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Comment by martin_a | Hacker News Reader

Did somebody tell you that in a Youtube video or a post on a suspicious $messenger/$platform? Better get your tinfoil hat ready!

edit, seriously: After about a year of all of this Corona shit, I'm just tired of people spouting conspiracy theories, denying scientific evidence and whatnot. This is probably the biggest crisis after WW2, but lots of people still rather believe in something that "YourDave69" told them on a messenger instead of taking good advise from scientists around the world and working together to get rid of this epidemic.

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I abhor the low-information manipulating, cognitive-bias exploiting, self-serving, anti-scientific YouTube conspiracy charlatans as much as the next rational, reasonable person.

That said - if you believe that there's no chance the Wuhan Institute of Virology had anything to do with this, then you'll believe anything. It's the largest virus bank in Asia and we know it was doing Coronavirus research. This is not tin foil. The Chinese government is not remotely accountable to the truth as Western governments are and should not be trusted an inch. Plenty of educated people are very concerned.

There's definitely a non-zero chance of the Wuhan Institute of Virology being involved somehow, but unless there's actual evidence to support the claim, it's just speculation.

That being said, there's plenty of reasons to keep looking; if nothing else, it would be very nice to have solid evidence of the origin of the virus, regardless if it was from a wild bat or not.

There is no direct evidence of zoonotic origin either. An entire year on and we don't even know the intermediate species, let alone where crossover occurred. With the original SARS this was worked out in a couple of weeks.

Also I've yet to see any slightly convincing explanation as to why SARS-Cov-2 emerged from the wild spectacularly well-adapted to human ACE2.

Is this lack of information in itself unusual enough to imply the origin is being covered up?

It took 15 years to find the origin of the original SARS, but indeed it took a few months to pinpoint the intermediary species (civets). Now I don't know about SARS but many people infected with SARS-Cov-2 have no symptoms or mild symptoms, which means the virus might circulate for a while before it hits a major population centre and blows up, which would make finding the source more difficult.

They have already found virii in bats in Yunnan that are 96% similar to SARS-Cov-2 so it seems probable that the origin will be similar to the origin of SARS.

Certainly the consensus is that the virus is natural despite you and others implying that it might not, which is nothing but FUD at this point.

SARS origin:

"Around late 2017, Chinese scientists traced the virus through the intermediary of Asian palm civets to cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Xiyang Yi Ethnic Township, Yunnan" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

The issue here is that if it was related to the WIV, which, i'll be honest - common sense tells me is likely, then the evidence will never see the light of day - because of the Chinese regime.

They honestly want us to believe that it was brought in on frozen fish at the market around the corner - that it never even originated in China. This is what we're dealing with. It's gaslighting in the extreme.

This is why I feel the international community should somehow come together to agree to indemnify China against all types of future sanctions or prosecutions etc re Covid-19.

The critically important thing is to establish exactly what happened in order to prevent SARS 3, SARS 4, etc. Absolutely everything else is of secondary importance. In the absence of malicious intent - and I think everyone agrees on that - we should have no interest in appointing blame.

What do you think the world will gain from indemnification of China? My money is on another frozen fish theory, or flying monkeys if lucky

Well, do you expect any country would honestly say that they are responsible for global disaster like this? Even if it really was an 'industrial accident', the consequences are so severe that any country admitting it would open themselves to future lawsuits, embargo and who knows what else. And I'm not even mentioning 'losing face' which is a big deal in Asia.

Yes. The people of many countries would demand it. Do not underestimate the transparency that democratic accountability provides. Western democracy is little short of a miracle in this respect. It is incomparable to China's unaccountable one-party dictatorship.

Seriously? Have you ever heard about state secrets? Some information are locked for decades, even centuries, some never made public. Are you sure that there were never any accidents in USA related to manufacturing of VX or similar nerve agents?

I don't think this is a good place or medium for this discussion, to be honest, there's too much room for interpretation. I'm not saying that the West is perfect or without its share of scandal, I'm trying to push back on this notion that it's all the same - that it's no better or worse than totalitarian systems like China when it comes to transparency and accountability. Because it's just so obviously not true. And that really matters.

Did I miss the /s tag? This cheerleading needs to calm down a bit, I'm not sure this bashathon should be used to tighten our own wools. Different systems can both be bad.

Let's relax with flexing our elite 'Western accountability'. It's all talk.

In the context of public inquiries into industrial accidents, I'm sorry but no - it absolutely is not "all talk". We are worlds apart from China in this respect. It's not cheerleading, it's just true.

How can we reasonably expect evidence when journalists were suppressed early on, domestic research into virus origins was censored/state controlled, and site visits from external organizations were prevented for an entire year? Clearly all of this is tampering with evidence and highly suspicious, and I feel like the label of “speculation” is misleading or missing context at best.

Lab leaks are also not uncommon. There’s a reason why the Obama administration paused gain of function research - with risk of SARS research specifically called out - after numerous incidents (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/10/17/doing-d...). With SARS (the first one), there were literally multiple lab leaks from the Beijing institute of virology, including one leak tied to deaths (https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20040423/china-sars-death).

Wuhan lab is not unique. Virus can be leaked from any other lab. For example, Vector lab in Novosibirsk had a major breach just before the epidemic: equipment was stolen from the lab by first responders after a blast and fire.

https://thebulletin.org/2019/11/what-happened-after-an-explo...

There's a chance for everything.

Nevertheless I find it much more likely that we really see a case of zoonosis here, given the fact that Chinese food culture has "little respect" for anything.

Also: If this came from an institute for virology, that must be the WORST of its kind of all times. That is making mistakes on the Resident Evil level.

> If this came from an institute for virology, that must be the WORST of its kind of all times.

Not really. SARS escaped from laboratories (at least) 3 times. Once in Singapore, twice in Beijing. SARS doesn't have the long asymptomatic but still contagious period that SARS-CoV-2 has, so the lab escapes were much easier to contain before they spread widely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

It's not even necessarily linked to "Chinese food culture" (which seems to be a somewhat racist trope more often than not).

Bats interact with cattle, from drinking points to barns. It is believed that MERS jumped from bats to camels to humans, yet we hardly read any criticism of the Middle Eastern "food culture", do we?

When camels were implicated as a MERS reservoir, one indeed did see offensive comments on social media about traditional Middle Eastern culture or the warped stereotypes based thereupon.

If we didn’t hear more of that talk, and it eventually died out, that is only because MERS never managed to spread beyond a limited part of the Middle East, unlike COVID.

The point stands that this is really thinly veiled (or not veiled at all) racism more than anything, be it against Chinese or Arabs. And apparently it's not even OK to point this out judging by the reactions to this comment and my previous one.

But I also think that the targeting of China is something that is let to happen because it fits some agendas.

lots of people still rather believe in something that "YourDave69" told them on a messenger instead of taking good advise from scientists around the world and working together to get rid of this epidemic.

You are right, but why do you think that is the case? Unfortunately it takes a very few (or even a single one) proven conspiracies to lose all trust and god knows we have plenty. Fool me once and all that. Can you really blame them?

> You are right, but why do you think that is the case?

People seek for easy answers in a world that is getting more and more complex.

"It's from a Chinese lab!" is obviously a lot easier than understanding how "everything" (more people need more food, want more meat, meat needs land, this leads to invasions/contacts with more wildlife, this leads to higher risk of zoonosis and so on and so on) comes together.

We can see the same thing with lots of other fields.

In my experience the "easy answer" here is the one that excludes the lab. Most of the people advocating the lab leak hypothesis are also saying it originally came from wildlife, i.e. understanding their position requires understanding zoonosis as well. The reverse is not true.

In general I do not think that is true. However I do think official narratives are usually the easiest to digest, people would need to be crazy to believe otherwise.

In this particular case I don't think "It's from a bat" is any more complex than "It's from a lab" either btw.

It's less complex. The lab theory is a superset of the bat theory because it includes the bat as the original source.

> You are right, but why do you think that is the case?

With the flip-flops in messaging over the past year+, it's easier to trust someone starting from zero than a known entity currently in the negatives.

do you have any evidence to dispute that theory? that's the basis of the scientific method, proving hypothesis wrong, not assuming them right from the start.

doesn't seem like there is a clear explanation of the origins yet (see outcome of latest who investigation). supposedly all options are valid until proven otherwise

It's always difficult to prove a negative... When you put forward a farfetched 'theory' it is for you to provide evidence.

Otherwise, following your logic, everything and every conspiracy theory should be assumed valid until proven wrong, which is ridiculous.

Example: The Novichok poisoning in the UK happened about 7 miles from the only lab in the country that works on these things. The UK government is actually behind it and they are framing the Russians for it. Prove me wrong.

Now, seriously, considering that bats gave us SARS and MERS, and that they harbour other coronavirii extremely similar to Covid-19 all over Southern China and down to Thailand, the overwhelmingly most probable theory is that the origin of Covid-19 will be bats, somewhere in Southern China. If you think that's not the case then it is for you to support your hypothesis.

Re. Novichok, if there wasn't video evidence of two known Russian agents the Porton Down theory might be more plausible. But Porton Down says they have nothing to do with it and we should just accept their word as fact, just as we have to accept the word of the Wuhan Institute of Virology that there was no possibility of lab leak there.

Or maybe given the global significance of Covid-19, and the obvious conflict of interest for WIV, and especially given that the original SARS escaped labs at least 6 times, maybe some independent auditing and investigation should be done?

> Re. Novichok, if there wasn't video evidence of two known Russian agents

Well, it's expected that Russia try to spy on strategic facilities of other countries and on former agents who flipped, isn't it? (I'm making a point here)

My point being, if we go down the rabbit hole of "everything is valid until proven wrong" as the person I replied to said then we just lose sanity, in my view.

Who do you believe then? Let's take the first sentence from the article:

> As the World Health Organization reaches its findings...

Why would you believe a largely Chinese controlled organization when we KNOW that China censors negative news about itself?

> Who do you believe then?

Scientists all over the world.

> Why would you believe a largely Chinese controlled organization [...]

Who came up with the idea that the WHO is "chinese controlled"? The orange guy?

Maybe the current leadership of the WHO is leaned towards China, that should be tackled as it's not suited for something as important as the WHO.

Also countries should probably "invest" more in the WHO to make it financially (and therefore politically) more independent.

Nevertheless I don't think that the WHO as a whole is "controlled by china" and we should not trust in their findings.

> Who came up with the idea that the WHO is "chinese controlled"?

Indeed, this only is the case because the US chose to withdrew funding from the WHO (it hasn't really paid what it has underwritten before), while China simply continued to pay its membership dues. https://www.devex.com/news/us-says-it-will-cut-who-funding-w...

China supplies 0.88% of the WHO budget [1]. The idea that they somehow control the organization is ridiculous and was spread by certain politicians that needed someone to blame for their failures.

[1] http://open.who.int/2020-21/contributors/contributor

It's actually over 11%, as stated on your link, isn't it? The US was the biggest contributor with 20% (on paper, it didn't actually wire all this money to the WHO, only signed the contracts), which is now zero.

You don’t find it at all suspicious that the CCP blocked site visits to the Wuhan lab for an entire year? Or that they censored domestic research on the origins of the virus early last year (https://www.newsweek.com/china-censoring-research-covid-19-o...)? Or that they deleted studies from this lab relating to bats and coronaviruses (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13701168/covid-cover-up-china-...)?

As for the WHO’s findings - from https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00375-7:

> Dwyer [member of the WHO team visiting Wuhan in 2021] 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.”

Clearly China is not helping their case. And the international community, including the WHO, has not been holding them accountable on the possibility of a lab leak.

You're quoting trashy publications like The Sun and Newsweek, but discounting a team of experts assembled by the WHO.

> Clearly China is not helping their case [...]

Do you really think this would be in any way different for any western country? Especially given that those labs might not only be doing "influenza research" but research for biological weapons, too.

It's ridiculous to believe this would have played out the same way if the lab was based in Denmark. Or Sweden, New Zealand, Switzerland, or any number of other Western countries. They would have welcomed the inspection and it would have happened very close to the beginning of the outbreak.

You’re changing the topic. We aren’t talking about western countries. We’re talking about China’s ruling government, the CCP. And what we saw is that they took virtually every possible action to prevent legitimate investigations by suppressing information and tampering with evidence. The only reasonable motivation to do so is to hide origins that lays blame at their feet - such as a lab leak.

I'm not changing the topic, I'm just saying that this isn't something only China would do. I would expect the exactly same behaviour from any Western country.

A practice known as "wataboutism", but in your case it's much worse, because yes, things would go very differently in a democratic country.

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