be much more relevant to residents living and working on that side.
People looking up flu symptoms in the middle of winter is not evidence of anything abnormal.
I don’t understand the intellectual effort going into the lab leak theory… it feels like some kind of state run propaganda piece, I assume to just keep a negative view on China in people’s minds. It’s crazy given that whatever the truth there is no consequence… literally an inconsequential endeavour
>> it feels like some kind of state run propaganda piece, I assume to just keep a negative view on China in people’s minds.
China is a fantastic country filled with amazing people, culture, history and so on. It is quite possible to recognise a country's positive characteristics while questioning specific actions by some of the people within that country. This is as true of China as it is of any other country.
That’s not what people are doing, they are trying to prove a lab leak theory, else all this effort would be in “how’d it get to that wet market” if you can’t answer that, then you do not have a logical chain to its true origin lab leak or not.
Because right now that is the origin point. But we also know it was there for quite some time before it hopped to humans. It wasn't in a lot of places... it was just at the wet market as far as we know, we have no earlier outbreaks than that.
If anyone's in for a long read, despite the hokey sounding name, I found this to be one of the best contemporaneous explorations of Covid in china that I've seen to date:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This is the kind of writing you need to properly discuss the lab leak hypothesis. It's not perfect, there are no good links to sources which suggests a lot of it is made up.
However, this kind of writing should only happen after years or months of investigation. You can't do the lab leak panic 2 days into the pandemic. You can't even really do it half way through the pandemic.
I'm glad such investigations are being caried out. I only wish links to whatever is declassified from the investigations to be made public for such publications. Authors need to prove their research effort when it comes to such news.
> It's not perfect, there are no good links to sources which suggests a lot of it is made up.
Existing evidence points to another lab: BSL4 lab "Vector" in Novosibirsk, Russia. They worked on their "Sputnik" vaccine when blast in laboratory on September 16 2019[2] caused chain of incidents: broken windows, unprotected soldiers break in, which checked rooms for signs of fire, equipment stolen from BSL4 lab by those soldiers[0][1], epidemic of unknown virus in Siberia, Military World Games in Wuhan[3].
I mean... There are references to names, institutions carrying out certain investigations, references to experiments done prior to the pandemic. Yeah, some of it can be congecture. Which is why I really want the direct links to data, not just mentions to the events.
I'm not sure it's a conspiracy theory. I think it's a legitimate thing to investigate by an international entity like the UN (not the US), and the outcome (if it turns out to be true) should likely be some proportional sanction/payments by China.
Russians started to clean up evidence, which points to BSL4 lab "Vector".
IMHO, this article is a part of their disinformation campaign. The name of their vaccine "Sputnik V" (Follower 5) suggests that there was "Something","Sputnik I", "Sputnik II", "Sputnik III", "Sputnik IV" before "Sputnik V".
It's impossible for Russians to produce 5 vaccines in row in such short span of time, just few months, which took billions of dollars and year of time for western companies.
IMHO, Russians started developing of their vaccine since SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2003.
It was named after the satellite Sputnik 1 and the V is not a roman five but stands for victory, multiple sources consistently claim? Sounds reasonable that this was just PR propaganda to connect to prior great successes in Russia..
(Even without that knowledge I'd find this theory a bit far fetched, there could be many other good reasons for that naming).
"Sputnik" is a regular Russian word, which means "one who travels together with another" (s-put-nik s-=with, -put-=travel/road/journey, -nik=somebody).
Victory is Latin word. Russian word for victory is "pobeda" (po-beda po-=after, -beda=bad/something very different from good, "after bad times").
It looks like 5 in the name is from Ad5 component of vaccine.
Moreover, the vaccine produced by Vector is called EpiVacCorona[0].
> The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.
This part doesn't make sense to me. Coronavirus is known to mutate constantly and rapidly. Having a vaccine against a strand might provide a temporary advantage, but that advantage would subside quickly. Coronaviruses would make poor bioweapons considering how impossible it would be to control them.
If an army wants to develop a virus-based weapon wouldn't there be better viruses to base it from than COVIDs?
To be frank, given SARS-CoV-1 as well as MERS, and the known prevalence of coronaviruses in and near China, if I was the military I think I'd be justified into looking at viruses not as potential bioweapons but as a force readiness problem.
The U.S. has done this, and indeed, most of our public health infrastructure is an outgrowth of it.
You're not meant to ask questions. You're meant to blindly swallow this non-sense because it agrees with your pre-existing prejudices, political views or just emotional need to feel like you're part of a group of special people with inside knowledge trying to wake up the sheeple or something...
You don't do research and development on things that are already perfect. You do it on things you hope one day might be refined into something more useful. Similarly you don't halt all research on all other possible avenues because one single avenue _might_ be better.
Viruses mutate because they are constantly exposed to the immune systems of people who were already previously infected, so they have to mutate in order to dodge prior natural immunity. That isn't a concern if most people who get infected die.
Moreover, the first SARS-CoV-2 variant took a long time to start mutating and even then it was only minor mutations. If you release an extremely infectious very deadly virus and you have a vaccine for it, then at that moment it's a Deus Ex scenario and whoever can manufacture the vaccine can take over the world because your enemies are now collapsing and will do anything to obtain the vaccine including giving up their own autonomy. Guess that's the theory, at least.
As to why SARS-CoV-2: because it's airborne and can spread long distances via gas-like clouds (which is why lockdowns, masks, wiping surfaces etc didn't work). You can't really get better if you want to very rapidly infect a whole country.
It honestly terrifies me that people in this very thread are still pushing conspiracy theorys. Not just the technically possible ones ("the CCP did it all on purpose") but the just plain factually wrong ("vaccines are more deadly than covid"). Such comments remain popular.
From the start, the claims about the Mojiang are unproven and they don't have a shred of evidence to back it up [0]. I don't think you can divorce the newfound popularity of the lab leak from the new cold war we're entering.
Nobody will ever want the truth because if it did come from the lab it implicates the Chinese government as well as the US government given that the US funded research in Wuhan through the EcoHealth Alliance to get around the ban on Gain of Function research in the US.
It's gone oddly partisan in the US with the republicans wanting to investigate lab leaks and the dems not. Not sure I really understand that one.
Seems to me that from the point of view of public health and not having millions die unnecessarily it would be good to figure what went on. Then if it's a lab leak you could restrict that stuff and if natural you could up research on nature.
The response to Covid tells you that it came from their bioweapons lab. Their first response was to start burning people with flamethrowers and sealing in entire cities. You don’t do that if it’s a random virus you’ve never seen before.
For some excellent COVID-19 origins discussions I' d recommend the Straight Talk MD podcast by Frank Sweeny. Great coverage -from initial coverup of cases, silencing of doctors and deliberately misleading the world on human to human transmission (when Wuhuan authorities knew full well), to the Proximal Origin fraud and Raccoon Dog gate
The central issue is that the extremely dangerous gain-of-function experiments were being undertaking and potentially still are. I would advocate for a worldwide ban of gain-of-function research and strict regulation of potential dangerous medical research in a similar manner as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation agreement. Even as imperfect as it would be.
Issues regarding funding, laboratory security, military involvement, country of origin, responsibility of scientists, institutions and leadership involved are all secondary.
The only thing I have said about the whole lab leak theory for the last 3 years is this.
IF it was a lab leak, that is the best case scenario. It means the virus was a part of peoples hubris and messing around with viruses. I potentially one time accident.
If it isn't the lab leak, that means it is because of our intrusion on the wild world via agriculture and eventually the conditions of factory farming. If that is what it is, Covid will be the first of many like it.
This article does a lot of finger pointing, but there are no suggestions on what should be done differently. Its all "The chinese military is at fault!" but no serious discussion on whether or not gain-of-function research should be prohibited or not.
> but it isn’t a “scientific” question in the first place.
... which is true of the pandemic response in general. "Science" doesn't tell society how to react to something. Science is a process to test hypothesizes--it isn't a book of facts or direct answers on the trade-offs of various mitigation techniques. It can only inform, not dictate.
They will not, because those accusations came from people who intended to use them to discredit Chinese people in general, or that closely associate the leak with the Chinese way of doing things and so on. These accusation led to racist attacks against Asian people all over the us.
Ok, so the original motivations for some making that claim were suspect. Should that automatically excuse or prevent discussion that better safety protocols should be used or a better “ways of doing things” should be undertaken when handling viruses and pathogens that are capable of killing 7M people? I think it’s a valid topic and important one that should be verboten lest the next time we accidentally kill 14M with carelessness as the cause.
If the people making that claim had been sane, instead of pushing it in the middle of; "it's not deadly, just a flu," "masks do nothing," "maybe a bit of bleach is fine in the lungs," "hydroxychloroquine cures everything," "no, wait, it is horse paste that cures everything," "the vaccine will kill you in X months, guaranteed," and "GREAT RESET," it'd be easier to transition into a serious discussion about studying deadly viruses in labs.
The middle ground always gets pushed to the extremes when there's a strong push to alienate some views.
Covid was worse than the flu, but the flu is also deadly and we should be paying more attention to vaccinating it. The deaths aren't evenly distributed, either, young healthy people have less to worry about, but "less" isn't "nothing." For masks, you really wanted N95 masks, not cloth, and you still have to avoid large indoor gatherings.
Nobody said that bleach in the lungs was good. Trump mentioned disinfectant presumably butchering a description of the HealLight which would use UV to destroy the virus, effectively "disinfecting" the lungs. There are always idiots poisoning themselves with bleach, though, but nobody pays much attention to the poison control stats most of the time. HCQ and Ivermectin had some promising studies but no real effectiveness for the things people wanted them for. There probably is some rise in myocarditis due to vaccines... but they're still a lot safer if you look at mortality rates. "Great Reset" was from an actual policy proposal someone put out, but doesn't really stand for the things the conspiracies say it does.
All of these things got pushed into extreme caricatures depending on what side you trust.
I thought that Ivermectin was proven to be helpful in places where parasitic infestations are extremely common (most of the world).
The problem being that treating someone with steroids also strengthens parasites, which burdens the immune system even more.
So in parts of the world where parasites are common, it makes sense to treat with an anti-parasite drug from the beginning (no need to test for actual parasites).
In parts of the world without widespread parasite infections (for example, the US), the costs outweigh the benefits.
This caused lots of confusion because there were quite a few papers promoting Ivermectin as part of treatment. The fine print said “in developing countries” but nobody reads the fine print.
I honestly don’t see much difference in the level of extremism between everything you listed vs people deciding a specific topic is off limits just because the theory may not be politically correct, or because the alt opinion may have some factual basis.
Yes, of course, everyone should treat disingenuous propagandists as if they were attempting to have a serious discussion. If anyone objects to that, it is "deciding a topic is off-limits," which is insane. Of course we should let them run their horse paste grift and just patiently repeat over and over, "no, no, studies show it doesn't work. Please wear a mask to reduce spread."
Considering that you are intentionally misconstruing that ivermectin position that folks were discussing at the time using the same tired and dishonest “horse paste” media talking point, I’ll assume that “disingenuous propaganda” runs in many directions.
So you want to let the conspiracy theorists dictate discussion. And not everyone claiming there could have been a lab leak was pushing for those other things. There were sane claims. You seem to want to ignore the possibility that the Chinese and American governments had something to coverup, if there was a lab leak given the kind of research done there.
Science is in agreement that it is most likely not natural and was engineered. The missing piece is where it originated and majority agree that it most likely originated from the wuhan institute of virology.
I disagree, it is a scientific question. Whether we can answer it in isolation of politics and prejudice is the question for me.
But if you observe some gravitational waves in a single event, you can correlate it to optical or radio observations, you can try to analyse the signals to match them to existing hypotheses of gravitational waves origination etc. The singularity of the event doesn't make it not science. Same as the emergence of a novel virus.
It is just a shame that most of the evidence is subjective and non-scientific. But the question itself is well posed scientific endeavour.
I think it's splitting hairs, but even then I disagree. I can't see how the evolution and emergence of a virus is not a question of applied science.
That it is commingled with a million political questions, yes it's true. But to me that's a nuisance variable, not fundamentally changing the underlying question.
One of the allegations is that one or more lab workers were sick with covid in 2019.
Their colleagues - the scientific community - cannot through science alone determine if this was true.
If it happened then they went to a nearby hospital. To investigate there is possibly a police matter, certainly a health matter, a political matter and many things - but is not answered by waving the magic science wand. And so on.
People who claim it’s a science question are shallow or deceitful.
That's the very point I'm trying to make about this dubious article and all the people posting conspiracy theories here. How can we say they aren't trying to cause xenophobic feelings?
Ah, so when people disagree with you, it's because they're conspiracy theorists and you're ready to make wild assumptions about their motives. How perfectly reasonable of you.
This article literally explores and lays out theories about how potentially events and people could've conspired to our present day. I don't think that is intellectually helpful.
Sure yes, that is a fair point, but this conversation doesn't ascribe that kind of limitation in the argument, because we're already talking about other motivations. Maybe (probably lol) they were negligent, maybe it was an accident, my point is if we are also trying to get people to think for a moment "or maybe they did it on purpose" then it follows that people are pushing that idea, if false, for xenophobic reasons.
The lab leak theory started in China. It has never been about xenophobia. The only people pushing the whole xenophobia thing was the CCP. Chinese news called it wuhan virus long after it was given the name Covid-19.
Protect them from what? Being blamed? What does that do except stoke fear? There are actual things to talk about like their aggressive naval horseshit why do we have to make them nefarious mind controllers or secret world saboteurs or whatever this lab leak hypothesis is supposed to prove.
Knowing how the virus leaked allows us to figure out how to try and prevent it happening again.
When you cover it up, prevent investigations, destroy data, and try to blame the rest of the world. That does not help understand how we can prevent it happening again.
If China was open and honest from day 1, countries would have actually tried to help. But instead all the CCP did was hide it and blame everyone else.
It’s clear that you side with the CCP. You don’t want to prevent another pandemic or make sure people are safe. All you seem to want to do is defend them and get angry at everyone who wants to discuss the issue.
1. Lab leak hypothesis being proven is not a requirement for any kind of prevention
2. If everyone was honest all the time life would be roses
3. These lab leak articles don't make anyone safer they just cause conspiratorial thinking.
I don't trust the China for shit, but I'm sick of Americans suckered in by lazy bullshit thinking. I can't think of anything positive to say about China, but you can't say this because it is all a dead end useless thing that serves no purpose.
How about putting back in our observers like Trump kicked out, arguably hobbling our view into what was going on. We still have not done this. Instead we're here dicking off about shit that doesn't matter. Way to be people.
I agree sort of with this sentiment, but it ultimately doesn't matter even if it is that china is covering up their bioweapon accident just like anyone might. We'll never know, and we don't need that to hold them accountable for many many many other wrongs, and we don't need it to start working to prevent the next pandemic either.
The communist party is sensitive doesn't want it to be known that a Chinese lab leaked a dangerous virus (see also "how does RBMK reactor explode?")
The ecohealth alliance that Fauci and Dazack were involved in don't want it widely known that they had a hand in the WIV GoF (that Obama banned stateside) and worked early in the pandemic to obscure their own involvement in it.
Trump doesn't want it widely known that his administration contributed $100k to the Ecohealth alliance.
Lots of powerful people working to not take responsibility and obfuscate reality.
Science very much does ask that kind of question - what is the origin of some thing. With SARS1 it also answered it easily - testing showed if came from palm civets at the market. This time though scientific investigation has been blocked by the politics.
So, science doesn't have a problem when results of experiments are faked, because science doesn't ask this question, it's a question for politics, forensics, and history? Nice try! Still your move.
Yes, you nailed it properly. If results of experiments cannot be reproduced and confirmed by two independent researchers at least, then it's not a scientific process. History of science is full of fakes.
Summary: The Case for a Lab Leak, from a Sunday Times investigation (C):
(1) The institute sought funding to research something (A), which Covid could result from. (Said later they didn't do the planned research), but funding from the military appears to have been given.
(1.1) They planned to do the research at the time and approximate place where Covid later emerged.
(2) Protections at the lab were not what they should have been.
(2.2) Lab scientists had previously created a highly infectious super-coronavirus (not Covid-19) with a very high kill-rate that in all probability would never have emerged in nature. Their tests showed no known (at that time) way to effectively limit its spread were it to leak.
(3) NO animal testing was reported in a wide vicinity around the the Hunan market. Samples of Covid found in the market were NOT from animals (B).
(3.1) The market is a busy place in the center of the city where the virus would almost certainly be once it's spreading between people.
(3.2) There is some evidence that researchers from the lab were hospitalized with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019, and one of their relatives died.
(4) The biggest hotspot of people reporting illness via social media (in the month before the province was locked down on January 23) was at the institute, though this was partly hidden in initial reports. The first case in Britain was recorded a week later.
(A) The Wuhan Institute of Virology sought funding for inserting a furin cleavage site. The institute is a 40-minute drive from the Huanan Seafood market.
(B) In January 2020, Chinese officials cleared the market without testing live animals. The presence of SARS-CoV-2 was from environmental samples (animal cage, hair-and-feather–removal machine, etc). Covid-susceptible animals were present but NOT tested. The study of those samples was criticized for not having any animal samples.
(C) Information above drawn from archive.ph/L2BSO and comments and links here in this HN thread.
---------------------------
"The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak. The closest relatives to Covid known were too far from Covid to have developed into Covid on their own in a short time. So bringing in dangerous viruses and accidentally leaking them is an unlikely cause." Earlier reporting by the Times: archive.ph/Mkqox
Genome statistical estimates indicate the "relatives" are decades away from Covid. In February 2020, RaTG13 was identified as the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, sharing 96.1% nucleotide identity. It was found near the town of Tongguan in Mojiang county in Yunnan, China. However, in 2022, scientists found three closer matches 530 km south, in Feuang, Laos, designated as BANAL-52 (96.8% identity), BANAL-103 and BANAL-236. However, it is alleged that one virus at the Wuhan institute was an even closer match to Covid-19 than RaTG13. Note that bat viruses had never been known to harm humans. Intermediate animals apparently catching a virus from bats and passing it to humans had been known to happen.
In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base.
Overly-speculative information supporting a lab leak:
"Scientists with close relationships with the Wuhan Institute of Virology said it was their belief that there was vaccine research going on in the fall of 2019, pertinent to Covid-19 vaccination"
"Investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power."
In May 2020, one of the key researchers died from unconfirmed causes at age 54.
"On November 19, the safety director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences made a visit, according to the institute’s website. He addressed a meeting of the institute’s leadership with important 'oral and written' instructions from China’s president, Xi Jinping, regarding 'a complex and grave situation'. "
"In the first months of the pandemic, many Chinese scientists visited bat caves in Yunnan to see whether they could find a place where Covid may have originated.... 7 scientists attempting to visit were told the Moijang mine (known source of at least one Covid-like coronavirus) was closed, so they sampled bats in another abandoned copper mine nearby. On the first day of their work, police arrived, seized the samples and took them to their station, where they were interrogated and detained for 48 hours. Officers also went to their hotel and seized the samples they had collected from elsewhere. Even though the team had approval to test in the area, they were ordered to leave. Searching for bat viruses was banned in Yunnan in early 2021"
I’m just annoyed I was given -3 downvotes here on HN for saying there was research indicating artificial/lab gene markers were discovered indicating it probably had a lab origin. I didn’t say anything else just mentioned a research paper and I got downvoted here on HN. :(
If people spend time answering your questions (eg about copilot) and you can't be bothered acknowledging or even upvoting them, probably best not to be moaning about the voting system.
The idea that Covid19 was accidentally leaked from the Wuhan lab has moved from conspiracy theory to mainstream view of many US gov't agencies with the most classified information available to them.
John Ratcliffe, former Director of National Intelligence: “My informed assessment, as a person with as much or more access than anyone to our government’s intelligence during the initial year of the virus outbreak and pandemic onset, has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense. From a view inside the IC, if our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side-by-side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a naturally occurring “spillover” theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long and overwhelming while the “spillover” side would be nearly empty.”
The Furin cleavage site is one of the more compelling pieces of evidence. 1.5 years before the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute applied for a grant from Darpa to explore mutating coronaviruses to make them more infectious to humans, particularly through the addition of a Furin cleavage site. (Darpa declined to fund the research).
The Covid-19 virus is notable for being the only coronavirus to have a Furin cleavage site. Not only that, but it appears to be basically a perfect mutation that specifically modifies the 12 nucleotides necessary for the Furin site, without modifying other base pairs.
Here's a quote from email excerpt included in the recent Congress hearing:
"Before I left the office for the ball, I aligned nCoV with the 96% bat
CoV sequenced at WIV. Except for the RBD the S proteins are
essentially identical at the amino acid level – well all but the perfect
insertion of 12 nucleotides that adds the furin site. S2 is over its
whole length essentially identical. I really can’t think of a plausible
natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar
to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide
that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function
– that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t
figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment
of the spikes at the amino acid level – its stunning. Of course, in the
lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you
wanted."
(That latter quote is Tulane virologist Robert Garry. Like his peers he would go on to downplay the LL hyp in the wake of the Feb 1st conference call organized by then-head of Wellcome Trust Jeremy Farrar.)
I remember still when it was considered a conspiracy theory and we got downvoted here and banned on reddit for even implying the possibility. Unfortunately something similar is happening with AI x-risk right now.
Same with pointing out at the first studies that indicated that the virus was airborne. I got downvoted to oblivion here for posting a link to the study.
We still have no strong evidence for lab leak from BSL4 lab in Wuhan, while we have some evidence (two early strains of SARS-CoV-2: A, then B; B was in Wuhan in December; where and when was parent of A and B?) that suggests start of epidemic outside of China in mid-September 2019. Russians start to delete videos about blast at their BSL4 lab "Vector" in Novosibirsk on Sep 16 2019[0], which suggests that this information may cause harm for them.
So, "Lab leak" theory may be right, while "lab leak from BSL4 lab in Wuhan" theory may be wrong.
We are playing with words. Accusation vs possibility vs open to options vs etc. The problem is that it was called which hunting anything that was not natural origin.
I don't think that's true with AI. Loads of people worry about it and I've never heard that called a conspiracy theory.
It's true with covid though and I always thought the allegation a bit unfair. I mean suggesting the origin of X is from the nearest source of X has never seemed much of a conspiracy to me.
I had long messages on the Wikipedia discussion before they allowed the idea to be mentioned without a this is conspiracy disinformation disclaimer, after many months of fighting.
You're right that Daszak and the Ecohealth Alliance are culpable, but it must be noted that various USG orgs were not supportive of his actions
> The report he finally did submit stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and killed 35% of the humans it infected. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide. (A chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH’s grant specialists to ask a critical question: Should the work be subject to a federal
moratorium on what was called gain-of-function research?
> But the [2015 research paper he cited](https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985) was not particularly reassuring. In it, Shi Zhengli and a preeminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina, Ralph Baric, mixed components of SARS-like viruses from different species, and created a novel chimera that was able to directly infect human cells. (Baric did not respond to written questions seeking comment.)
> If anything, the MERS study Daszak proposed was even riskier. So he pitched a compromise to the NIH: that if any of the recombined strains showed 10 times greater growth than a natural virus, “we will immediately: i) stop all experiments with the mutant, ii) inform our NIAID Program Officer and the UNC [Institutional Biosafety Committee] of these results and iii) participate in decision making trees to decide appropriate paths forward.”
> This mention of UNC brought a puzzled response from an NIH program officer, who pointed out that the proposal had said the research would be performed at the WIV. “Can you clarify where the work with the chimeric viruses will actually be performed?” the officer wrote. Ten days later, with still no response from Daszak, the program officer emailed him again. On June 27, Daszak responded, buoyant as ever:
> “You are correct to identify a mistake in our letter. UNC has no oversight of the chimera work, all of which will be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology…. We will clarify tonight with Prof. Zhengli Shi exactly who will be notified if we see enhanced replication…my understanding is that I will be notified straight away, as [principal investigator], and that I can then notify you at NIAID. Apologies for the error!”
> Allowing such risky research to go forward at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was “simply crazy, in my opinion,” says Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center. “Reasons are lack of oversight, lack of regulation, the environment in China,” where scientists who publish in prestigious journals get rewarded by the government, creating dangerous incentives. “So that is what really elevates it to the realm of, ‘No, this shouldn’t happen.’”
In general, his actions make clear he's much more aligned with the Chinese government than the US, so extending Daszak to US govt purely based off of nationality seems unjust.
> On January 30, Daszak went on CGTN America, the U.S. outpost for Chinese state television, and said two things that proved to be spectacularly wrong. “I’m very optimistic…that this outbreak will begin to slow down,” he said. “We’re seeing a small amount of human-to-human transmission in other countries, but it’s not uncontrollable." He went on to conclude that the Chinese government was taking all necessary steps “to be open and transparent, and work with WHO, and talk to scientists from around the world, and where necessary, bring them in to help. They’re doing that. It’s exactly what needs to happen.”
I love how people who don’t read the article ask “did you read the article”. Agree there’s nothing new here, and most things presented as new are mostly conjecture or hear say
Cientists and medical professionals being arrested, a history of poor containament protocols, a fucking lab that did gain of function in the ground zero of the pandemic, China attempts to hide the situation before the rest of the world could starting preparing for it, and the destruction of evidence. Yeah.... no evidences whatsoever.
You posted 68 (!) comments in this thread, most of which were either unsubstantive (like this one), or flamebait, or both. That's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We have to ban accounts that post like this, so please don't do it again.
The idea here is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do. And please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the guidelines in the future.
I just don't like it when conspiracy theories are featured for days on the front page to be perfectly honest. That's not news for nerds, and it feel likes the community wants that flamebait if they keep promoting and engaging things that are simply not based in fact.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
This is every single post in this thread in my opinion, so when I see it, I feel compelled to respond.
I also don't think that most were unsubstantiated, most were pointing out the logical fallacies and lack of facts of posts, or other things like people accusing me of being pro china simply because I think this is all unknowable.
Sorry to keep editing. Additionally, this thread started late at night, and while many reasonable comments with great exhaustive expressions of my same opinion did get posted by calmer people, before that happened, it was a lot of conspiracy pile on. My opinion was that thinking a leak did happen wasn't some kind of conservative gotcha they think it is, and that maybe didn't happen isn't some kind of leftist thing or whatever the problem is with it not being a leak. Not enough people talk about just doing something about the ongoing world crisis and instead want to frame it in ways that are politically advantageous, and you see it the vast majority of comments I replied to, this mindset that someone must be blamed, and then people who are ashamed of that claim they really just want to find out the truth, but the people who know anything about epidemiology really wonder what use that would be at this point. This is the majority of my comments here and this feels pretty substantive, and the real discussion that people elsewhere are having on this topic.
So, I also felt like I wasn't doing anything wrong here. I could've just down voted but people also say you shouldn't just downvote if you disagree?
It is specifically OK to downvote to disagree on Hacker News, and the reason for that is exactly because the alternative, of writing lots of repetitive rebuttals, is so much worse for the threads.
This is not a good tactic for misinformation and disinformation, and general authoritarian thinking... That the message gets out there let alone isn't challenged on its merits immediately implies that it must be something reasonable to say if HN allows it to be posted.
If you want to correct false information by providing correct information neutrally, you're welcome to do so. But it's not ok to get triggered into posting a bunch of low-information objections. That kind of thing just contributes to general degeneration, and we're trying to avoid that here.
If something isn't even wrong then it probably is just noise. In that case the best thing to do is downvote (if you have the karma, which your account does), chalk it up to the internet being wrong, and move on.
I just don't understand this at all. Is it not obivous that US government discovered this virus a long time ago and started researching? There are too many proofs on this. How the fuck is this related to Wuhan? Are these publishers not thinking normal people too stupid and easy to be manipulated?
Ironic that their research aimed at giving them a head start on vaccine development, and yet China’s covid vaccine ended up being garbage compared to the American and European ones.
