WHO abandons plans for second phase of COVID-origins investigation | Hacker News Reader

WHO abandons plans for second phase of COVID-origins investigation

nature.com

211 pointsrntn232 comments

I know most of the comments here are the politics of the situation, but I just want to point out the extreme irony of this sentence from the article:

> Researchers are undertaking some work to pin down a timeline of the virus’s initial spread. This includes efforts to trap bats in regions bordering China in search of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2;

There is significant concern that the mere act of having researchers wade around in bat caves looking for coronaviruses is a bad idea. As happens frequently, Zeynep Tufekci has some of the most reasonable, logical takes on the pandemic [1]:

> Many of these research practices weren’t deviations from international norms. A bat field researcher in the United States told me she now always wears a respirator in bat caves but that wasn’t standard practice before.

> It isn’t a wild idea to suggest that field research risks setting off an outbreak. Dr. Linfa Wang, a Chinese-Australian virologist based in Singapore who frequently works with Dr. Shi and pioneered the hypothesis that bats were behind the 2003 SARS epidemic, told Nature there is a small chance that this pandemic was seeded by a researcher inadvertently getting infected by an unknown virus while collecting bat samples in a cave.

There is also a good Twitter thread on this subject [2].

My vote is we stay the fuck out of trapping wild bats looking for viruses in the first place.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.h...

2. https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1557378231342350343

Basis of the plot for the Alien movies.

Bats are bad news and generally it's a very good idea to completely avoid contact with them and also with bat feces. Don't touch bats. Ever.

One of the day trips on a Vietnam visit was swimming/wading deep into a bat cave. I wonder now what viruses we dodged and if they are still taking tourists in there?

Then again bats also eat many many many bugs that carry disease. All things considered I'd rather have the bats then the bugs.

Well you don't have to wipe out the species, just keep your distance.

The OP just said not to touch them, not to eradicate them.

It's the same with crocodiles. They're important in their ecosystem, but I highly recommend that you avoid coming close to (or worse, touching) a wild crocodile. Or a bear, tiger, etc.

It's not just bats. Plenty of wild animals carry rabies and other diseases. Bats are incredibly vital to their ecosystems and shouldn't be vilified. It's generally a good idea not to touch any wild animal or its droppings.

As someone else pointed out, bats eat mosquitos and other insects that transmit disease at much, much higher rates.

When I was living in San Francisco, I had bats take nest between my (rented) house and the place directly next door. It was just a few inches gap and perfect for them to build a nest in. I could hear them through the wall. Called the city to do something about it and since the bats were protected, there was nothing they could or would do about it.

I knew it was just full of poop in there...

Wait until you hear how the Wuhan lab and Peter Daszak’s Ecohealth Alliance are still doing NIH-funded virus research…

> still

It's worse than this implies. If NIH had taken no action, then the Ecohealth contract would have expired. Instead, Fauci made sure that one of his last acts as (the highest paid) public official was to renew that contract.

Wanna know what is real infuriating. Is the fact Ecohealth still to this day has refused to share any data or records from their decades of research. You'd think if the reckless research they were conducting was so vital (as they have and continue to claim), then sharing their research and databases would have helped fight the pandemic. But for some reason they have refused.

What’s objectionable about that? Can you explain that to me. I’m afraid I really don’t understand.

The theory is the US through ecohealth funded the Wuhan lab in their gain of function research which brought us the virus which causes Wuhan Pneumonia.

That is a hypothesis. I just don’t understand why it should have policy impact since there is no evidence for it. It’s currently just a conspiracy theory.

You asked what. I said what. What I said is why someone might find it objectionable that they're still going.

If it were just a conspiracy theory, someone would have gone through the claims in the book "Viral" by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan and debunked its arguments one by one. Matt Ridley is a journalist who wrote numerous books about scientific topics (one about the genome in 1999). Alina Chan is a biologist who works at Harvard and MIT. When people say "trust the science", or "trust the scientists", why should we trust Peter Daszak, with his obvious conflicts of interests, over Alina Chan?

Depends on your definition of conspiracy theory I guess, but serious people take it seriously https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1463219980506439691 There may be no direct positive evidence for it, but that doesn't mean it's all that implausible.

No, it not "just a conspiracy theory". They were seeking research funding for a proposal to do gain of function research on Corona viruses. Function that would produce something very much like covid19. Whether they ended up doing it is not even relevant IMHO because the proposed result would have essentially been that virus. Lab leaks have happened before and will happen again. People are actively looking to make similar things for "research".

It's not that they make Covid. It's that they may as well have and wanted to (sans releasing it hopefully)

Shouldn't we be doing more research on viruses that come from bats?

> There is significant concern that the mere act of having researchers wade around in bat caves looking for coronaviruses is a bad idea.

Bat guano collection for farming along with mining activity probably has a hundred thousand times more human to bat contact than research does. It isn't like nobody in China is coming into contact with these bats other than the scientists.

Also in Hubei's Enshi prefecture there is the Tenglong cave which is the longest monomer Karst cave system in the world, home of probably millions of bats, and open for tourism:

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-r...

> Bat guano collection for farming

I thought this was made obsolete by the Haber-Bosch process.

Currently fallout from the Ukraine war has disrupted fertilizer markets globally. Anyone who can keep a Haber-Bosch process going is dominating the output and selling any extra at a premium. Guano is extremely valuable right now.

Tell that to the people in China, Thailand and elsewhere that collect it:

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-thaila...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3739538/

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijecol/2020/9872532/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31860-w

https://www.alibaba.com/countrysearch/CN/bat-guano-fertilize...

> My vote is we stay the fuck out of trapping wild bats looking for viruses in the first place.

That's not the issue here. The issue is there's a fucking NIH funded lab that was doing (and still is) doing gain-of-function research on bat viruses (and other viruses I take it). And that the outbreak did happen, by sheer coincidence and out of all the place in the world, very near that lab.

And that the dude who got the funding happens to be the authority that was consulted at first to know about the origin of the virus.

No, that outbreak didn’t happen by sheer coincidence near that lab.

That outbreak happened in a certain region, and the lab happened to be one of the things humans would immediately look at and be like “oh thst looks suspicious”.

For example, the outbreak also happened right next to, and all evidence points to, a live animal market. The kind of thing that is known to have led to Novak viruses multiple times before.

Happening next to a research lab is far less suspicious than happening at a wet market. The latter have a history of originating novel viruses and all the research so far points to that being the source.

And Wuhan's epidemiology lab was a few football fields from the market..

Here is the problem with your argument. There are wet markets in every city in asia, and the animals sold in these markets are from all around South East asia. For every single spill over that has occurred prior to SARS2 there were multiple independent outbreaks overtime, this is because the virus is circulating in an animal species, and this happens regardless if one of the viruses has spread to humans. It's hard to imagine how no closely related virus has been found in wet markets in bordering nations that researchers are actively studying.

Another problem is when spill overs do happen, the virus rapidly mutates as it adapts to humans from a virus adapted to another species. It was due to these mutations that allowed researchers within months for both SARS1 and MERS to track down the animal responsible for the spillover(this is known as the proximal origin ). For SARS2 there virus seemed already completely adapted towards humans, and in fact had more affinity towards human receptors than all other candidate animals tested. You'd think with the 80K animals tested and all the environmental samples taken they'd at least find SARS sequences with distinct animal markers.

One last thing when you look at virology research, for years FCS(furin cleavage site) as been a key area of focus due to it's key role in allowing the virus to enter cells. But for some reason when the head of WIV published a report on the SARS2 genome, she neglected to point out the FCS despite it being a major focus of her and many collaborators research for years prior.

Regardless, due to pandemic-induced scrutiny we now know that there exist these labs that are playing fast and loose and could cause a pandemic. They should stop doing that even we have reason to doubt they caused this specific pandemic.

What an expected disappointment.

From how botched the first investigation was, it was clear China was never going to allow an actual investigation to happen.

Especially since the virologists were educated in Canada, and the GoF was funded by the U.S.

“ China is never goiing to allow an actual investigation to happen.”

- any reasonable person should be now asking “Why?”

Maybe you're trying to imply lab escape hypothesis, but probably any origin in China, including natural sources causes them discomfort due to the fact that the initial response was denial.

the world needs to know, this is bigger than China and their “discomfort”

China doesn't want anyone to start following up on that line of reasoning either. A lot of problems in China are "bigger than China".

I doubt they'd want us snooping around looking into the specific sources of the air pollution they spread either (https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/03/518323094...)

China's problems involving climate change, human rights, censorship, manufacturing, product/consumer safety, and the economy all have global impacts but you can bet they don't want the rest of the world at their gates wanting to "do something" about any of it.

> this is bigger than China

How sympathetic is China going to be to that argument?

if they draw limits on cooperation with the world on such an important issue, the world should start imposing limits on cooperation with China in this and possibly other areas.

Sounds like a good way to go broke. Good luck with that!

China restricted their entire society for almost 3 years, yet they've done ~nothing to shut down wet markets or convince average Chinese that wild/exotic meat is dangerous.

What conclusions should we draw from this?

The important aspect of a wet market / farmer's market is the removal of exotics from the trade. [1][2]

There is a movement that simply doesn't like live animals prepared into food at the markets, or raw meat products hung in non sterile conditions and wrongly attribute aspects of the trade for any emerging disease.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00677-0

[2] https://says.com/my/news/china-finally-bans-trading-and-cons...

CCP is fucking useless and we have nothing to fear of their invasion of Taiwan. They seem to have found the least intelligent people of China to run the country and exported the smartest citizens.

> What conclusions should we draw from this?

Imagine the 2009 H1N1 pandemic originated on a pig farm on the US and not in Mexico, and that the pandemic death toll was as big as SARS-CoV-2.

Now imagine the shit show that happens if Obama banned bacon.

> Now imagine the shit show that happens if Obama banned bacon.

It would have been, and should've been, a shit show! Which side exactly are you in arguing in favor of?

Substitute:

H1N1 => SARS-CoV-2

USA => China

Bacon => Civit Cats, Racoon dogs and the wildlife trade in China

This is why China doesn't want to discover where it came from, because they'd have to take highly unpopular steps to ban the trade. Everyone here thinks they could do it tomorrow and just take a write down on the their balance sheet and move on. There would be a political cost to cracking down in China ("Obama banning bacon") in addition to a more stoic financial hit. And China really doesn't crack down that hard on wildly popular things because they don't want unrest.

They'd rather have the West blame it on a lab leak and they can throw up a smokescreen claiming it came to China from Italy for their own domestic consumption, block any research into the zoonotic transfer, and not have to take any unpopular political actions.

If the inherent nature of bacon creation or trade caused a pandemic, and there was no reasonable way to mitigate it, it should be banned. If it can be mitigated, it should be! Why has this not happened in China?

I know we Americans love our bacon but a good leader would do the right thing. There are plenty of other foods to eat. Added benefit is that a lot of them are a helluva lot more healthy than pig fat.

You do offer a compelling counterpoint to my argument, however. Maybe the CCP think they can't ever ban wet markets, exotic meat, etc. Either due to concerns with implementation, or with popular anger over it, or both.

I'm not convinced though. They are very ambitious with their social engineering. They "successfully" (genocide is always a terrible tragedy) interned millions of ethnic minorities, crushing their culture and religion, raping women, sterilizing people, forcing people to think of themselves as "Chinese" above all else, or at least pretend like they do.

I wouldn't underestimate their propensity for heavy-handed state action. The ruling class certainly think highly of their of their own ability to influence events. Banning large wet markets like the one in Wuhan doesn't seem difficult when you consider the scope of their other "achievements". And also, their legitimate achievements.

They don't have to fully ban the trade. They just have to make it more difficult. We're talking about a society that required regular COVID testing for citizens to be citizens, or even leave their apartments. The fact that they did basically nothing is glaring in my eyes.

There's no political upside for them. The Trumpian wing of western politics are going to believe whatever they want no matter what evidence comes out. There's a chance an investigation uncovers wrongdoing or recklessness at some level of Chinese bureaucracy be it a lab leak or just unsanitary meat handling or something else. Or they turn over every rock in Wuhan and still don't find conclusive proof of anything.

The simple though somewhat superficial explanation is that the Chinese government is allergic to criticism and that anything that's less than "China is a paradise on Earth" is perceived as "criticism".

No matter what the origins are (lab leak, wet markets, or something else) it's going to be due to something Chinese people did. "Blameless post-mortem" doesn't seem to be a concept the Chinese government is familiar with, and in general doesn't really seem to be an aspect of Chinese culture.

Plus there really is plenty of blame to go around; they absolutely botched the initial response to COVID for seemingly no other reason than to "save face". Doctors who raised the alarm early on were rewarded with reprimands. This is already widely known, but they have no interest to bring more attention to it. It's entirely plausible (albeit far from a certainty, partly because China is so uncooperative) that the entire global pandemic could have been prevented if they just hadn't botched the initial response.

To be fair, blameless postmortem is at most dubiously part of anyone's culture, except at the smallest scale. It's not something that comes naturally to humans, and I only know of a few cases where it's stable at any large scale. The US NTSB comes to mind, but I bet they have to fight everyone else's urge to play the blame game on every investigation.

That's true to some degree, but in general there is far more willingness to find the truth. And in some cases blame also should be assigned; "never assume blame" is just as foolish as "always assign blame". There's often a bit of tension there.

> It's entirely plausible (albeit far from a certainty, partly because China is so uncooperative) that the entire global pandemic could have been prevented if they just hadn't botched the initial response.

Based on the earliest found wastewater samples in Italy, along with what we know about how the virus spreads, this is very unlikely. By the time China was reprimanding doctors the virus was already spreading in Europe.

To the best of my knowledge these studies are rather controversial: they may be false positives, and there isn't enough corroborating evidence. It's certainly a possibility – I don't expect we'll ever establish the exact timeline of the spread for sure.

The wastewater study in Italy is pretty good and fits the pandemic timeline and doesn't claim anything particularly outrageous. They had lots of samples turn positive, the ones that turned positive generally stayed positive. It was just a bit more than 2 months before the first recognized deaths, which fits the timeline of a few weeks of cryptic spread, 4 weeks of doubling every 3 days to get to >1k infected, followed by 3 weeks for the disease to progress to death.

See the date of publication, and the dates of events there:

https://chinamediaproject.org/2020/01/27/dramatic-actions/

Now take the traveling of people working in (fast) fashion, and where those clusters are into account.

The first Italian wastewater study took samples between February and April. While the timeline of the 'dramatic actions' article suggests intervention and meddling with data by politicians by at least early December.

The first samples in Italy that were later detected to have the virus were from 18 Dec 2019

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7428442/

The first documented COVID hospitalization was 16 Dec 2019. The first sample was sent for sequencing on 24 or 25 Dec 2019. 27 Dec 2019 was the date of the first medical report.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...

It was between those days an 20 Jan 2020 when Zhong Nanshan went public with the information that it was communicable human-to-human that the government in Wuhan was dithering. Long after the virus was already in those samples in Italy.

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

Because China tried to cover up the existence of COVID at the beginning. Because they didn’t want to hurt their economy.

They suppressed their scientists from sharing data. They insisted it didn’t transmit between humans. And they insisted it wasn’t very contagious while erecting massive facilities to deal with it overnight.

Add to that the fact that the local administration deliberately wiped out evidence of illegal animals being sold at the market very early because they were worried about literally being sent to the gallows by the national government if this could be proven, the Chinese have been wiping evidence right from the evidence but for completely explainable non conspiratorial reasons.

China did allow an official investigation. It even included a visit to the Xi Jinping museum.

Their reasoning they don't have good access to China and all the data collected should be seen less as concerned interests who don't want the origins found, and more that the investigation isn't practical any more, given that no matter what they eventually found, the media pwned by various politics will still perpetrate the lab theory.

I'm disappointed that they're not looking into the September 2019 detection in Italy of covid 19 (screened lung tissue samples) and the fact the closest iirc match so far to the original covid 19 is from a population of bats in Laos.

It's not unreasonable to blame the emergence of the virus on the presence of an exotic animal trade which post codid 19, China has moved hard on that practise.

> the September 2019 detection in Italy of covid 19 (screened lung tissue samples)

That study was sheer utter fucking crap. They rolled their own antibody test, didn't do any false-positive testing, claimed to find D614G circulating then, and that it was commonly occurring in respiratory samples, during a time when Italy didn't have any excess deaths. It is literally dumb as fuck.

The wastewater in early Dec seems to be good, matches the timeline of the pandemic, leading the wave of deaths by only a couple months, it only claims low levels of cryptic spread and was done by a totally separate group.

Is there a link to the full study and peer review?

I wish I could find the original dissection and conclusions in 2020, but I don't recall the positive count being common. I don't recall where on the web I read the study in full and all I find about it on the web atm is somewhat limited. [1] [2]

The findings were inconvenient to the lab theory cabal who have attempted to sweep away any noise that doesn't agree with their train of thought and attempts in the media, one being quite amateurish effort that needed delicate retraction where the noise the week before was being descriped along the lines as some time ago ...

It would have been smart if WHO investigated to determine the variation in those samples to the Alpha strain which was detected in Wuhan. Clearly for a virus detected in 2019 that wasn't spreading much or rather benign, it wasn't the Alpha stain.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33176598/

click on the DOI number in the second page and it takes you to:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0300891620974755

> SARS-CoV-2 RBD-specific antibodies were detected in 111 of 959 (11.6%) individuals, starting from September 2019 (14%),

14% prevalence in September 2019 is batshit insane, the old folks homes would have been morgues, and they weren't.

and anyone that tries to argue that it was some cryptic non-virulent progenitor that would mean that a large amount of Italy's population would have been exposed and developed T-cells before Feb 2020 which would have blunted the effect of the pandemic (acting like a vaccination) which clearly didn't happen.

[T-cell epitope escape is something that we still don't observe years later]

> The serologic assay used in this study is an in-house designed RBD-based ELISA

They rolled their own assay, and don't provide any controls against false positives (a problem that plagued early antibody testing)

This study is very likely a clumsy effort paid for by China in an attempt to argue that the virus did not originate in China at all.

EDIT: oh there was a followup study and retest:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/dispute-over-italian-co...

> Out of the 87 samples reviewed, three were found by both laboratories to be positive for IgM. The first dated back to Oct. 10, 2019, in Lombardy.

> But Erasmus' criteria required all three coronavirus-linked antibodies - IgM, neutralising antibodies and IgG - to be identified, and none of the samples fulfilled that requirement.

Reuters plays that off as he-said-she-said, but the Dutch have a much stronger position there. The requirement that all three indicators turn positive is a good control against random false positives due to cross reactivity. And they completely falsified 25 of 29 other positive samples.

Thanks and that's a heck of a curve ball on my view of this study. IIRC it's not the same study I recall written up before peer review and read back in late 2020 but it's left me wondering how it could be. Sometimes I don't pay the closest attention for instance the last couple of days I missed the word antibodies meant human derived versions not what an antigen developed to hone in on covid proteins which an elisa test would detect. (ie for covid detection in the wild where there the human population is not significant compared to the host species.) Obviously there's not two studies regarding the lung tissue samples, so that leaves me in a bit of a WTF moment, did I misread whatever I read in 2020 badly, since surely I would have binned it once I saw mention of IgG and IgM. What I recall looking over how they had used elisa not for human antibodies but for antigens to specific protein sequences unique to covid 19. The result was a single set of figures with iirc nothing over 1% until at least early 2020.

At the time I thought it a clever means to track the presence of a non infective / benign virus before it reached an infective stage - pre Wuhan and wondered what exotic pets or animals people had unwittingly exposed themselves to - obviously lung tissue is a sponge of sorts.

If they were testing for human derived antibodies, IgG and IgM blood samples from blood banks makes more sense.

I would now guess the supposed high IgG and IgM detection is probably why WHO ignored this study and or sloppy work on the researchers and labs part.

There was a study in early/mid 2020 that tried to identify groups of mutations (what we now call "variants") and track their spread and severity over time. It found that most likely there was a mutation that started in or around Italy that increased the severity to the point excess death was easily detected, that then spread around the world. It was even noticeable in how it affected the US east and west coast differently, because the original out-of-Wuhan virus wasn't as severe.

It was using identifiers like L, LL, and M; does this sound familiar to anyone?

That early finding would completely explain the study you linked to.

I'm disappointed to hear this news. Understanding the origins of Covid is one of the most important things we can do in this century.

Why is that?

If it was a lab leak there will be no accountability anyway.

If it wasn’t a lab leak, GoF research remains incredibly, incredibly high risk and should be banned.

Seems almost definitionally not meaningful.

We need to know so we can understand what we're doing that could lead to another disaster.

Among the possibilities: wet markets, exploring caves, gain of function research, unclean cooking practices, or it could be just bad luck.

Each of those would lead us to drastically differing ways of trying to mitigate the next virus.

Can you explain how each scenario would "lead us to drastically differing ways of trying to mitigate the next virus."?

There doesn't seem to be a practical way to control all known bat caves or unsanitary cooking practices.

Controlling the illegal wildlife trade would require a huge government commitment which doesn't seem like a viable option.

China boasts about successfully reigning in things like drug trafficking/use, cryptocurrency investment, firearms ownership, liberal reforms and revolutions, etc. They can even prevent you from using basic public services if your state-assigned social credit score is too low.

Are they lying about this? Exaggerating it in some major way? If not, I see no reason they can't shut down big wet markets like the one in Wuhan.

I'm left to assume they know that COVID-19 did not originate in such a place. If it had, there would be an "all hands on deck" campaign by the security services to shut these markets down. It would be accompanied by a massive propaganda effort to convince average Chinese that wild and exotic meat is unsafe.

Did you reply to the wrong comment?

No, I was casting doubt on this:

"Controlling the illegal wildlife trade would require a huge government commitment which doesn't seem like a viable option."

Why isn't it viable if it would prevent a pandemic? They already implement many other authoritarian policies (supposedly successfully) that are meant to curb far less dangerous outcomes.

> If it had, there would be an "all hands on deck" campaign by the security services to shut these markets down.

You're making a lot of rational deductions from assumptions of rational behavior without taking into consideration the backpressure (or negative consequences) that rational behavior will cause.

eg If you start an exotic meat campaign, that's an implicit admission that it's a source (if not THE source) and you'll lose your position/head over suggesting it. Even if you could get some momentum, wherever you focus that campaign becomes the defacto ground zero. etc etc etc.

> eg If you start an exotic meat campaign, that's an implicit admission that it's a source (if not THE source) and you'll lose your position/head over suggesting it

Isn't it the official position of Xi Jinping, and the broader CCP he controls, that it was from the Wuhan wet market?

I fail to understand why this is not a target for reform in China. "One bad apple", I guess.

Plausible, but not believable, from my perspective.

> gain of function research

The parent comment addressed that if you read it carefully.

The parent comment asserted that it should be banned regardless, but arguably if such research was discovered to be the cause, it would be banned far more swiftly.

I'm not quite sure if that was their meaning, since banning amateur GoF research in practice is impossible. Nor would any major country allow external inspectors into such highly classified areas. So there's no way of independently verifying claims of 'banning' in any case.

If we know it came out of a lab, there would be a stronger call for internationalized safety precautions.

As it stands now, BSL3/BSL4 are totally arbitrary depending on what country you are in.

>Each of those would lead us to drastically differing ways of trying to mitigate the next virus.

Except we did already know some stuff but a bunch of people ignored it anyway, including chunks of the government. We learned from past viruses and a certain admin just decided to ditch the literal playbook

They *always* do.

Acknowledging an outbreak means an economic hit to the area where it is. Officials *never* react in time to actually stop it because by the time it's obvious there's a problem it's already spread.

How far it spreads comes down to how well it spreads and how well it resists efforts to stomp it out.

SARS had low infectivity and showed symptoms before it became contagious--isolating the infected was possible. The world jumped on it and managed to fence it into extinction. (Note, however, that whatever the precursor was it wasn't ever identified.)

MERS simply doesn't spread well regardless of containment.

Covid-19, however, spreads mostly before symptoms show. This makes containment very hard--China was able to stop it with draconian lockdowns but even that doesn't work against the Omicron variants, it's simply not possible to isolate people well enough. (There are documented cases of it spreading through walls--the only way to be sure it doesn't spread is with a negative pressure room. It probably can't spread through a truly solid wall but most walls are not.)

> There are documented cases of it spreading through walls

Source?

The claim is of the specious and super-bogus-misinformation variety.

We now understand how COVID infections occur:

As a function of viral load due to exposure via inhalation of exhaled droplets transmitted through air shared with someone shedding the virus.

https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/frequently-asked-questi...

Fuck me, a quantum tunnelling virus.

No, it's that walls aren't normally airtight. All the documented cases involved situations where there was behind-the-scenes holes (utility accesses etc) even though there was nothing on the surface.

Not the person you're replying to but:

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/28/12/22-0666_article

I wouldn't worry too much about it though. I put it firmly in the possible but extremely unlikely category. I've seen other papers talking about the possibly of it spreading through apartment buildings though plumbing and air vents, and also spreading via shared spaces like hallways and elevators.

In the end, it's all a numbers game. If enough of the virus wafts your way and your immune system can't deal with it before it gets a foothold and spreads you'll get infected. If you've got a hole in the wall between you and your neighbor and your neighbor is sick and their virus is shedding like a stressed cat you might get sick too. We've also got plenty of cases where someone is living in the same household as someone infected and they don't get sick. It's really just down to the amount of exposure/viral load, and the immune system of the person exposed.

Yup, that's the research I was thinking of. Note that the transmission did occur, admittedly at a fairly low level.

China is full of buildings with many, many residents and far from airtight. Many buildings over there also do not use p-traps. SARS has been documented to spread through the sewer stack this way, Omicron spreads *far* better than SARS.

> because by the time it's obvious there's a problem it's already spread.

That doesn't quite ring true to me - there's a difference between 'obvious to the public' and 'obvious to the experts'.

The problem is that if you respond to the experts, the problems don't eventuate, and the public goes "well what was all the fuss?".

We saw that with SARS. People were actually criticising the (then competent) WHO for their zealous response.

You get praised for fixing problems; you get shat on for preventing them.

The politicians are rarely experts. Your last sentence does basically say what I'm saying, though.

> it's simply not possible to isolate people well enough. (There are documented cases of it spreading through walls

that's... dramatic. It's an airborne virus that spread throughout a very badly constructed and poorly ventilated building that was literally filled with infected people.

The virus spreads easily, but it's far from impossible to keep it from spreading, as evidenced by the many people who have never caught it. There are a lot of variables that determines if someone gets sick after exposure. Someone can be in the same household with a person who has it and still never get sick. Containment is challenging, but not impossible, and it's probably not coming through the walls to get you.

Take sensible steps, and you've got a pretty good shot at avoiding getting infected as long as you aren't locked in a shitty hotel filled with holes and gaps in the walls where there are infected people all around you.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations ditched the playbook. It is depressing.

Setting aside the "active research" one, which is rather different than the rest of your list: given the amount of things we (earth-level "we", not a specific government) know increase risk of cancer or other health issues, but that we willingly tolerate for lack of alternatives... what changes do you really think would happen around things like cave exploration, wet markets (farmers markets too, or do you mean specifically just more unusual foods?), cooking practices?

I hate to break it to you but all human activity is the problem. Viruses will jump species and eventually hit pandemic levels. Research is required to minimize their impact. The bird flu could mutate and broadly infect humans killing millions. Swine flu likewise.

Most people in the 21st century want to believe we have forever conquered such things. Even after COVID-19, many believe that if we had just tried a little harder we could've turned back the tide.

I hope we remember the utter failure of "Zero COVID", especially in places like China, for a very long time. Humility is a virtue.

> Even after COVID-19, many believe that if we had just tried a little harder we could've turned back the tide.

I can't speak to china, but "Zero COVID" wasn't even attempted in the US, and I'm absolutely certain that if we'd tried harder we could prevented tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths. Many Americans made no effort to avoid getting infected and some went out of their way to get infected or to promote the spread of the virus while others were convinced even as they gasped their last breaths that the virus was hoax or clung to treatments that were ineffective or harmful.

The efforts we Americans should have made but failed to started long before the first cases were discovered as people had been warning us about the dangers of a global pandemic yet we were entirely unprepared. Our stockpiles hadn't been maintained. Our hospitals were already understaffed and under-equipt. Our population already under-educated and lacking critical thinking skills. We were not ready for a crisis.

We could do better for the next pandemic (and it is coming) but I haven't seen a lot being done to prepare us and a lot of damage has already been done which will take a long time to repair. The CDC has proved themselves to be unworthy of our trust, the government has proved that it will not adequately care for the needs of its people in an emergency, and our supply chains have proven to be critically fragile. I don't give us very good odds at doing much better when the next virus enters the ring and starts taking shots. We were tested, we failed, and we're still failing.

"'Zero COVID' wasn't even attempted in the US"

Nor shall it ever be. Inshallah. :bow:

> The bird flu could mutate and broadly infect humans killing millions

Yes, but when humans are infected it takes a while for the virus to adapt the mutations needed to efficiently spread human to human. This was the case for SARS/MERS/Bird Flu. But in the lab they can insert FCS that are extremely effective at entering human cells and spreading. So if any of these research studies leaks out of the lab there is no way to contain it. Besides we have been conducting this research for decades and it did not help fight or predict this pandemic and in fact these researchers refuse to even share records/data they have collected. So best case scenario, this research is useless, worst case disastrous!

The FCS genetic engineering hypothesis is extremely unlikely. The problem is people don’t understand the science and how it works.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119

Short of basically stopping any contact between humans and non-humans we aren't going to stop it. Finding the exact route this one took (which is probably impossible--the local officials destroyed as much possible evidence as they could trying, as local officials tend to, to not take the economic hit) says nothing about the exact route the next one will take.

You've fallen for the "all or nothing" fallacy of security.

In reality, securing something means taking steps to reduce the probability of the event, and reducing the impact of the event when it occurs.

You're treating the event as a binary--but it isn't. Zoonotic jumps happen when you have an animal virus capable of infecting humans and you have contact between humans and said animal. The thing is such contacts aren't a one-off, if the potential exists sooner or later it's pretty much bound to happen.

What we should be doing is studying the viruses that appear to have the potential to be pandemics. We got lucky in this regard with Covid--we didn't actually engineer a vaccine in a year. Rather, we had been working on a SARS vaccine for many years, it had been taken as far as it could be without human trials (and since there were no cases of SARS around human trails were impossible.) The mRNA Covid vaccines are simply the old SARS vaccine with some tiny edits to the payload--what took the year was the human trials, not the creation of the vaccine. That took IIRC 2 days.

If the investigation uncovers a covert offensive bioweapons program there would be major repercussions. Repercussions a state would do almost anything to avoid.

Concretely what are you imagining here? US/WHO/UN says "there was a covert bioweapons program" and China says "no there isn't" and then... we invade? We embargo China?

The CCP would lose face, which is one of the worst fates for them. No more mandate from the heavens. Sure, they could try to deny it and claim the world is jealous of China or something like that, but that's unlikely to work for very long, especially with the rest of the planet. Losing their mandate from the heavens to rule China could very well lead to their ouster and perhaps the balkanization of China. Losing the respect of the rest of the world at a time when China wants to be the other major superpower, would be disastrous for them. In a multipolar world, the superpowers compete against each other for the loyalty of the rest of the world. Hard to do that when every single country on the planet suffered during the pandemic.

Lose face in the eyes of whom? Not clear to me that "this came out of our advanced bio research lab" is more damning than "this came out of our extremely unhygienic wet markets in urban centers."

These things move slowly and by little bits over time. If there were to be found a covert bio weapons program it costs China some credibility, not much but a bit and over time it just keeps happening.

Coup. CCP members can vote somebody other than Xi in charge of the PLA and purge him and his supporters, improving their standing.

If it was a lab leak it seems and the report said that then I imagine there would be a political consensus to ban GoF research.

I dont disagree it should be banned either way but I think a bit naive to think it will be banned on its own.

Maybe so, but it’s also naive to think we’ll ever get to certainty or near-certainty about the lab leak hypothesis without China’s participation (which, if culpable, we obviously will not get and cannot force).

So the argument should take the form of, “jeez, this was awful and even if this was natural or artificial, we are purposely producing stuff like this on a daily basis in labs that regularly make mistakes.”

At the very least, we can look at our own response to the pandemic, both government and societal, and agree that huge mistakes were made, and lessons need to be learned instead of taking the usual "Hey, let's just move on and forget about all the evil things we did" approach. There certainly needs to be a reckoning for the tech world that gleefully jumped on the authoritarian bandwagon and tried, somewhat successfully at times, to stifle all opposition to the botched pandemic response.

Sure, none of which is dependent on the origin of the virus.

Banned by whom? You can't ban it. You can pretend to ban it, countries could get together and do something similar to nuclear nonproliferation, but as we see today that is only a stopgap, and the big countries that were already doing it will keep doing it.

If it wasn't a leak, we need to understand the geopolitical dynamics that led to this, if this is the case it was on par with Hiroshima and surface nuclear weapons testing, it is as dangerous a technology as nuclear weapons.

Well right it likely won't be actually banned, which pushes this further into the "not meaningful" territory.

"If it wasn't a leak..." are you referring to a deliberate release scenario?

I'm just responding to what you said, I'm assuming that's what you meant so that's what I had in mind when I wrote what I wrote, yes.

This is one of the problems with discussing the lab leak hypothesis is that it refers to two very different theories: accidental vs deliberate leak.

I was primarily referring to the accidental version because deliberate is way less believable than accidental.

Problem is unlike a nuke, a virus can not be controlled, and gives little bargaining power when compared to nukes. If the prestige of this research was taken away, China would stop investing in it.

> If it was a lab leak there will be no accountability anyway.

There hopefully would be accountability from those in the west who did their best to crush any dissenting voices from even questioning the origins.

I take no stance on this and don't consider myself informed enough to have an opinion but I will say that even asking the question two years ago made people treat you like a moon landing denier.

I'd argue that response to crush the line of questioning at all is bad regardless of the true origin of the virus but if it did turn out to be a lab leak of some sort then hopefully it would spur all the academics, media pundits, and average joes who shouted down anyone asking questions to reevaluate their approach to topics like this.

If it was intentionally released by X, I think it’d be meaningful to hold X accountable.

What does that look like, do you think? And what if we can only get to 99% certainty that it was intentional?

Genuine question.

China blocked it, it was their lab.

China wanting to have billions upon billions of citizens means it’s only right for them to own up to the occasions when those billions of people cause billions or trillions worth of economic damages to the entire world.

Like it or not, if it’s Chinas fault then they should be forced to pay reparations. At the very least held accountable and change the circumstances that led to them breeding the virus.

Genuinely interested to know under what circumstances you envisage China being 'forced' to do anything. Held accountable means nothing here, and paying reparations is for the weak op cit History.

War? Pretty simple. Either they willingly pay reparations if they’re responsible or the world takes it from them.

Yeah, that's brilliant. Clearly tons of appetite for that. No chance.

Populations around the world would force their governments hand If it comes out that China knew they were responsible while blocking every single meaningful investigation into the root cause.

1) No they wouldn't

2) If they would, then this would be a very good reason not to investigate further

How many billions in economic damage and millions in lives would that take? I mean I get the desire to see people and countries held responsible for things, but at a certain point you have to ask what the cost you're willing to pay to make that happen is.

I am not a religious person in general, but I do sometimes wonder if society as a whole isn't losing something valuable in the declining beliefs in a cosmic balancing even if a secular balancing can't occur. Whether that's karma or judgement day, there's a lot of anger floating about these days about wrongs that are just realistically too costly to address, that in other belief systems would at least be assuaged by the belief that they would be addressed in the after life.

I don't think China is going to take kindly to a 2nd century of humiliation.

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

Why does it matter? We have multiple examples that virtually certainly aren't lab related. Even if this was a lab oops doesn't make the others go away. This time it just hit the jackpot on being able to spread well: spread before symptoms. We don't have enough understanding of genetics to engineer this.

Covid is actually low in the lethality range for rampages from whatever is the underlying virus, it's just the others haven't spread so well. Finding that underlying virus could be useful, figuring out exactly how the zoonotic jump happened is simply an exercise in finger-pointing that will do nothing about the fact that they do happen naturally.

this is the single most disruptive event on the planet of the last 80 years. understanding how it happened can help us prevent it from recurring

Similar widespread infection happened a few years before with SARS. Many countries even had procedures and emergency medical stock from there, and just discarded it for budget reasons from 2018.

All this “prevent it from recurring” is cute but wont last long if history can tell.

I mean you're right. It's weird that people are fixated on the specific way this outbreak occurred. Any plausible and proven way an outbreak of roughly this type could occur is equally significant, and I think is pretty well understood. If there was a strong will to reduce those risks it could happen without us knowing any specifics.

Why? It's not like we're going to react to the next pandemic any better.

Once again the world gets bullied into silence by the autocrats and “strong man” leaders.

China buys too much from distinct European countries for them to coalesce as one trading partner and fight Chinese foreign trade bullying.

France, Germany, Italy, etc know that if they voice concerns their exports will be subjected to “additional inspections” by the shameless CCP who acts with international impunity.

They’re so shameless they’re lodging complaints about how their spy balloons have been shot down!

> France, Germany, Italy, etc know that if they voice concerns their exports will be subjected to “additional inspections” by the shameless CCP who acts with international impunity.

Then so be it, let those inspections come. 1930's appeasement all over again. China needs the EU as an export market just as much as the EU needs China. They're completely underestimating the strength of their own hand.

We will probably never know the real truth behind origin of virus. It carry burden of many deaths, fraud, money, poltics, ruined businesses and relationships...

Worst part is, that it destroyed peoples trust in almost everything. Gonverments, science, dialogue, media, doctors...

Good part is, that it will be harder to manipulate with masses by fear.

The virus didn't do that, the dishonest people involved in the response did that. They're not victims, they had choices to make and they made the ones that benefited themselves instead of the public they were entrusted to serve.

Sure, but grinding for power was allways sickness of elected politicians. It just escalated into whole-socio-economical problem. Which proofs why globalisation is dangerous and decentralisation so important.

Politics did all that with an assist from social media. Scientists, mainstream media and reasonable politicians all handled the crisis pretty well. The speed of development and dispersal of effective vaccines was absolutely miraculous.

Politics did what with assist of social media?

I'm wonder why we cannot distribute drinking water and food like vaccines in poor countries?

How do you know that vaccine was effective?

Vaccines. There are 8 or so that have been deployed. And we have absolutely tons of data on the morbidity rates of vaccinated vs unvaccinated controlled for other factors (especially age) that show they were effective. If you're really not sure then you just want to be a contrarian.

Links?

Do you have personal experience with effectiveness of vaccine?

I know you don't actually need me to google it for you and I'm sure you've seen all the evidence. My personal experience is that I got several doses as did my whole family and we all were exposed and had very minor symptoms. I won't descend into solipsism where only my personal experience is relevant. The consensus of experts is good enough for me.

I have same experience as you without vaccines. Symptoms as usual flu. Also 9 people around me dead or seriously injured after vaccination. Sure... It could be anecdotal evidence, but for me personaly more relevant. I would be stupid to ignore this.

Im really curious which data convinced you about safety and effectiveness of vaccines that you and your family have. Consensus of experts is divided.

Our symptoms were way less than flu. Barely a sniffle. Wouldn't even know it was covid if not for at-home test. Nine people dead is meaningly. Millions of people die every year. How many died of covid symptoms after vaccination? How many died of predictable causes of death that would have gotten them anyway?

Here's a pretty straightforward chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-co...

Experts are in overwhelming unison on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines relative to being unvaccinated. Here's an interesting study on how subjectivity can lead people to not only misunderstand scientific evidence but to overestimate the degree of dissent among experts:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo0038

This study from the Czech Republic shows that the public there severely underestimate the degree of medical consensus among practicing doctors

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35650433/

> Our symptoms were way less than flu. Barely a sniffle. Wouldn't even know it was covid if not for at-home test.

It could be omicron mutation, which has minor symptom. Vaccines was developed for alpha/delta. So again... How do you know that vaccines worked?

> Nine people dead is meaningly.

Not all of them are dead. But cause was made by uninformed decision, mostly because it was required to work, not from medical reasons. 6 of those people were healthy, 3 elder, 1 was born death.

> How many died of covid symptoms after vaccination?

How many get covid in health care/vaccination centers because it was epicenter of virus where healthy people met sick ones?

> How many died of predictable causes of death that would have gotten them anyway?

I ask same question for covid deaths. Official statistics from ministry of health says that in our country died around 60 people (from 0y to my age) that has positive PCR test during whole covid (2 years) and also covid was not necessary cause of death. Costs/benefits from vaccination is irrelevant there and my doctor agree.

> Here's a pretty straightforward chart

Is covid main cause of death in this chart? If so, which mutation? What is a definition of vaccinated individual? 2-3 weeks after shot? What are absolute numbers?

If you are interested in subject of vaccine safety, there are plenty studies and charts that rise questions.

----

Autopsy Histopathologic Cardiac Findings in 2 Adolescents Following the Second COVID-19 Vaccine Dose https://meridian.allenpress.com/aplm/article/146/8/925/47778...

Risks of myocarditis, pericarditis, and cardiac arrhythmias associated with COVID-19 vaccination or SARS-CoV-2 infectionhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0#Aff1

Vaccine-Associated Myo/Pericarditis in Adolescents: A Stratified Risk-Benefit Analysis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13759

Persistent Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging Finfings in a Cohort of Adolescents with Post-Coronavirus Disease 2019 mRNA Vaccine Myopericarditis https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(22)00282-7/fulltext

Epidemiology of Acute Myocarditis/Pericarditis in Hong Kong Adolescents Following Comirnaty Vaccination https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34849657/

Age and sex-specific risks of myokarditis and pericarditis following Covid-19 messenger RNA vaccines https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9233673/

Goddard K.et al: Risk of myokarditis and pericarditis following BT162b2 and mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccination, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9273527/

Bardosh K.et al: COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters for Young Adults: A Risk-Benefit Assessment and Five Ethical Arguments against Mandates at Universities https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4206070

Oster M.E. et al: Myocarditis Cases Reported After mRNA-Based COVID-19 Vaccination in the US From December 2020 to August 2021 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788346

Lai F.T. et al: Carditis After COVID-19 Vaccination With a Messenger RNA Vaccine and an Inactivated Virus Vaccine https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M21-3700?rfr_da...

Massari M. et al: Postmarketing active surveillance of myokarditis and pericarditis following vaccination with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in persons aged 12 to 39 years in Italy: A multi-database, self-controlled case series study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34849657/

SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination and Myocarditis in a Nordic Cohort Study of 23 Million Residents https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...

A Case of Vaccine-Induced Thrombocytopenic Thrombosis Manifesting as Cerebral Venous Thrombosis and Intracerebral Bleed https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9894637/

Protection and waning of natural and hybrid COVID-19 immunity https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v...

Acute Inflammatory Diseases of the Central Nervous System After SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination https://nn.neurology.org/content/10/1/e200063.abstract

A Comparison of Cases of Autoimmune Hepatitis After Vaccination Against COVID-19 https://journals.lww.com/acgcr/Fulltext/2023/01000/It_Can_t_...

Cerebral venous sinus thrombosis after COVID-19 vaccination: a case report and literature review https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9853928/

COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report Week 42 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

-------

Saying that "experts are in overwhelming unison" probably depends on source of your information.

Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives is kicking off an investigation of covid origins: https://www.yahoo.com/news/gop-launches-probe-covid-origins-...

If ever there were a team qualified to get to the bottom of this, it would include MTG and Matt Gaetz!

Jamie Raskin and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are in the committee, too, so, yeah, we got the A team on this one.

Oh yeah, they're going to be the 1995–96 Chicago Bulls of congressional COVID investigation teams.

Raskin is a serious guy actually. The headwear is because of cancer.

Why do we have to rely on Republicans to investigate covid origins? Scary!

Me as a European software engineer, understanding tech stuff well, but not American politics, what's the problem with the Republicans? Why would you prefer the other party, Democrats (right?) do the origin research instead?

Americans view politics like sportsball, I.e "our team good everyone else bad"

> Americans view politics like sportsball, I.e "our team good everyone else bad"

it doesn't take a lot of effort to discover that plenty of power-structures and political regimes around the world aside from the United States eventually simplify down to basic adversarialism.

It goes from 'RED/BLUE' all the way to 'GreatLeader/Dictator', but the United States doesn't have 'us versus them' to ourselves.

That's politics everywhere. Politics is the nonviolent contestation of power and typically political parties cater to a set of specific people with peculiar interests and beliefs. Sometimes polarization splits people into two equally self-interested groups fighting a zero-sum game, but sometimes polarization is literally over good and evil, where one side wants to enslave, exterminate, or oppress people, or they want to exploit or invade other countries, or they want to neglect their poor, sick, or unfortunate neighbors, or they want to undermine the democratic intitutions to permanently ensconce themselves in power. Enlightened centrism is just intellectual sloth.

My interpretation of what he said was 'shouldn't this be a bipartisan effort?!'

The main reason is that the Republicans are the relatively right wing party in the country and wacky conspiracy theories about COVID have become more popular in right wing media here. So that’s the partisan reason.

But also, since a Republican was in charge when COVID became a problem, it would make more sense to have the then-opposition do the investigation, right? Let’s not ask people who have an incentive to hide uncomfortable failures to investigate!

The simple question about the origin was considered a conspiracy theory not that long ago. And you won't find any democrats speaking up about it, no they were busy covering it up just because that's what the "bad side" were claiming.

Why is memory so short in politics? The question you should ask instead is why do they suddenly care?

I wonder what it would mean if Republicans conclusively proved that China did covid (whatever that means). Do you think the Republicans would have been/will be more likely to wear masks or get vaccines?

I wouldn't know I'm not from the US. But you sure seem very personally invested in those kinds of decisions. Maybe that should be Bidens strategy? Claim masks are terrible and get the Republicans to wear them?

Seems to be how both sides reason over there. Exhausting but entertaining to follow. I'm leftist (real "hang the bankers" kind of left not Teslas and Iphones left) and even to me the Republicans often seem like the reasonable bunch in the gang, and that says a lot...

Both sides would benefit from some serious self-examination.

I don't know that I'm very personally invested in these kinds of decisions, but it's certainly possible. No one ever held a gun to my head and made me wear a mask or get a vaccine or anything, but I did them anyway because they seemed like the best ways to avoid dying from coronavirus or getting long covid, neither of which I particularly desired, and I do know people to whom those things happened.

What I wonder is how laying the blame on some country or other would change other peoples' calculations on those decisions.

You make assumptions on what the other side wants and build your arguments on that. It's not about blaming China, you're already doing that. If you ask me Fauci and Dazsak are much more interesting as culprits. The Chinese are completely irrelevant.

My conclusions by looking at the facts are very sinister. If I told you you were going to vaccinate 5-year olds with new tech for flu-like symptoms 5 years ago you'd call me crazy. But here we are, and you're asking me about masks.

Masks are the last thing on my mind, but that doesn't mean I don't wash my hands and run around coughing on old people. I care about some people answering difficult questions and getting jail time, but we'll see their friends asking fluffy cute questions.

The greatest trick they pulled was to politisize it and get normal people fighting eachother over facemasks while they're swimming in profits.

We've long given vaccines to children 5 and younger, and yes, people made money from that. I'd love to see some structural changes to for profit healthcare in the US, but if it's a problem, then it's hardly limited to vaccines. I suppose I am just not all that bothered in retrospect by the pandemic response of the US. If anything, I wonder how it could have been improved so that the 1 million Americans who died would not have, but I also learned that living through a pandemic is still not something we have all that much control over even with modern technology.

The difference is we used to care what was in those vaccines and their effects, not just that everyone got them no matter the cost/benefit ratio. I don't mind smallpox vaccines but putting kids on subscription vaccines for a disease that has no risk for them is just brain dead. And this was known before they were rolled out in that age group. It was entirely political at that point.

I'm not really aware of the risk/reward levels of different vaccines for different age groups, but to imply that we used to care about what got put into vaccines but no longer do seems quite silly - the "vaccines cause autism" idea got going in the early 90's. But low as the risks of either may be, I wonder - did more children die of covid or of covid vaccination?

Almost no children died of covid, a rounding error. It wasn't a problem for them and shouldn't have been made out to be. Old people died from the flu before covid but we didn't vaccinate kids to protect them back then, what changed?

The problem is we really don't know what effects mRNA can have and anyone who claims they do are lying. So why was it pushed so hard?

I've gotten an annual flu shot since adolescence and I'd recommend that everyone of every age do so as well, mostly because of the consequences I suffered when I failed to do so.

Again, I'm far from an expert, but I've been told that RNA vaccines have been studied for a couple decades now, but the recent vaccines were the first widespread use. But won't a virus deliver several orders of magnitude more RNA to you anyway? Speaking for myself, I've personally known many people including myself who have gotten a variety of vaccines with zero long term consequences, though I did have one friend who gets knocked on his ass for a day or two by them. It's those that chose to forgo the vaccine who have suffered life altering consequences as a result. I actually was talking to a friend yesterday who's thinking about applying for disability since he's tried several times to return to his job as a waiter and been too weak to do the job.

Of course, new technologies will always have the risk of novel effects I suppose. Frankly if I had kids, I'd be more concerned about their constant attachment to phones/tablets and social media like Tiktok or the like. It's hard for me to tell if that's just me getting old and grumpy about technology or if these are in fact new and novel risks, but it's impossible not to notice all the children being carted around with their faces essentially attached to some screen or other.

Interesting, I know that some middle-aged people do get flu shots but never met one. To me it's something the elderly need. I'm raised with the notion that a little bacteria now and then is only good for me. My vaccine is the disease.

But don't get me wrong, I don't blame anyone who got the shot, I'm questioning those in power who had the same data I did but still claimed it was so necessary for everyone and their mother to get vaccinated or the world would go to shit.

If you looked at the numbers it was just a bad flu season. They definitely knew because I knew, from their own official data. And to my knowledge no other country than the US is pushing it to kids below 12.

But I've let it go, it's no longer a thing and I was lucky enough to dodge any mandates. This thread started with me pointing out the revisionism in claiming democrats are the right people to get to the bottom of the origin. I'm not getting into the details of if/when mRNA started testing and roll-outs.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/diseases/flu.html

I had not had occasion to look into it, but the US CDC recommends flu shots starting at 6 months. From a quick search, it looks like EU guidelines differ a bit but some do encourage that children and the elderly get it. To me it was always just one of those things responsible members of society do - pay for your car registration, go to the dentist, keep your area clean, get your shots, etc... I'm far from 100% on all that stuff, but the vaccines never struck me as being all that far out of line - maintaining my car is more expense and trouble than that at least, and I hate going to the dentist. But I fail to see how my flu vaccination needs would change if it turned out that the flu had been somehow a creation of a foreign nation.

I don't know who "the right people" are to get to the bottom of the origin of Covid, but if it is Republicans, then I doubt their motives are for a blameless post-mortem style investigation that ends with a list of plausible recommendations for improvements in response to future pandemics. That skepticism was were I got started.

Still with blaming a foreign nation. I already answered that. Look into Fauci and Daszak, gain-of-function and everything related. It's a rabbit hole I know but you have to ask the question to understand where the other side comes from.

Dazsak himself even mentioned his conflicting interest when he was appointed by the WHO to investigate if his own lab was the source of the leak. And the democrats did everything they could to suppress this and calling anyone curious a conspiracy theorists. All because the bad evil Republicans made the claims first. The same conspiracies that are now pretty mainstream and many people backing down from earlier claims.

Try to be less partisan and get to the bottom of the truth. My conclusions as I mentioned are sinister, and very ugly. And the entire world media dancing to the same tune just reinforces that. I don't want to believe this but it's the only explanation I see, I don't believe they're incompetent, they're evil...

For many it was just the right-thing-to-do™ (how many times has that been used throughout history), but those pulling the strings are different. And they're not partisan, they play both sides.

Let's say I cast aside all partisan and national interests sufficiently and actually get to the bottom of the truth - how would I live my life any differently in response to this truth?

That's a question much bigger than covid. I would like our elected to fix the accountability for us, but they don't since the accountable are their donors and friends. So the last resort was added to your constitution.

We all want to avoid it but how long are we going to stay occupied fighting over bullshit reasons while some live like gods on everyone's expense without even a slap on the wrist?

Oh this dictator likes Putin to much we have to replace him with this other guy. For centuries it's been like this. Is it ever going to change? Probably not, one can hope though.

If you're asking me what you can do today? Put higher standards on truth from your allies than your enemies is a good first step. A lot of people today just regurgitate whatever is the topic of the month making the exact same points never questioning the source.

Orange man bad, Biden is senile, bla bla bla. You're the most powerful nation in the world start acting like it instead of bullying any country that opposes your truth into submission.

My question is pretty specific to covid, as is this HN post, so that's pretty much what I was focused on. Beyond that is pretty grandiose, but you may have some misconceptions about political power in America and how it works, particularly if you are exclusively deriving those from our media.

It's all connected though. Cause a mortgage crisis and crash the world economy? Just a hickup and the responsible still get millions while normal people lose their homes.

What you can do regarding covid is ask "how does this help me and society?" instead of just rolling up your sleeve when someone asks you. You need to start asking questions, all the time. They don't have your interests in mind. Neither does my own government so I'm not acting like we're any better.

Demand answers. Why was Fauci smirking behind Trump on press meetings knowing full well that the US was funding research on covid virues in fucking Wuhan? Textbook James Bond villain. How people are not outraged is a mystery.

To be honest, I'm not particularly interested in Fauci or outraged about him myself. I don't know what his motivations would be for smirking or anything else. I was in a state where our governor quite literally said that the old should be willing to sacrifice their lives for the economy, so he wasn't too fond of Fauci either. I will say that I spoke with my grandmother on that one and she decided that she'd prefer to live lol.

What a cute anecdote as response to the head of NIAD conducting gain-of-function research and covering it up when it "leaks". I'm sorry about my tone but it's incredible to see the denial.

He's the biggest reason your grandmother was even at risk and you go out of your way to ignore it because "Republicans" I assume? I don't know. I will never understand people.

Well, I haven't seen much evidence that would pin responsibility so squarely on Anthony Fauci, but say that he engineered the virus himself and released it into a Wuhan market as a cover and this was all proven beyond dispute. So what? I presume you'd want to punish him with life in prison or something stronger than that. That's fine with me, woodchip him for all I care. But what difference would it make to the way I should have lived my life for the last couple of years?

You haven't even looked for the evidence. Government files prove it. He knew and should've made it known instead of covering it up. Regarding your second question I already answered it. But honestly I don't expect you to do anything different, keep your head in the sand, do "the-right-thing" and live as you've always lived. You don't matter. Is that the response you want?

We're going in circles and I'm done spoon-feeding you. Best of luck.

Oh, I've been shown bits and pieces of evidence for awhile now, but nothing I'd consider a smoking gun. But I always come back to the same question - what does the source of the virus matter? Humans have lived with viruses for as long as they've been humans, and our ancestors have as well, I'm assuming back to the protozoan era. I suppose we used to blame god for them, but perhaps now we can blame someone else, and I'm sure in the future the technology will exist such that they can be manufactured by students at home. Regardless, it still seems that the best defenses against them have not changed drastically in recent history.

What’s an example of a country you think is well run?

None really, but McEmpire is in a league of its own.

If you don’t think any country is well run, I wonder if you just have miscalibrated expectations for what good government looks like.

Or I just have higher standards and expect more than too big to fail, nepotism and endless fucking wars between east and west? There are pros in many countries I can cherry pick here and there but nothing lives up to the standards we should have and the potential of humanity. We're wasting it, I'm happy for you that you seem content though, wish I could be too.

Taiwan is well-run. Norway does well, it's easy to point to their resource wealth but plenty of other countries have similar yet aren't run nearly as well.

The Democratic reports have better visuals but the Republicans use clearer language.

because Republicans started too and Democrats are obligated to take an opposing position.

I'm sorry but this seems like an ignorant comment. I remember the stories from CNN(?) about how it was Trumps fault they didn't investigate the origin back then.

I remember when the only ones actually asking questions and not getting vaccinated were blamed to be "stupid republicans" and "conspiracy theorists".

You're so polarized over there my fucked up country seems like heaven in comparison. We've always been at war with Eurasia, right?

I don't understand your viewpoint. It was Trump's fault. He was president. Biden is currently on the hook, and he's fucked it up just as badly.

The Republicans never had a sane response to Covid; their "questions" were all racist as fuck; their vaccine skepticism is still killing people; they're why we can't mask up and reduce the spread.

The Democrats have decided that the very young, the very old, the weak, and the disabled are collateral damage. Joke's on them: Long COVID doesn't discriminate!

The Republicans on that committee are child sex traffickers and virulent antisemites. Their agenda is to shut down the United States government. They don't care about the origins of COVID.

You're so hyperbole I don't even know where to begin.

top notch trolling

>I'm sorry but this seems like an ignorant comment. I remember the stories from CNN(?) about how it was Trumps fault they didn't investigate the origin back then.

My favorite CNN article on the topic from Januar 2020, before COVID19 spread worldwide: "Coronavirus task force another example of Trump administration's lack of diversity" <https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/30/politics/donald-trump-coronav...>

I remember when people were shunned for saying "lab leak". Now it's more than accepted

Lab leak is still not probable. There hasn't been any substantial evidence to change the likelihoods.

There is no evidence because it was not investigated

Opposed to the wild origin theory, after 3 year investigation there is also no evidence

It's still an open question if you're honest. There's no hard evidence either way -- everything that people have come up with is disputed and reasonably so -- and China won't let people investigate.

The WHO has shown itself to be completely and absolutely useless. It was wrong at the beginning and continuously was behind the curve. It was as if they wanted COVID to spread as quickly as possible. I think that it should be shut down at this point, there's nothing they can say that can ever regain their trust.

Agreed

What does everyone think an appropriate punishment for China is if it comes out there was negligence in a lab?

Increasing measures at those labs, stopping gain of function research, much more international oversight in virus labs.

Only productive thing would be to forgive and the work to ban GOF on pathogens worldwide.

The WHO should invade Wuhan and claim it for the United Nations.

Annotated review of WHO draft agreements [1][2] to expand their powers over all countries globally. Note that the IHR amendments that will be voted upon in May 2023 only require the consent of 50% of countries to take effect, https://brownstone.org/articles/amendments-who-ihr-annotated...

> The WHO proposes that the term ‘with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons’ be deleted from the text, replacing them with ‘equity, coherence, inclusivity,’ ... The underlying equality of individuals is removed, and rights become subject to a status determined by others based on a set of criteria that they define. This entirely upends the prior understanding of the relationship of all individuals with authority, at least in non-totalitarian states. It is a totalitarian approach to society, within which individuals may act only on the sufferance of others who wield power outside of legal sanction; specifically a feudal relationship, or one of monarch-subject without an intervening constitution.

[1] 2023 draft of 2023 IHR amendments, https://apps.who.int/gb/wgihr/index.html

[2] 2023 draft of 2025 treaty, https://docs.reclaimthenet.org/who-zero-draft-international-...

The best references are the primary WHO source documents. A better source of analysis than Brownstone is needed. An older (May 2022) analysis was published by an EU law journal, https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-far-reaching-us-proposals-to-am...

> ..amendments to Article 12 IHR will both considerably extend the executive powers of the WHO Director-General to declare global emergency-like situations and centralise this power further by removing the need to consult and find agreement with the respective state party ... if WHO’s powers are extended in this way, is there a need to also answer the question quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who guards the guards?), and to thus set up mechanisms ensuring that WHO complies with its obligations under the IHR and its Constitution, as well as its responsibilities for human rights deriving from customary international human rights law?

HN ranking for this story, https://hnrankings.info/34795036/

There is no effective pandemic response that respects individual rights, as we currently expect them.

Too many people, too interconnected of a world.

Better to go ahead and admit that if the shit hits the fan (SARS-CoV-2 being far from how bad a novel pathogen could get) then world organizations will need to be pretty totalitarian to effectively manage public health.

If this concerns us, we should meet reality and focus on criteria and processes by which those powers will be guaranteed to be rolled back when the situation allows.

The alternative to having such agreements in place is an procession of ineffectual response, fear, death, ceding power to authorities from fear, and then having no structures in place by which that power can be subsequently reclaimed.

> criteria and processes by which those powers will be guaranteed to be rolled back when the situation allows.

What's a good historical example of a national or global institution voluntarily giving up totalitarian powers on the basis of subjective criteria?

Just about every industrialized democracy that has the concept of emergency powers and uses them in emergencies? This happens all the time in small and big ways, there are plenty of US examples alone. For instance the US currently does not have rationing or near-universal consumer goods price controls, the National Guard doesn't run New Orleans, etc, etc.

Yes, nation-state-unique emergency powers exist and were used widely over the last few years.

> world organizations will need to be pretty totalitarian to effectively manage public health.

What's being proposed for May 2023 majority vote goes way beyond existing powers, e.g. asking all countries to strike "human rights" from the international health treaty and their local response to health emergencies.

What's a good historical example of a national or global institution voluntarily giving up totalitarian powers

That's the question you asked and 'it's a thing that happens all the time' is the answer. Global institutions don't have any 'totalitarian powers' so that one has a simple answer too.

There's a difference between "totalitarian" and "emergency" powers.

> Global institutions don't have any 'totalitarian powers'

If 50% of countries agree in May 2023 to the draft WHO/IHR amendment to drop "human rights", that would change.

There's a difference between "totalitarian" and "emergency" powers.

We're clearly talking about emergency powers here, whatever you want to call them.

If 50% of countries agree in May 2023 to the draft WHO/IHR amendment to drop "human rights", that would change.

No it wouldn't. WHO/IHR and all similar organizations don't have any ability to enforce their edicts themselves, they represent the collective agreements and actions of their sovereign members. The members have to do the work, if any and come to the agreement to begin with. 'International organizations with unchecked supranational powers' is an idea with a long history in the US but it's not a real thing, it's largely a Bircher (and similar) fever dream.

> We're clearly talking about emergency powers here, whatever you want to call them.

Emergency powers end after some time period. The draft IHR amendments are not time limited and affect 196 countries.

> WHO/IHR and all similar organizations don't have any ability to enforce their edicts themselves, they represent the collective agreements and actions of their sovereign members. The members have to do the work.

Yes, the 196 countries voting in May 2023 for the IHR amendments.

So the options are:

  1) Countries implement totalitarian policy after voting YES, to comply with IHR-23.
  2) Some countries vote YES, then refuse to implement IHR-23.
  3) Some countries vote NO, IHR-23 passes by majority, they withdraw from IHR.

Poland, Czechoslovakia 1989

South Africa 1990

Were those based on pre-agreed criteria, or the result of widespread societal upheaval?

They're "historical example(s) of a national or global institution voluntarily giving up totalitarian powers on the basis of subjective criteria"

Not gonna play 20 questions as you try to downscope your ask.

People taking control of their government after years of resistance and protests is not remotely the same as a government giving up control in response to pre-defined written criteria in a legal agreement like the IHR treaty.

The government voluntarily gave up powers in each of those circumstances. The people didn't take control.

"Voluntarily". Where to start?

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

> Between 1986 and 1988, some petty apartheid laws were repealed, along with the pass laws. Botha told White South Africans to "adapt or die" and twice he wavered on the eve of what were billed as "rubicon" announcements of substantial reforms, although on both occasions he backed away from substantial changes. Ironically, these reforms served only to trigger intensified political violence through the remainder of the 1980s as more communities and political groups across the country joined the resistance movement.

> ... The Bisho massacre on 7 September 1992 brought matters to a head. The Ciskei Defence Force killed 29 people and injured 200 when they opened fire on ANC marchers demanding the reincorporation of the Ciskei homeland into South Africa. In the aftermath, Mandela and de Klerk agreed to meet to find ways to end the spiralling violence. This led to a resumption of negotiations.

You're arguing that a government murding non-violent protesters is an example of a government being forced by protesters to cede its powers?

What a shame. ATM, I can not imagine a more important question for WHO to answer.

I must ask now - Do we actually need WHO now? What is its point?

Very responsible of them. :/

I wonder who swayed them to cancel the investigation?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/world-h...

https://www.cfr.org/blog/who-and-china-dereliction-duty

https://www.politico.com/amp/news/magazine/2020/04/15/its-no...

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/02/china-coronavirus-who-h...

https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/03/23/fighting-coronaviru...

Covid killed more people than the Holocaust, and we're just going to sweep that under the rug so as not to create tension with a major global player. That's realpolitik for you.

Has nothing to do.

Not quite. 11 million people died in the holocaust.

You're probably thinking of the 6 million Jewish people who were murdered. 5 million Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, gay people disabled people, and others were also murdered.

The Economist estimates about 20m dead https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, [0] the “5 million non-Jews” figure was invented by Simon Wiesenthal. He intentionally concocted it by subtracting 1 million from the estimated number of Jewish victims.

According to Wikipedia, [1] at least 8.5 million non-Jewish Soviet citizens were massacred by the Nazis (both civilians and POWs), and also at least 1.8 million Poles. The victims among the groups you explicitly mentioned, by contrast, added all together number no more than 1 million. It is controversial, however, whether the term “Holocaust” should be used for all Nazi genocides and atrocities, or restricted to only include the Nazi genocide against the Jewish people.

[0] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/non-jewish-victims-of-t...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims

I found this interesting.

"There were 11 million victims of the Holocaust (or 6 million Jewish victims and 5 million non-Jewish victims)

The number 11 million is a fictitious number on a number of levels. “11 million Jews” is the population census that is mentioned in the 16th copy of the Wannsee Protocol, notes taken by Eichmann (January 20, 1942), only about the Jews. The issue also seems to be the differentiation between victims based on NSDAP race policy versus civilian deaths during war (i.e.: victims of genocide or casualties of war) if the latter, the correct number is probably between 30-35 million deaths, maybe more. The death toll on the territory of the former Soviet Union is generally regarded to be about 27 million including Soviet military."

https://www.ilholocaustmuseum.org/holocaust-misconceptions/

The holocaust is even worse when you consider that the 11M deaths was with a world population of 2.3B, where the 6.8M COVID deaths is with a world population of 7.7B

edit: sources.

6.8M COVID deaths reported to WHO https://covid19.who.int

1940 Estimate World Population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_...

Well, Covid does not discriminate...

The average covid mortality age at death was higher than the average life span.

Covid stats were cooked to broth.

196 countries agreed to the International Health Regulations in 2005, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Health_Regulatio..., and these are currently being amended for vote in May 2023. Current draft strikes "human rights" from the text.

If the global citizens of 196 countries would like input into health policy that will affect their daily lives for decades to come, they have a once-in-20-years opportunity to add their voice to this legal, nation-state and global governance process, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34798093

Nothing to see here. Now shut up and take your highly profitable boosters.

Software programming rule #1: "Never fix bugs at their root cause." (joking, of course!!)

China should be the world's laughingstock, not bogeyman. They fucked up covid so bad that they are still in lockdowns. They let it happen in the first place and have done a hilariously bad job at the coverup.

Pooh Bear doesn't have the mandate of his Mother, let alone Heaven.

China is using covid lockdowns to manage consumer demand on their economy.

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