US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins
reuters.com
reuters.com
My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them.
Which is exactly what this issue is about.
That's not to say we have compelling evidence that this was a lab virus, either. I think, for me, it's a, "we don't know, but I wouldn't be shocked at all if it was a lab virus".
Seems this holds true for every government and party.
Turkey is often unfairly criticised by western media, which obviously prefers military dictators in power.
Having separate and distinct parties and competitive elections also puts parties in the position of doing this to each other using the levers of power available to them.
Not saying it’s all golden, but these are very meaningful differences.
Freedom of speech is irrelevant if speech doesn't have consequences to those in power. Even less so if there are plenty to tow the establishment's lines anyway...
>and elections that matters so if the people dislike the policy they can change it
LOL, yeah, they can vote between one or the other corporatist neoliberal party, complicit in everything except a few token issues they use to lure their faithful. Such choice...
It's also disingenuous and lazy to ignore a century or more of empirical evidence.
>There are very obvious differences in how the world’s governments operate.
Are there?
https://www.amazon.com/All-Governments-Lie-Times-Journalist/...
https://project-evidence.github.io/
https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-origins-genome-analy...
Who was really behind this, and the whole history of it, is something surely we won't know for know.
"When war is declared, truth is the first casualty"
COVID-19 is ~30,000 base pairs long (10,000) codons. The 4% difference is 400 codons. That's not a lot. There are many singular proteins longer than that.
Is that proof? No, the same way gravity is just a theory.
or other things like assuming someone is dead based on the fact that they dont have a picture online and dont wanna talk to press
ive seen youtube conspiracy videos more convincing
It MIGHT have been possible but Occam's Razor says it's more plausible it evolved naturally and just jumped species.
FAR FAR FAR more plausible.
China has had multiple SARS escape accidents.
E.g. "killer bees" are a product of human scientists trying to engineer a better bee - the release was accidental. It's not like we have the ability to genetically engineer a bee from the ground up. But as a species humans have been purposefully manipulating the traits of living things for thousands of years.
More likely than building the virus is studying it and accelerating it’s development.
Now I’m not saying that’s what happened here however without the cooperation of the CCP we’ll have no idea what the truth of the matter is
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
It turns out we've been doing "serial passage" research for some time, which is where we leverage natural selection to do our genetic engineering for us, rather than manually editing genes. This is how we engineer viruses to jump species - on purpose.
> They did it using serial passaging: repeatedly dosing a mixed solution of mouse cells and hamster cells with mouse-hepatitis virus, while each time decreasing the number of mouse cells and upping the concentration of hamster cells. At first, predictably, the mouse-hepatitis virus couldn’t do much with the hamster cells, which were left almost free of infection, floating in their world of fetal-calf serum. But by the end of the experiment, after dozens of passages through cell cultures, the virus had mutated: It had mastered the trick of parasitizing an unfamiliar rodent.
In fact, "we" (meaning humanity) have even been experimenting with serial passage into humans.
> A few years later, in a further round of “interspecies transfer” experimentation, Baric’s scientists introduced their mouse coronavirus into flasks that held a suspension of African-green-monkey cells, human cells, and pig-testicle cells. Then, in 2002, they announced something even more impressive: They’d found a way to create a full-length infectious clone of the entire mouse-hepatitis genome. Their “infectious construct” replicated itself just like the real thing, they wrote.
The whole article is really worth a read.
The general evidence is this is yet another reason why wet markets are terrible for humanity, not that it was made in a lab and got away. But you can build lots of things.
A random virus, no. This one, we do.
We can't build a virus from scratch. But we can combine pieces of different viruses to build a new one. The same thing also happens naturally when an animal is sick with 2 viruses at once. If both get into the same cell, you get various mixes created and sometimes a mixture will turn out to be a better virus than either parent.
This virus looks like a combination of apparently unrelated viruses. See https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-origins-genome-analy... for confirmation. That happens to be something that can happen either naturally or artificially.
Where conspiracy theorists get going is that a few years ago there were papers from the lab near Wuhan suggesting that a combination much like COVID-19's actual combination should be particularly effective in humans. So this looks like an extension of a known line of research from a lab involved in military work. Combine that with the local coverup and you can see how people go down the rabbit hole.
Yes.
> your comment is worthless otherwise.
No.
See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/ for one of their previous lines of research that look similar to the actual COVID-19 virus.
I would discount the possibility that this was bioweapons research - the US was funding serial passage and gain-of-function research at this lab, of which the express purpose is to make viruses more infectious in different species, including humans.
At any rate, I don't think we can expect anything to be definitively proven. It is absolutely possible that this came out of the wild. But as the NY Magazine "Lab Leak" article illustrates, we should probably be open to the idea it came out of a lab. I also think we should reconsider whether or not serial-passage and gain-of-function research is something that can be ethically conducted. Anywhere.
Earlier in March, Zhao Lijian, an outspoken Chinese diplomat, raised a suspicion on his personal Twitter account that it might have been the US army representatives to the Military World Games who brought the novel coronavirus to Wuhan in October 2019, after a top US health official admitted detecting coronavirus infections on some deceased flu patients. Zhao urged the US to disclose further information, exercise transparency on coronavirus cases and provide an explanation to the public.
But, there is more than one conspiracy theory here. And probably will be forever. As a hopefully rational third party, I would like it investigated.
But I'm currently giving good odds to "accidental release from program intended to research possible future pandemics". And if that winds up seeming at all likely, I believe that the whole world should commit to having better controls on this type of research to avoid future accidental releases. Because accidental mass murder isn't OK.
Given that the CDC and commercial companies were doing research in that lab, is the US just as culpable as China?
What was the reason for the CDC working with that lab? Aside from rationalizations, was it essentially just outsourcing the dirty work like any other polluting industry?
There's a rational reason to study this one, since SARS (1.0) was a big deal in the early 2000's, and anyway why wouldn't you study something you don't fully understand as a matter of course. It's not a stretch if it was found that it leaked from the lab by accident and a cover-up ensued.
Occam's Razor says the only (non-vet) BSL4 lab in China, studying bat coronaviruses, several miles from known first virus reports, that has had multiple previous virus leaks, with huge information shutdown by China for a year, is the more plausible culprit.
Why wouldn’t CCP stop all suspicion on this and say the virus originated in another part of China? It almost feels like a murderer trying to use reverse psychology by hiding in plain sight. Like, it can’t be from Wuhan Lab because they actually reported that it came from Wuhan (what idiot that’s trying to cover it up do that?). A calculated person would make such a calculation.
The truth might be weird here.
If you ask people from any developing countries, they would express the same attitude (as you do for CCP) towards their own government. The reason is that the officials and way of work is stuck behind current standard, and that's why it is called developing country.
Personally I don't care too much about if it was a lab virus or something else, it becomes all political. Could it be better? I don't think so. If it was developed in a bio-weapon lab, China would have handled it well because it would be prepared.
Of course democracies are just as vulnerable to all the bad stuff as they are run by humans, but transparency is at least possible. Sadly we see national security being used as reason to avoid transparency, and of course corruption follows.
Man it took forever for someone to make this point. There's a lot of bad Chinese Gov behavior that US Gov players absolutely aspire to.
It’s not a new thing. The (paraphrased) quote “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance” is at least a couple hundred of years old. In practice however it’s not a very simple proposition at all. People typically agree with endlessly granting government additional powers when it’s for a policy they agree with.
The difference between the US (or France, or Germany, or the UK...) and China however, is that we actually have some mechanisms for holding our government to account (however flawed they might be). Whereas Chinese citizens have none at all.
If the penalty for lying and being caught is the same league as screwing up, people are going to cover up problems.
Not what I was expecting, but still a really interesting story.
That is to say, if the punishment for any kind of crime is death, no matter how serious or how trivial, you might as well go ahead and commit the much more serious one and try and cover that up instead.
Either way you're fucked, so why not go all in?
This is true of any hierarchical power structure, but is especially bad in overtly authoritarian ones.
> This is true of any hierarchical power structure
is only true if everyone in the hierarchy is a madman.
Or in this case, how covid19 export case numbers from places like Taiwan, HK, SK, Singapore, Australia, Newzealand all indicate Chinese numbers are not grossly exaggerated - China only exported a fraction of covid19 cases compared to Europe or North America because covid19 never exploded in China due to harsh restrictions. The article you're citing is also sourcing figures from _Chinese_ CDC on antibody prevalence rate which is expected to be higher than pure testing data seen in similar studies in other countries. So again, it's official Chinese numbers being useful and comporting to similar measures elsewhere. The difference is western media like BBC attempting to spin as the numbers being uniquely nefarious and useful idiots eating it up, just like in this NYT article.
Then, nothing happened. Not one country stopped their domestic travel, no one prepared and mandated a ‘3 month summer staycation’ (my poor attempt at marketing a terrible circumstance with some positive spin)... and we all started blaming each other.
That was sickening to me... it’s bad enough when we don’t take the proper action to protect our fellow neighbor, but even after acknowledging the cause is basically lost, we turn on each other.
So my quip was in that jaded poor taste, when I saw the finger pointing beginning again... and I should have just commented this to begin with...
Isn't this the point of public forums? To encourage discussion?
If this was some sort of lab mistake, as the conspiracy angle suggests, IMO that's much less embarrassing. In the "real" explanation, thousands of mainlanders are regularly eating food contaminated with bat shit, with zero health standards. In the "conspiracy", they're a first-world country doing groundbreaking science, and an accident occurred.
I think they're probably telling the truth.
"Mislabeled SRA entry is one thing but - it’s clear that it’s impossible (in my hands at least with a -very good- pipeline) to assemble the reference that is in GenBank from the data in SRA"
That's old information. The first cases of the virus had no connection with the wet market, and no connection could later be found other than it was the first major subsequent point of spreading for the virus. So it's much more likely that people spread it at the market, rather than that it came from there.
However, they are indeed disgusting third-world wet markets and the practice of consuming bush meat as well as having live wild animals of all different kinds together in a wet market is an experiment we shouldn't be conducting. The risk to reward ratio is way too high. Remember that HIV likely came from butchering and consuming contaminated chimpanzees in Africa. The world needs to put those kinds of practices behind us, it has cost us far more than it can ever be worth.
Yes
> The idea that this is only a problem in Africa and Asia is entirely nonsensical.
No, this statement of yours is nonsensical. What I'm saying is the practice of eating bush meat, and these kinds of wet markets bring very little value by themselves. Compared to animal husbandry in general, not even 1% of the total value. However, they represent an outsized proportion of the risk. So it's a bad idea. One could improve the risk-reward ratio by eliminating them - entirely logical.
The (theorized) problem was that wild-caught land-animals happened to be part of the selection.
Of course you are making some other argument, but I doubt it's the poor people in Wuhan that are eating pangolins.
If the wet market is at fault, it can be blamed on the local party leadership, which was easy enough to do because they continued to screw up during the early stages of the pandemic. One memorable one is when they hosted a massive dinner for 20000 people in close proximity when it was starting to really heat up.
If it's the lab, that squarely falls on the national government, which in all things can and must do no wrong.
A poster above said it perfectly, when your authority comes from competency, you need to show your competent. The CCP has this precarious position in China where the people support it strongly because they've been doing a good job giving people better lives, at least from their perspective. If that turns badly in any way, it could break them.
The people were informed, they reacted as much as they are going to, and until new information comes out, the issue is where it is.
Now go and check (it contains a story about FOIA requests to the UK government on Assange's case)
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/11/18/signs-of-u-k-misconduc...
It is the 6th (!) year that the litigation to obtain the information goes on.
Are we talking about China or the Trump administration?
The tone and tenor of the investigation has always been to find a way to absolve local politicians of responsibility for their incompetence in managing this issue by blaming China.
All for the punchline of "so you're then going to do what to China in response?" Of which the answer is nothing. The genocide of the Uyigur people certainly hasn't motivated any strong international action.
The WHO chief just blindly parroted whatever the CCP said for nearly 2 months while the pandemic spread and got out of control. That man deserves to be stripped out of his position. But he will face no justice for the many, many lives he has taken.
The entire timeline of tweets and statements by the WHO is open on the internet - don't see the need to quote them verbatim here.
The only nation in the world raising flags was Taiwan - and their warnings were ignored until it was too late.
I fully agree that Trump could have handled the virus better. Unfortunately, ALL media attention was focused on his impeachment at the time and he was derided as a racist and tyrant for banning China travel.
He should had the courage to ban all international travel immediately when the virus got to the EU and begun to initiate national readiness. Some nations did this and suffered far less as a result. Sadly, he - like so many national leaders - took the virus seriously far too late.
The final verdict on the efficacy of masks against this virus is still TBD once we have more information and the passage of time removes the political agenda's that cloud this conversation. Your "own the libs" certainly doesn't help either.
Though IMHO, given the role vitamin D deficiency seems to have on mortality rates, I think the harshest criticism (charges?) should be reserved for any mayor who ordered tanning beds to close in his or her city.
"Based on the available information there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission."
"Additional investigation is needed to ascertain the presence of human-to-human transmission, modes of transmission, common source of exposure and the presence of asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases that are undetected. It is critical to review all available information to fully understand the potential transmissibility among humans."
"Data collected through detailed epidemiological investigation and through the deployment of the new test kit nationally suggests that human-to-human transmission is taking place in Wuhan. More analysis of the epidemiological data is needed to understand the full extent of human-to-human transmission."
In my small European countries, no public measures were taken based on all this info until early March (more than 2 weeks after Northern Italy was overwhelmed, while our countrymen had been traveling all over Europe), because there were no confirmed cases in our country yet. The only initial measures in early March were advices to "wash your hands", "don't shake hands" and "sneeze in your elbows".
So I don't think the WHO confirming human transmission on 14 Jan instead of 22 Jan would have changed a thing. People only take painful measures when bad things happen to people they know, and politicians only when bad things happen to people in their own country. Trying to shift the blame on the WHO or China is not very common amongst politicians here (though anecdotally it's not rare among citizens), that seems to be mostly an American (specifically, Republican party) thing.
[1] https://www.who.int/csr/don/14-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...
[2] https://www.who.int/china/news/detail/22-01-2020-field-visit...
https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ani/taiwan-wa...
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3904054
Please note that the WHO confirmation statement on 22nd Jan came about after independent confirmation of human to human transmission and only after China's health ministry itself confirmed human to human transmission on Jan 20th. Just a mere week after strong denial, the casualties could not be hidden anymore after several whistleblowers spoke up and China was forced to backtrack.
The WHO merely acknowledged what China stated with a wishy-washy "more data is needed". I suspect if China hadn't itself come clean they would have simply followed what the CCP stated well into the future!
If the WHO had chosen to acknowledge Taiwan's concern in December, performed the most minimum of followups and raised the alarm early, this disaster could have been nipped in the bud. A lot of second and third-world nations put faith in the WHO and outside the EU and the US, the anger at the WHO is palpable.
Being skeptical is acceptable but not to the extent of rejecting the evidentiary process.
Also, Taiwan News is notably anti-China and is associated with Taiwanese nationalists.
Being skeptical is necessary when considering China's terrible past track record. The SARS epidemic also started with a denial and cover-up by China.
There are many other news sources apart from Taiwan News. You can check out the FT. You can check out Reuters. (Decrying Taiwan News as comprising of anti-Chinese nationalists is rather strange considering the CCP's stance against Taiwan)
https://archive.is/nqiKV https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-taiwan...
Please note that even in Feb, the WHO chief was saying travel bans. are not needed https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN1...
"The head of the World Health Organization said on Monday there was no need for measures that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade” in trying to halt the spread of a coronavirus that has killed 361 people in China, and he lauded China’s efforts to contain it." (real figure as we learnt later was already >10x by that time)
“It’s no reason to really panic now,” he said. “The chances of getting this going to anywhere outside China is very low, and even in China, when you go to other provinces, it’s very low.”
"The WHO continues to advise against the application of travel or trade restrictions to countries experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks"
https://apnews.com/article/a0b22f45f0cbc8e83e7d496dd2e09556
China cracked down harshly and sufficiently that countries that immediately listened to WHOs advice to test/trace/isolate managed to contain the virus well because very few cases ever made it abroad as seen in import cases statistics from many countries. Expatriation flights meant leakage was inevitable, but screening procedures were mostly theatre, temperature checks instead of 14day quarantines. The problem is very few countries listened to WHO's advice, and still don't.
I think you have this backwards. The obsession has always been first and foremost with US domestic politics because so many americans on the internet have an unhealthy obsession with domestic politics. Present discussion is a yet another example.
There's an unsolved mystery we would like to see solved. Specifically right at the heart of one of the most traumatic and pivotal events of our lifetime. Why do you care so much about finding ulterior motives for people interested in that mystery?
There's a huge incentive to blame China for our fuckups. Really, it should be assumed unless proven otherwise.
After all, aside from the whole "no evidence" thing, what does it matter if it's a lab accident or a bat bite or whatever? We had months of warning and fucked it up badly. They were blindsided and recovered nicely. Clearly this must be their fault.
Indeed because both of those leading theories point the blame at China. So if people want to blame china nothing is stopping them. Except perhaps those claiming it came from Europe or the US first. Perhaps that's the point of the stonewalling, to provide cover for being able to claim alternative theories? Since you're so into ulterior motives.
Who is the "we" you are referring to? The western world? The US?
> Who is the "we" you are referring to? The western world? The US?
I was thinking US -- I guess it goes to varying extents to the rest of the "western world", depending on how you define that.
But you're a westerner blaming the west, so that's cool?
Anyway doesn't one of the sides have the majority of facts on their side? I can't imagine the virus would have been eliminated by anything the west did, as it surely spread to the developing world at the same time anyway. I really don't think there's much the US could have done to lock down either. Trump floated the idea of restricting travel to the NYC region and Cuomo threatened to sue. You want Trump seizing emergency powers and suspending the constitution?
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/24/birx-says-someone-was-giving...
Dr. Deborah Birx, the Trump White House coronavirus response coordinator, said in a CBS interview released on Sunday that former President Donald Trump had been reviewing “parallel” data sets on the coronavirus pandemic from someone inside the administration.
"Rebekah Jones, the data scientist who helped create Florida's COVID-19 dashboard, has turned herself in to police, in response to an arrest warrant issued by the state. " https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...
Not unlike Fauci and the CDC being censored and forced to send information through the DHS...
So you are right entirely different level of screwup - China Censored a single Dr, US censored the CDC.
Obviously I wish they hadn't done this, but they didn't arbitrarily try to hide it.
If there was a 'coverup' it was by local municipal authorities which should not be conflated with central govt. Even if true, the actual reporting of first case was only delayed by 1 week with the genome sequenced shared w/WHO rest of world less 2wks later.
To me, the only constructive discussion that can be had at this point needs to be around actual evidence, and not the absence of it. The first documented cases, first traces of positive samples etc etc. It's clearly still in the early stages of discoveries so all theories are just theories. That said I don't expect this to remain a mystery forever. It will just take time, because eventually the natural origins will be pinned down and reasonable chain of events of first spread will be identified.
Kansas
And, as pertains to the virus's origin, COVID-19 did come from China, and we know that. We have epidemiology to guide us here, and the situation is altogether different from 1918 w/r/t speed of communication and the state of science.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
"There's no doubt that the novel coronavirus ... originated in China."
As a response to the statement: "COVID-19 did come from China" in the previous post, the article you linked directly confirmed that statement.
That doesn't disprove xenophobia at all. The Spanish press reported on it first because every nation involved in WWI very aggressively censored any mention of the flu. After the war, they had every incentive to play into people's natural xenophobia rather admit to covering up the disease. Here you see the Spanish Flu depicted as a flamenco lady:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/G386J3/the-spanish-flu-epidemic-ov...
No, it tended to be called the Spanish Flu because Spanish newspapers simply reported more about the epidemic:
>...Spain was not involved in the war, having remained neutral, and had not imposed wartime censorship.[17][18] Newspapers were therefore free to report the epidemic's effects, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these widely-spread stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit.
Some theorize it might have first originated in Kansas:
>...The first confirmed cases originated in the United States. Historian Alfred W. Crosby stated in 2003 that the flu originated in Kansas,[61] and popular author John M. Barry described a January 1918 outbreak in Haskell County, Kansas, as the point of origin in his 2004 article.
But then again:
>...A 2018 study of tissue slides and medical reports led by evolutionary biology professor Michael Worobey found evidence against the disease originating from Kansas, as those cases were milder and had fewer deaths compared to the infections in New York City in the same period. The study did find evidence through phylogenetic analyses that the virus likely had a North American origin, though it was not conclusive. In addition, the haemagglutinin glycoproteins of the virus suggest that it originated long before 1918, and other studies suggest that the reassortment of the H1N1 virus likely occurred in or around 1915.
Some theorize it might have first originated in Europe:
>...The major UK troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples in France has been theorized by virologist John Oxford as being at the center of the Spanish flu.[63] His study found that in late 1916 the Étaples camp was hit by the onset of a new disease with high mortality that caused symptoms similar to the flu.[64][63] According to Oxford, a similar outbreak occurred in March 1917 at army barracks in Aldershot,[65] and military pathologists later recognized these early outbreaks as the same disease as the Spanish flu.[66][63] The overcrowded camp and hospital at Etaples was an ideal environment for the spread of a respiratory virus.
>...A report published in 2016 in the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association found evidence that the 1918 virus had been circulating in the European armies for months and possibly years before the 1918 pandemic.[67] Political scientist Andrew Price-Smith published data from the Austrian archives suggesting the influenza began in Austria in early 1917.
But then again:
>...A 2009 study in Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses found that Spanish flu mortality simultaneously peaked within the two-month period of October and November 1918 in all fourteen European countries analyzed, which is inconsistent with the pattern that researchers would expect if the virus had originated somewhere in Europe and then spread outwards.
Some theorize it was China:
>...In 1993, Claude Hannoun, the leading expert on the Spanish flu at the Pasteur Institute, asserted the precursor virus was likely to have come from China and then mutated in the United States near Boston and from there spread to Brest, France, Europe's battlefields, the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world, with Allied soldiers and sailors as the main disseminators.[70] Hannoun considered several alternative hypotheses of origin, such as Spain, Kansas, and Brest, as being possible, but not likely.[70] In 2014, historian Mark Humphries argued that the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese laborers to work behind the British and French lines might have been the source of the pandemic. Humphries, of the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, based his conclusions on newly unearthed records. He found archival evidence that a respiratory illness that struck northern China (where the laborers came from) in November 1917 was identified a year later by Chinese health officials as identical to the Spanish flu.
On the other hand:
>...A report published in 2016 in the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association found no evidence that the 1918 virus was imported to Europe via Chinese and Southeast Asian soldiers and workers and instead found evidence of its circulation in Europe before the pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
So far the historical and epidemiological data cannot identify the geographic origin of the Spanish flu.
They can probably start by capping payments from any one country as to minimize the effects of soft power.
An under-funded WHO is better than a biased WHO.
On the other hand, the WHO after the pandemic had clearly emerged continued to appear biased, seriously damaging its reputation.
“ Though the US paid $446.5m in 2019 compared with China’s $43m, the bulk of American funding was voluntary; the organization only receives 17% of its funding through “assessed” contributions, AKA country membership dues. The bulk of its budget is funded through voluntary donations, for which countries can earmark specific use, because President Ronald Reagan passed a “zero-growth policy” for WHO funding in the 1980s. With the assessed dues frozen at 1990s levels, the WHO has been forced to increasingly rely on donated funds.”
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/oct/19/john-oliver-...
Great expression! I have the same strange feeling but couldn't put in correct words. Other than the topic of this thread, there's a meta topic which reflects some interesting human natures showing up more often among politicians and lawyers: Spread bias opinions without being caught misleading, disguise subjective speculations under objective delicately organized articulation.
Being constructive in discussion is extremely difficult. Sometime I watch the debate with fun on meta topics other than topics.
I am honestly laughing like this needs to be communicated to the HN folks, like it bares any insights, like it is not already the default political correctness for majority here.
The top comment is as useless as to say the OP would believe whatever he/she would love to believe whatever the evidence presented.
New Yorker puts it well:
"The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness"
Our prior is that novel viruses come from zoonotic sources. We haven't ever experienced a pandemic derived from a laboratory leak. It seems fanciful, because it would be unprecedented. But, what would it look like if it did happen? How would it be any different than what we've seen?
Given the situation, yes, we cannot make any conclusions without evidence. And this implies a burden of proof on governments. The fact that this outbreak began in China is unfortunate, but it does not make it right for them to withhold information on the origins of the virus. They should share every scrap of information and evidence that they have, or expect exactly the kind of reaction that you are critiquing.
There is no fallacy of middle ground here. There is simply a lack of hard evidence to confirm a particular hypothesis about where this virus came from. And, there is an uncomfortable abundance of circumstantial evidence pointing in a highly unusual direction. This is not an issue that you can align with the US political spectrum. And it can be approached without needing to make any claims about how good or bad the Chinese government is. You cannot claim to know what this virus is without information that is not available.
Claims that it is zoonotic are unfortunately just as baseless as any conspiracy theories about weapon development that you've been hearing. The argument for zoonotic origin are based on a single piece of evidence that came out of the labs in the very city where the virus was first found: the sequence of a related SARS-like virus, and one with some very unusual sequence features and publication parameters. Doubt is reasonable. We should fully accept the possibility that humans were able to generate such a construct, and be ready for the next time it happens. The basic fact is that we know how to make such a virus, and that information is now out in the open whether or not this particular virus came from a lab.
On the other hand asking if a bat type coronavirus could have come from the nearest place with lots of bat type coronavirus doesn't seem that unreasonable to me.
I don’t understand this point.
When described as you (OP) put it, it seems that abstractly, the Chinese Communist party is just the state religion.
I'm not trying to play a game of whataboutism. I'm curious why these structures seem to rise, regardless of what we intend or call the them. What is it about the human experience that so often results in this.
I apologize if this is overtly stereotypical, naive, assuming, or disrespectful. It wasn't meant to offend or annoy. Just cautiously curious.
Would you say “Microsoft is just a corporate religion”?
I think a religion is about more than just an entity that tries to avoid negative PR.
is that not the default mode for families? elementary/middle/highschool/universities? work? any communities you spend a lot of time in?
The line tends to be more that this sucks but we tried voting in the other lot and that sucked too.
If you suggest eliminating private property to mitigate certain ills engendered by capitalism, or express another view that is truly antithetical to capitalism then you will find yourself marginalized to the point you cannot influence the system.
Private property is inextricably linked with capitalism. If there is no private property there can be no private ownership of the means of production, hence no capitalism. Conversely, within capitalism there is private ownership of the means of production hence there can be no private property, only personal property.
A Chinese friend once described to me the week he discovered YouTube after going to study in America, when for the first time he saw videos of Chinese leaders (2000-era) behaving very rudely toward reporters. He found that shocking, and over the next few weeks and more research, accepted that much of what he’d been taught about his history was fabrication. The experience was pretty traumatizing for him. He’s back living in China now, but with a very different perspective.
I was what you might call a fundamentalist Christian for most of my life, until I was exposed to enough of the counter-arguments that some of them finally stuck. The deprogramming process took a year and a half and was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.
In both cases, the in-group is well-protected from “improper information” (as the CCP calls it). In China they have the great firewall and the domestic censorship apparatus; in religion believers are inoculated against trusting information from “worldly” sources (though the motives of those involved in the actual suppression may differ). Neither system could survive in its current form if this information weren’t suppressed — that’s obvious by looking at what happens when individuals are exposed to alternate points of view and take them seriously.
That said, the firewall is easily bypassed with VPN by many with the means to do so. Chinese govt does not view this as contradiction with their policy as it is deemed those able to read Englis/foreign news are educated enough to discern the truth.
Japan's deputy prime minister calls the WHO the "Chinese Health Organization": https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/04/29/commentary/w...
> are we saying that the international group that entered china were some how in league with the CCP?
There may be reason to expect that they or their superiors are ... biased.
Really... Japan... because there is no history of tension between China and Japan that would make me doubt Japan's agenda here.
WHO is an international organisation, literally people from around the world work there... are ALL of these people actually secretly Chinese agents? Tell me how that works.
They still have confirmed that it is not a lab grown virus, and have consistently confirmed it’s from the wild.
How is this different from any other country? Do you think that the United States government, or any other western government, would accept any damaging rumors that would cause embarrassment to them?
Just look at their hypocrisy when it comes to Assange or Snowden. But at least these two are still alive. For now. Too bad for the Australian guy that exposed Australia’s recent war crimes, he got pleasantly suicided. That’s the penalty for upsetting the western world order. Thanks for playing.
Why is it never brought up that it could just be an accident? It doesn't need to be a weapon. Just poor safety during research.
I mean, name any other country that has a lot of biological weapons labs all over the world.
2) The Wuhan virus lab has been experimenting with corona viruses for a long time, including gain of function, and it had a history of problems.
3) There's no indication--as in zero--that any other country had covid-19 cases before China. And in this case, lack of evidence IS evidence for lack, because case records are open (except in China, it seems).
Now if you want to debate this point further, I suggest that you establish with us that you are not a CCP hack. So repeat after me: Premier Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03008916209747...
Also, if you look closely, notice that the reason we have no earlier samples then september is, because we have no earlier samples. Can't test one from august, if you don't have one from august.
Perhaps people noticed it when it hit Wuhan and freaked out because of the Research Institute thinking “oh shit, is this what they’re playing with?”
I don't think the US has labs abroad but other countries such as the UK and Russia have mucked around with bioweapons research in the past. Probably China too as it has a general policy to keep up with the opposition.
While I don't trust the CCP a bit, I also doubt that China is pursuing bioweapons research, for the same reason: a bioweapon is too likely to backfire. If the covid-2 virus came from a lab in Wuhan, it's not because they were pursuing it as a potential bioweapon, it's because they--and others--wanted to understand how to protect against it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Detrick#2019_closure_and_...
Then a small group favors their stories to happen because of malicious intent. Like saturday morning cartoon villain style of obvious evilness. And that is often mixed with a "them (evil) and us (good)" type of self-assertive tribe behavior as well as the bitching and bickering that stems from relating social status. (USA and China are not humans, they are nations, but people anthropomorphise them)
A story about poor standards and accidents is more about empathy and carefulness, and while a wise man might tell it to his children, it is not the thing people gossip about. Everyone agrees that bio-labs should have highest standards and that is it, there is little difference to "it happened randomly", and more importantly there is little blame and fame. Have you heard what <china> did? has another ring to it.
The human mind operates on stories, not on facts. Working with facts is hard and even the most pious intellectual can and will fall prey to nature. So it is no wonder that the most scandalous stories are the ones that get around a lot.
Certain actors have a narrative they would like to push.
Now, it still most likely came from China but this adds to the reasonable suggestion that the Wuhan market was simply the first large outbreak but not near the origin of the virus.
My 2c is that the virus will be found (if we do find its origin) to come from a rural area in Southern China.
A US intelligence contractor that collects location data from apps on phones made a presentation that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was shut down from October 7 to 24, 2019. This was reported in the popular US press [1]. You probably missed that in the nightmare flood of last year. I did when it was first reported...
Thus far, the earliest-detected SARS-CoV-2 in the EU has been in November. I would bet that no evidence is ever found for it globally before late October, 2019. We may look for a long time.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/report-sa...
I was disappointed that having looked at evidence of early spread in France and Italy through wastewater samples and patient blood samples that the Chinese response instead of doing similar research was to say all wastewater samples have been chucked and looking at blood samples is illegal.
The cynic in me perhaps asks why they would do that.
Recall how much the situation changed in 2020 between the beginning of January and the end of March...
Even if we just had an handful of cases at the beginning of October, by the end of December we would have got massive clusters of cases, tens of thousands of people hospitalized with the same symptoms
And then suddenly, when we started to look for it in January/February, we found only a few clusters and the disease grew (again?) From almost nothing
Covid19 is not something that you can keep hidden:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...
If it was intentionally released, it’s even more important to know by who and why.
Because it doesn't matter if it's accidentally released from a lab, if you're going to catch it from a bat cave anyway. You haven't eliminated it from the world.
So yeah, it is important to find out what the origin of this virus was because whatever the reason was we want to ensure that it isn’t the same reason for the next big pandemic.
To me it seems like the lab escape story has only developed because of journalist brain. It's convenient if you'll only accept a narrative that involves blaming a human and not a natural system.
Anyway, the story doesn't seem to be developing in that direction:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/14/health/who-mission-china-intl...
I like how the WHO investigator calls the original patient "dull and normal".
Yeah ok.
How about this China, find out what cave the market was getting their bats from. Go in there, confirm the bats have it, and release some data.
To answer your question: If NYC had a virus lab that actively mutated bat coronaviruses so that they could become infectious in humans, and then one day a human-infecting virus with 96% similarity to a bat coronavirus started popping up in New York City with no known origin… Yes, people would start asking questions about that lab.
Check out this commentary from 2015. This type of research was being subcontracted out to the Wuhan lab, despite public concerns that safety wasn’t tight enough there.
https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...
I get that people don’t want to discriminate against China, but this is very clearly a hypothesis worth investigating further.
"Lipsitch’s activists (calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group) sent around a strong statement on the perils of research with “Potential Pandemic Pathogens,” signed by more than a hundred scientists. The work might “trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control,” the signers said. Fauci reconsidered, and the White House in 2014 announced that there would be a “pause” in the funding of new influenza, SARS, and MERS gain-of-function research." [0]
In December 2017, the US began funding gain-of-function research on these deadly diseases again. This research creates deadly diseases that may not have existed otherwise.
This pandemic has been enough for me to strongly believe that there should be a global ban on gain-of-function experiments on deadly viruses and bacteria. I'd like to help prevent a future pandemic, and that's one clear way we can help.
[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
This seems like a supremely bad idea.
Only inside level four labs, of course. But early warning (and this work on mitigation) seems important.
Must be in rural isolation, NOT a city.
The administrators and janitors and everyone has to sleep inside the fence.
Getting out requires spending 40 days in a quarantine hotel in a different nearby fenced area.
Armed guards patrol the fence.
(EDIT: To be clear. BSL-5 doesn't exist yet... but it should.)
Anyway Murphy's law is always applicable and we need the capability to fight fires even more.
As an RE geek, and a biologist, the Movies were so f'ing awful... I'm playing the new reboot of the Outbreak series, my favorite of all, RE: Resistance and its pretty awesome and still does way more with genre of survival horror in what was simply an add-on DLC cash-in to sell an updated RE3 then all the horrible movies combined. Online play was always more fun, but now that you're the villainous 'master mind' behind the plot kill the subjects for your own gain is absolutely brilliant, something sorely lacking the same Raccoon City Outbreak universe.
They simply did what Hollywood always does: make shit up and refused to speak about the Cyberpunk-esque undertones of Umbrella and the T virus in any adequate way. This works for comic book stuff because it's audience is so self-serving, but it's also why it's so boring and suffers from the repeated one dimensional story telling.
Instead of following the manga-style adaptions they have in Japanese cinema Hollywood made a series of mindless 2 hour brain drains of of zombie shooting banality, and then made up characters the main character (Jovovich) doesn't even exist in the lore, they deviated so far from the plot that they even managed to get Jill's character so bad I literately pissed of my date when we went I was nerd-raging so hard about how bad it was and how much a missed opportunity it was to inspire more like me to enter into biology--we were both freshman in University and I was at my peak of biopunk naivety and advocacy.
The animated series were way better, as is the case with Batman stuff and shows how gritty and dire these subjects are when properly told from the right platform and setting.
As for COVID, I witnessed how resurgance of the yellow movement in HK was being quelled by the CCP and PLA since that Summer, and I personally feel the theory that an accidental leaked gain of function virus makes sense but that nothing 'damning' will ever be uncovered as the floods that impacted Wuhan provided perfect cover to do any successful form of epidemiology, the wet markets are no longer a source of valid data and it was clear how the WHO who were refused at first from entering) is not to be trusted given their alliances to the CCP and refusal to acknowledge the efforts Taiwan had during this pandemic.
Sadly, political theater will always undo anything Science can prove (or not prove) even when it results in the death of 2+ million people. Let it not be forgotten the CCP was jailing, disspeaing and going fafter people on Social media for talking about the deadliness and serious nature of what was happening. Mainland Citizen-journalists who exposed the dire situation and the pathetic state of these make shift hospitals over run by are still not accounted for and are presumed to be either dissapeared in a black-site re-education camp, or simply murdered at this point.
That's why the CCP is such a threat, and its reliance needs to be broken from and decoupled: cheap labour and trinkets aren't worth having them be the vanguard for Human or even environmental health and denying and hiding, getting rid of any and all evidence when it suits them--which includes but is not limited to disspearing people and committing war crimes and acts of genocide while Xi speaks at DAVOS about creating a more 'diverse' system as it extinguishes ethnic groups it see's as threat to it's divisive death cult (CCP).
I meant RE though
I'd genuinely like to know what we would get out of it that would warrant such risk taking?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debat...
https://www.wired.com/2014/07/cdc-found-pox/ https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/blog/scab-story
A failed experiment? Maybe a bit more likely, but still I don't think so
Sars-Cov-2 looks like pretty much what it is: a zoonotic virus that "doesn't know what's going on"
Hence why only the recent mutations made its transmission more efficient.
Now, if it escaped unbeknownst from a research lab, that I would put on the plausible category. Would be more possible if it wouldn't have had a perfect virus breeding ground right next to it.
What you can do is follow chains of mutations and infections and try to get somewhere.
It was actually remarkably stable in the early days suggesting it was used to reproducing in human cells. Or so Professor Petrovsky says https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8356751/How-COVID-1...
As how that could have happened lab wise here's Daszak saying they routinely infect human cells with coronavirus in the lab https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1701&v=IdYDL_RK--w&feature=y...
Or maybe it was in humans a bit before it took off. I see Daszak's kind of changed his tune a bit these days to not mention anything like that lab stuff.
The common Flu can infect horses and even chickens. "stability in human cells" means pretty much nothing
It is unenforceable from the start. All the major world powers would continue their research (perhaps slightly less openly) simply from a MAD angle (it is irresponsible to ignore the value of a pathogen that no one else has seen and you have the antibiotics for).
We are living in dark times in terms of our technological capability and the aggressiveness of state actors.
I would argue that the only chance we have is to reign in the behaviours of our states. Crazy and seemingly impossible, but stopping science/tech is far beyond reach.
I don't think there's anything that we could learn from gain-of-function research on deadly viruses and bacteria that would be worth risking millions of deaths.
It doesn't matter how good your intentions are when your behavior is extremely dangerous and can (and possibly did) result in a global pandemic that kills millions of people. Risk/reward calculations should be performed without regard to intent.
>Banning it would reduce the amount done greatly.
It would also reduce the risk of a man-made virus killing millions of people.
So, while it may not be 100% foolproof, it would be quite meaningful.
Is there a reliable reference that the US is no longer researching biochemical weapons?
Wikipedia claims: "Both the U.S. bio-weapons ban and the Biological Weapons Convention restricted any work in the area of biological warfare to defensive in nature. In reality, this gives BWC member-states wide latitude to conduct biological weapons research because the BWC contains no provisions for monitoring or enforcement.[74][75] The treaty, essentially, is a gentlemen's agreement amongst members backed by the long-prevailing thought that biological warfare should not be used in battle.[74]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_biological_weapo...
How do you know this?
Now, try to apply that same reasoning to your allegation without looking silly. Yes, the USG has secretly run certain aspects of a public biowarfare program - and when it came to light they paid. Boom, they couldn't keep it secret and they couldn't escape the consequences (lots of very damaging legal cases and hearings). Finally, do they have an incentive? No - as I said, it makes no sense for them to reduce the cost of yet another world ending weapon. Now you could point to Russia getting caught with massive stockpiles of Anthrax after they claimed to end the program... but their nuclear program's credibility isn't comparable - they've always demonstrated clear signs of insecurity about it. That isn't the case for the USG.
Would you make the same argument for software vulnerability research? I think the arguments against both are the same, and with the same result: white-hat researchers will halt their work, leaving more of the field available to black-hat researcers.
It is also much easier to stop bad software than bad biology. Software is much simpler than the human body.
Every Asia-focused analyst will tell you that the only aspect of China's state-reported numbers you can assume with a high degree of confidence is that they're heavily massaged for PR purposes.
A -> CCP. OP -> a concerned citizen.
A -> Race/Color/Religion/Gender. OP -> Racist/Sexist.
A -> Trump. OP -> a concern citizen.
A -> Scientist. OP -> conspiracist.
But one thing that I am sure is that it'll never ever be constructive. Not mean to be disrespectful, but I do hope this type of comment won't ever get to the top of HN.
[1] https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/editorials/wendy-m...
> shocked at all if it was a lab virus
That's a useless statement. It's just a weak appeal to authority with no proof in any direction. I live in the US. Me saying that "I wouldn't be surprised" it came from the US wouldn't mean jack squat without evidence.
Do you believe the devil doesn't exist?
...Or has this logic changed since the election fraud controversy? (and no, it's not really a different situation if you think about it)
So are they or are they not mindless robots? It's not only ignorant but supremely arrogant and condescending to assume the 1.4B can't tell the difference between real and fake news and need to be restricted in what information they can consume. Qubit000 has the same username on reddit and twitter. He posts lots of pro-CCP garbage
It's not about 1.4G people: it's about 7G people... The whole of humanity is suffering because a small vocal minority has been deceived and is causing problems for others.
Before the pandemic, I thought just like you that control of the mass media... Some kind of censorship was incontrovertibly a bad thing
Now I think otherwise: if it allows us to save 2.4M lives (and counting!) I'm ok with censorship, as long as you can still use VPNs, TOR or other ways to circumvent it... And the fines for violating censorship are just little bit more than a slap on the wrists
You can blame an individual, even sentence them to death, but you cannot ever criticise the system/party. Nor shine a light at any evidence that the system is wrong. This is a deadly sin.
For the party to admit, there's flaws in the system, would collapse their whole authority.
The 1977 Russian Flu pandemic was genetically near-identical to a strain from 1950, without the expected mutations that should have appeared after 27 years of undetected circulation among humans or animals. It's been widely suspected in mainstream literature to have escaped from a research or vaccine manufacturing accident, to the point that the NEJM casually wrote:
> The reemergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322
But at the time, the WHO said:
> 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.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul...
And it's absolutely bizarre to me that people are asking why the origin even matters. After thousands of people died in Bhopal, did it matter whether better chemical safety standards could have prevented that? So with millions dead now, how could you possibly not wonder whether our current standards for the sampling and manipulation of poorly-understood pandemic-candidate viruses are adequate?
Wait are we looking to improve and make sure that this doesn’t happen again, or do we just want someone to blame so we can continue to do nothing?
They were even demanding reparations too! If the Chinese didn’t have ICBM nukes to defend themselves, then you can bet that the western nations would’ve mounted a multi-country alliance to attack China by now.
Read up Jack London’s The Unparalled Invasion from 1910. The Grand Master Plan is all laid out right there for you. It’s disgusting. You’ll want to throw up after you read it. But yet, this is how the white people of the western world sees China.
For the most probable outcomes, it's about improving (whether it's a lab escape that requires tightening how labs work, or a natural origin that requires, well, something).
Of course, if theoretically this or another pathogen was discovered to be human-made / engineered on purpose (not a real scenario in this case! Purely a hypothetical), then obviously it might have "holding someone responsible" repercussions.
And there might be other scenarios I can't think of that would engender different reactions.
Bottom line, when investigating to discover the truth, I don't think it's valid to beforehand decide on the reason that you're seeking the truth.
> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the Institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect 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.[11][12]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology
You make a good point. The wet market is only 20km from the lab, so if this one is lab-based (and not a bizarre coincidence) it seems much more likely to be an accident.
> engineered on purpose (not a real scenario in this case! Purely a hypothetical).
Because I'm thinking of future scenarios where this kind of thing happens and we want to uncover the truth, and in which it's more likely to be on purpose. Probably more relevant to a nuclear strike or cyber attack or whatever than a biological weapon, given collateral damage.
https://project-evidence.github.io/
Summary (IIRC): The most likely explanation of its origins is a person who collected bats for a lab in Wuhan contracted the disease in the cave where bats were collected.
Very interesting. Does that mean Covid was in Europe 3 months before the supposed patient zero in Wuhan (December 8?)
Sorry, but this would be pretty insane. Most likely explanation is probably false positives or scientific fraud or a combination. Antibody tests don't really prove much anyway since they are not directly identifying the virus. A full sequencing of a virus would be much better. The RNA would also give us information about the evolution of the virus.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-ch...
The "argument" that "if you've got nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about" is is just as worthless when promoting encryption backdoors as it is now.
I think you oversimplified to get to this binary view. Where does "national security" fit in this "transparent or corrupt" philosophy? State secrets? Classified information and intelligence?
Can the Chinese (or other) authorities simply raise deep concerns about whatever they want and expect US (or other) authorities to provide information as needed to prove the contrary?
People are accusing them of building the virus in a lab with literally zero evidence. Give the US a bunch of raw data to spin and it just makes that easier.
Maybe with people like Trump in the world who would definitely capitalize on that type of thing to cast blame there is inherent risk, but at least amongst civilized educated people, its obvious a virus could show up anywhere and disseminating information shows a clear desire to fight the virus as a member of the world, rather than a desire to use it as a political tool or to gain an advantage because china can execute more draconian mitigation measures than a "free" country like America would be able to.
Where China is clearly to blame is the reduced amount of information clearly inhibited the fight against coronavirus, in the world's fight against this thing china defected rather than cooperated.
Before any whataboutism is mentioned, Trump also defected and made a mess out of a response, lying to the public, and hiding cases. That doesn't make either correct and neither one justifies the other's actions. Both countries are clearly very in the wrong for their COVID reactions.
We knew or should have known the virus was coming for months before it was a problem in the US. It would take an incredibly enlightened politician not to try and scapegoat China for our failures, and they know this. Why gamble on our goodwill amidst all this rhetoric?
China's behavior is concerning.
Even with this data US and other western countries dismissed it as non-threat for over 3mos while ridiculing China for 'draconian measures' and violating human rights.
I don't think there is a lot of evidence for malice, but there is definitely evidence worthy of contemplation:
https://project-evidence.github.io/
Here is a study from 2007: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/
> In this study, we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat.
That is literally building of viruses in a lab.
I guess I should have specifically said covid-19 rather than "the virus", but I thought that would be clear from context.
This is a densely-populated, agriculture-heavy third-world part of the world that had bird flu and sars in the previous 15 years... random-ass diseases materialize there. Occam's razor says it's another one of those.
Clearly a lab studying coronaviruses is interesting. Clearly its possible that the lab could have had a leak. Clearly it's possible a farmer could have wandered into a cave, or run into a bat in the wild. Clearly it's possible that it didn't originate in China.
There is certainly enough evidence to investigate the lab being a possibility. It definitively being responsible or not is definitely of interest. There was a lot of cover up at the beginning, which implies to me a party who knows they are responsible.
From everything I've read on the topic, the best going theory that I understood is that in order for the lab to perform tests on coronavirus found in bats, coronavirus samples are collected from bats. A person must collect these bats from caves, not in Wuhan. A person might have collected the samples improperly or with insufficient gear, resulting in contracting and then spreading the disease.
That's not a "controversial" (read: conspiracy) theory, that's not an act of the state being evil. That's something that could happen anywhere in the world. That's something that could happen on accident. That's something that could be prevented by improved process/standards/equipment. By denying the possibilities of such things, it makes it look like there was a coverup or an explicitly guilty party. Everyone should want to know the nature of it's origin. It should obviously be a possibility.
> Occam's razor says it's another one of those.
To me occam's razor says that Wuhan is a first apparent epicenter. So it stands to believe it's the first place with major outbreak. Wuhan has a lab that studies this very disease specifically for it's epidemic properties. The most simple occam's razor explanation to me is that it has to do with the lab.
1) Bat->Livestock->Human transmission
2) Direct bat->human transmission (your example fits here as a tiny subset, I don't think specifically employees of that one lab are the only people who could have had contact with a bat)
3) Lab leak
I'm rating the probabilities as I see them. Your scenario is possible! It's just not the most probable, and even if it were, there are a lot of possibilities.
Yet for some reason the West seemed intent on pursuing lockdowns, demonising countries like Sweden and Belarus which didn't.
Hospitals have never been overloaded (apart from places like New York where symptomatic patients were sent back into nursing homes - or Italy, with generally inadequate pandemic preparations) and in places like Sweden deaths in 2020 are up only single-digits against 2018:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
As soon as we realised we were over-intubating patients, and that proning and oxygen treatment were sufficient for serious admissions, and that Vitamin D and C (and other cheap and generic treatments) were enough for the general population, the potential for hospital overload (beyond what flu waves incur anyway) was also eliminated.
And yet we still persist with lockdowns despite them causing a greater amount of harm than the virus itself due to factors like interrupted education, mental damage, and interrupted regular medical treatment.
There were political games afoot in both China and the West in terms of this virus. The fact that the American economy was booming just before the re-election of a non-mainstream, anti-China president, and that pandemic responses justified mail-in voting on an unprecedent scale is too coincidental to ignore.
Look at raw gdp growth data and that was without major tax cuts. Nothing proves that the previous US president did anything more than "ride the wave".
Also, debts were greatly increased even before covid and the current president will have to fix that, again...
Additionally, lockdowns have an additional reason, namely to not overload healthcare so the situation doesn't get out of control. While rural areas can play denial, that's not an option for bigger and more dense areas/cities. A lot of hospitals were running on the edge, where >90% of capacity was for covid and delaying all other ( even urgent) surgeries.
Ps. Sweden has a very low population density. Not everything there applies elsewhere.
They even admitted they were wrong with having no lockdowns.
Earlier last year, Sweden was being highly praised for its approach, until they ended up with a much higher per-capita death rate than neighbours and comparable countries.
"Sweden deaths in 2020 are up only single-digits against 2018"
Sweden is a low population, sparsely populated country with a relatively wealthy, healthy and homogenous population and the highest percentage of people who live alone of any country.
While Sweden did not lock down like other countries, they issued instructions to reduce travel and work from home if possible, and - as Swedes have an atypically high level of trust in the government - they complied: if you look at Google mobility reports, you find that Sweden's non-mandatory lockdown had a similar real world effect as the various lockdowns in the US and Spain. Sweden was not entirely without lockdown rules either, which got more severe as criticism within the country and from neighbours intensified.
"Hospitals have never been overloaded [..] the potential for hospital overload (beyond what flu waves incur anyway) was also eliminated."
While the hospital system was not overloaded in the UK, individual hospitals were, and the system as a whole came very close to overload during the peaks. Were it not for the first lockdown, and using the time that bought us to massively increase the capacity, they absolutely would have been overloaded.
The hospital my girlfriend works at ran out of PPE, oxygen and staff (due to illness), and the conditions for staff were beyond awful, including multiple of her colleagues in their 40s and up being killed. This isn't just because the UK health system was poorly prepared, prior to the pandemic, we were considered the second most prepared country in the world for a pandemic.
I am not saying lockdown is the right approach -- I don't know, and indeed lockdown carries with it a huge number of economic and health harms. But to characterise this as just a normal flu-season and say that hospitals coped fine is clearly wrong. The only reason hospitals weren't overloaded was because of a combination of heroic efforts from staff and measures to limit the number of incoming patients. One reason the UK likely got so much closer to being overloaded and has a higher number of deaths (besides demographic differences and population density) was that we left it relatively late to lock down and our lock down was relatively tame compared to many in Europe.
> Such raw data is known as “line listings”, he said, and would typically be anonymised but contain details such as what questions were asked of individual patients, their responses and how their responses were analysed.
> “That’s standard practice for an outbreak investigation,” he told Reuters on Saturday via video call from Sydney, where he is currently undergoing quarantine.
I can't claim to know much about what's standard practice for outbreak investigations, but I'm inclined to believe him on this more than - no offense - a random HN user.
https://www.biospace.com/article/1nih-awards-ecohealth-allia...
After a few different US lab leaks involving anthrax, smallpox, and avian flu in 2014 the Obama administration put a ban on the fuding of gain of function research.[2]
The ban was eventually overturned in 2018.[3]
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-wor...
[2]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-anthrax-labs-analysis...
[3]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
So, in other words, there is no evidence that GoF research is "here to protect us"?
There is no such thing as 100% security.
I’m bothered by the fact that GOF research was banned in the USA, and then the NIH setup funding for it in Wuhan. I think the need and safety of this research should come under serious scrutiny.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-nih-gain-of-functi...
Likely enough not in any meaningful way attached to either president, though.
- China intentionally manufactured the virus and released it (Proven false, virus wasn't engineered)
- China accidentally released the virus while collecting it (Possible, but unlikely given the virus has early evidence away from both collection point and Wuhan Lab)
- China has too many wet markets that allowed the virus to mutate enough for human jump (Current consensus working theory, but also unproven as intermediary animal has not been identified)
But all of these list China as the responsible party, so if you want to call it out as not Xenophobia or Anti-China sentiment then you'd have to show evidence the reporting showed "Joint Sino-American research lab causes..." kind of headlines. Otherwise, you point strengthens that this has at least an under current of anti-china sentiment, as the reporting has not mentioned US involvement at all.
WHO of course have a lot to answer for with regards to ignoring Taiwan because if BS geopolitics when they had the most reliable/believable/compelling evidence of the nature of SARS-Cov2
The most common lab leak hypothesis I've seen is that it was engineered during gain-of-function research and then accidentally leaked.
The fallacy is just that the only reason someone would engineer a virus would be to weaponize it. Gain-of-function research is regularly done to study and combat viruses. So just because it was engineered doesn't imply it was intentionally released.
(Yes it isn’t 100% match, but it’s 100% an ancestor... so not engineered)
Here's an article mentioning this hypothesis: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/coronavir...
SARS-CoV-2 has not yet been found in bats or any other animal. Relatives have been found, but relatives with key differences. It certainly could be found, and if it's correct then it'll still probably be very difficult to find due to being a needle in a haystack, but so far it hasn't been found.
I'm certainly not arguing it's true and the zoonotic origin is false (and I have no clue where to allocate the confidence values, myself), but your repeated insistence that it's "100% zoonotic" is puzzling because that hasn't even been claimed by any experts yet. The jury is still out.
Sure, the ultimate origin of the virus - tracing its full lineage - will have been from an animal no matter what. But if it were substantially modified by deliberate RNA manipulation in the lab after being collected from an animal, potentially increasing its lethality or contagiousness in the process and resulting in the pathogen we now call SARS-CoV-2, that would mean this particular virus isn't zoonotic. If true, it would totally change the discussion into one about the safety of such gain-of-function research and this particular lab.
Almost any engineered pathogen of any kind (protozoon, bacterium, virus) in any scenario will likely ultimately have been derived from something already living. But once the pathogen is experimentally modified to add, remove, or alter its functioning, it's no longer accurate to describe the modified pathogen as being zoonotic. By that logic, even engineered bioweapons would be considered zoonotic (and no one is claiming in this case it's a bioweapon; the lab leak hypothesis posits benign gain-of-function research and an accidental escape). Frankenstein's monster is no longer just some guy.
It's like saying the origin of the domestic dog is 100% natural because, look, you find its close ancestor the wolf everywhere in the wild. It omits the hypothesis that some wolves were taken and deliberately shaped and molded by humans to produce something new.
Second, are you really saying that if we somehow later confirm that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus sampled and accidentally released by the WIV, we should just shrug and do nothing? Even before the pandemic, there was a debate over whether deliberately seeking out novel pathogens (especially for gain-of-function experiments, but even just for collection and sequencing) brought sufficient benefit to justify the risk. If it turned out that such activity started a pandemic that killed millions of people, wouldn't it perhaps be worth revisiting that tradeoff?
This was the significance of the pangolins, which were initially proposed to be the proximal animal host. But while it initially seemed that multiple infected pangolins from different sources had been found, it later turned out multiple seemingly independent papers had been written based on the same pangolins[2]. This means it's much more likely that something else infected those pangolins, in the same way e.g. that some housecats have been infected by their owners.
Nature has added an editor's note[3] to one of the pangolin papers, and even Daszak and the Chinese have pretty much abandoned the pangolins. So for now, there's no known animal host for SARS-CoV-2, unlike for the original SARS-CoV (palm civets) or MERS-CoV-2 (camels). Perhaps the animal reservoir just hasn't been found yet; but it's also possible that animal reservoir doesn't exist, because SARS-CoV-2 originated from serial passaging in a WIV lab. That's just natural evolution under unusually fast selective pressure, so any arguments that SARS-CoV-2 shows no evidence of genetic engineering are inapplicable to that theory.
1. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/12/20-2308_article
2. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2
1. Direct artificial manipulation of a virus's genetic sequence.
2. Laboratory culture and passaging of a virus, allowing evolution due to natural mutations to proceed under artificial selective constraints.
No one serious is focusing on (1). The people bringing it up most often are either uneducated cranks, or zoonotic origin proponents using it as a strawman to refute.
The serious concern is that SARS-CoV-2 originated due to (2). In that case, since it's a natural evolutionary process, there would be no indication in the virus's genetic sequence of human tampering, because no direct human tampering occurred. The only evidence would be the absence of any animal reservoir of the virus. Perhaps that will eventually be found; but so far--unlike for SARS-CoV or MERS-CoV--it hasn't been.
As I note elsewhere in this thread, the discovery of a proximal animal host would convince me that the virus is probably of natural origin. Is there any evidence short of a direct admission from the people responsible that would convince you it might have escaped from a lab?
> We adapted the SARS-CoV (Urbani strain) by serial passage in the respiratory tract of young BALB/c mice. Fifteen passages resulted in a virus (MA15) that is lethal for mice following intranasal inoculation.
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
So it doesn't seem implausible to me that the WIV would bring up a similar program. The lack of any public record doesn't seem like it requires any conspiracy to me, just for them not to have published yet (especially since they only got the BSL-4 lab where they'd likely be doing that work in 2018).
I think I probably understated the plausibility of a genetically-engineered origin in my comment above, too. I've just re-read Andersen's reasoning in the Nature article, and it's based heavily on the dissimilarity of SARS-CoV-2 from previously-known viruses. But we know the WIV had a private database--for example, RaTG13 was allegedly collected in 2013, but not published until after the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.
Honestly this whole area of research seems terrifying to me. Regardless of whether it's eventually shown to have caused this pandemic or not, I see no indication that this work is delivering any benefit commensurate to its risk. Many prominent epidemiologists vocally opposed the lifting of the 2018 ban on funding of gain-of-function research (e.g., Marc Lipsitch at Harvard), and I agree with them.
Thank you. I'm curious ... how many virology labs, like this one, are extant in the world and how many study coronaviruses as they did ?
Is it tens of thousands of virology labs like this one and hundreds that study coronaviruses ?
Or is it hundreds of virology labs like this one and a handful study coronaviruses ?
What circumstantial evidence?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-needs-a-real-investig...
There's also been a string of academic preprints and articles, like
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2102/2102.03910.pdf
The authors tend to be kind of fringe, not surprisingly given the reputational cost (and given that if a lab origin is ever confirmed, many of the techniques that top researchers have spent their lives mastering will probably become illegal). A lot of very senior virologists are on the record as open to the possibility of a lab escape, though, for example:
> Baric said he still thought the virus came from bats in southern China, perhaps directly, or possibly via an intermediate host, although the smuggled pangolins, in his view, were a red herring. The disease evolved in humans over time without being noticed, he suspected, becoming gradually more infectious, and eventually a person carried it to Wuhan “and the pandemic took off.” Then he said, “Can you rule out a laboratory escape? The answer in this case is probably not.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
I don't recommend that article in general; the author uses his talents as a novelist to paint a more vivid picture than I believe the evidence justifies. I do trust him to faithfully print the quote, though.
And as your first article details, the "lab accident" theory rests on some lab doing secret virus experiments. Even if you find a whole sea of the virus in some cave, someone will argue they could have gotten there after the first "accident". Good luck disproving that without letting US virologists snoop in every lab in China.
To me "open to the possibility" is a very strong reading of "can't rule it out".
If we ever find the same for SARS-CoV-2, then I believe that pretty confidently excludes origin from lab manipulation (e.g., serial passaging). It would still be possible that the first human infected was on a WIV sampling trip, and not even all that unlikely (since an expert deliberately looking for novel viruses is far more likely to find them than e.g. a merely reckless wildlife trafficker).
If we see evidence in the phylogenetic tree of multiple animal-to-human spillover events--as we do for MERS--then that would pretty clearly exclude any scientific activity as the origin. At the very least, it would imply that even if some hapless grad student did accidentally start the pandemic, if they hadn't then someone else would have soon after. But as you say, so far we have neither.
Ralph Baric and 'batwoman' Shi Zhengli worked together on several coronavirus research projects spanning more than a decade.
It's like asking the fox if he knows where the hen went.
Presumably someone in the Chinese government ordered Google to lie about the institute's location. Why would the Chinese government do that if the institute was uninvolved?
Investigators ought to ask China who ordered it, and why. And ask Google the same thing.
I do feel a bit sorry for Google employees who'd be caught in the middle if this actually happens.
US government to Google: "Tell us about how China ordered Google Maps to help with the coverup. If you lie to the investigators, we'll send you to jail."
China government to Google: "When the US asks about the Google Maps coverup, lie. If you don't lie to the investigators, we'll send you to jail."
https://elifesciences.org/articles/31257
For the original SARS, it's palm civets, identified in less than a year. (The link to bats wasn't discovered until much later, by Shi Zhengli; but the intermediate host is enough to feel pretty confident it's natural-origin.)
For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting for that intermediate host. That's the significance of the early pangolin papers; but as Alina Chan and many others have noted, those papers have significant data quality issues, and even the Chinese have pretty much abandoned the pangolins.
https://mobile.twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/13605511085659...
https://mobile.twitter.com/TheaKFischer/status/1360590441817...
https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/article/othe...
> Peter Daszak, is a zoologist and bat-virus sample collector and the head of a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance — a group that [...] has channeled money from the National Institutes of Health to Shi Zhengli’s laboratory in Wuhan, allowing the lab to carry on recombinant research into diseases of bats and humans.
> [...]
> Daszak, for his part, seems to have viewed his bat quests as part of an epic, quasi-religious death match. In a paper from 2008, Daszak and a co-author described Bruegel’s painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels and compared it to the contemporary human biological condition. The fallen angels could be seen as pathogenic organisms that had descended “through an evolutionary (not spiritual) pathway that takes them to a netherworld where they can feed only on our genes, our cells, our flesh,” Daszak wrote. “Will we succumb to the multitudinous horde? Are we to be cast downward into chthonic chaos represented here by the heaped up gibbering phantasmagory against which we rail and struggle?”
There's much more in there; it's clear that he's good friends and business partners with the WIV and it would be deeply his interest to suppress any consideration of the lab-escape hypothesis.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/world-h...
There is practically nowhere on this planet one can hope to truly be unaffected by one or the other.
"The scientific community applauded President Joe Biden's decision to rejoin the World Health Organization and other global efforts designed to stop and prevent COVID-19."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/01/22/scient...
A response of "Trump did thing, Biden undid thing" after a comment of "US should do thing" can be interpreted as support of Trump and criticism of Biden.
This is not a good thing to be true. Thus, it is downvoted.
The reality is that it was up to the member states to pressure China in early 2020 to release the information they should have shared. And as the only member state as large or larger than China, this was the US’s job. At the time, however, the Trump administration was entirely focused on closing a trade deal with China that Trump could use in his election campaign. Which is why the US said nothing which prevented the WHO from getting the support they needed to investigate the origins of the pandemic.
For the first few months the US, and especially Trump, was basically going on about how well Xi Jinping was handling everything.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-praises-xi-for-han...
It’s precisely the vacuum created by the US’s voluntary defanging of itself in multilateral institutions that has allowed China to resist these institutions and even take control of some of them. The answer to that isn’t to continue unilaterally reducing its own power.
Better form a new org that is apolitical and concerns itself with promulgating health and disease prevention rather than some political agenda?
It is not a police, it has no coercive power. The reason is obvious if you think more than 10 seconds about how to get sovereign governments to cooperate on public health matters.
What would be your ideal organisation? One subservient to the American government? Or do you want it to be a world government above sovereign states? How do you think it would fly?
If anything they were cautious before February 2020.
It need not be "lab-created". Most samples are taken from the wild, and then has its evolution stimulated for research.
Does anyone know whether this story (including video and photos is credible?
The only article that I can find that actually tries to levy complaints of obstruction is this one from the NYT[0]. However, several of the WHO investigators quoted have gone on Twitter accusing the NYT of twisting their words[1]. Makes me pretty doubtful that there was any obstruction.
On one side we have a country with half a million cases that has since December been accusing China with "coverups" without materializing much evidence, despite document leaks and now an international investigation. On the other side we have a country with orders of magnitude fewer total and per capita cases, whose case demographics have matched up with numbers from other countries, and whose export numbers in neighboring countries has also been consistent with their reported numbers. At this point if there was some sort of obstruction or coverup the Whitehouse would have a smoking gun by now.
Other comments here talking about the "lab origin" theory pretty much hinge on theological logic. "Well it could come from a lab, and there's no proof yet that it didn't, so I have faith". It isn't Bayesian reasoning if you don't bring up rigorous statistics to prove your point.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/world/asia/china-world-he...
[1] https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/02/caught-in-the-act-new-...
Not to mention thousands of large social gatherings that happened way after the virus was already causing thousands of death.
If you can’t control other countries, maybe we should at least figure out how to improve our response?
What if some other virus comes out of nature next time when we have no one to blame?
https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1360551108565999619
https://twitter.com/TheaKFischer/status/1360590441817772034
https://twitter.com/LiuXininBeijing/status/13607416005072691...
And people wonder why I complain about propaganda in the western world :/
On the other hand zoonotic disease is known to exist.
Please do not allow dislike of a state party system to pollute your thinking. Your views about China do not inform what happened and in the end, this becomes repetitive.
I might add that I dislike many things about other economies just as much. I too indulge these "they musta dunnit" fantasies. But, I wake up to myself: wasting too much time on motive and belief is not helpful.
There is no strong evidence of lab caused leakage. The WHO scientists are competent. WHO politics are ugly, all UN politics are ugly. Read the science.
Personally, I think the idea of this being lab created by China is far fetched.
Would China really do top secret illegal bio-weapons research in a lab essentially open to the public?
Similar to if we had a sudden large radiation hazard and it was unclear if it was some spontaneously emerging phenomenon with essentially no direct human cause, or a power plant/enrichment facility/warhead manufacturer/etc.
And beyond that, there are supposedly methods of (even purely scientifically motivated) research that would involve engineering a virus with certain properties that also happen to make it extraordinarily deadly.
Ethics committees determine all sorts of experiments to be prohibitively unethical, and a virus with particularly deadly design should certainly be held under such scrutiny.
"Yes, come right in, here's our primary source data collected, it concludes that Chernobyl (or WIV lab leak) did happen..."
Suddenly China's rapid detection and extreme lockdown would literally be properly contextualized as buying the world time, and the Chinese system would be validated beyond measure.
I tend to think China is a danger to humanity at-large, but I could be wrong. These specific events have not surprised me (new virus, spread, etc) but the sheer amount of incredulity at the behavior of countries (China, US, etc) is disheartening.
Totally disagree. The political ramifications were apparent the moment the denials and information flow stopped. There's nothing more to be gained. Basic game theory.
If a country choose not to shut its airports doesn't mean your country has to accept incoming flights. If a country thinks people are coming in with a pandemic disease and don't shut the entry points (ports/airports) that's on that country's leadership.
I've heard this multiple times as a reasonable possibility, and yet it seems absurd if you think about it: are you trying to accuse someone of leaking into the environment a virus that actually comes from the environment? And how do you even prove something like that?
You could have frontloaded manufacturing by commissioning companies to produce doses while waiting for trials. But we didn’t do that with the knowledge we had, so unclear earlier knowledge would have worked.
Trials were the big bottleneck and for that you need infected patients. So I guess if they had got a vaccine to wuhan for trials it would have sped things up, but not clear it could have been used in trials there before this all seemed serious.
Once a guy is dead, does it matter who killed him?
So... murder shouldn't be punished ?
If it was being developed as a biological weapon you would tend to assume there's likely progress on how to defend against it by those who created it so you could hope to leverage that work to get a head start on vaccines and so forth. No one could force China to hand that work over but they could certainly pressure them in full force, including some of their allies that may also be suffering.
Overall, there's really not much in terms of actionable information to follow through with. It might help states target spies to keep a closer eye on these scenarios and prompt a better global response in the future.
Just 2.4 millions as today. Not millions and millions. This is not 1918 flu levels (yet).
The public justification for the giant US nuclear arsenal was the entirely fictional "missile gap," thereby creating an actual missile gap in the other direction that the Soviets thought they had to close. I'm not saying that "If new coronaviruses are being cooked up in Wuhan, we'd be negligent if we weren't funding development of our own" thought processes will necessarily become ascendant, but "China is a existential threat to the world, and any expenditure is justified in order to defeat it" is absolutely common.
From the conclusion section
1. take a virus that is highly adapted to humans, and inject it in another animal (like a rabbit)
2. the virus will cause a very low-grade infection in the rabbit, since the virus is adapted to humans, not rabbits - but it will still be a non-zero level of effectiveness
3. at the peak level of the rabbit's low-grade infection, the mutants of the virus that are more effective against rabbits will be expressed more than any others, and replicate themselves more than any other mutant
4. capture these variants from the rabbit, and inject them into another rabbit.
5. step 3 and 4 repeat as the virus becomes less human-specific and more rabbit-specific
6. if all goes well, you will have transformed the human-effective virus into a rabbit-effective virus. But the virus still has enough of the same characteristics that it will provoke an immune response in humans that will also protect against the human-specific variant
I imagine if you wanted to do the opposite, and craft a virus that is more effective against humans instead of less, you would simply follow the steps in reverse.
Since these steps are so simple, and require no direct modification of the genetic material (you simply encourage it to drift in a certain direction) it seems like it would be hard to tell which viruses were manipulated in this way.
It's amazing so many people will just take CCP's narrative at face value, there are still many that think it came from the seafood market.
Nature has lied to protect the CCP before:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/world/asia/china-springer...
>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/world/asia/china-springer...
Your article does not support your claim. "One of the world’s largest academic publishers was criticized on Wednesday for bowing to pressure from the Chinese government to block access to hundreds of articles on its Chinese website."
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...
Edit: removed incorrect conclusion
Without Chinese data the origin will remain a mystery.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...
Kept searching for followups, didn’t see anything till this:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...
That’s from 21 January 2021 and says:
“So far unpublished data, analysing retained wastewater samples from Barcelona, Spain, taken in March 2019 showed positive RT-qPCR results for SARS-CoV-2 (Chavarria-Miró et al., 2020). The authors conclude that the virus was introduced to the Barcelona population due to global travel and remained undetected.”
So as of then, still unpublished.
The French study has just been published last week [0]. It is based on a vast cohort study in which serum samples were collected regularly. They tested older samples and found some anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. The article also mentions an Italian study with similar results [1].
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0300891620974755
Unfortunately this is not yet possible because, well, the WHO scientists are still working on it.
However making it a regulation to keep samples and publish sequences would probably make sense.
This is what gets me in politics: For all the well-deserved vilification Trump was subjected to, it seems that every day we are discovering some of the important policies and opinions they issued were right on point. The dichotomy, it seems, is one of vilification due to his often insolent and down-right ignorant public style and presence rather than anything I would characterize as substantive.
I have worked with people like that. People with sometimes deep personality and social issues who do great work and excel professionally. To take it in another direction, back when I was actively mentoring high school FRC teams we got all kinds of kids. There were kids on the Autism spectrum as well as Asperger's. I can say that every single one of them was superb in their team participation once I learned how to work with them and, above all, accept that they didn't sound or behave like the rest.
I am not making a parallel between Trump and these conditions. Just saying that it is sometimes important to focus on substance rather than theater.
Case in point:
I just got my second COVID vaccine yesterday. Shaking and feeling like crap as I type this (it will last a few hours).
When Trump said vaccines were coming by the end of the year everyone laughed at him. It was brutal. I remember watching CNN as they tore him to pieces for daring to "not use science" and raising our hopes in such ignorant ways.
Well, we are currently vaccinating at a rate of approximately 1.5 million people per day and this will go up.
Did Biden do this? Look, I am in manufacturing. Have been my entire life. You don't produce 1.5 million per day of anything, distribute and administer it with some sort of a "then a miracle occurs" approach. Biden has only been in office a few days. There is absolutely no way he could have any material impact on vaccine delivery and administration during that time. These things have to be planned and well-executed for months. Which means I got my vaccine (and 1.5 million people are getting their vaccines) because of the organization and planning the Trump administration created and drove, likely back to March/April of last year. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone --WITH MANUFACTURING EXPERIENCE-- who thinks you can instantly go from 100K per day to 1.5 million per day just because there's a new boss in town. I mean, remember that we couldn't even produce masks and PPE at scale in this country (or nearly any other country). In this sense this should have been a massive wakeup call to the world, not just the US.
This means that Biden's "100 million in 100 days" will be achieved and exceeded --by Trump-- so long as people go get vaccinated. And, without a doubt, Biden will take credit for 100% of it. This is what I hate about politics.
There are other issues for which he was vilified that will turn out to have been right non point. I won't dive into the details here. Some of these include:
- The Paris climate accord (seriously, google the document, read it and tell me how it will save the world...it's nonsense...expensive nonsense)
- Tariffs on steel and aluminum. I am doing an aircraft design project right now. I can buy US-made aluminum for roughly 25% less than the cost of steel. That has never been the case in my life. Of course, everyone in the metals industry wants Biden to keep the tariffs in place. May I remind you Trump was called "racist" and all kinds of other things for enacting this?
- The pipeline. Aside from the fact that tens of thousands of jobs will be lost (a good friend of mine lost his and is facing having to sell his house to survive). Everything around you requires oil. It doesn't matter if it is made from plastics or not. You don't think aluminum and steel require oil for manufacturing and more? Do some research. The US achieved net exporter status during Trump's years. That will surely go away. Also, cost of goods (not just gasoline) was kept under check because we controlled oil. Not any more. A friend in Arizona tells me gasoline prices have doubled there. I regularly ship large aerospace components in the thousands of pounds. Freight prices are being impacted by this (my opinion) stupid move. Yes, we all want everything clean. However, there's a fine line between wishing something and being delusional about how and when it can be achieved.
Anyhow, I'll stop here. There's more, but I need to go to the couch and shake-off the vaccine side effects for a few hours. If you disagree with the above, be honest enough to do the research before forming an opinion. Above all, if you do not have operational experience running a business, you need to understand that you are not equipped to understand the many dynamics at play here.
Simple example: If gas prices explode companies are going to have to raise pay for their workers. Sounds good until you understand at least two things. First, the worker doesn't get to use that raise, it goes towards paying for oil. Second, that money could have been used to hire more people and create jobs. In fact, higher oil prices could destroy jobs in areas one might not suspect.
No, everyone isn't going to go buy electric cars and trucks. Get over it. This will take a long time. The infrastructure isn't ready.
FYI: Fixing climate change by 2030/2050/2100? Delusional. We can't do it. And yet we are going to burn resources promoting pure bullshit instead of talking about how to adapt.
Politics sucks. I want honest exchange of ideas judged by their merit, not through a political lens.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
Authoritarians, their unchecked ambition, unrestrained by laws replace life with nothing. To them, a place with plagues and murder is a good place. Billions of people are something to be processed, to be mined for hollow celebrity and ambitious license unrestrained by laws. A genetic weapon released from a communist military lab??? Everyone is very lucky they're still breathing. This could have easily killed the world. And for what? A 1% margin on soy bean prices? Americans, people we trusted with power and money rushed to defend their precious marxism like some teenage girl catfished by jihadis in 2014.
Since everyone gets to what they want, I'm going to emit a matter wave into the center of the sun. The sub orbits a black hole. I make it so the surface of that black hole is a faster, easier path than completing an orbit around it. I expand that to the surface of the Earth for gravity applications, coherent control of pair production. All observable celestial bodies are thermal effects of what's here on Earth.
It's one thing to mine an asteroid with fuel cells and drones. It's another thing to microwave it out of the sky, as if I command the weather around us, the clouds above, and even the great heavenly bodies themselves!!!
The US should use its own primary sources in future to evaluate disease spread. China will lie to the WHO and the WHO will protect it.
But to know the truth, we should use our modern equivalents of Key Hole. There is no truth but that which you have examined yourself.
Also, you clearly don’t understand what the WHO does and how critical it has been in the reduction and even eradication of disease spread across the world over decades.
Further, the WHO, much like most multilateral organizations is dependent on its member states for strength. When the most powerful member state voluntarily and unilaterally chose to disengage over the past half decade, it shouldn’t be surprised that the 2nd most powerful member state is calling the shots.
Yeah, I'm sure as a multilateral platform for cooperation on things that everyone wants done they're good.
But as an information source for novel epidemics, clearly we should use our spy sats.
I'm really struggling to understand what you're suggesting here. I'm aware there is a whole cottage industry of conspiracy theorists that point to satellite photos of busy parking lots outside hospitals in Hubei Province as evidence of earlier spread of Covid than has been officially acknowledged. But there's no way to distinguish a busy parking lot caused by a severe influenza outbreak (which existed prior to Covid in Hubei) and a novel pathogen.
If the Western world would have done what the WHO advised at the time, we all more or less would have a COVID stuation like the Chinese have for some time.
That said, I don’t share the optimism of the parent poster. This would be a heavy burden in terms of freedom and human rights for a result that is far from certain. There have been some resurgences, the extent of which is of course unknown because the truth would be damageable to China. And there is no knowing whether the next variant would start it all over again, in which it would be back to square one.
The lockdowns, even as implemented, extracted an enormous toll on small businesses and mental health.
I am certain it hasn’t. But the same reasoning applies for state governments. Having public health decisions taken at the county level is sheer madness.
> The lockdowns, even as implemented, extracted an enormous toll on small businesses and mental health.
This is entirely true, and I hope this will make people and governments take health issues and depression more seriously. Now, we don’t have an alternative earth to experiment, but whether one strict lockdown for 6 months followed by progressive reopening is better or worse for people and the economy compared to a succession of waves and partial lockdowns with no end in sight should certainly be discussed.
This is even more skewed in countries that do not have a proper safety net and where people have the choice between going to work ill or not having a job.
> Mask early
Are we living in the same timeline?
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1243972193169616898 https://twitter.com/UNGeneva/status/1244661916535930886 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234095938555260929 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234871709091667969 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234619007841525764
"Source?" is now the dual of the Gish Gallop strategy. It is a meta-rhetorical strategy to amplify work done by some perceived "opponent".
After all, for anyone who truly believes in sourced claims, they would say "I found these sources that do X. What have you found?" This is natural because they are more interested in the truth than in an argument against an "opponent".
So now I don't respond to disproportionate requests for work. I am glad you did, though. And looking through them, it's exactly as I remember: anti-mask advocacy.
https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360001513491-Save...
:)
The sources remain. Editing for clarity.
Their official stance before that was rigorous test, isolate, and trace, which was not done seriously anywhere outside China.
In my mind it was ‘mask before the apparition of symptoms’, and I realise that my wording was not ideal in the context.
I am fairly certain that the US government reversed itself on masks before the WHO did (Wikipedia says WHO changed its advice in June).
Did it have to do with a lack of evidence, or was it a cynical ploy to preserve mask stocks for medical professionals? I recall it being the latter: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...
I feel like the reporting from the WHO was deliberately sub-par for political reasons. For example the vacillating on masks - everyone knew that masks helped, but the WHO tried to be on the fence about it because some countries were experiencing shortages. Another example of the WHO playing politics was when they neglected to publish the advice not to trust folk remedies, since that would have gone against a Chinese government campaign to try softly promote TCM, perhaps as a form of psychological comfort to the hundreds of millions stuck in lockdown.
Living through corona has helped me to realize that successful public health policy isn't just about giving everyone the raw facts, it's also about managing people's morale and trying to influence their behavior through propaganda. I think the WHO tried to do this, but it wasn't universally successful.
I agree the fourth tweet has aged particularly terribly.
WHO changed its position on masks as late as June 2020. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200608/who-changes-stance-...
The US government changed its stance by April: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/public-health/2020/04/08/why...
In much of the world, people who wore masks were subject to ridicule, especially on social media because of the cynical public health messaging, which seemed to be about preserving stocks of masks for healthcare workers by telling the public that “masks don’t work” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...).
The New York Times op-ed above, and efforts from the Czech Republic made discussing public masking more acceptable in the US, and then the rest of the world.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/who-says...
I am almost certain that they took a long time to recommend masking. I also am fairly confident that the WHO was/is opposed to lockdowns and it certainly still opposes travel restrictions.
They did. Initially they recommended testing and isolating (which obviously could not scale much). Their guidelines were still happily ignored as they were updated, though.
But then I gave away my N95 mask stockpile (years old¹) in a moment of weakness because local medical personnel appealed on the Internet. I regret it entirely because I didn't want to do it, had concrete rational reasons not to do it, and then I felt bad when they appealed and did it anyway.
I really regret the emotional hijack. I'll never let it happen again. I just know they used those masks once and threw them away. Or maybe they used them zero times because they couldn't tell if they're safe because they're from the public. I really really regret it.
¹ Because CA sees wildfires everyone I know has boxes of these. And old ones are not supposed to be used either, but the only common failure mode over ten years isn't filtration, it's the elastic, which was fine on mine.
Thus, we have the WHO. You wanna replace it, it's gonna take a decade to get to another agreement if one even is made. Then it will have its own set of issues. During a pandemic, seems better to me to work with and hold accountable the one we have... kinda like the WH is doing today.
However, now we know the adversary is truly an adversary. China will suppress information on pandemics started within its borders.
The game has changed. You don't listen to China about whether China is sick. You listen to Keyhole and your guys on the ground.
Do you have any reason to believe that this is true?
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-pled...
I remember thinking that the WHO wasn’t what it seemed. Just one small example of course.
I think in some years when we have better options and more transparency we’re going to reflect on this “person with the most votes gets speech” thing.
The WHO is a forum to coordinate strategy and exchange information. Obviously, this requires a minimum of good faith, which seems to be difficult for some countries (yes, particularly dictatorships). But even then, it is better to have them within, collaborating on their terms, than to leave them outside, in which case it would be even harder to get any information out of them.
So yes, China will lie, which will make life worse for epidemiologists and governments across the globe, but not as worse as it could be with China being entirely uncooperative.
It is not the world police, and it won’t come anywhere and do anything against the local government’s wishes. Otherwise the screams world be even louder, and justifiably so.
They are working with what they have, which comes from governments and governmental health agencies. If they don’t have information, they say ‘we don’t know’, even though everyone knows that the most likely scenario involves emergence in China.
If one wants them to be able to coerce information out of China, then by definition it would need to be more powerful.
Authority is derived from something being something that everyone has. In the past, achieving that goal practically guaranteed authenticity to within a comfortable enough quanta for everyone to work with.
With more advanced remote sensing equipment, the decreased cost to publish, reach one can attain for relatively little cost nowadays, that is no longer a luxury we can all afford to continue to entertain. We must all see with our own eyes. In the case that is frustrated or made impossible, it should not a surprise that the world acts as badly as it does.
This is why the collective lie is the most powerful weapon fielded by modern civilization, and why there is such a jockeying for control of what the definition of allowable evidence is. Perception management is a weapon of mass destruction, and should be called out for what it is.
On the one hand, there's a part of me that imagines a world of completely neutral sensor grids that absolutely everyone is able to tap into for reading from, no questions asked, no restrictions. Anyone can see anything, from anywhere, period.
Imagine this was set up and anyone who knew how to insert state into the system just got disapoofed.
So you now have a reality where we're all capable of receiving the exact same information, and operatinng on it as we desire. The Executive decision of free will literally becomes what or where to pay attention to or where to invest your effort.
However, this ideal setup wouldn't last 15 minutes before nodes started to organize into meta-blocks devoting their cycles to getting other undecided nodes to devote their cycles where the meta-group thinks that attention is best directed. This creates information asymmetry, which enables perception management. To hell with mentioning or lining out for the Undirected that there are alternatives or an opportunity cost.
So even in the most ideal case where all the hard work is done to make it so everyone, everywhere can magically remote sense the same data, I can't architectually guarantee a proof against perception management.
Let us now shift to the opposite side of the spectrum.
You only have your own eyes, and your only means of long range remote sensing is by dedicating other people to head over there and collect it, and report back. Magically assume everyone is okay with these individuals doing so with no strings attached. (That never happens, but lets's assume). Also assume these people are selfless and amazingly perfectly rerceptive with a talent for getting across aspects of what they see.
You end up at the same problem. The hand that sets the bounds or priorities of those people collecting information represents the true seat of power, and de facto perception management. In a centralized system, you'd confer godlike power over the lower rungs to the people at the top.
The only way I can see it working out in some modicum of a better way is to ensure distributed sourcing of prioritization decisions. I.e. localized populations of these metaphorical informational go getters, with priorities set as some function arrived at by the consuming population.
Then again, you run into the problem of our current media/press edifice: the audience picks the facts by collective editorial discretion, and furthermore, you emergently get meta-nodes that pop up and rate authoritativeness by how often similar renderings of the same inputs pop up. Those meta-nodes, and the consumers of information feed into an overall balancing act. The meta-nodes try to build audiences by tailoring the facts they provide for maximized odds of acceptance by their influenced audience.
So in no way do I find any way to reconcile a system that includes authoritative weighting that results in a low probability of perceptual management arising. It's an emergent property of any network medium of information propagation.
This suggests, given it's inevitability of arising, we need to thoughtfully structure something around, enshrining information propagation as a first order infrastructure (which we kind of already have), but also relegating some form of negative outcome to poor performance as a neutral information propagator, which again, we already have. People are starting to distrust media outlets and other authoritative sources due to the bad information received, just as Nation's are apparently placing the WHO's credibility at arms length due to their proven unwillingness to research theories that reflect poorly on their subject.
So yeah. We got what we've got, and with a blank slate we'll end up in the same place even with a massive change to the fundamental architecture of human social consciousness.
It seems to stem from some some deeper intrinsic instinctual underpinning of successful life forms that I"m not really good at imagining outside of.
A lot of words to say I don't know I guess, but I gave it the good old college try.
Government is just people trying to do triage, discern signal from noise, coordination, move the ball forward... with a bunch of other people.
People expect too much. It's amazing anything works at all. We should all marvel at the progress we've somehow achieved thus far.
While striving too do better, of course.
The motivation you suggest may apply to some people, sometimes, in some places but certainly not all people in all governments much and perhaps even most of the time.
Self interest, corruption, the desire for power, the desire for conquest and theft and a complete disregard for their citizenry and indeed humanity in general are unfortunately all too common with those who get into the governance business.
Their problem is not that their data is bad. Their problem is that they are acting like a political entity when they are supposed to be an impartial, data driven, scientific organization. For example, the WHO railed against common sense risk mitigation strategies such as travel restrictions (i.e. isolate China) early on with COVID when they were precisely what was needed to reduce risk. They did so for political or monetary reasons (closing borders harms economies). Xi latched on to this and used it as justification to keep borders open. Unsurprisingly, COVID subsequently spread rapidly between China and countries that had maintained open borders with China.
It is not the WHO's job to consider the economic ramifications of their policy suggestions: that is the job of politicians. It is their job to put forward suggestions for how to limit the spread of disease regardless of the impact to economies or governments.
I tend to agree with this sentiment, however I'm always on the fence as to if acting on no new information is better than acting on false or misleading information. If you can't trust the source the data is almost worthless. Anyways, that's for self reported information. Getting any direct access to gather independent information I'd say is nearly always valuable unless it's also targeted with disinformation campaigns.
Yeah, neither is good.
> If you can't trust the source the data is almost worthless.
It’s worse than worthless, because you are expecting disinformation. Though to be fair you can also get disinformation from sources you trust...
> Getting any direct access to gather independent information I'd say is nearly always valuable unless it's also targeted with disinformation campaigns.
That’s why it’s good to have inspectors. But even then, there are limits. Inspectors usually cannot go anywhere they please (otherwise nobody would sign that treaty), so it’s always possible to hide things from them.
Our governments have also the right to be critical when reading reports, particularly based on data from untrustworthy countries. We elect them to do their job, and that job involves quite a bit of critical thinking when dealing with other countries. They also have experts and often scientific cooperation agreements that can complement the WHO.
So yes, the WHO is imperfect. Perfecting it is quite difficult without causing countries to drop out, and countries should not be reliant on only one source anyway.
Of course, cooperation is always possible, but what would be the extent of cooperation between say China, Russia, and the US if a new treaty were signed today?
Before the pandemic, I thought the WHO was a relatively capable organization. But from what I witnessed they just seem like a prestige farm used as a stepping stone to more lucrative careers.
Unfortunately this particular topic is heavily politically-loaded and CCP’s track record of handling the virus leads the common person to believe the WHO won’t receive the full information.
In this case the WHO’s hands seem tied. How are they supposed to fix that? (Genuine question, I would like the WHO to be able to fulfill its role well and serve the global public good)
The truth probably is that they know it originated (from animals) in China, and don't want the WHO to officially reach that conclusion. That's not particularly damaging to most countries, but in a communist country with tightly controlled information flow, the citizenry isn't shown a government making mistakes.
To be clear, these scenarios are entirely and spontaneously made up, but they're also entirely possible, and we've fallen into the trap of believing any old bullshit about China simply because it's possible, and reconciling our spreading it and our obvious ignorance with racist "inscrutable Chinese" tropes.
The reason we don't know more about China is not because they're quiet, the reason we don't know about China is because we ban and censor media coming from China (just as they do to us, but moreso.) Somehow it's become mainstream to believe that the public shouldn't know what the Chinese government thinks (or the Russian government, or the Iranian government) and that it's better to rely on rumor and retired generals.
> Dwyer says that the team didn’t see anything during its visits to suggest a lab accident. “Now, whether we were shown everything? You can never know. The group wasn’t designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practice.”
From https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/world/asia/china-who-wuha...
> Even in the best of circumstances, a full inquiry could take months, if not longer. The team must also navigate attempts by China to politicize the inquiry.
And yet a few days ago the WHO pushed out a hasty judgment that it was very unlikely the virus leaked from the lab. And in the last day they’ve already started backtracking after intense skepticism from the world - see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-12/who-backs... titled “ WHO Backs Away From Outright Rejection of Virus Lab-Leak Theory”.
It also seems that now the virus may have been reported even earlier than we thought. From https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/world/asia/china-world-he...:
> The Chinese scientists also acknowledged they had discovered that 92 people were hospitalized in Wuhan as early as October 2019 with symptoms such as fever and coughing. The Chinese experts said they had found no trace of Covid-19 in those people, but the tests were incomplete. The W.H.O. team members said more research was needed.
Between the CCP’s early suppression of journalism and social media reporting on the virus, the fact that Taiwan was the first to warn the world, China’s repeated denials and delays in letting an outside team to visit the site, and their purge of all the coronavirus studies originating from this lab (https://www.the-sun.com/news/2113876/covid-cover-up-china-wu...), there is very little reason to trust the claim that a lab leak can be ruled out. If anything it only seems more likely that a massive coverup is in progress, and the WHO is the willing mouthpiece for it.
That the Chinese eat bats? Or that this was a lab leak?
Because it obviously cannot be both!
But yet, all the racist white people of the world, and yes, they were all white people, were accusing the Chinese of being disgusting and eating bats.
The western world claims that they are multicultural, and not racist, but yet, this one thing caused them to show their true racist colors.
Surprisingly, no normal white people, came to the defense and shouted down the racists among them. Thus validating the fact, that their silence meant that they supported all the racist vitriol that came out from their fellow brethren.
The truth hurts. I know. I expect that my comment will be flagged and censored.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...
Again, they didn't (or failed to) sequence the virus to prove it was in the samples, and their antibody data (fig 1) doesn't make any sense. IgM antibodies are acute and IgG longer-lasting, so they should appear more like a cumulative distribution if there was a real outbreak. They didn't test their antibody assay for cross-reactivity to seasonal coronaviruses, so that's probably what's going on here.
Same story for the American study (https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...), though Forbes was at least minimally competent enough to quote a scientist's tweet pointing out the limitations, and the authors even address "potential cross reactivity with human common coronavirus infection". Only 1 sample, from 10 Jan 2020, was positive across all their antibody tests, and no samples were sequenced! These studies all fail to properly account for the false positive rate of their assays, and then pretend that all the positive hits are SARS-CoV-2 without any orthogonal verification.
North Korea seems a more trustworthy source of news than US nowdays.
To me this is like a magician distracting the audiences attention from the gold penny - you are all looking in the wrong place while the real issue is being forgotten.
Caution: Potentially Misleading Contents
Substantial peer feedback has been received that this record does not follow the norms of scientific rigour or balance, and thus the main claims may not stand the test of scientific scrutiny.
The PCR Pandemic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LToSnpz8A4
Fuck these lone doctors and fuck Youtube for spreading their unfounded theories through the general population, putting millions of lives at risk.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...
Doesn't that sound super fishy to you, too good to be true, doesn't sound like it would be legal if you think about it for a second, that sort of thing?
As a general rule, I don't take this kind of analysis via repeated repeated repeated repeated repeated repeated repeated application of Bayes' Rule with somewhat-to-completely arbitrary probabilities at each step very seriously. At all.
It's a kind of gish gallop [1] with additional window dressing purporting to wrap it all up into one easy number. From a probabilistic point of view it ignores any dependency between observed facts, which is a serious issue but not necessarily the most damning one.
This particular case is even worse than usual. According to a quick Ctrl-F-aided skim of the document, the author doesn't identify a single fact that increases the probability of zoonotic origin, which is extremely suspicious. If every single available fact in a complicated issue points to the same conclusion that's probably because you are messing with your facts, not because that's how things actually are.
After noticing the one-sided-ness of the Bayesian updates I rolled my eyes and closed the tab.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Now maybe the virus mutated from those initial 174 cases but that's unlikely.
China does have a narrative that covid19 reinfections are coming from imported frozen foods though so I'm not sure why they are pushing that angle. It's probably an economic one and to save face. But maybe it's real.. if it is we are screwed.
- Virus infects human ACE2 suboptimally, therefore it's not lab grown. Why? Because a virus engineer is always going for maximizing spread rate? Seems plausible that less-than-ideal infection rates of humans could be a feature rather than a bug.
- A polybasic clevage site was not seen in SARS-CoV... but it's function is not known. Okay?
- The virus backbone was "0day" and not previously known to researchers. Seems like a feature that a covert bio warfare lab would desire.
The rest of the speculation seems to ride on the assumption that the virus originated in China (despite evidence showing otherwise[1][2]), and their discovery seems biased toward any data to support that conclusion.
1. https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...
2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2
You are correct. There is both gain of function and loss of function happening in these types of experiments.
That China blocked the Who's efforts and the WHO disclosed this is more relevant to future health policy than where this particular outbreak started. (Do we really want the public health system to tune to this specific scenario?)
Whether this is motivation is true or not has nothing to do with whether the WHO report reflects reality.
What they knew and how early they knew it is at least as significant.
edit- make China/cooperate more explicit.
> That China blocked the Who's efforts and the WHO disclosed this is more relevant to future health policy than where this particular outbreak started.
(Obviously the WHO, like any part of the UN can do nothing but document anything a superpower refuses to do.)
Now how does that build a case that the WHO is a problem instead of allowing superpowers to have super power is a problem?
It seems to me like people down voting my original comment are members of superpower states with hypocritical stances.
What has this got do to do with anything we are discussing here? Who is ‘allowing this’. What does it mean to not ‘allow’ it?
> It seems to me like people down voting my original comment are members of superpower states with hypocritical stances.
What state are you a member of? Does something make you think it has no hypocritical stances?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
Note, these nations are listed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
Note Lord Acton (also from a state listed there) states the meaning of that list in the context of the UN system:
“All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Now, what has the WHO done wrong vs what is outside the abilities of any part of the UN to address?
I will summarize my very simple position again:
The WHO did a good write-up, if you want to look beyond what a UN organization is allowed to do then do your own inference.
You seem to be implying the WHO should do something else that is consistent with its position and the fact that choices by China and the US are beyond its control. Maybe you can elaborate on what that is?
If you are suggesting a reform to allow a UN organization to force these nations to not be a global threat in every area, including health, then I'm happy to hear it.