> Not allowing foreign scientists in, destroying evidence, arresting journalists, etc.
That is par for the course. The Chinese government would have acted this way regardless of if it was a lab leak, natural event, or space aliens.
That is par for the course. The Chinese government would have acted this way regardless of if it was a lab leak, natural event, or space aliens.
The Chinese government does all these things because it is routinely covering up illegal behavior. The fact that they followed standard operating procedure means they were probably simply continuing with the standard operating procedure of tacitly allowing illegal behavior. Illegal behavior in the context of a lab enhancing viruses is likely to result in a lab leak of a very dangerous virus.
This is not suspicious behavior in China, as the GP said - it is standard operating procedure.
Barring foreign scientists, arresting journalists, and destroying evidence is always suspicious, even if they always do it, and it should always make people from open and free societies curious of why they are doing it, not shrug it off because it's the norm.
It is similar to the way that Hussein's actions in blocking access to presidential palaces was considered to be highly suspicious and therefore proof that he was hiding his weapons program. Turns out he was just trying to save face domestically by standing up against the weapons inspectors over something that he considered symbolic and immaterial in order to not look like a total pushover (a desperate need of dictators). It had nothing to do with weapons programs at all.
If the outbreak started in Colorado, and Russia wanted access to the CDC lab there, Americans (officials and public) would also be crying and screaming...
My second paragraph is meant to show a possible other explanation why the Chinese didn't want foreigners snooping around their bio labs: in my belief the same evasiveness the Chinese has/had would apply to the USA if China wanted to visit and have unlimited access (for a thorough investigation) of American bio labs.
And I'm not talking about whether American journalists would be arrested. I'm just talking about the evasiveness about the labs.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29916895 for more.
The US are actively prosecuting a journalist on phony charges because he helped expose their war crimes, among other things. The UK is of course actively complicit, which contributed in making his life a living hell.
Given that precedent, I wouldn't be shocked at all.
We shouldn't even be on this tangent, because the parent comment was nothing but "what about America!" and now we're veering into even more tangential territory with "well what about America with regards to some other topic!?" This isn't a Chuck Norris movie with a good guy and a bad guy.
Now that I think of it I was likely incorrect. There's one big difference: I expect the US would first make sure they wouldn't look too bad doing it. That's almost certainly why some Swedish prosecutor happened to blow Assange's sexual affairs utterly out of proportion: kill the name before the guy.
If you write an officially sounding letter to your neighbour demanding to know how they come to choose the paint to repaint their bikeshed you are a weirdo and they are in their right to ignore you.
If you write the same letter to a city official about a public bikeshed you are sending a freedom of information request and they are expected to respond promptly and accurately.
countries and people are different things; countries are generally much more secretive than people.
What always interests me is:
1) How many pandemics have there been? 2) How many lab leaks have there been? 3) How many lab leaks have caused outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics? 4) What is the cause of every other pandemic?
The answers lead me to believe a lab leak of virulent COVID, if it occurred, and let's assume it did, is only a coincidence, and the hidden cause of this pandemic is, while somehow the most unsuspected in light of the assumed lab leak, was the same cause as every other pandemic, ever.
I think the article just shows that experts are human and subject to human bias, and as such, like everyone else that similarly succumbed to bias, foolish for considering or believing in something with literally millions, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions to one odds against (lab leaks happen occasionally, there have probably been hundreds to thousands of lab leaks in 100 years, but over eons there have been millions of pandemics, and in recorded history, there have been enough of them to see a clear pattern: viruses jump species, people living and working in close proximity to animals are infected, the infection spreads).
Wildfires occur naturally in a similar fashion. We still try to diagnose their causes and use that information to punish arson or otherwise come up with better strategies to prevent them.
If you prefer to close your eyes and keep blaming a bat in the nearby Wuhan fish market, you're free to do so.
With SARS-CoV-2 there was no known mutation phase where the virus rapidly gained mutations to more efficiently transmit between humans. SARS-COV2 came out the gate perfectly adapted and did not start mutating extensively until many months after it spread globally. These lack of adaptations are also the reason why it's so hard to trace back to the original intermediate host species.
We actually do not know this for sure. There is a chance that the reservoir is one step removed and that another host in between amplified the virus to the point where it could make the jump.
Ebola also has this property, but it is just a bit too lethal to spread far (fortunately). An Ebola with a slightly longer asymptomatic incubation time (while already shedding) would be far worse then the current versions.
With Ebola each and every outbreak starts with an interspecies jump, usually bushmeat. The idea that these jumps are extremely rare is in principle incorrect, but it looks like that because pandemics are rare. But those are just the runaway successes (from the viral point of view).