Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling | Hacker News Reader

Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling

nytimes.com

42 pointsjbegley39 comments

What a difference a year makes

>“The Discussion Is Basically Over”: Why Scientists Believe the Wuhan-Lab Coronavirus Origin Theory Is Highly Unlikely

>Trump and Mike Pompeo’s favorite blame-China theory makes great propaganda—but dubious science.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/why-scientists-belie...

This insane gaffe should be taught in schools, and the driver of these articles and organizer of these facts should be found and studied.

I think everyone is quite aware of the driving force behind these ‘gaffes.’

I remember I heard about something called Russiagate, but history never-ever repeats itself. EVER.

A broken, racist, nationalist clock is right twice a day. And as for the "new info" that has come to light, I find it amazing that Americans will continue to believe every 'smoking gun' offered to them by their intelligence agencies, as long as it's laundered through the right news outlets.

Same for the anti-clock.

It seems NYT and others just said whatever the opposite of trump was saying. Hardly good journalism.

Archived version to bypass paywall

https://web.archive.org/web/20210625124427/https://www.nytim...

For me, the most startling line in the article is,

"Nearly every SARS case since the original epidemic has been due to lab leaks."

I wasn't aware that so many cases have been due to lab leak. This would have been valuable information at the start of the pandemic.

You weren't allowed to have that information at the start of the pandemic because, without the guiding hand of the media, you might have misinterpreted it and come to a then-racist conclusion.

I had all of this information, most of it from a little known "quarantined" subreddit. Luckily reddit didn't outright ban it for so many users proposing the "misinformed" lab leak theory. There was a lot of random/fake info but there was also very accurate information which was outright banned everywhere.

and meanwhile I was watching the circus in the media, and wasn't allowed to even spread this "misinformation"

Seriously, if the tech companies are going to censor, they should at least get the facts right, over something serious enough to cost lives.

The problem is that you simply cannot "get the facts right" when the facts do not exist. We did not, and still do not, know where the virus came from.

It's very easy to look back and say "yes well of course this thing was just fake news, but they also censored this other thing that we now know was true!". Either platforms shouldn't censor anything in these situations, or we have to accept the realities of censorship under uncertainty.

This is less a news article than a careful management of emotions as they slowly let the truth trickle out.

In fairness, it is an opinion piece. I strongly suspect that - on this topic more than most others - "truth" is a Rorschach test, and different people will come away with different conclusions. That said, Zeynep Tufecki has an excellent track record of being right (she was way ahead of the curve on airborne), and if you're going to read one thing on Covid origins, this is probably the one.

Another really fascinating piece of background, Jon Cohen's 2000 piece on the origins of AIDS: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/10/the-hun...

The tl;dr is that there was a popular book (The River) that pushed contaminated oral polio vaccine as an origin story, a lot of people believed it at the time, but that story pretty much fell apart as more detail (slowly) came in on transmission from primates.

Thank you for this information, great comment. Edit: Not sarcasm.

One of the new items was that there was a report there was a bat colony at the institute[0]. (Although, if Sky News Australia is similar to its UK counterpart, it is not a highly reputable news source).

Still it wouldn't surprise me. To culture viruses in the lab you need the right cell culture. If you don't have a suitable one, you can always use the host.

[0] https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6258639874001

On the next installment of speculative FUD, mainstream media, agenda-driven reporting:

Do the Chinese subsidize supervillains' labs to manufacture pandemics to kill themselves and the world?

Do the Chinese drink the blood of young children? If so, what does it taste like and what food pairings work best?Does the dog Fluffy get to have a taste?

What should we do to thwart the ascending Red Menace while America crumbles from within like Rome 2.0?

This isn't about news, it's about yellow (no pun intended) journalism to serve Western corporate interests.

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