The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
The value of an article (and thread) on a major ongoing topic, such as this one, is in the specifics of what the article discusses—in other words, the diff relative to previous articles and threads [3]. If there aren't any new specifics, then the article itself would count as off topic [4], but in this case there do seem to be.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[6] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/predicting-katrina/
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46722.The_Coming_Plague
If it happens to be the root cause, no doubt there will be a huge change in how it is carried out, if not outright banned.
If it is proven to not be the cause, it will be easier to argue that it can be safe.
Curious to see what comes of that so. Not that it would change a lot in term of fighting the pandemic, we have working vaccines by now. The narrative will change a lot, so. And with all the mask clusterfuck still going on, I don't think the narrative will be good.
I'm not sure that "disprove my wild hypothesis" is how proving things works.
When you run into massive resistance to doing so, it only points one in the direction that there may be more to be uncovered in one direction than another.
>Come on in guys, let's compare notes research wise!
Would have done volumes more to defuse suspicions than nothing but stonewalling and saber rattling.
The "circumstantial evidence" is that pretty much all recent new infectious diseases in humans were traced to animals in the wild, or alternatively, sometimes not traced anywhere at all (Hepatitis C, anyone?). "Yes, but this one is special!", conspiracy theorists swear. Sure, Jan.
One analogy I heard recently is that lots of people get covered in paint worldwide, but if you see 10 people covered in paint right next to the dulux paint factory, you should probably consider the likelihood it came from there, even if the paint factory denies it.
Let’s not forget that we are talking about the outbreak being right next to a lab which was known to have inadequate safety precautions which was trying to make bat coronaviruses jump species.
We are also talking about a strain that, if it began in a lab with inadequate safety standards, could have very easily escaped due to its high infectiousness and low detectability due to asymptomatic carriers.
Might we find it in a cave? Of course. Might we find it started in WIV? Of course.
The only people I personally think are silly are people that outright dismiss either option.
https://archive.is/tpxg1 (Nicholas Wade's excellent medium post, one hundred percent worth the read, Possibly duped in the Bulletin of atomic scientists shtick floating around right now.)
>https://archive.is/ONgMa Yuri Deigin's excellent write-up
I expect in the absence of a smoking gun, that people weigh the relative preponderance of evidence and do reasonable things. The preponderance of evidence clearly tilts in one direction over another, but the people closest to the subject matter at hand have rather tangible conflicts of interest in controls implemented if the story tilts against their preferred zoonotic spillover which conveniently absolves any human agency of responsibility.
Mother Nature throws us a curve ball every once in a while to keep us on our toes. Other humans do so with a probability approaching 1, and I see evidence of all the tools and expertise necessary to have constructed the ball from scratch, measure that, in fact, this is the ball that will curve the way we expect it to, and through it all I've seen the most grossly blatant active perception management of facts and science by media and government alike that I've ever had the misfortune to witness. I've had my eye on the community and volunteer collated pools of evidence and have actually been running down references and anomalies and watching things evolve since this first entered the public eye as rumors of a mysterious illness back in 2019, and even before that, when my interest was piqued by some seriously questionable research papers getting published every few years over the past decade in terms of "You were so busy wondering if you could, you never stopped to ponder if you should." I've done my level best to ensure that I fully delve into the subject area enough to actually form a reasonable stab at a fact based opinion, including integrating new info as it became available.
It's not my burden to prove zoonotic. I welcome those looking for it to find us the smoking gun we need to put lab-leak to bed. I also welcome lab-leak to do the same for zoonotic. Until then, I propose doing something about all the smoke in the room as it's a little odd how everyone just seems to have handwaved the possibility there is a fire making it.
In the grand scheme of things, the only people with anything more to lose are the ones most vocally advocating everyone not look behind the curtain, or actively making it more difficult to and that everyone else just doesn't understand.
I understand perfectly. China has sovereignty issues to deal with. They have a bunch of other red marks going on in terms of baggage foreign and domestic policy-wise and don't want to make it any easier for another one to get dropped on their doorstep. That's fine. I don't care half so much at this point.
I care that we've got a bunch of institutions at each other's throat trying to fist feed advantageous narratives and lies through omission instead of everybody putting all their cards on the damn table, and we're doing some of the most dangerous damn research I can conceive of in ways where it convenience of the researcher even comes into the picture. G-o-F on Viruses are the biological equivalent of bloody "let's make grey goo" in nanotech.
But I get it. That's life. It's absurd. It will continue to be absurd. People have to look at other people in the most uncaring or warped way to think helping anything along it's evolutionary path to human infectiveness is a good, viable research topic to take place anywhere near other people. I don't even begrudge Baric or Zengli Shi. I begrudge the complete lack of foresight and institutional self-reflection that surrounded this type of research even having all the necessary tools collected in one place without audit controls just in case this sort of thing ever came into question to keep it from blowing up in everyone's faces. assuming the risk it presents would ever be reasonably mitigated is the very definition of foolishness and blindness to human fallibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
There's no evidence that the lab had this virus previously, and there's actually good evidence that they didn't have it (they publish on the viruses they discover, and they never published this virus).
There are no investigations going on. What the F are you talking about? The communist dictatorship is not letting in any investigators. They have every incentive to prevent any investigation, and they do so.
The lab leak reporting is also odd. When it first happened my initial thought was natural, then when it came out it was next to a lab doing gain of function type experiments on coronaviruses and hundreds of miles from the bats I thought ah likely a lab screw up. This was around feb 2020 that the info came out.
But then the press has done a year of lab leaks are mad, possibly racist, conspiracy theories and then a couple of months of it's likely a lab leak, all based on basically the same facts. Also odd.
I would argue this was not a widely known fact.
It's difficult to prepare for the next disaster if you're not willing to explore the previous one.
1) Researchers easily found multiple naturally occurring coronaviruses that seemed likely to be able to jump into humans. In fact that is why they were so eager to conduct that lab research: the natural threat seemed imminent.
2) The sequence of COVID-19 does not yet resemble any of the sequences associated with the lab research that was being conducted.
https://newrepublic.com/article/162689/bats-covid-19-lab-lea...
This doesn't discount the possibility of a lab leak if you take into account that some sequences appear to have been deleted[1].
We shouldn't make assumptions based on lack of evidence if that evidence was tampered with. And given China's history of deliberately concealing facts to save face, this raises far more questions than it answers. We need a serious and trustworthy investigation into what happened that puts politics aside. Alas my hopes for that happening are slim to none.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/science/coronavirus-seque...
That is a completely unrelated issue. The sequences you're talking about are sequences from patients (obtained in February 2020, I believe). They are not bat coronavirus sequences, which is what the poster above you is referring to. The Wuhan Institute of Virology publishes the sequences it discovers. RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, was published in 2016, for example.
Even if we're talking about the patient data, even though the authors withdrew their raw data from a database, they still published the most important information in a paper: the genetic sequences.
Unfortunately any claims pointing in the direction of a zoonotic transfer or lab leak is speculation at this point until serious research is done. And even then the extent of data manipulation might be so deep that drawing any conclusions might be impossible. It's an absolute disgrace that science has become so entrenched with politics that more than a year later we're still not clear on the origins of a world disrupting pandemic.
> they still published the most important information in a paper
Could you link to this please?
> Could you link to this please?
It's in Table 1 of their June 2020 paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/smll.202002...
> If the patient data had links to unpublished bat sequences the lab was working on, it would certainly be motivation to get rid of both.
The patient data had nothing to do with bat sequences. The paper we're talking about was a methodology paper, in which the authors were trying to test a new sequencing technology using recent patient samples. They were not focusing on SARS-CoV-2 origins, and they certainly weren't working with bat coronavirus sequences. I don't even think there's any connection to the WIV here: the corresponding authors don't appear to be affiliated with the institute.
The author is also puzzled why this was done if the data matches the published summary in the Wang et al. 2020b paper, but hasn't received any replies from the authors.
This is also interesting:
> Particularly in light of the directive that labs destroy early samples (Pingui 2020) and multiple orders requiring approval of publications on COVID-19 (China CDC 2020; Kang et al. 2020a), this suggests a less than wholehearted effort to maximize information about viral sequences from early in the Wuhan epidemic.
> I don't even think there's any connection to the WIV here: the corresponding authors don't appear to be affiliated with the institute.
The authors of the nanopore paper are associated with Wuhan University. Since the CCP controls all aspects of Chinese research it's safe to say that a connection with the WIV certainly exists and they would be in a position to control the output of both.
Again, the reason behind this will likely never be known to the outside world. But to take anything coming from Chinese researchers as evidence for a narrative that exculpates China from any fault would be extremely naive. Or do we really believe there's nothing suspicious about a country of 1.4bn people having 5,508 reported deaths from COVID-19[2]?
[1]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.18.449051v2....
> Since the CCP controls all aspects of Chinese research
Not everything in China is automatically connected to everything else. People working on a new medical diagnostic tool at one university are not automatically related to people doing bat coronavirus research at another institute.
> Or do we really believe there's nothing suspicious about a country of 1.4bn people having 5,508 reported deaths from COVID-19[2]?
I'm sure there are lots of people here on HN who live in China, and who can explain the extremely strict and effective measures China took in early 2020 to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 from within their borders. China had a first wave that was largely confined to one city, and has had no large outbreak since. It's had small, local outbreaks that have been quickly contained. There's really no mystery about this at all.
(some details - they even tried to hide the original sequence which our vaccines are based on. When a lab released it against orders they closed the lab. When Australia suggested an independent investigation they put 80bn of trade sanction on them. When a doctor at the start warned his colleagues privately to be careful as the vaccine was contagious they arrested him and made him sign a confession etc etc...)
> they even tried to hide the original sequence which our vaccines are based on.
By the accounts I've read, there was rivalry between the China CDC and researchers at different institutions to publish the genome first, not to hide it. The China CDC was taking longer to validate the genetic sequence and write up a publication, and they didn't want to be scooped. But regardless of the delay this caused, the genome was published extraordinarily quickly - less than two weeks after the first patient test results even suggested that there might be a new virus.
You're referring to something completely different, which has nothing to do with bat coronavirus research or the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
A group of researchers working on new sequencing techniques for patient samples (not bat coronaviruses) withdrew their raw data from a database. They then published the key data in a peer-reviewed journal.[1] It's better to have the raw data, but it's not as if the researchers hid their results. And again, this has nothing to do with bat coronaviruses or the WIV.
The WIV publishes the viruses it discovers. They published RaTG13, which is now recognized as the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2 (but not the progenitor), in 2016. WIV scientists regularly publish papers, give talks at scientific conferences, and collaborate with international scientists. We have a very good idea of what they had and what viruses they were working with. Nobody from the WIV ever mentioned anything that looks like SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic began.
March 2020:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/chinese-scientists-destro...
That's standard biosecurity when a new, dangerous pathogen is discovered. Regulatory agencies in other countries would have done the same thing.
A bunch of patient samples were sent out to diagnostic labs before anyone knew they contained a novel coronavirus. You can imagine regulators freaking out when they discover those samples contain a new, possibly dangerous virus.
And you are talking about something else.
From the Nature article you link to:
> The sequences were associated with a paper in which researchers used nanopore-sequencing technology to detect SARS-CoV-2 genetic material in samples from people. That study was published in the journal Small in June 2020, having been posted on bioRxiv in March of that year.
> the sequences Bloom recovered were not hidden: they are described in detail, with enough sequence information to know their evolutionary relationship to other early SARS-CoV-2 sequences, in the Small paper.
> The genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 does not resemble that of any virus the WIV was known to be culturing in its lab, such as WIV1
We know, for example, that the WIV has three live coronaviruses that it works with. None of them is close to SARS-CoV-2.
We also know about a whole range of other viruses they've discovered (by sequencing RNA fragments), but which they haven't been able to culture in the lab. These include RaTG13, which they first published on in 2016. It's significant that among all these viruses they've published on over the years, none is similar enough to SARS-CoV-2 to be its ancestor.
I'll just add that some of the people we're talking about here, like Dr. Shi Zhengli, are very highly respected scientists who have contributed a huge amount to the field of virology. Just accusing them of lying with zero evidence is in pretty poor taste.
Google a reference for my first sentence.
Capabilities. Not motivations. Never ever lose sight of that. You will never know what makes another human being tick or do what they do, but you can definitely establish an upper bound on the trouble they can get themselves in to.
It seems that even of this were manufactured, it is not likely intentional.
>The Chinese research did not have the specific goal of making the viruses more deadly, and rather than SARS itself, it used SARS’s close cousins, whose real-world risk to humans was unknown—in fact, determining the risk was the point of the research. Just as when you trade in part of a poker hand for fresh cards, there was no way of knowing whether the final chimeras would be stronger or weaker.
https://archive.is/tpxg1 Nicholas Wade's excellent medium post, one hundred percent worth the read, Possibly duped in the Bulletin of atomic scientists shtick floating around right now.)
>https://archive.is/ONgMa Yuri Deigin's excellent write-up
I'm hedging the percents because my quick reference of previous post's substances is on my other phone, which died horribly, and having to play the "Dude, I had it elsewhere card, I swear" card is my punishment for shitty backup hygiene.
These are two of the better write-ups I've seen and deep dove into, and project evidence is a staple that's only gotten more and more confirmed with the number of eyes that have gone into it despite their initial total flub up of picking a name for it.
There is more than enough know-how condensed between Baric and Zengli Shi to swap RBD's and insert Furin cleavage sites without leaving traces of having done so. I had one paper that went into a hypothetical process for doing so, but I was an idiot and can't remember the author, and it wasn't the most straightforward search engine query because it was one of those middle of the night, just got done reading another paper, saw a query string that looked promising, did it, and pay dirt. Great when looking for a dopamine hit and ego boost for "haha I found it!"; Not so much for when life happens and you suddenly have to rewalk that mental path.
>_<
This is why I'm not an academic... Or more precisely, this is what happens when you let habits you built during college atrophy because you have a day job now.
Baric, Shi and others use particular reverse-genetics systems, which are well known to the outside world. Developing a new system is a significant effort. They don't just swap RBDs or spike proteins into random viruses that nobody has ever heard of before.
SARS-CoV-2 is an entirely new virus, different throughout its entire genome from any previously known virus. An engineered virus would use a known backbone, such as SARS-CoV or WIV-1.
Keep in mind that neither Wade nor Deigin actually has any expertise in virology, and it shows. Rather than listening to laypeople shooting from the hip, listen to what actual virologists have to say. Here's Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry on TWiV: https://youtu.be/Hez3xNv2ido
“Consider this hypothetical scenario,” Fauci wrote. “An important gain-of-function experiment involving a virus with serious pandemic potential is performed in a well-regulated, world-class laboratory by experienced investigators, but the information from the experiment is then used by another scientist who does not have the same training and facilities and is not subject to the same regulations. In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?”
That said, let me temper that with some skepticism. First, having got a book deal[1] she is now in the position of directly financially benefiting from media promotion, which in my opinion puts her in a slightly different category than a purely objective scientist.
Second, while she is careful that her words are always defensible and rooted in science, my interpretation of her (prolific) memes is that hell yeah, she thinks it's a lab leak. I want to emphasize that this is my interpretation; at worst, she can be accused of communicating ambiguously enough to create this interpretation in a cross-section of her audience. And a large fraction of her replies are people who are, shall we say, less scientifically careful.
Third, she has truncated quotes from her detractors in a way that changes their meaning, and I find this not entirely good faith. Here's the thread[2] that has that quote and Dr. Rasmussen's response. Perhaps this is an honest difference in interpretation, and Dr. Rasmussen is being too thin-skinned about it.
In any case, my goal here is to present evidence which I think might be relevant, and encourage people to look at it and decide for themselves. As I say, while for the reasons I cited above, I certainly wouldn't consider everything Dr. Chan says to be gospel and accept it uncritically, I absolutely agree that hers is a voice that should be heard. Much to her credit, she has been consistently calling for a real investigation for a long time, well before it was newly fashionable.
On your second point, she has stated repeatedly and explicitly that her position is that she doesn't know what the origin of the virus is, natural origin is not ruled out either, and that all she is asking for is that both theories are credibly investigated, for example here [1]. Of course she talks a lot more about the lab leak, but that's largely because she feels this side has not been discussed sufficiently, which was certainly true until 2/3 months ago.
On your third point, you're right that she truncated the quote, but I think her interpretation is the one many readers would come to: "lab leak=conspiracy theory". The quote is dishonestly structured to start with, lumping together lab leak with 5G/Bill Gates silliness. It's the same mistake that the Andersen paper made lumping lab leak with bioweapon. I wouldn't count that as a win on either side.
[1] https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1411049136762327043?s=21
> Investigating the effects of human genetic variation on the efficacy of adeno-associated virus (AAV) variants in order to engineer gene therapy viral vectors targeting diverse patient populations.
So this is professional work at a prestigious institute on (a) viruses, (b) engineering of viruses, and (c) deeper understanding of the dynamics of transmission of these viruses in humans. Further, adenovirus is one that can be engineered to be combined with pieces of SARS-CoV-2 to do interesting things in humans, as I can personally attest, having had the J&J vaccine.
It's hard to imagine a set of credentials better suited to analyzing origins of Covid. There are a lot of grifters out there, "epistemological trespassers" if you will, but Dr. Chan's is a voice that deserves being listened to.
Full quote (as per Dr Rasmussen), and italic parts support the above interpretation:
> Unfortunately, this did little to quell often contradictory and sometimes outright ridiculous conspiracy theories that spread faster than the virus itself: SARS-CoV-2 was the result of a laboratory accident or was intentionally engineered, and this was concealed to hide either spectacular incompetence or a complex international conspiracy involving Bill Gates, the Chinese Communist Party and 5G wireless network infrastructure with an end goal of ushering in a new world order.
I won't even touch the rest, but this one still strikes me as too early to call, given the cultural importance of saving face. I'll buy that there was much less of it than people allow their imaginations to run away with it, but if you don't think there was some very long tense, sweating bullets meetings on how to best go about sculpting the narrative and shaping the story in terms of national interest goes, or covering of ass in the early days, then I don't think you've been paying attention to the diplomatic realities surrounding China at all.
The author admits that the NIH has a specific definition of "gain of function research" and then seems to go forward with the article using their own definition, without calling out that they're doing this. Why are they using their own definition instead of the NIH's?
The Chinese research this author cites claims that there are large reservoirs of virus's in bat populations that are currently able to cross into the human population with minimal, if any, mutation required. This makes a natural crossover event more likely compared to the lab-leak hypothesis. This point seems to escape the author entirely.
Next, this whole paragraph is a mess:
> The revelation that the WIV was working with SARS-like viruses in subpar safety conditions has led some people to reassess the chance that SARS-CoV-2 could have emerged from some type of laboratory incident. “That’s screwed up,” the Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin, who coauthored the seminal paper arguing that covid must have had a natural origin, told the journalist Donald McNeil Jr. “It shouldn’t have happened. People should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs. My view has changed.”
There are multiple topics that are being jumbled up. The surrounding context has been heavily discussing genetic engineering research. Ian Lipkin's paper discussed a virus with natural origins. The linked article is discussing the possibility of a lab-leak. These are all different topics and no attempt is being made here to distinguish and collate them. The linked article doesn't make it clear on whether Lipkin changed his view on the virus being of natural origin or of possibly being leaked from a lab or even something else.
In fact, this whole article can't seem to distinguish between the hypothesis of an engineered virus escaping a lab, and a naturally occurring virus escaping the lab. The article ends by belatedly admitting that Baric believes that a natural spillover is still the most likely explanation but devotes zero space to explaining why. Instead, the author sees fit to spend the rest of the article explaining why Baric thinks WIV should be investigated further.
To many of these lab leak articles are structured distressingly like a Q-drop: "Look at all these facts that I'm going to recite in a spooky tone of voice but not bother to synthesize into a coherent hypothesis. Isn't it spooky?" It's not clear to me if it's because the author is writing high-brow clickbait, is unable to recognize these flaws, or is deliberately trying to sling conspiracies. The lab leak hypothesis should be investigated, but not like this.
The author has more than a few other pieces which helped push the US into invading Iraq back on 2003
And these are the same old tactics which were used to foment the invasion of Iraq in the 90s with things like the unquestioned statements such as "throwing babies out of incubators"
It's not even established that they were "misdirecting" then, either.
Similar to the way the Zoonotic link articles are structured as the Ultimate Truth which must not be questioned (even as early as one month into the pandemic).
It only took a year later for prominent blue tribe members like Jon Stewart to point out how ridiculous the dominant narrative was.
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-...
Also, how can you even write sentences like
>This makes a natural crossover event more likely compared to the lab-leak hypothesis. This point seems to escape the author entirely.
And in the very next paragraph quote all of the points the author was making. Specifically that a crossover event is entirely possible because the scientists were working in sub-standard conditions.
The point you missed is that you don't need centrifuges and lab equipment for this to happen, just a place where lots of source material is stored and people not using proper safety precautions.
I'd recommend giving the article a second read, it's the best article I've read on the subject to-date.
[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-27/did-covid...
And their earlier research was done in BSL-2!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#ci...
But of course the WIV has a few other research centers there.
Software engineers might appreciate the simplicity with which redundant failsafes are attained - each Biosafety Level being contained by a less safe abstraction.
Thus a BSL-4 lab is essentially 4 labs built inside themselves, like a Matryoshka doll for pathogens.
"Unnoticed by most, however, was a key difference that significantly shifted the risk calculation. The Chinese work was carried out at biosafety level 2 (BSL-2), a much lower tier than Baric’s BSL-3+."
BSL2 is not much more than "wear a lab coat". https://consteril.com/biosafety-levels-difference/
So the nicest BSL4 lab does not help if you do not use it.
This is a pretty well reasoned take kn the lab leak hypothesis. We might not know for certain if covid came from the lab in Wuhan but there are enough lapses that took place in that lab that a future pandemic can start from that place
I'd estimate most people can agree the probability of a lab leak of a dangerous virus in any given decade is between 1-20%. Is this acceptable or can we greatly reduce it with policy?
The experiments done on the SARS-CoV-1 or WIV1 backbone don't remotely get you close to SARS-CoV-2 and you're dealing with centuries of evolutionary difference there.
The RaTG13 virus backbone is also several decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2.
Learning how to replicate a virus in the lab is also not simple so they're not going to be doing this with every virus they find. We know they managed to do it with SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1, but they'd need a reason to undertake it with any other virus.
So you have to assume that WIV has a virus which they found which is similar to RaTG13 which they have never published, and for some reason they jumped straight to making that virus replicate in the lab and creating chimeras, and they also had a previously and still unpublished spike protein which was similar to the Pangolin spike which they used. Then for some reason they didn't do this in petri dishes, but used animals and/or somehow managed to aerosolize enough of it that researchers at WIV got sick from it. This is with a virus that we now know doesn't stick to surfaces very well at all, so the actual accident remains unexplained (they had a party and someone chopped up some chimera and railed it like a line of coke? that'd do it).
While you're pondering all that keep in mind that the person who "broke" the story in the WSJ about the sick workers at the Wuhan lab was Michael R. Gordon. He's also notable for having co-authored with Judith Miller in 2002 the NYT story on Hussein's nuclear program and WMDs that arguably helped propel us into the Iraq War.
It is also worthwhile to read Shi Zhengli's rebuttal to the lab leak theory:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/world/asia/china-covid-wu...
If you'd like some actual science on the zoontic investigation:
"Evidence for SARS-CoV-2 related coronaviruses circulating in bats and pangolins in Southeast Asia"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21240-1
"Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus"
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
"Identification of novel bat coronaviruses sheds light on the evolutionary origins of SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses"
I suppose we’ll never find one because China has no interest in getting to the truth. Cooperation means disclosing things which have the potential to make them look bad so why risk it?
The Bat CoVs that are likely part of its natural zoonotic reservoir were only found in 2013-2016 in Yunnan.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/ncezid/stories-features/global-stories/e...
"The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory":
https://newrepublic.com/article/162689/bats-covid-19-lab-lea...
Uh, are you referring to this [0]? It's the only obvious thing I can find on Google linked to his name.
It was also posted over a year after when we first heard of those sick workers. Here's [1] one example (they're mentioned from 6:30 to 6:50).
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-w...
You could probably check this by going to the bat caves and taking samples which is probably why they pretty much mobilised the military to block the road when some western reporters tried going there.
If the west could every get independent investigators to the Mojang mine I think there's a high chance we'd find the origin.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-ori...
>Let’s face it: there are going to be unknown viruses in guano, or oral swabs, which are oftentimes pooled. And if you’re attempting to culture a virus, you’re going to have novel strains being dropped onto culture cells,”
So it could have come from the lab without them even knowing. The way to check would probably be to get inspectors to the caves where the guano came from, which annoyingly I doubt the Chinese will ever allow.
(ie shortly after the scientific community suddenly revoked it's embargo on the idea that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was studying bat coronaviruses, might have had something to do with the sudden appearance of a bat coronavirus in Wuhan that still has no evidence of a natural origin).
Regardless of whether or not this pandemic came from this lab, the industry incentives described in the article can only eventually result in one.
We have a mechanism for dealing with this sort of problem, and it involves outside audits. The "bad thing" involves being slapped down by an outside authority that has teeth behind its recommendations. In order to have authority in places like China, it would also need to have authority in places like the USA, which means a bunch of American (and European) scientists would see their own work get more difficult, as well. This has to make it more difficult for them to decide to think objectively about the possibility that this pandemic came from a lab.
If anyone is researching this I support their change of address to prison.
I think it's possible to split out the question of bioresearch risks from Covid origins. If it was a lab leak, obviously we should regulate those risks better, but we should also do more to mitigate zoonotic spillover, because we have tons of evidence that happens and causes damage. If it wasn't lab leak, we should do more to mitigate spillover, but it would also be a good idea to be more careful about biosafety.
The quotation you cite from Lipitsch doesn't validate your comment.
He wasn't "questioning gain of function research". He was calling for greater oversight over gain of function research and for more initiatives to try to limit the damage potential of zoonotic spillover.
If anything, Lipitsch was upholding the value of gain of function research, because he believes scientists should do everything possible to try to prevent pandemics.
Now, one thing that is going on in a lot of the discussion (and which makes reasoned discourse harder) is that many people mean different things when talking about "gain of function." For some, it's anything that creates a pathogen that's potentially infectious to humans, which potentially covers a lot of experiments to test transmissibility and other factors. For others, it has to be specifically engineering to increase transmissibility or virulence [3]. That can lead to confusion, for example the debate about whether Fauci's denial that the NIAID funded GoF research was honest.
I very carefully check my sources when posting, but am sure I make mistakes. When I do, I'm happy to be corrected. But this seems a very odd thing to call me out for.
[1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/exclusive-controvers...
[2]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269283247_Gain-of-f...
"I think it's possible to split out the question of bioresearch risks from Covid origins. If it was a lab leak, obviously we should regulate those risks better, but we should also do more to mitigate zoonotic spillover, because we have tons of evidence that happens and causes damage. If it wasn't lab leak, we should do more to mitigate spillover, but it would also be a good idea to be more careful about biosafety."
The over focus on origin is clearly a proxy for something else.
> If it wasn't lab leak, we should do more to mitigate spillover, but it would also be a good idea to be more careful about biosafety
This seems like a roundabout way to endorse Matt Yglesias' view that there are basically no implications to the question "was it a lab leak?"
It’s hard to overstate the case here. Even a tiny chance for a proposed research project to causing something like covid 19 has a gigantic risk adjusted cost and should only have been undertaken if the expected results were likewise enormously beneficial.
Something seems off with the cost benefit analysis in these laboratories.
(1) this pandemic has not been shown to be caused by gain-of-function research and probably wasn't.
(2) why do you think scientists do gain-of-function research? It's to try and prevent pandemics by finding viruses which might be dangerous.
So if there's a problem it's really (3): we haven't consistently funded pandemic preparedness, in particular there needs to be an established process to clinical trial and test new vaccines against identified "risky" viral strains in the wild, ideally with a platform perspective that we can have confidence can be rapidly modified to get a new vaccine out the door.
When looking at cost-benefit analysis you have to understand that the probability of a naturally occurring human infectious disease capable of causing a pandemic is 100% over a long enough time span. Therefore the possibility of a lab leak can add little marginal risk over that same period of time. Whereas the understanding that comes from research will confer benefits no matter the origin of the disease.
Labs should be as secure as possible: yes. But there is a huge opportunity cost to saying “don’t work with human infectious diseases any more.”
Following your "gonna happen eventually", let the scientists play with their toys under tents in the public square.
My point is that ceasing research entirely does not rule out a future pandemic, but it certainly would harm our ability to respond to a future pandemic.
Can you provide a reference for this?
So far all I’ve seen is a bunch of handwaving about “advancing the science.”
The lead author of the WSJ piece on the "sick lab workers" is the same author that helped get us into Iraq with a NYT article on Hussein's nuclear WMD program in 2002.
If you’re looking for someone with a clean record commenting on the viability of the lab leak theory for months, take a look at Bret Weinstein.
Also, he and his brother have (IMHO) quite obvious inferiority complexes about their academic careers. So much of what they both say boils down to how the academic system doesn't respect their intelligence, and implied is that they deserve it.
I mean, who doesn't feel that way about their field? But to speak at length on podcasts about it, which are only popular due to Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, is pretty exhausting to me.
In general there's a fine line to walk with being cautious around vaccines vs 100% assuming they are safe, but he got it wrong with the guest he had on talking about cytotoxic spike proteins in the vaccine. At least that seems to be the overall scientific consensus that I've seen (but who knows! it's a rapidly evolving topic!).
Relevant:
" “The sound bite ‘SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is toxic’ is not technically wrong—also not news at per se—but that has nothing to do with overall established safety of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, especially the mRNA vaccines,” Lee said.
That’s in part because, according to Machamer, the spike protein in SARS-CoV-2 is different than the spike protein created after the administration of the mRNA vaccines.
“The vaccine, at least the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines, the mRNA vaccines, they supply the information to make spike, but it’s not exactly the spike that’s in the virus,” she said.
“There are changes that were made on purpose that would prevent the spike protein from being able to undergo binding to the receptor and fusion,” Machamer explained. “And so, all this business about toxicity that has been shown for the real spike protein, the one that doesn't have that block, is totally irrelevant for the vaccine.” "
Source: https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/v...
That said, I take everything he and his brother Eric say with a large pinch of salt - they are clearly both very intelligent but I don’t like this cult leader like absolute certainty of their own ideas and the audience (and revenue) building based on controversy and semi-conspiracy. I think it’s essential to have many voices though so I welcome what they are bringing in to the mix, but personally for me it gets tiring after a couple of podcasts.
Reported minimum 6k deaths and double that in UK, only a minimum because the standards for incontrovertible linkage is high and fwiw Bret and co hear from physicians who claim their reports aren't being accepted.
The rates are higher in younger people than in covid deaths.
Clinical trials are halted after 1000x less death.
He is more than just an “expert”
He made the claim that the spike protein is cytotoxic. He notified the FDA
And FDA has claimed it is not without any evidence
They're found not only in many other coronaviruses, but they've independently evolved over 6 times that we know about, and they've now been found in SARS-CoV-2 related sarbecoviruses in bats.
The goalpost moving has migrated to arguing that a couple of sequences in the furin sites are now "unusual". Kristian Andersen, whose early 2020 e-mail to Fauci has been passed around as evidence of the lab leak theory has more recently talked to the NYT about this:
> Furin cleavage sites are found all across the coronavirus family, including in the betacoronavirus genus that SARS-CoV-2 belongs to. There has been much speculation that patterns found in the virus’s RNA that are responsible for certain portions of the furin cleavage site represent evidence of engineering. Specifically, people are pointing to two “CGG” sequences that code for the amino acid arginine in the furin cleavage site as strong evidence that the virus was made in the lab. Such statements are factually incorrect.
> While it’s true that CGG is less common than other patterns that code for arginine, the CGG codon is found elsewhere in the SARS-CoV-2 genome and the genetic sequence[s] that include the CGG codon found in SARS-CoV-2 are also found in other coronaviruses. These findings, together with many other technical features of the site, strongly suggest that it evolved naturally and there is very little chance somebody engineered it.
And "surprising genome snippets" don't get you past the fact that the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2 is still decades of evolution away from being SARS-CoV-2 which is not something that can be engineered in the lab.
See this article for a lot more:
https://newrepublic.com/article/162689/bats-covid-19-lab-lea...
I don’t think it does.
I’m pretty sure NASA has an excellent internal team of quality control specialists. The specialists are a part of all aspects of deployment and launch.
They don’t just pop in and review work, they’re constantly there.
They’re also very much “part of the team.” They don’t strictly speaking “have teeth.” They’re focused on the same mission everyone else is, only with a special focus on making it happen safely.
Maybe you mean something like the relationship between the FAA and airline industry.
But that’s very different from how NASA operates.
So it’s clearly not the only model.
Case in point: biological weapons convention. A few years back there was a very popular proposal to add “teeth”, i.e. random inspections and stuff. Guess who bailed out and passed a Hague invasion act instead?
EDIT: grammar
[Edit] I found a copy of the coverage posted by Forbes [1] and as a matter of correction it is the GOP House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Select Coronavirus Crisis hearing
[Edit] In this case I am thinking maybe Forbes had exclusive coverage and the other videos were pulled down for not having the rights to coverage. Just guessing because their upload is 3 days old.
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/trusted-news-initiative...
I don't know if it's following their policies to the legal letter or if there's something else going on, but it's clearly bad in both of these cases.
The connection between Asher and Quay is that during the Trump administration, Asher led a group trying to prove that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon. Asher refused to go to actual subject-matter experts, and instead had Quay do his "Bayesian analysis." When Asher was finally forced by another official to bring scientists with relevant expertise in to go over his evidence, they tore it to shreds.[1]
These are simply not credible people to be getting your scientific information on SARS-CoV-2 from.
1. https://christopherashleyford.medium.com/the-lab-leak-inquir...
Quay's analysis is not a rigorous Bayesian analysis in any sense. It's a series of subjective judgments about likelihoods of various scenarios. It's classic garbage-in, garbage-out, dressed up as science by using the word "Bayesian." The thing is, Bayesian inference is only as good as the information and knowledge you put into it. Quay treats cancer patients and invents medical devices. He has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to virology. It's incredibly telling that he's the guy that pro-lab-leak congresspeople invite to talk, instead of an actual virologist.
Asher is just a career political hack with no scientific background.
Edit: Right off the bat, Quay's first claim in his testimony is highly dubious. He claims that the Huanan Seafood market was not where the virus spilled over, because supposedly the earliest version of the virus wasn't found in patients who were at the market. Two problems: 1. We don't actually know which is the oldest lineage of the virus. 2. Only a tiny fraction of people who got sick at the market have had samples taken. Probably hundreds of people at the market caught the virus and had mild or asymptomatic cases. We only have a few samples, from people who fell seriously ill. By the way, mortality evidence independently supports the Huanan market as the area of the first major outbreak.
Yes China did seem to contain COVID well, but if it were (hypothetically) a bio-weapon there's no way they could have known ahead of time they'd be this successful or that the virus wouldn't mutate into something far more dangerous. The CCP can be evil but they're not reckless. They prefer a very measured, calculated, incremental approach, not high-risk gambits like releasing a bioweapon. If that backfired it could decimate their population, drag them into WWIII, or both, and none of that would be a win.
Very few. I don't know of any major virologist who actually says it's more likely, and the overwhelming majority say it's highly unlikely.
Right now, everything points to the outbreak being associated with animal markets, just like SARS.
There are very good reasons why virologists think SARS-CoV-2 spilled over naturally. I've discussed some of the reasons elsewhere in this discussion (there's absolutely no evidence the WIV had this virus before the outbreak, and there's pretty good evidence they didn't, dangerous human-animal interactions outside labs are vastly more common than in labs, the first outbreak was centered on a market that housed live animals).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2
"Here we document 47,381 individuals from 38 species, including 31 protected species sold between May 2017 and November 2019 in Wuhan’s markets. We note that no pangolins (or bats) were traded, supporting reformed opinion that pangolins were not likely the spillover host at the source of the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic."
That doesn't mean there couldn't be a zoonotic explanation, of course, but it does significantly complicate the main alternative to the theory that WIV was doing coronavirus research in humanized mice and that escaped from the lab.
That's not a problem for the theory. SARS did not come directly from bats (or pangolins). It went through civets first, which were sold at markets. That's why SARS first showed up in Foshan, 1000 km away from where the bats that harbor the ancestral virus to SARS live.
The Nature paper you linked shows that live animals that are known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 were sold at the Huanan Seafood market. Because of that, the paper has been generally received as strongly supporting the idea that the outbreak began at the Huanan market.
I would revise my assessments if we have a clear animal reservoir, but I need to see more data on that first.
And several lab workers did get sick early on. We'll likely never find solid proof one way or another at this rate, though, unless an animal reservoir is found.
The people surveying which animals were there were not from the government, and were not studying coronaviruses. They're conservationists, and it's coincidental that they did this survey just before the outbreak.
> And several lab workers did get sick early on.
So the US government claims, without providing any evidence.
> prior outbreaks didn't take even half this long to find.
That very much depends on which outbreak we're talking about. The intermediate species for SARS was found within about a year, but how Ebola spills over is still elusive, decades after its discovery.
Unlike with SARS, this time around, the Chinese government closed the market down quickly, and also quickly shut down the wildlife farms and culled their stock. That might possibly make finding the intermediate host more difficult.
Regarding the researchers, there were videos by some people in China who later vanished. I know that China is usually China, but that doesn't exactly make me trust them more.
It's entirely possible that the people ordering the culls and the people carrying out the scientific investigations are different and don't talk to each other. From what I've heard, the wildlife trade was shut down very quickly after the outbreak was discovered. This is a bit like the Huanan market: it would have been scientifically valuable to keep it as-is and do a thorough study, but once the authorities discovered there was an outbreak there, they immediately ordered it to be closed and decontaminated - which makes sense from a public health point of view.
Anyways, there has been a lot of extremely valuable research published over the last year+ by Chinese researchers on the origins of the virus (we now know a lot more about the family of viruses that SARS-CoV-2 belongs to, for example), and I think progress will continue to be made.
Are you claiming that YouTube's policy is to take down all videos with non-credible speakers? Or that YouTube judged that the arguments made in this particular video did not meet their standards?
> Two well known scientists testified before congress on GoF testing and the Corona Virus characteristics.
I'm not commenting on YouTube's policy. I'm commenting on the fact that the people giving testimony are not at all credible. It says a lot that Congress invites obvious cranks to testify, rather than scientists with relevant expertise.
It's not a good enough justification anyway.
It's all quite sinister.
It also exists on HN. There is a bevvy of topics we are not allowed to discuss here because dang will point to some arbitrary guidelines saying how "that's not allowed here" and ban you. It's the same shit everywhere.
Basically, the moment you step outside of the given narrative and what is and isn't allowed to be questioned, you should have zero (or less than zero, actually) expectation of having a platform where you can voice your concerns, and heaven forbid that your online persona be linked with your personal details, because if it is, you are in so much deep shit it's not even worth it for most people to utter certain words.
There should be nothing so sacred as to be above debate.
The problem with this group of tech companies deciding what is true and what is not, is that even if they're right the vast majority of the time, that few percent where they were wrong and silenced that voice actually matter. Nearly every idea we now hold sacred in science was once heretical. If you silence the heretics, how can you have progress? The Catholic church used to do that, during a period we now call the dark ages. We know how this ends.
Protecting people from misinformation can't be done with censorship, only by presenting them with the truth.
I care a great deal about the benefits of Mastodon! For me, the benefit is that anyone who is obsessive about conspiracy theories, racism, etc have a quarantined social space where they can converse without me having to listen.
If they had a different answer to decentralization than a 2MB/minute block size or a media hosting solution that wasn’t just “allow iframes from YouTube and Vimeo” I would have had more faith, but now that I’ve cashed out I see what the sibling sees, target demographic for a influencer-speculation-exchange is very small.
First we need good tech, like Mastodon.
Then we need to move our own digital "lives" onto those better platforms, and start encouraging our friends to join us.
For my part, I'm working on a new social app where everything is E2E encrypted [1], so you don't have to trust the server. The main use case is to let parents share photos of their kids in a safer way. I'm hoping this will be a big draw for people who have currently checked out of the creepy ad-tracking platforms.
What about all those times internet infrastructure companies shut down the people who built their own website? Do you see the precedent that you're setting?
The urge to ban that info in social sites came much later, when politicians got the message and considered that info dangerous(and because the West depended on Chinese supplies).
Most politicians are so dumb from the scientific and technical side that it took a long time for them to understand.
But it gives us and important lesson: If we want to inform ourselves, we should use alternatives to centralized social media.
It simply got politicized just as masks got politicized. The more one side advocates it the more the other side discredits it.
If Trump kept his mouth shut, it may have gone down differently (that is, less politicized).
The justification of 230's existence is that the host shouldn't be liable, because it's not their speech.
That's no longer true if they're picking and choosing what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned.
They may not be typing the post, but they're determining what actually gets said. And that means they no longer deserve 230 protection.
That's how it's written. It provides protection for hosting controversial content posted by users, based on the fact that the host didn't write it, endorse it, or promote it.
If the host has an active hand in doing those things, they are no longer merely hosting. Same goes for surpressing or censoring.
The "another content provider" means the host is not involved in determining the content. But treating posts differently based on that content is not meaningfully different than an editor choosing what to publish.
It isn't merely a grey area. The law was deliberately intended to support editorial selection and even deletion of content offensive to the platform owners sensibilities while explicitly preserving their protection from liability for their users content. This is supported by a plain reading of the text and the words of the men who wrote it.
First the law
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
> (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
>(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]
Now the words of Ron Wyden
>Republican Congressman Chris Cox and I wrote Section 230 in 1996 to give up-and-coming tech companies a sword and a shield, and to foster free speech and innovation online. Essentially, 230 says that users, not the website that hosts their content, are the ones responsible for what they post, whether on Facebook or in the comments section of a news article. That's what I call the shield.
> But it also gave companies a sword so that they can take down offensive content, lies and slime — the stuff that may be protected by the First Amendment but that most people do not want to experience online. And so they are free to take down white supremacist content or flag tweets that glorify violence (as Twitter did with President Trump's recent tweet) without fear of being sued for bias or even of having their site shut down.
Your positions isn't merely incorrect it is directly counterfactual. It's an example of replacing actual known reality with the counterfactual in order to obtain a rhetorical advantage.
It is more advantageous to start from the lie that platform owners have somehow been violating or abusing the law outrageously and something must be done about it compared to the actual reality that the law is working as intended and you wish to change it because there is both a general feeling that existing laws and privileges ought to be enforced and that new laws need be examined before being enacted.
The prevalence of people of a particular political stripe to literally just making up alternative facts in response to inconvenient reality is deeply challenging to productive dialogue because its impossible to start out with a reasonable basis for discussion one must instead rewind to figure out which part of your fellows assumptions are based on purely fabricated reality. I expect you have taken it as a given that the line you were fed was based on reality. You are mistaken. I strongly encourage you to read both the laws and the words of the man who cowrote it.
The intent is clear from this list. It even implicitly allows violence as long as it's not excessive. It does not include anything about truth, or difference of opinion, or statements that aren't "backed by the science".
It also requires a "good faith" interpretation, which would be irrelevant if hosts were allowed to act on any criteria they wish.
Good faith is only relevant to immunity from suits by people whose content was moderated not in terms of liability for other parties communications which is inviolate in all cases.
A finding of bad faith would then pertain exclusively to the particular act or acts of moderation and would not effect the platforms immunity for either other acts of moderation or for other parties speech. There is no act by which a companies 230 protection may be in general dissolved.
Furthermore absent 230 protection for act or acts of moderation those moderated would have little just cause to bring anything but fraudulent frivolous lawsuits because you in truth have little right to be heard on someone else's website. That is to say finding bad faith would only open the door to lawsuits it wouldn't be a cause in and of itself.
Say I banned you from my site because I don't like blond people but lied and said it was for breaking site rules.
I might be acting in bad faith but as you have no particular right to access or post content on my site so the judge would find my bad faith may cost me protection under 230 but nothing else.
This is probably why there wasn't a notable finding of bad faith that helped the blocked party between 1996 and 2019.
In 2019 we finally had Malwarebytes v Enigma wherein Enigma sued Malwarebytes labeling it's software as a possibility unwanted program and advising it's users not to install it. The 9th circuit found it was in bad faith discouraging competition.
If your issue is Facebook and Twitter silencing some viewpoints this is hardly encouraging as there are few parallels.
> That's no longer true if they're picking and choosing what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned.
No, its not. That's approximately the traditional justification for distributors having more limited liability than publishers.
Section 230 was expressly adopted to allow platforms to act like publishers in a limited way without publisher liability, specifically to pick and choose what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned.
The justification you invented is basically the opposite of the explicit purpose of 230.
BS. It covered liability for third party speech. It allowed controversial things to be said without the host being liable for hosting them.
Private censorship of controversial speech is the complete opposite of it's purpose.
>"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"
If you only allow speakers to be heard that agree with you, you are the speaker.
If you only publish things that you agree with you are a publisher.
The law shields hosts in exchange for providing a place for free speech. If you no longer provide that space, you no longer deserve the protections it affords.
The behavior we see now is exactly the behavior that 230 was meant to prevent: sites being overly protective and aggressively policing what gets posted. 230 was passed so they wouldn't have to do it. It's not an excuse for them to do it anyway.
No one forsaw that the hosts would actually want an excuse to censor users.
That was already allowed, provided they didn't, to use the phrasing being used in this thread, “pick and choose what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned.” Doing that even on a limited basis made them, under pre-230 law, a publisher, subject to liability for all content on the platform.
Section 230 was adopted specifically to allow platforms to moderate user-generated content according the platform owners’ view of objectionable content without incurring publisher liability, because the pre-230 situation was viewed as encouraging a situation i which platforms who didn't feel they could completely moderate were forced to not moderate at all, making online communities persistently polluted with objectionable content.
The Communications Decency Act, of which 230 was the only substantive part to survive, was not about promoting unmoderated internet fora, but the opposite.
If they tell you, "you can't say that, change what you're saying" is it now the cities speech? No.
230 specifically is for the purpose of not being liable, and being able to choose what's on your platform. Specifically so you can moderate your own platform.
No one has some magical right to use your social media business.
Bad faith propaganda at the scale we have seen recently is abuse of free speech, and widespread abuse of a freedom often leads to the curtailment of that freedom.
I didn't say they were doing a good job, just that the alternative would have been to let the platform turn into a complete cesspool of bullshit and hate.
This scenario is a curse you get when you are operating a gigantic Internet forum at that kind of scale.
Here's an example of this happening[1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
They're not that far off that to be honest - https://oversightboard.com/
Drop the algorithmic feed, and you solve most of the problem. Unfortunately for Facebook, this would also cut their ad revenue, so they'll never do it.
Facebook decides to blank ban anything that hasn't been approved by gatekeepers and you approved because you are worried that people might hear on facebook that vaccines cause people to go sterile and not get one?
Which one of these things is actually causing harm? Shutting down all discussion or the worry that someone might post and might think the vaccine causes you to be magnetic?
It's crazy people are falling for this.
Then I worked with the IC and heard what intelligence agents said. Maybe they lied. Maybe they’re crazy. But combined with what happened in the last 18 months, and their statements, there is an acutely centralizer corrupt power which has ever bigger rings of corruption.
Which is normalized as it goes. Everyone does it! Politics as normal. Modern Neoliberalism and government revolving door.
Sometimes people make unfounded guesses based on little/no evidence. Just because it turns out to be correct doesn't mean those people were any more justified-- at that time-- in their unfounded accusations.
Of course a person is now justified, with evidence available, to make these claims. It doesn't mean those who made them baselessly out of suspicion and guesses any less irrational for doing so before there was evidence. Making unfounded accusations doesn't retroactively turn an irrational accusation into a reasonable one just because it turns out to be true.
It's also worth noting that this is still unproven: it doesn't look good for China, but there's nothing definitive yet.
Where is the RoI on that? We failed miserably.
The thing is though, I seriously doubt the end result would have been any different if the virus has first come about in any other country.
Imagine that the virus has first been discovered in Atlanta (first US city that came to mind) - would officials really be brave enough to have a hard, immediate lockdown, with all the economic hardships that would entail, and with all the problems of getting a doubting populace on onboard? (keeping in mind that Trump's initial reaction was to denounce the very notion of a serious virus as a "hoax")
To ask the question is to know the answer. Just imagine a public health official trying to convince the mayor or governor to quarantine a city of millions of people, based on a small number of pneumonia cases.
Leaving aside the Lab origin theories, Covid 19 never would have happened if China had hygienic food supply-chains and banned wet markets.
That's where other zoonotic diseases have come from in recent years from China (SARS is the biggest example). They closed the markets, new viruses stopped happening and everything was fine. Then they opened the markets again and we got covid 19.
China is like a drink driver who already hit someone and refused to stop drunk driving and hit another person. Right now no one wants to make them stop driving. So I guess we'll just keep getting pandemics?
Covid 19 is really just SARS 2.0.
That's what really gets me here (sorry, I'm ranting now). China knew this would happen. Everyone did. And they did it anyway. And now everyone is pretending like it was bad luck or something!? This is literally why every other major, industrial country has food hygiene laws and minimal "Bush meat".
Thanks for listening to me shout into the wind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
Edit: I wonder if one of the reasons china is so unwilling to engage is to encourage people to think it was a bio-weapon accident (we'll never stop that happening) rather than just "the CCP is too weak and lazy to say no to old people who want bat soup". Conspiracy within the conspiracy! But I'm an idiot so probably not...
Why not simply collaborate and cooperate with the authorities in finding the truth? After all, they are 100% convinced the origin of the virus is natural...
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/china-calls-us-investigation-covid-...
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/06/04/chinese-virologist-says-fauci-...
For a take published outside of academia, there’s been a thought-provoking write-up featured here not long ago[0]. It touches upon the funding aspect that this article focuses on, as well as the contrived web of misinformation around the issue, WIV virus sample mislabeling, the apparent PLA’s involvement in US-funded research, and a lot more.
It is not just about a lab leak. It is the deliberation and freedom of expression that is more than important. Good luck.
Humanity has lost. It might come back. After losing hundred years perhaps. But why we do not wake up and start to rebuild a better open environment … so we can be safe later.
https://www.the-sun.com/news/3174242/wuhan-labs-leak-covid-c...
For example:
_In December 2019, The Sun's political editor, Tom Newton Dunn, wrote an article for the paper titled "Hijacked Labour", alleging that "Jeremy Corbyn is at the centre of an extraordinary network of hard-left extremists pieced together by former British intelligence officers", a network ranging from Novara Media contributor Ash Sarkar to French philosopher Michel Foucault, who has been dead since 1984, that is alleged to be pulling Corbyn's strings.[204] It was later found that the ultimate sources for this claim included the antisemitic, far-right websites The Millennium Report and Aryan Unity._ [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_(United_Kingdom)#Far-r...
Bloomberg: The Last–And Only–Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan Lab Speaks Out
She is an Australian virologist, now working in Melbourne’s Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, previously scientific director of the biosafety lab at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School in 2016.
Archive link:
Let us inspect the bats. The cages, the equipment, the staff.
Meanwhile we have someone here with direct experience of the lab as it was at the actual time in question. It seems to me that's absolutely the best we are ever likely to get.