Soviets Once Denied a Deadly Anthrax Lab Leak. U.S. Scientists Backed the Story | Hacker News Reader

Soviets Once Denied a Deadly Anthrax Lab Leak. U.S. Scientists Backed the Story

nytimes.com

47 pointsjohncena3329 comments

Youtube and Facebook once denied the lab leak theory. U.S. politicians backed them in the name of the war on fake news.

It's funny that we already have a big politicized example of experts and debunkers being wrong for political reasons and yet their March will continue on with large public support.

In this case the "experts" were the one with the biggest stake of all in it. "Gain of function" research had to be defended at all cost. Even a global pandemic was not to stop the grants from flowing.

Pretty much. The next controversial thing with really suspicious surroundings will still be rebuffed in exactly the same way. "trust the experts".

Yep. And YouTube Facebook et all will continue with the censorship and banners with no shame.

What’s the alternative? Trust crackpot amateurs?

The alternative has always been to not blindly trust, but to validate when the circumstances seem suspicious. "trust but verify" , after all.

This goes 10x when there's a distinct partisan political slant /objective in the belief.

As did every main stream media and news outlet, such as the New York Times.

The New York Times coverage of Covid-19 has been really obvious propaganda in general unfortunately - and now it's Pulitzer prize winning propaganda too. Misleading comparisons with other countries, deceptive or occasionally just outright false descriptions of how well everywhere is doing, why, and what measures are in place there, misrepresentations of important figures like the fatality rate, a bizarre insistence that the previous administration was incompetent for not achieving things no other country had managed and that probably weren't technologically possible, blatant rewriting of history, and through it all a constant drumbeat making it clear just what was warping their coverage: Trump! Trump! Trump!

There’s a fairly lengthy account of this incident in the (very enjoyable) book The Dead Hand: The Untold History of the Cold War Arms Race and its Deadly Legacy.

It’s long but a great read if you’re interested in this part of history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Hand

The New York Times was complicit in the cover up. Its COVID reporter was caught recently still pushing the narrative that lab leak theory was "racist". [1]

YouTube mass deleted videos about it. Facebook censored discussion.

Now the entire orthodoxy is facing reckoning for their sloppy and censorious actions.

[1] https://www.thewrap.com/new-york-times-covid-lab-leak-apoorv...

Now the entire orthodoxy is facing reckoning for their sloppy and censorious actions.

Hardly - I do wish you were correct in this, but the same culprits in covering it up have root access to the minds of millions of people. They can just do what they're doing right now, present the lab-leak theory as new "news" and congratulate themselves for being the ones to educate and inform us unwashed masses.

There is no reckoning. The emperor has no clothes but many people just don't care.

The American public isn't stupid despite what politicians and media reporters believe.

Unfortunately I don't think it's a case of "stupid" or "clever". Human beings are inherently susceptible to being influenced, and the levers are well-known in some circles already (see marketing, media orgs, and spy agencies).

We're all programmable, "moist robots" as Scott Adams calls it, and even if we think we're too smart to fall for it, we can still be manipulated by motivated actors.

The first defence is of course to be aware of it, but others include firewalling ourselves from information we consume. Being super judicious with consuming in the first place is the best defense.

It seems far more likely that it's a "boy who cried wolf" situation. The people strongly pushing the lab leak possibility at the beginning were not doing it for honorable reasons, or they would have released any evidence they had for it. Given that, it was reasonable for media outlets to characterize those claims as disingenuous. It's not impossible that they could end up being right, but I'd bet that it won't be because they knew they were right at the time.

But the flip side is true, too. The people dismissing the possibility at the begging were also not doing so for honorable reasons, or even because they knew they were right at the time.

Naturally evolved strains have happened before, many times (within a rounding error of 100% of pandemics), so that's the default reasonable assumption. It wasn't dishonorable for the villagers to say "there's that boy, crying wolf again, he's probably lying this time too", it was pragmatic.

But that's not why they rejected it, or at least not why they rejected it so hard. They rejected it as hard as they did because doing so let them paint Trump as an idiot.

Aug. 5, 2019: "Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns" - NYTimes [1]

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/health/germs-fort-detrick...

I expected to see a mention of "Vector" BSL4 lab incident in September 2019. :-/

This reminds me of the excellent play “An enemy of the people” by Henrik Ibsen.

COVID’s origin and coverup has done tremendous damage to the faith that people had in the media, and their government. Perhaps it is the media that has become the enemy of the people.

The media already did plenty of damage to their reputation long before COVID.

ARCHIVE: https://archive.ph/OUP25

Paywall. Can someone summarize or have a non-paywall source?

A history of anthrax lab leak in Soviet Union, which was covered up by SU, then few mentions of Wuhan lab, with hope to create parallels between them.

I expected to see mention of "Vector" lab incident in September 2019, but nope.

Lab leak is no joke. Locals are constantly afraid of lab leak. Just look at the face of a journalist, when he tells about possible lab leak at "Vector": https://youtu.be/_w7SAeNcXA8?t=16

The paywall could be bypassed with simple "debugger" in console :)

debugger? injecting JavaScript or hiding CSS layers?

I mean write "debugger" in console, press f5, then before it's fully loadded press enter (while in console)

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