WHO's Chief: It Was Premature to Rule Out a Lab Leak as the Pandemic's Origin | Hacker News Reader

WHO's Chief: It Was Premature to Rule Out a Lab Leak as the Pandemic's Origin

npr.org

32 pointsheshiebee16 comments

What bothered me most about this was that there was very little consideration or toleration for anyone suggesting it may have been a lab leak, could have been a lab leak, and hey let's really look at this lab leak theory so we don't just dismiss it out of hand due to media manipulation, and politics. America let politics dictate its response to COVID and in doing so let China off the hook. One hopes we don't make the same mistake in the future.

>there was very little consideration or toleration for anyone suggesting it may have been a lab leak

This wasn't my observation. There was a lot of championing of the theory motivated by politics or xenophobia, a lot of backlash against that attitude, and a little reasonable hypothesizing suggesting a lab leak. Of the three, the last was by necessity least common because there was so little evidence. That may create a false impression that the "lab leak" voice was oppressed, when what you're actually seeing is the result of the high levels of ideological pollution in the "lab leak" voice itself.

Will there be fallout for social media fact checkers, who moderated out users' observation and hypothesis which matched the new consensus?

Also, 'there had been a "premature push"' is very passive language. Who pushed? I wish the AP published on the web so that they were able to hyperlink to original source material or their transcript.

Edit: I guess the old consensus must be buried.

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-world-news-health-scien...

AP Does publish on the web...

NPR wins on the permalink though. I was going to link someone the apnews version but changed to the npr one due to the url.

NPR: who-chief-wuhan-lab-covid-19-origin-premature-tedros

AP: joe-biden-world-news-health-science-coronavirus-pandemic

AP is just stuffing keywords in there.

Depends on who you ask. For some, because Trump lost, the fact checkers, media, etc. were justified in burying the lab leak theory because in doing so was a "resistance" to trump.

What new consensus? There is no new or old consensus, and this article does not indicate otherwise.

The one thing that has consensus from early on is that the virus is not man made. However, that did get muddied and confused with the possibility of a lab leak. In other words, lab origin is not the same thing as lab leak.

It is, however, wrong and harmful to suggest it was a lab leak without evidence. And that is what a lot of social media people were saying at the time. It's also not wrong to hypothesize that it could have been leaked from a lab. But most of the stuff I saw being censored or fact checked was not presented as a "possibility".

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

> On 2 April 1979, spores of Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax) were accidentally released from a Soviet military research facility in the city of Sverdlovsk, Russia (now Yekaterinburg). The ensuing outbreak of the disease resulted in the deaths of at least 66 people, although the exact number of victims remains unknown. The cause of the outbreak was denied for years by the Soviet authorities, which blamed the deaths on consumption of tainted meat from the area, and subcutaneous exposure due to butchers handling the tainted meat. All medical records of the victims were removed to hide serious violations of the Biological Weapons Convention that had come in effect in 1975. The accident is sometimes referred to as "biological Chernobyl".

It was irresponsible and harmful to declare that it definitely was a Chinese lab's fault, too.

Yup. I was pissed off from the start by people who were absolutely sure it was/wasn't a lab leak.

Who was saying that?

The lab leak origin is the subject of a popular conspiracy theory that failed to put forward evidence and served mostly as an expression of hatred and political side-taking (and therefore predictably engendered similar attitudes against the theory). This is irrelevant to its status as an actual theory in good faith (sort of like how mask wearing has a left-vs-right flavor independent of legitimate arguments).

Yep. Just taking a 50:50 bet on the popular side doesn't mean anything, unless backed up by something substantial. There's no meaning to saying you were right or wrong, unless how you got there can be followed by facts and verification.

As far as I remember, the prominent people who were talking about this a year ago did not say "it definitely was a Chinese lab's fault", just that it was seriously suspicious and needed further investigation, and that they were upset that people who were bringing it up were getting prematurely dismissed. Who exactly (other than random conspiracy theorists) was saying it was definitely a Chinese lab?

Maybe English isn't your first language. They were using the "some people are saying" Trumpian rhetorical technique of blaming the Wuhan labs and Chinese leadership directly for the outbreak.

The virus had TWO names and instead they wanted to refer to it as the China Virus and Kung Flu because they didn't want to take responsibility for the lack of political leadership by this country during a time when we could have limited the spread and effects of the virus. The result is that Asians were being assaulted because "they brought it here."

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