Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid
thetimes.co.uk
thetimes.co.uk
Tech companies too had a role to play here. For the sake of free speech, what happened here is worth discussing.
For the official response, it was to be expected. The UN does plenty of compromises with authoritarian countries for the sake of being able to operate. It would have been surprising to see the WHO press China.
Mashup of clips from the news: https://youtu.be/zl-X-Lgrlf0
Jon Stewart was the first to call this into question publicly, which was brave at the time. Watch Colbert push back on Stewart’s line of reasoning: https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8
Honestly questioning anything covid-related was taboo at that time, including the vaccines, masks, ivermectin, etc. Please note, I am not making any claims about these things, other than it was taboo to question anything “official sources” stated.
Globally the world is right of the US on most issues, but you're probably pretending that the rest of the world is just Europe.
The most overt stuff he has done politically is the late 2000s rally with Colbert which was very middle-of-the-road decorum-focused Democrat in tone, I don't think there's a lot of evidence for him being "hard left". If I had to guess, I think he'd be more in line with the Obama / Biden type camp than Sanders.
I am a fan of Jon Stewart, but the fact that I have never heard someone on the right-wing claim that Jon Stewart is non-partisan while I hear it frequently from mainstream democrats should tell you something about the veracity of the claim.
But yes, when hundreds of thousands of people are dying globally, I think patience for those things wears thin in a personal capacity.
But I would seriously question whether something is really 'taboo' if ~half of the country is watching media outlets where they ask these questions regularly, which is the case in the domestic US.
Having that attitude is not "a problem", having opinions on dumb stuff people say is not censorious.
This new interpretation that freedom of speech means freedom from having people criticize you is novel.
Most of it is either people saying that we can't know whether the lab leak is true or not and people who are claiming persecution on "Reddit/the Media/etc" because "they" are keeping the lab leak theory from being discussed.
[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=33&prefix=true&qu...
Both can be true: It originated in a lab, and the distrust that inspired is still killing many. It's dangerous to talk about it because it's still killing people.
If we found out 100% the lab theory is false, you'd still have millions who want it to be true and who want to be enraged. You have millions who want to put themselves at risk. There are larger problems with society than this virus. That's what this conspiracy uncovered.
It's still killing people. I directly vaccinated thousands in Los Angeles, I had several family members die, and 1 of my aunts - an RN - is getting reinstated after 2 years because she was fired for telling people "the jab will kill you". This was after she tried to convince my other aunt - another RN - that she should not get the vaccine while being in a risk category.
Never have we seen disinformation used to harm so many. It's too dangerous to talk about, and if we found the truth no one could corroborate it or convince others of it. It is done, millions are dead.
As a sidelong thought, I'm convinced in this information age that there is no truth. The truth is anything you want it to be if you can inspire a viral cult around a contrarian thought. I'm sorry if I just sound so jaded.
I still remember assisting a woman who /wanted/ the vaccine while her husband screamed at us outside the tape line with officers nearby - screaming about how the government was trying to kill black Americans and citing events like Tuskegee. We earned that, and I still see the fear in his eyes when we swabbed her arm.
"the jab will kill you"
It's crazy how many nurses don't trust science and news reports. Here in Belgium it was a big problem too. So many of them seem to be very cynical about and have serious distrust in big pharma while they themselves administer drugs that make (most) patients better. How they can just overlook that and keep their jobs is beyond me (no offense meant to your family)
Not sure what sausage they see being made. They're trained to evaluate patients, carry out emergency procedures, take measurements and administer medicine as instructed by a doctor. It's a hell of a job, hard, stressful, thankless and underpaid. But that's irrelevant.
> Are you sure that the reality around patient drug experiences is so positive?
Well yes, by definition. Generally, and simply put, a drug can't enter the market unless it's better than the current standard treatment.
Hundred years ago a simple infection could kill you, or result in a limb being amputated sans anesthesia. The difference between then and now is the work of research and pharma companies.
I worked in pharma for a few years on clinical trial systems. What I learned of the dishonesty in the industry made me decide to only take anything they produce if it’s an extreme emergency and I have no other choice. The FDA is a revolving door of pharma execs with financial incentives so they can’t be trusted either.
Same here. What did you see that didn't make you lose trust?
What I saw if anything was the rigorous work required to get a drug on the market. FDA inspections were feared because if you've made mistakes in your trial everything risks going to the trash.
> to only take anything they produce if it’s an extreme emergency
How high would you toddler's fever or painful your tooth ache have to be for it to be an extreme emergency, before you administer some paracetamol? What about anxiety? What about illnesses your ageing parents may have? There's a very large gap between comfort and near-death.
I don't force my own preferences on my family. I'd not go to a doctor complaining of pain again - they're in over-correction mode over killing so many people with opiates that you can't get help with that for the time being. I'd never personally take any of the medication peddled for anxiety - too many of those meds don't have long term studies or the AE's were swept under the rug for approval.
I personally know 3 people who have had life altering negative effects due to the vaccine, including myself. You no doubt think that is a lie or a statistical anomaly. What you've missed is that it is ridiculously hard to register an adverse event, due to procedural process, and the negative bias of medical practitioners such as yourself who are unwilling to attribute an event to a recent vaccine, or blame it on the virus itself (without any symptoms of course).
The 'Trusted News Initiative' is one mans life-saving purveyor of truth, and another mans very obvious propaganda network.
I would encourage you to look at an Israeli study "Survey of reported symptoms after a third vaccination Of Pfizer against 19-COVID".
4% of men experienced chest pain after vaccination (page 16) 7% of women experienced chest pain after vaccination (page 16)
A survey based approach is more likely to get better statical results IMO because it removes the laborious reporting procedure as well as medical practitioner bias.
I'm fed up of self-righteous do-gooders who think they have an exclusive view of 'the truth'. I wouldn't care so much about it were it not for the negative effect those do-gooder's actions can have on other people's health, as it did in my own case.
Also, the team lead I worked with for 3 months was 1 of the 100,000 or so that saw adverse effects. Last day of our deployment in LA county, he received the vaccine in preparation to go home. He was in the hospital for 2 weeks because fluid started to pool in the sac that contains your heart. He nearly died before they could get that under control. He went home for a month and then went back out again on another deployment.
I think this goes to the "is 1 life more important than 100,000" argument. The vaccine saved millions and we are barely celebrating that fact. Even if you say "well there are long-COVID effects" -> the alternative is death. The alternative is nothing happens to you and you become a vehicle for someone else's death. Unless you were planing to isolate for the rest of your life, you became an inherent risk to others for a virus that was spreading too fast.
My great uncle was put into an old folks home to sequester with the others in that risk category, and 1 of the nurses spread it among the staff. 13 people died. Disinformation convinced reckless people that there's reasons to not get the vaccine, and then they went out and did reckless things because they doubted the legitimacy of the danger. People who walked into hospitals without masks, who spit at others taking their own precautions, people who violently attacked service staff in supermarkets because they felt the whole thing was an attack on their livelihood and freedom.
I remember being in Marana, AZ the week that Pfizer was cleared for kids 12 and up. We were stationed outside a school, and for the last 2 days we had watched teachers going in and out of the facility back and forth to their cars to get random things. Every time 1 walked past we asked if they had questions for us, if they wanted to know about the vaccine, and that they could talk to us without committing to anything. Surely these educators were interested in protecting their students? AZ was a strange place. They were more concerned with recounting the election for the 2nd time. The state gov was actively hostile and tried to keep us out so the county we were working within took them to court citing a clause in their constitution that they could request assistance if it was a health concern. We moved from that site a day later, we had vaccinated just 27 people.
To put things in perspective, in LA we did nearly a million vaccinations. In AZ we reached just under 13,000 over 3 months.
I am acknowledging that we were both surrounded by propaganda/disinformation, and both affected by it. You will not find the objective truth to any of this 3 years later, so far from Wuhan, and with this much political influence behind investigating it.
The deaths were right in front of them, but the party told them to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. The org I work for was actually responsible for vaccinating my own grandparents. My grandpa still caught covid and seemed like he was coming out of it. Then he got pneumonia as a complication from it and died that July 4th weekend I got home.
I'm glad I have a monopoly on truth as a self-righteous, do-gooder it really helped me preserve my family tree . I hope in posterity people understand how amazing it was to see the world support this humanitarian mission, for all its faults. May you live a long life.
Additionally a Pfizer report dated Aug 2022 showed the company observed 1.6 million adverse events covering nearly every organ system:
•73,542 vascular disorders •696,508 nervous system disorders •61,518 eye disorders •47,000 ear disorders •225,000 skin and tissue disorders •178,000 reproductive disorders •190,000 respiratory disorders •77,000 psychiatric disorders •127,000 cardiac disorders •100,000 blood disorders •3,711 tumors
This company has been fined billions for their shady practices. Not sure why anyone would trust their data. Plenty of information available about how dodgy their initial trials were conducted and reported for anyone who cares to look.
Huge incentives to hospitals for reporting any deaths as covid (around $30k per person if I remember correctly), and huge disincentives to report adverse events (threat of revoking medical license, difficult reporting procedure, biased doctors etc). As a result, the stats are skewed extremely in favor of vaccination.
Add into the mix lockdowns causing huge collateral damage. While you pat yourself on the back for protecting your family, it is entirely plausible that the vaccination campaign along with the lockdowns caused more deaths than they actually saved. Reports from John's Hopkins and the Fraser Institute found this to be true.
Good intentions are well and good, and I'm glad that you're proud of your achievements. Next time I hope there's more humility amongst proponents of mRNA vaccines and lockdowns, and that they consider the possibility that they could be wrong, and their actions may actually cause more damage than if they did nothing at all. Humility was missing.
I'm not sure the origin story mattered a whole lot along the way, other than being a useful political distraction. I don't think it informed personal or medical behaviour.
Of course discussions around vaccines, masks, social distancing etc did have a huge impact on personal behaviours, so those are far more impactful both than and in hindsight.
The different strategies applied, the messaging, the outcomes, from New Zealand to Sweden and everything in-between will be disected by anthropogists for decades to come.
The actual origin is a red-herring, it really doesn't matter. Viruses come from lots of places. We can't prevent that. What we can control is our response. As long as our first question is "who to blame" our outcomes will be similar, or worse, the next time around.
Can you agree that, if it was generated by human activity that we can control, it'd be critical to know this and spread information about it widely?
Given that I don't think we -can- control human behavior, there are good labs, there are bad labs, etc, I think the ability to -respond- I paramount. While the origin is interesting in an historical way, lessons from the response will be more useful going forwards.
We need to respond in a way that is independent of origin. That will ultimately lead to better outcomes, and incidentally reduce the risk of bio-terrorism.
[Aside - if it was lab grown I don't think it was released on purpose (it wouldn't have been released locally). Which means some sort of failure in the safety protocols, which likely means human error. General discussion on that topic I useless except for a tiny sliver of people doing that work. I'm not sure discussing it on social media really achieves anything. ]
And perhaps the people that did that shouldn't be in charge of how to handle the pandemic and shouldn't be in charge of determining how the pandemic started?
It looks a lot worse than suspicious.
But the source of the virus remains less important to the folk that died from it. They're no less dead because it escaped from a lab than if it came from a wet market.
Responses in every country were different. Which ones were the right ones are valuable lessons moving forward, and anthropologists will be studying that data for decades.
I mean, I'm not trying to be a dick, but ... duh. This has been the primary plot point of a zillion movies for forever.
Oh, and accidents at labs happen more often than you'd like[1]. And the frequency seems to be going up, not down. >> the public absolutely has a right and obligation to participate in.
I'm sure the "public" (by which I assume you mean random people on social media) are not qualified in the slightest to participate in this discussion. If you feel that you have an "obligation" to weigh in, then by all means feel free. No-one is stopping you. It's completely possible to have discussions on lab safety without having to point fingers at a specific incident.
As you point out there's a really strong tension at play here - it's very important to be able to do virus research. Working with viruses is dangerous. It can be made as safe as possible, but it's still dangerous. There is a very fine line here, which is best walked by people highly qualified and working in this space. Given they are the most likely first victims of any accident, I'm sure they are highly motivated to be safe.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
The question then is, does it apply to yourself, or are you special? What knowledge motivates you to do bad things? Do you wish that was hidden from you so you weren't such a harmful person?
This is such a fatalistic and cynical way of looking at the world. It mattered then -- as it matters now -- because we can act on information. Everything that happened after that "window" was not overdetermined.
Don't forget that some people just want to know the truth, and don't like being lied to. I don't think it's a good principle that whenever the truth is used as an excuse for bad things (insofar as "distrust of authority figures" is even a bad thing), it is justified to lie.
>Even today we're still seeing thousands die from what may very well be a conspiracy theory.
And how many past and future deaths can be attributed to the lack of trust caused by trying to cover up the truth? Many more, I'd wager. There's a crucial irony in trying to maintain trust by hiding the truth. Many people just can't or don't want to understand this.
A bear charging at you is dangerous. Talking is not.
> We’re building a community of doctors and patients affected by medical tyranny. Our goal is to rebuild the sacred trust between the medical community and those they serve.
Sure but looking at just one of the GHP people (Molly Rutherford) shows a Twitter timeline promoting conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers, Epoch Times, anti-LGBTQ, etc. It doesn't engender much confidence in her reliability as a narrator.
https://unsw.press/books/dark-winter/
Looking forward to reading Pandoras Gamble by Alison Young next
https://www.amazon.com.au/Pandoras-Gamble-Leaks-Pandemics-Wo...
These conspiracy theories lead to a marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent in the US, and generally fed into the wet dream fantasies of western warlords looking for any excuse to enter that eternal war against Eastasia.
Any time that anything relating to information around Wuhan labs was released, there was a massive flood of how the "lab leak" theories were right all along, and China is, in fact, trying to kill us all. This is the sort of virulent hatred that no social media company wants to help propagate.
Not sure what crazy publications you all were reading.
I don’t recall a single instance of this. A year ago, people were saying on this site and elsewhere was that the issue was conflating “lab leak” with “intentionally engineered”. A year before that, people argued that the issue was conflating “lab leak” with “leaked from WIV”, when WIV was established in that location due to the prevalence of novel coronaviruses in the region.
The goalposts keep moving.
I saw the birth of r/WuhanFlu and other related subreddits that were created in early 2020, and accusations of it being a bioweapon were there from the start, and once someone looked up "Wuhan" on Google Maps and saw the virology institute, people were saying it was a lab leak.
> China and the WHO intentionally developing and deploying bio-weapons as a means of global population control
This is what I mean about moving goalposts - these two theories might both assert that it was a bioweapon, but they are otherwise very different.
It totally feels orchestrated. Someone somewhere in the US establishment needed an excuse to not discuss about the lab leak theories. So the attacks on people of Asian descent turned out to be the perfect excuse. That's what it comes across to me as an observer of US politics. There is literally no reason for censoring information on discussion of a lab leak that did not even happen on US soil but in Wuhan. If you can discuss Russia, 9/11, terror attacks in various parts of the globe, without US citizens going bonkers and attacking people of those races, I am pretty sure discussing lab leak theory would not piss US citizens off that much. But bring in race attacks angle and you have the people by your side asking for and justifying censorship.
Let me ask you another question: How do you think people in Asia discussed the COVID pandemic? Did people in China not question their own government (CCP) and its role in the pandemic? How sure are you that they all believed that the virus did not come from the Wuhan lab but, as per CCP, came from the West?
Quoting https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/03/03/anti-russia...
As Putin’s invasion of Ukraine intensifies, some Russian-themed businesses and Russian Americans in the United States are suddenly getting a frosty reception — and in a few cases, experiencing outright hostility. A Russian restaurant in Washington, D.C., called Russia House, was vandalized and the owner indicated that he thought anti-Russian sentiment might be to blame. Some Russian Americans say their children are being bullied at school.
“Americans were encouraged to sympathize with the people of Russia rather than the government. And that seems to me to be what is really different from what we’re seeing now, where you see people at protests with signs saying all Russians are to blame for Putin’s aggression,” he said.
Thulien pointed to another incident in which the parents of a close friend, a couple in their 80s, had their car scratched and vandalized overnight this week.
Also note that in the context of the US culture war, Russia is seen as an ally against the 'woke left', leading to the bizarre situation where Putin himself made references to Harry Potter author JK Rowling in a speech about the invasion of another sovereign country. This might shield Russians against at least some antagonism from that part of the political spectrum.
When Russians complain they're being victimised, it might behold you to consider that "Russian" is pretty much not an identifiable group amongst the wide range of eastern Europeans who have immigrated - including Ukrainians.
So when Russians complain they're being mistreated, is worth asking what they were doing at the time. Because it tends to be vocally supporting the Russian invasion[1] or the whole idea of it is being straight up invented and pushed by Kremlin propaganda agents[2].
[1] https://www.rferl.org/a/germany-pro-russia-rallies-discrimin...
[2] https://time.com/6257372/russia-ukraine-war-disinformation/
Claims of an anti-Russian bias or set of hate crimes is literal Kremlin propaganda which amongst other things was used to justify the Ukraine invasion, the South Ossetia invasion in Georgia, and has been a general talking point as to why Russia should consider invading many other of its neighbours.
Wuhan was hit by strain B in December. Strain A, original virus, was released about 2 months before that. Where it was for 2 months?
I am pretty sure 9/11 - War on Terror saw a rise in aggression of muslim looking people even though it concerned less people than covid did.
You're pretending there was no such thing as people on TV blaming it on people eating "bat soup" and stuff like that.
When lab leak hypotheses were able to rise above the conspiracy theories thanks to reasonable argumentation, it was finally heard. At first only on HN, thanks to which I first gave credence to the hypothesis and now you here you have it in mainstream media. It all takes time and debate, it's normal.
The only conspiracy I see is from people, whether in the state apparatus or the scientific community that really did not want people to look too much into Gain OF Function research. I think the existence of such research and democratic control over is the debate now worth having.
And what does it have to do with State censorship of information? The State has no societal relationships (like grandpa/grandma/brother/sister/husband/wife/son/daughter etc) that can pressure it to shutdown flow of information. We are talking about State apparatus censoring information here. With Big Tech actively aiding it.
> You're pretending there was no such thing as people on TV blaming it on people eating "bat soup" and stuff like that.
I am not pretending anything. Also people blaming people eating "bat soup" has nothing to do with lab leak theory. Both are totally different issues altogether. I don't see how they are related?
> At first only on HN, thanks to which I first gave credence to the hypothesis and now you here you have it in mainstream media.
Many of us knew it from the very beginning once the censorship started that it has to do with lab leak. The only ones interested in suppressing information are the ones who have something to hide. Age old adage.
> It all takes time and debate, it's normal.
No it is not normal. Even post 9/11 no conversation was censored in US media. Even conspiracy theories were not snubbed or wiped off. Censorship was rampant only post COVID. It only tells me, as an observer of US politics, that the people high up in the US establishment, who had a stake in the Wuhan lab, had something really nasty to hide.
> The only conspiracy I see is from people, whether in the state apparatus or the scientific community that really did not want people to look too much into Gain OF Function research. I think the existence of such research and democratic control over is the debate now worth having.
Exactly. But having a debate now is mostly useless anyways. Whatever window of opportunity we had to investigate lab leak theory is now long gone. All the actors who wanted to cover their tracks have now had enough time to do so. So even if you are able to prove that lab leak did occur (to some degree) it won't lead to any indictments. And with an authoritarian CCP, good luck getting any leads directly from the labs itself.
Most post COVID conspiracy theories have actually come true. Be it mask mandates, lockdowns, GoF, harmful vaccine side effects or lab leak theories. In a couple of years we will have even more information about why information was censored and who were behind this censorship. Such things cannot be hidden for long. That's a given. But what we lose out now on is the scale of the things that went on behind the scenes. Now that these nefarious actors have had enough time to clean their evidence, even if you find any evidence it would be really weak leading to no indictments/charges forget prosecutions and convictions.
No true. 9/11 was a nearly perfect military industrial play and no one could publicly question the US actions post the event. It felt like a lockstep war machine with vengeance at an all time high. You must’ve not lived through it.
Look up 9/11 Truthers movement and "Bush Did It!" to get an idea of the conspiracy theories that emerged right after 9/11. The "Bush Did It!" rallies took place in September 2002, just 1 year after 9/11.
Personally I don't believe in the 9/11 Truthers movement but I wouldn't even know about it if COVID level censorship was adopted back in 2001. Mainstream media was very different back then. Compared to what it has devolved into now.
You're remembering things through rose-colored glasses. Ellen DeGeneres and Laura Dern, Bill Maher and the Dixie Chicks can tell stories of what happened in the 90s and 2000s when you went against the mainstream. In fact, people were cancelled over the silliest things (remember nipplegate?). Government censorship was also alive and well: Under the Bush junior administration, NASA and EPA scientists were not allowed to use the phrase 'global warming'.
> Also people blaming people eating "bat soup" has nothing to do with lab leak theory. Both are totally different issues altogether. I don't see how they are related?
Because the bat soup people where the first one to jump on the lab-leak theory. That did not help the cause. We use network of trust to digest information. I don't have no trust in people saying crazy stuff even though they might sometimes be right.
> Exactly. But having a debate now is mostly useless anyways. Whatever window of opportunity we had to investigate lab leak theory is now long gone. All the actors who wanted to cover their tracks have now had enough time to do so. So even if you are able to prove that lab leak did occur (to some degree) it won't lead to any indictments. And with an authoritarian CCP, good luck getting any leads directly from the labs itself.
I don't agree. It didn't matter more at the time to know if it was a lab-leak or not, situation had to be handled. Now that there's less urgency maybe we can investigate the dark corners and do something about it so it won't happen again. It m atters more than ever.
> Most post COVID conspiracy theories have actually come true. Be it mask mandates, lockdowns, GoF, harmful vaccine side effects or lab leak theories
How are mask mandates and lockdowns conspiracists predictions turned true... ? The real conspiracy was not telling people they should wear masks to protect others because there wasn't enought for everybody. How was lockdown a conspiracy rather that government trying to pretend they were doing something ? I don't think the economy benefited fromt that\
Harmful vaccine side effects ? What about getting covid side-effects ? Listen you would have caught it no matter what and it would probably be worse. The discrepancy between deaths of vaccinated and unvaccinated people should tell you much.
GOF was known before too, it just wasn't in the public eye
And yet there was no censorship on conspiracy theories about the CIA being behind 9/11, for instance.
In contrast to the lab leak theory which made the front page more than once, was actually the was much more heavily "censored".
> At the time the US had a president that routinely used race-baiting as a divisive political technique
What exactly did the US President, at that time, say specifically that exacerbated attacks on Asians, after breakout of COVID, and more importantly could be used as a justification for Worldwide censorship of lab leak theory? Don't forget that the lab leak theory was being suppressed on behest of the US Government by Big Tech and that suppression of information was not limited to just the US but entire World. As far as I remember, Trump was only the President of USA. He wasn't the President of the World. So you can't blame Trump if Big Tech is doing a Worldwide censorship of lab leak theory. I don't buy that argument at all.
The lab leak theory and weaponization theories were never squelched. The right wing in this country fantasizes that their viewpoints are marginalized while having their most extreme viewpoints broadcast on the top watched news programs in history. The idea that the lab theories were squelched was floated by those very same programs as part of their promotional formula.
This is at least as true now and in 2015
In any case, the most alarming aspect of the lab leak hypothesis is that gain-of-function research is STILL being done, and that the same thing could happen AGAIN. Since this risks creating another pandemic, suppressing the story because of concerns about street crime is very misguided.
I never thought the leak was intentional though.
This right here is an example of why we can’t have reasoned discussion around the topic.
You can explain one of the many reasons why gain of function research is necessary: anticipating next year’s version of the flu, designing drugs and vaccines such that resistance mutations reduce evolutionary fitness.
You can explain how it is done: lots of computational simulations, and some benchtop with results feeding back into computational methods.
You can explain some of the safeguards in place: BSL 3/4 facilities, regulatory / institutional oversight, security services, etc.
And then someone will stand up on a chair and yell “SUPER VIRUS!”
Anyway from my perspective, the “lab leak” theory tends to be people pushing an unsubstantiated theory to either (1) blame China for an “act of god/nature” or (2) argue for a moratorium on infectious disease / vaccine / therapeutic research.
Please note that no one here is calling you a racist. But I think calling parts of your comment uninformed or misinformed is fair game for discussion.
For me it's just common sense. It probably came from the coronavirus lab with a bad safety record it popped up next to. Duh. And I "push" it because I value the truth and want to live in a rational society where the truth isn't gamed for emotional or political reasons. And that's probably the same for most of us.
> Duh
This is the kind of argument one makes when they don't have an argument
- They study novel coronaviruses - They sampled the same regions where the closest relatives to the virus were found - They applied to put a furin cleavage site in a coronavirus before the pandemic - They were cited in diplomatic cables for poor safety standards - The database containing records of the viral sequences was taken down right before the pandemic - A scientist working at the lab at the time of the origin disappeared - A scientist who patented a coronavirus vaccine a few months into the pandemic "jumped off the roof"?
Does a lab accident not immediately jump out as the obvious leading possibility to you?
So, 'things happened before' are heavily tilted towards 'nature did it' in any case.
https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/207501This is why "common sense" is very often wrong and we have to refer to data instead. You're making assumptions that are very wrong.
The wet market was over 50,000 square metres in size and one of the largest in China. The idea that there are hundreds or millions of these things is completely backwards.
The conditions were unsanitary, animals were slaughtered on site, and large numbers of wild animals were sold.
This is exactly the sort of place you'd expect a zoonotic spillover event to occur. It was flagged beforehand as a danger site.
It's not impossible that it could have been a lab leak, but consider that this market had hundreds of thousands of animals being kept, slaughtered and sold, in unsanitary conditions, shitting and pissing on each other, bleeding everywhere and biting humans and each other.
Now compare that to a secure biolab holding a small number of samples whilst following biosecure protocols. Even if they weren't perfect, which environment provides the best chance of a spillover event?
And sure, the wuhan market is a great place for a zoonotic spillover to occur, but any wet market would be, so the wuhan market in particular isn't the exact place you would expect. In fact I would expect it to occur at a market much closer to where the most similar viruses were found.
However, since the wuhan market is the enormous unsanitary market near the novel coronavirus lab, it is the exact place I would expect the first super spreader event to occur following a leak at that lab.
Can such contagious virus as SARS-CoV-2 cross the distance between lab in Wuhan and wet market in Wuhan in few days? Of course. In few months? No way.
It's unfortunate in so many way - admit a mistake was made, acknowledge the problem, and clean it up is so much more respectful of everybody's time and resources. Between Asian traditions of saving face, and US traditions of lawyers suing anything that moves, that approach never stood a chance of course.
Also, Russian media informed about spike of pneumonia cases in November 2019[1].
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7813667/
Note: This page below crashes my browser (Firefox at Fedora Linux) even when requested from Wayback archive. Beware!
[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20191119113457/https://www.1tv.ru...
If someone went to Novosibirsk to check situation after blast at BSL4 lab "Vector", then (IMHO!) he may contracted the virus and spreaded it in USA after return, which (IMHO!) explains why USA three letter agency covers that blast.
It would be an extraordinarily rare and noteworthy event in human history. The bar to prove that it happened to cause COVID is very high and the direct evidence (not circumstantial) for it is so far very low.
https://twitter.com/emilyakopp/status/1620884457032155136?t=...
This is what the “lab leak” theory is. It’s why every conversation of lab leak is tied up with comments about gain of function, etc.
The interesting thing about SARS-COV-2 is that it can infect humans and cause illness (unlike the vast majority of known viruses). When people talk about the origin of the pandemic, it is the origin of this property specifically that they mean. The lab leak theory is that this property originated in a lab.
Letting viruses evolve in-vivo is the problem especially when they are so viral.
There needs to be limitations on what R is allowed to be produced in-vivo, even more so because calculating the risk of virality of the outbreak is trivial if in-vitro studies are done.
And why are you worried about humanized mice and not human cell lines like HEK or CALU? Why not primary cells or organoids? Somewhere the “Outbreak” monkey is crying.
I admit that I am being a bit snarky and passive aggressive here; but for the past few years I have watched people butcher bioscience in online discussions. Imagine being a classically trained pianist and having to watch people misattribute all of Mozart’s work to Brahms. It is enough to drive anyone mad.
I mean it sucks if it hurts your career or impacts your profession, but highly dangerous work needs to be reviewed and banned if need be!
Humanity > Your personal career
Temper this proposed modest benefit with the potential cost in terms of human adapted viruses being accidentially/intentionally released in the wild given the vagaries of both biolab security protocols in the labs accross the world conducting this kind of research and individual human psychology makes the justification of such research a pretty hard sell.
None of these require gain of function research.
> You can explain some of the safeguards in place: BSL 3/4 facilities, regulatory / institutional oversight, security services, etc.
All of these have a long history of failures [1,2]. And those are just the acknowledged, some have actually been covered up [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
[2] https://www.amazon.ca/Pandoras-Gamble-Leaks-Pandemics-World/...
[3] https://health.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2023-04-25/d...
Please elaborate on this. How should I go about anticipating which mutations in which genes / protein will result in resistance to a candidate therapy / molecule / mechanism that I am considering advancing into phase 1 trials?
If this research indeed caused the pandemic (and might cause more), do those things make the juice worth the squeeze?
A chance at a better flu vaccine doesn't seem like enough reward for what we all went through.
A few problems with this. First modifying wild animal viruses to be infectious towards humans is different than modifying human viruses to model potential mutations. Modifying animal viruses to be infectious towards humans has done nothing but cause risks. Despite this research being conducted for almost a decade it has yet to predict or prevent any pandemic and probably started this one.
Additionally the idea that modifying animal viruses to easily transmit towards humans will allow us to develop vaccines is absurd. You can't test a vaccine that is not circulating in humans, so trails can not start until the pandemic has already started.
So yes, there should be moratorium on research that modifies infectious diseases! The public has a right to consent on whether such research is worth the risks.
Especially if done near population centers.
See any issues there?
Where? Can you back this up with clear evidence? And assuming this claim isn't simply made up, in what universe would it be a good strategy to address a USA specific problem by systematically and globally destroying the credibility of the entire scientific, media and public health establishment? The solution to violence is police; no one in their right mind would decide the best solution to this would be to establish a global conspiracy.
No, the above is all retroactive justification. We have the emails from the virologists as they planned the letter that claimed it was all a conspiracy theory. They weren't motivated by violent attacks. They were worried about being blamed for it, and that maybe it'd be harder to fund work in China in future. They say that, in writing.
Why? Because China was behind on vaccine development, and when they finally produced on it was not only late, but barely functional.
Late is one thing - if you release a bioweapon, it's far too suspicious to release a co-developed vaccine simultaneously.
But ineffective?
When it got out the WHO was parroting China's talking points from day one - it's not airborne, that's just a racist conspiracy. It was nuts.
And from the same group that was ignoring the big red flags from Taiwan's early warning system (Taiwan, who incidentally is refused membership as part of the world's China appeasement policy).
Then China shutdown domestic travel from Wuhan, while still allowing it internationally.
They didn't develop it as a bioweapon - but that did not stop them from weaponising it after the fact.
Lie[0]:
> On April 21, Ferguson provided an “update” to his April 5 column in which he acknowledged, “Data from sensors tracking actual flight paths would seem to indicate that no flights left from Wuhan itself to other countries in the world after January 23.”
[0] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/trumps-flawed-china-travel...
The biggest difference was that we didn't have someone like Gro Harlem Bruntlant [1] to competently handle the WHO's response [2] and call them out for their bullshit.
Both China and Taiwan looked at the SARS outbreak, and made efforts to prevent it from happening again.
Taiwan set up a robust early warning system in order to detect and contain such outbreaks in the future.
China on the other hand, set out to inject themselves into the WHO to protect themselves from future embarrassment [3].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro_Harlem_Brundtland
[2] - https://www.who.int/news/item/05-07-2003-sars-outbreak-conta...
It should be noted that the statistics don't support the media narrative and there was no wave of white supremacist attacks on Asians.
Here are the stats from New York ("Arrest Statistics by Bias Motivation"): https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/reports-analysis/hate-cr...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/21/asian-americ...
+Anti-Asian 2019: 1
Anti-Asian 2020: 27
Anti-Asian 2021: 131
*+ Edit: Added 2019 as suggested below
Also worth to know that anti-asian hate was also a narrative pushed by the CPC to label things like supporting Hong Kong democracy protests or criticizing uighur genocide as "anti-asian hate", which happened after the CPC noticed the effectiveness of BLM protests in sowing us discord (mid-2020) so to trust any stats post 2020 it would at least need to segregate the two use cases.
Anti-Asian 2019: 0.2%
Anti-Asian 2020: 10%
Anti-Asian 2021: 25%
EDIT: Regarding an uptick in anti-jewish etc.
Anti-Jewish 2019: 57%
Anti-Jewish 2020: 43%
Anti-Jewish 2021: 37%
> hate crime
These are not the same thing and especially when comparing over time you need to take into account how the definitions for the categories themselves change.
2019 is the pre-covid default state.
2020 is when covid rhetoric was hot.
2021 is Vaccines and Biden is president
2019 stats are in the archive at the bottom of the page. I’d pull them but on a phone.
2021 values could be the result of 2020's rhetoric.
BLACK: 11 (55%)
WHITE HISPANIC: 5 (25%)
BLACK HISPANIC: 2 (10%)
WHITE: 2 (10%)
Total: 20
2021:
BLACK: 31 (53%)
HISPANIC: 15 (26%)
WHITE: 7 (12%)
ASIAN / PACIFIC ISLANDER: 5 (8%)
UNKNOWN: 1 (2%)
Total: 59
2022:
BLACK: 39 (49%)
WHITE HISPANIC: 20 (25%)
WHITE: 17 (22%)
ASIAN / PACIFIC ISLANDER: 2 (3%)
BLACK HISPANIC: 1 (1%)
Total: 79
I hope one day we can look back at this period and think about how to better critically think about these things without applying personal biases and fears to a whole population.
> A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like, "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people." (spoiler alert: it was both)
Did you have some extra context there? Or do you just assume that anyone criticizing the ccp is also criticizing chinese people? Because I feel like that's a reasonable stance towards any nation.
It seems like sometimes people aggressively read between the lines (probably because of real past experiences with shitty people), and it makes it so that reasonable people now can't express reasonable ideas and have other people understand what they're actually saying.
I especially notice this in online forums where some topics have been discussed in depth by a subset of the population. Through all that discussion, they've basically invented a whole field of study, and turned everyday phrases into jargon with unintuitive subtext.
Then someone new comes along, says something that seems completely innocuous, and the community jumps on them for the subtext that they're not even aware exists.
This is a reasonable thing to say. I think mainland Chinese are oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party, and I hope I live to see the end of this cruel regime.
'Dog-whistling', meaning they don't overtly say it and you infer that they mean it. If they make it overt such that it doesn't need to be inferred, they're not longer dog whistling.
How do you know your inference is correct and that is their intent? How can you be sure that wasn't just an impression given to you by [social] media? The CCP has a vested interest in conflating any criticism of itself or the PRC generally with racist criticism of all Asians. They also say that criticism of their Uyghur genocide is dog whistling anti-Asian racism. The CCP say this of anything that criticizes them, and their narratives do not stop dead at their borders. I've heard it echoed by some of my coworkers, PRC nationals working in America, and even western media that might not endorse such narratives will still give voice to consideration of those narratives.
Now allow me to be frank; during the supposed surge of anti-Asian hatred ostensibly motivated by Trump and perpetrated by white nationalists, much of anti-Asian crimes that were being reported had been perpetrated by African Americans. It was probably crime motivated by class/social/economic inequality, and insofar as it disproportionately targeted Asian Americans at all (rather than selective reporting merely creating that appearance) it probably had nothing to do with any politician's covid rhetoric and was instead was an artifact of geographic proximity and inequality in policing (Asian American neighborhoods receive less protection from the police, making Asian Americans an easier target for crime.) In this last regard, you can easily show that racism against Asian Americans played a role, but such inequalities in policing are problems that go back many generations and have little if anything to do with covid.
The above commenter’s experiences will ring true for many Chinese living in the US, because we are the ones who experience and are impacted by sinophobia (this can also extend to other E/SEA diaspora to an extent). Whereas the commenters claiming that we’re biased or influenced by propaganda, as if they are uniquely exempt from such things, are not.
Criticisms of the Cuban government are absolutely independent of criticisms of individual Cubans like myself. If another Cuban person felt that they were being individually criticized when other people criticize Cuba, I'd tell them they need to learn to distinguish between the two - it's not the responsibility of the public to avoid any criticism of the Cuban government. This isn't an attempt to "deflect the discussion", it's using another country as an example to make it clear that this is a distinction we're perfectly capable of making for other ethnic group.
For that matter, sincere requests for clarification are not immediately followed by attempts to dismiss the underlying concern as invalid. This inherently makes the request insincere.
Remember, allegations of "dog-whistles" are really just saying "I'm assuming other people are implying XYZ." My conservative relatives think words like "diversity" or "inclusion" are dog-whistles for anti-white discrimination. They're earnest when they say the feel attacked, but that's entirely on account of their own assumptions and does not indicate any actual racism. If doom2 wants to make point, they should actually explain what they witnessed that was bigoted or hateful - don't just allege "dog-whistling" and do nothing to substantiate that claim.
Add to that that there are many Russians publicly supporting the war and/or their government. The same goes for the Chinese and for corona specifically you had a lot of them travelling the world while the virus spread was heating up.
Ultimately, humans are pattern seeking animals and if you fit into a pattern of shitty people you better make sure that you make it clear you are not one of them. It would be better if people could be more discerning but I'd rather take this than not having any pushback for countries and other groups of people misbehaving.
I don't think we've worked out a better way to deal with this yet, and it will always be a factor of the way populations are broadly responsible for their governments in democracies and even semi-democracies.
There are many white people being racist towards white people, should I give all white people the cold shoulder so one day it will end racism?
I think it is unkind to treat people in a punitive manner for something that is beyond that individual person.
> you fit into a pattern of shitty people
What an awful thing to say to another person
Annual for 2019: 1 out of 420
Annual for 2020: 27 out of 265
Is that not enough of a percentage increase for you? Edit: Apologies for not seeing the other users' replies who have already made this point.
You’re conflating hate crime with white on everyone else hate crime and the law (and stats) don't reflect that
You went as far as to add those words, which is fascinating to say the least
Meanwhile they ignore all the near misses the US seems to have with anthrax and smallpox being misplaced in US labs every year lol.
The average person was much more worried about the potential harm to millions of citizens than a much smaller uptick in one particular sector. It's of paramount importance that we don't repeat the mistakes that led to the pandemic in the first place. The only way we can do that is getting to the bottom of what happened.
If "possible Asian hate crimes" was the best excuse that the censorship industrial complex could come up with, then it is clear to me that any excuse would have done, and the conclusions I draw is that the suppression was 100% politically motivated. I want to know who was involved in making the decision to suppress, and to what ends they were trying to shape public opinion. At the minimum I want to know who I should be working to vote out of office.
How can I know who to vote for when we're normalizing lying as a justifiable policy up and down the chain of government communication and mass media?
Also important though is it never really went away. For all the talk of censorship and suppression the possibility of a lab leak never left the investigation. It's also a very difficult thing to investigate without access to the labs to see what strains they were working on looked like which we still don't have afaik. It's been a process of eliminating other possiblities to some extent as other vectors that could be looked into were and turned out to be less likely.
Sort of true -- but only because you can't kill the idea, the need to find the cause of the pandemic to avoid a repeat.
This is cold comfort to the people who were getting banned had their accounts cancelled for suggesting things that turned out to be actually true.
There's was a lot of collateral damage here, all in the name of... well I'm not sure. Trust is hard to build, and once broken takes a long time to regain.
The point is, as a society we're heading in the wrong direction. Freedom of speech is becoming freedom for those who keep their mouths shut.
Only by those wishing to shutdown legitimate discussion.
So back to the original question. Who was behind trying to change the narrative.
Dr. Fauci’s emails have shown he orchestrated deceiving the public. I’m not sure that is sufficient to explain the total media backlash against a lab-leak.
Few people want war with China. But I know of plenty that think China should be footing the bill and paying the entire world damages for their incompetence (or malice) in mishandling their bioweapon.
Communists have no integrity. ChiComs blamed the US for the virus, which is ironic, since the NIH knowingly or unwittingly (incompetence) funded it through Eco Health Alliance.
Extremely dubious.
Your first paragraph was on point. Then you descend into ideologically driven speculation. You also seem to not grasp the basic chronology of how the early pro-China slant of the WHO plays into the whole gestalt. And overlook the fact that social media companies are filled with government workers who are paid to manipulate (censor) views that don’t align with those of the government, a government who in this case funded the research that caused the pandemic.
How did it become taboo to discuss the pros and cons of a specific vaccine or the complex geopolitical background of the Russo-Ukrainian war?
An ad-hoc coalition of political parties, NGOs, activists and journalists has hijacked public discourse, are manufacturing an official narrative and selling it as as unassailable truth while bullying and mobbing any dissenters.
In China some people must have been amazed how the US was arranging such a thorough cover-up all by themselves.
You hit the nail on the head.
> In China some people must have been amazed how the US was arranging such a thorough cover-up all by themselves.
Exactly. Even in India we were amazed by the cover-up. I am pretty sure every Asian country knew it was a cover-up. The very first reports on Coronavirus I came across was not even in the media. It was on a Korean Youtuber who posted regular video updates on the virus leak in China even before the news was picked up in the West. He was warning how CCP was arresting scientists who put out information about the virus and even sharing videos of doctors who had recorded themselves warning about the virus itself (one of the first few who treated patients of the virus and fell sick themselves). I can't, for the life of me, find that channel on Youtube anymore. But yeah there was, and still is, a lot of censorship aided and abetted by Big Tech.
The death of the doctor was widely reported on throughout the pandemic[0][1][2].
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/06/whistleblower-...
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
I think this is for a few reasons; America is a [the?] global hegemon; so American domestic politics have some earnest global relevance. But more than that; reporting one country's news is more efficient than reporting N countries' news. Fewer stories means fewer writers to pay, less research and investigation to do, etc. Furthermore people have an appetite for news, but a finite appetite; sate people with news about America and you'll have them thinking less about local issues. Therefore, news organizations in other countries have both an economic and political incentive to report American news instead of local news. What's more, America encourages this because for America it is a form of soft power to live rent-free in the minds of everybody else.
Point is: when a narrative becomes taboo in American media, that's likely to rub off on the rest of the world. Particularly so in countries where a sizeable portion of the population consume at least some English-language media, participate on English-language forums, etc.
Sure, the overall narrative was that this is just an unproven theory and nothing more, but it was out there, people were discussing probabilities of some lab employees error who went to nearby wet market afterwards.
I am not saying this didn't happen in scientific community, I don't follow them closely enough to claim that. I recall few cases in Europe where paranoid scientists were claiming this, on top of quite a few other crank theories about various topics, also ie pushing hard for high doses of Ivermectin, dismissing all vaccinations etc. Understandably, with just throwing around various claims without backing them up with facts, they were not received well in community.
According to journalist Paul Thacker, the Lancet letter "helped to guide almost a year of reporting, as journalists helped to amplify Daszak’s message and to silence scientific and public debate." This affected reporting on the origins of the virus, "characterising the lab leak theory as unworthy of serious consideration".
In many ways, it makes sense to try to get the entire population on board with a single narrative, in order to have a coherent response to an emerging situation. On the other hand, it opens the doors to corruption by leaving those in charge with no credible voices willing to criticize or draw attention to the holes in that narrative.
That just sounds like an unfounded conspiracy theory.
More likely is that extreme statements on social media generate more reactions, which is more engagement, so they get more traction in feeds because that is what social media is optimised to do, irrespective of what the content is.
And these nutjobs routinely invoked the term "lab leak", which organically led to an association in most people's minds between the term "lab leak" and crazy conspiracy theories.
It's interesting that this social media promoting action was so coordinated that it is happening on this very thread in Hacker News.
Most of us were open to the idea of a lab leak but the disinformation was so hard around the topic that sensible people had to push back and the loser was the legitimate 'theory' that a lab leak was a possible source.
This is still a theory btw and not proven.
In times of crisis a large fraction of the population will latch on to authoritarianism. This is universally true, and there are many historical and contemporary examples. The world is messy and complicated and people desperately want simple answers. People will cheer on the collapse of hard-won civil rights and the advent of military rule if they believe it's necessary for the greater good. Thankfully it didn't come to this during covid. But not because there was an invisible line in the sand that nobody dared to cross. People were not held in check by their principles, covid just didn't "necessitate" an even harsher response.
This is why many people are so upset about the censorship surrounding the lab leak theory. They got a rude awakening. One, that fundamental rights like free speech can curbed very effectively, and two, that it's the citizenry itself that demands their rights be taken away. It's scary to be suddenly robbed of naïve notions about rights and process and governance.
GP is absolutely correct - people reacted negatively (and remind that someone not liking what you say does not mean you are censored) because people (including now in this thread) are saying that there is 'definite proof of lab leak' when that is just bull?
Untrue, from memory, but what's the use in anecdotes. Other users have shared links.
The idea of it being an accidental release though was discussed a lot; it merely lacked strong evidence (no doubt partly due to Chinese obfuscation) to take pole position against the meat markets theory.
Additionally there was definitely a ridiculous and likely harmful "anti-racist" thrust by the usual censorious suspects, including those you mention that tried to control conversation, as they do.
Unfortunately the merging of the two theories at the time (which I think is continued here by wrongly suggesting the accidental-leak case was "taboo") has never helped clear discussion.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/13/us/coronavirus-made-in-la...
The latest poll from the public opinion fact tank shows that misinformation around the virus is still king, even as fact checkers and public health officials work furiously to dispel it and save American lives.
A total of 23% of adults polled said they believe the virus was created intentionally. This is almost certainly not true, according to the genetic detectives studying the virus’s origins.
The theory that the virus originated in a lab was one repeatedly shared on One America News Network, a far-right channel favored by President Donald Trump.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52224331
From the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, conspiracy theories about the origin and scale of the disease were spread on online platforms.
Among these were the false claim that the virus was part of a Chinese covert biological weapons programme.
The claim that the virus was man-made has been pushed by numerous conspiracy groups on Facebook, obscure Twitter accounts and even found its way on to primetime Russian state TV."
Now what we read is that the virus was man made and the WIV was doing secret military work for the PLA, with the idea being to create a virus and vaccine simultaneously so the attacker controls who survives i.e. a bioweapon. That's the same as what the BBC called a false claim and conspiracy theory.
The reason this investigation was initially done by anonymous people who found each other via backchannels on Twitter is because suppression of this discussion was near total.
In a tabloid, recycling claims that have already quite questionable without any additional evidence (ie. the Mojiang mine stuff is not nearly as cut-and-dry as this article makes it out to be).
To assist: The Times was founded in the 1700s and was the first newspaper in the world to use that name, a name that has been copied many times due to its reputation. In 2004 they switched to a compact paper form of the size used by tabloid papers, but that didn't affect the content or style and didn't make it a "tabloid paper" in the sense you're trying to use here.
I was in China during the outbreak. All western media and healthcare experts had to say about lockdowns was that they were counterproductive and have never been part of the medical playbook. And that it violates civil rights. A month later this seemed to be completely forgotten.
Personally, I believe this is all a function of the states ability to enforce it. It wasn’t possible before, but they found that it was possible now. But it was summarily rejected on principal prior to that.
I followed it all very closely at the time. Tegnall and his mentor stood alone. With the exception of the Great Barrington crew and maybe Ioannidis, all the other so-called experts were loudly and vocally demanding lockdowns as a strategy. Great Barrington meanwhile was viciously attacked, described as fringe, non-consensus, would kill millions etc.
The attempts to rewrite what happened in this whole thread are incredible to witness (not just your post, many others). It was only a few years ago! Our memories aren't that bad! And the internet is full of receipts on this. The idea there was robust academic debate about lockdowns or masks or the lab leak or anything else is a fantasy.
Second, there is no "debate" regarding efficacy of masks and limiting exposure via quarantining. Masking reduces the likelihood of contracting SARS from others, and staying home reduces the spread to others and strain on hospitals. Unsurprisingly, the people attempting to debate this typically had no medical background whatsoever.
Millions died in the US alone, and a non-trivial percentage of them would likely still be alive if our public officials did a better job of respecting the medical professionals and their recommendations.
Oppositions to lockdowns were always about tradeoffs and whether they were worth it. Its just such a boring critique.
My main question still remains, what would your plan have been if we still didnt have a vaccine? From my perspective lockdown supporters got completely bailed out by one of the greatest medical/scientific achievements in human history (developing and deploying an extremely effective vaccine within 1 year).
The only thing lockdowns do is push cases into the future.
Even without vaccination, mortality from covid is significantly lower than it was early in the pandemic.
I also don't think it was any stroke of luck that resulted in vaccines being made quickly. Our scientific establishments correctly devoted their resources to developing vaccines. A lot of us were closely following their development and knew that they were just around the corner. Even without advancements in MRNA technology, other types of vaccines were being made that could prevent the majority of deaths.
heres an article in the NYT about managing vaccine expectations.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coron...
also you argument falls apart when lockdowns (restrictions, npis, whatever you want to call them) continued way beyond vaccine rollout. I was first in line to get vaccinated and im very glad i did, because they promised us that would be a return to normal, but it wasnt for at least a year afterwards and i still havent been given an explanation why.
County / MSA hospital capacities, percent available ICU beds, ventilator use, admission increase rates, deaths, and various other stats were factored into restrictive policy decisions. However, this varies city by city and state by state (I suppose as an effect of federalism).
0. https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
do you see how ridiculous this sounds?
If I could make my car crash proof (me getting vaccinated in this analogy), i would have no issues with people wanting to drive as fast as they like (they already do it anyway).
also, even if vaccines did stop transmission your argument still doesnt make sense. I can protect myself by being vaccinated. I dont give a shit if the person next to me is unvaccinated, im already protected myself. If you decide not to, you are consenting to increased risk.
Also, you’re misreading the article; please review.
Enjoy dying on this hill, Anthony.
I'm just guessing, but an obvious reason would be because the vaccines were not as effective against the new variants? As in, while the vaccines still protected the vaccinated person, they did not effectively prevent spread of the disease, so other ways to do so remained relevant...
The idea we needed to "flatten the curve until a vaccine" was obsolete the day many states closed their completely unused field hospitals. That should have been the indicator that covid wasn't nearly as bad as predicted. That was the day everything should have gone back to complete normal.
These lockdown "experts" never had an end game. They kept pushing the goal posts further and further until they completely lost the plot. That was one of my first objections to such mitigations. There was zero success criteria. Fuckers were just winging it. Which might be okay for some minimally invasive crap like enhanced handwashing protocols but it is absolutely bat-shit insane for something as impacting as lockdowns.
What we did was insane. I still have no idea how people look back, given all the data, and say "yup, what we did made sense". None of it make a single ounce of sense at all...
Fully agreed; saving lives / community responsibility is the noble choice. Unfortunately, many folks in states with poor education (e.g., Texas), would make remarks questioning the actual existence of the virus - even after Trump contracted it and was treated at Walter Reed.
But, work on a vaccine began almost immediately, no? I trusted that shifting the focused lens of US policy toward medical research would produce some incredible results, especially with the private sector pharmaceutical behemoths battling it out, so to speak.
This can be rephrased as "it's just obvious/common sense that lockdowns work" and it's a really common argument, but wrong.
Unfortunately there's nothing really obvious or intuitive about viruses. The Diamond Princess cruise ship showed right at the start that lockdowns would be ineffective. They locked down everyone on the cruise ship the moment the first outbreaks were confirmed, confining them to cabins. In the transmission model that lockdowns rely on that would have ended the outbreak immediately. But it didn't, instead people kept coming down with COVID completely at random, scattered all over the ship. From this two things could be concluded:
1. SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, that is, it can move long distances in gaseous clouds, i.e. through air ducts, by hanging in the air for long periods and other ways that lockdowns can't affect.
2. The clouds must have circulated through the ship, yet not everyone was susceptible.
This wasn't a terribly surprising result because investigators had concluded the same things about SARS-1 back in the day. SARS-1 clouds were able to move within apartment buildings even when everyone was locked down in their apartments, apparently via air ducts.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa032867
Some people pointed out at the time that this would render lockdowns irrelevant right back in March 2020, and were ignored, but time has proven them right. There's no correlation between lockdown severity and results.
You don't need to have a "medical background" to debate lockdowns or masks. The decision to use those should never have been made exclusively by people with "medical backgrounds". It isn't their job. Just because the "medical people" say it's gonna work, doesn't mean it is worth the cost to society. And it isn't at all the place of people with "medical backgrounds" to figure out what those costs are and if they are worth it...
"Experts" shouldn't be decision-makers. They should only inform decision-makers. A good decision-maker should take input from everybody who will be impacted. This was never done at all. Had it been done openenly and transparently we'd never have done lockdowns, school closures or anything else. Such things are completely insane no matter how much "medical experts" suggest to use them.
You’re right; I’m really glad I polled thousands of fellow employees before forcing multifactor auth, or that time I chatted with a sysadmin to make sure they really did mean to open RDP on a public server before taking it offline.
Sarcasm aside, in a time of a medical emergency, it is the job of medical professionals to make decisions, because public safety supersedes individual freedoms. It’s why we have speed limits. It’s why you have to wear a seatbelt. It’s why you can’t shoot fireworks off during a drought. It’s why products are restricted from being sold. The concept is fundamentally the same.
It’s also the same reason I’m glad cybersecurity policy, strategy, and operations are not a truly democratic process.
This might be true for like the first week or two of march but after that... the response should absolutely not be solely in the hands of nothing but "medical experts". Those people were never elected, are not accountable at all for their actions, and were granted virtually unlimited control. That is what we call a dictatorship.
I would much, much rather have a diverse party of people calling the shots and not just one very specific niche class of "expert". Without a diverse set of people involved you'll wind up where we got... an extremely myopic fixation on exactly one single respiratory virus for two+ years to the complete disregard for the damage it caused to our children and communities.
I used to think technocracy would be awesome. What better than to have a bunch of experts doing things "the right way". But covid opened my eyes to how incredibly bad of an idea that is. Experts are only expert on one specific thing. All their advice and mandates are made through that narrow lens.
> You’re right; I’m really glad I polled thousands of fellow employees before forcing multifactor auth, or that time I chatted with a sysadmin to make sure they really did mean to open RDP on a public server before taking it offline.
But you also chatted with business people to get insight into the costs of forcing multifactor auth on people would be worth the security gains? Right? Because forcing 2FA is absolutely not something a security expert gets to decide. A good security expert would realize they are an advisor and not the person calling the shots. They know their role is to outline "what would happen if we did blah blah" and then let the business people know the pros and cons so said business people can make a decision. The business people, if they are any good, realize that there are multiple often conflicting requirements and have the hard work of deciding what the right tradeoffs to make are. Experts don't get to decide those tradeoffs at all...
I mean, could you imagine if the only input you got for a product, say a car seat, was just from a bunch of lawyers? The product would be absolutely lawsuit proof but I bet it would suck as a car seat.
This wasn't the case, and to say so is a blatant misrepresentation of the past. Did Fauci issue a travel ban, enact the Defense Production Act, or redirect the supply of medical equipment? Did the CDC somehow supersede congressional authority and directly fund research via the CARES Act? Were appellate courts no longer hearing cases regarding COVID and civil liberties?
> you also chatted with business people to get insight [...]
this reinforces my point: anyone who happens to be impacted is not entitled to input. Conversations between medical professionals and public officials were occurring every single day. But - do you think Trump was genuinely listening to his advisors?
> there are multiple often conflicting requirements and have the hard work of deciding what the right tradeoffs to make are
that's exactly my point, again. No one knew it was going to mutate that quickly and stay an issue. The tradeoff for doing less was more people dying.
That is quite simply not true at all.
I did a study of mask based on self reports early in the pandemic and I did show a significant slowing of the progress of the pandemic in states that had a high claimed rate of mask use. I had (I thought) some clever ways of eliminating other differences between states in my analysis and was surprised to see so much slowing. However, I am not sure which way the causality runs. I can easily see heavy masking making it such a bummer to go to bars (e.g.) that the lack of socialization caused the slowing.
But in summary, to your point, to the medically knowledgeable there was a lot of evidence before that masks would not do much (not nothing) and there is a lot more now that masks didn't do much
The nurses who thought so are either fired, dead, or updated their thinking.
But if you don't trust your own eyes, maybe the Cochrane Collaboration is enough for you? They published a meta-review of mask studies.
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
Remember, you don't get to claim you're right because you fired everyone who pointed out you're wrong. It's painful to accept this, but masking was a lie from start to finish which is why the position of all the medical staff at the start was that masks don't seem to do anything and there's no evidence community masking would help. That position was correct. They changed it later for ideological reasons and the politician's fallacy.
This is simply factually incorrect.
The situation in the US provided a textbook ANOVA scenario with various individual counties adopting a hodge podge of approaches.
For example, one of many such studies
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jom-2021-0214...
concludes:
These data showed statistically significant lower averages of SARS-CoV-2 daily infection in counties that passed mask mandates when compared with counties that did not.
The difference-in-difference analysis revealed a 16.9% reduction in predicted COVID-19 cases at the end of 30 days.
You might want to look into why meta reviews, particularly those plucked from popular COVID forums, aren't the bees knees you seem to think they are.
Problems with this paper:
1. It's just a study of public data so should be trivially replicable, but they picked data points "via Microsoft Excel’s random number generator function" so it's non-replicable by design. Right up front this makes it incompetent work because there'd be no way to detect P-hacking.
2. Because it's not an RCT they can only show a correlation, not a causation, yet their claims are causal. An obvious confounder is that going out with a mask is no fun so you'd expect people to socialize more in places without a mandate, yet this isn't mentioned.
3. The effect size is tiny: ~4 cases a day! In counties with tens of thousands of people! This is NOT how mask mandates were advertised to the population.
4. "We did not record compliance with mask mandates". Yes I'm sure the residents of places like Anderson County Tennessee followed public health orders meticulously.
5. They ignore all the contradictory evidence.
Again, I cannot stress this enough, we know mask mandates don't work because of the times they were introduced with no change in case trends. Here's a single example:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FPHy4ZoUYAIsYbt.jpg:large
Because the claim is "mask mandates always reduce transmission", it only takes one counter-example to disprove the claim. There are hundreds of charts like that one, but only one is required. That's the nature of falsifiability.
To conclude that mask mandates work you have to be able to explain the times when they didn't. Crap studies like this one (cited 3 times, well done for finding it) are produced by academia all the time, but they get ignored because they can't explain that, and the authors are invariably biased. These guys even cite a claimed 0.5% reduction in cases and call this "effective"! Imagine if governments had stated up front when imposing mask mandates for the first time, "we think this will be effective because it might reduce case counts by half a percent". What would people have thought of the sanity of this cost/benefit tradeoff, exactly?
This is not true. Denmark, Finland, Netherlands and UK [1] had their own versions of "Tegnell". That is, epidemiologists who recommended the let-it-rip, "herd immunity" strategy. In these countries, politicians finally decided to follow the majority consensus among countries, and ignore those epidemiologists who were among the "herd immunity" school of thought.
Even in New Zealand it was a somewhat close call, would the government listen to Michael Baker [2] as they eventually did, or Simon Thornley [3].
> Great Barrington meanwhile was viciously attacked, described as fringe, non-consensus, would kill millions etc.
Maybe because it was somewhat fringe, definitely non-consensus, and would kill millions?
[1] "For a time, he advocated a herd immunity approach."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Vallance#COVID-19_pand...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Baker_(epidemiologist)...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Thornley#Covid_Plan_B_gr...
> Maybe because it was somewhat fringe, definitely non-consensus, and would kill millions?
It's amazing how many people still never got the memo that lockdowns and masks had no effect whatsoever. This isn't even up for debate anymore, the data is openly available and has been analyzed to death. These interventions simply did not work, and it was known from the start that they wouldn't work. Heck the idea they wouldn't work was the consensus right before 2020, which is why a "consensus" of these idiots is worth less than the electrons used to transmit it.
Do you have a source for that? It's been a while since I've looked at Covid numbers, so the only research I know off the top of my head that claims there was no effect is a meta-analysis by some economists, which originally claimed lockdowns only prevented 0.2% of deaths. After criticism, they had to re-evaluate their approach and arrived at 3.2%. However, not all objections were addressed, so who knows if there isn't another order of magnitude hiding somewhere.
Personally, I've been leaning towards lockdowns having the potential to be effective based on excess mortality in the nordics: Sweden was the only nordic country that did not lock down in March 2020, and it's also the only one of these countries that saw significant excess mortality in April 2020. There could of course be another reason for that, but until someone offers such, the lockdowns seem to be the obvious factor...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
April 2020 did a real number on that country...
https://i.imgur.com/X6BKdnt.png
Sweden was the only country where the result was clearly distinguishable from noise...
It's also important to remember in all this that the lockdown policy wasn't predicated on making a small difference you need powerful statistics to find. It was advertised as: anyone who doesn't lock down will experience mass deaths and full blown collapse. Epidemiologists claimed Sweden would experience double the usual death rate due to COVID, i.e. as many deaths from COVID as from all other causes combined! Their actual death rate:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
There's a tiny bump in 2020, but at least part of that is simply noise due to 2019 having an unusually low death rate, so you'd expect it to be higher than normal in 2020 even without COVID.
Also, Sweden has a peculiar bookkeeping system, and a surprisingly large number of deaths are recorded without precisely known date. If you only look at weekly death statistics, you will miss the "week 99" deaths from the yearly total.
And here you would assume very wrong.
OECD does indeed estimate excess mortality simply by comparing to the 2015-2019 averages:
"The expected number of deaths is based on the average number of deaths for the same week over recent years (in this case the previous five years, 2015-19). This baseline could be considered a lower estimate of the expected number of deaths since both population growth and an ageing population would be expected to push up the number of deaths observed each year."
"Importantly, given the impact of COVID-19 to the overall number of weekly deaths in 2020, the average deaths for the period 2015-2019 continues to be used to calculate excess deaths in 2021, and still applies as the base for 2022 and 2023 excess deaths."
From their: Methodology_All-cause-Excess-and-COVID-19-deaths_OECD.pdf
Which you can find from https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676 when you try to find their notes for methodology.
Also here you are assuming somewhat wrong.
For Finland, the 2015–2019 average annual deaths is 53723. 2022 deaths were 63219. Thus the simple, OECD-style, estimate for excess mortality is 9496.
Whereas an age-structured model from Statistics Finland estimated 56158 deaths for 2022 from pre-covid trends. So the age-structure-aware excess mortality estimate is 7061 for 2022 for Finland.
So when was the last lockdown before covid?
A related comment of mine has a link with examples for the last several hundred years.
FTA:
> However, the use of quarantine and other measures for controlling epidemic diseases has always been controversial because such strategies raise political, ethical, and socioeconomic issues and require a careful balance between public interest and individual rights.
Here’s a list of about 30 examples since the 15th century where various governments have prevented the free movement of their people (because even then, they recognized that public health is more important than individual travel).
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/short-history-of-quara...
In the face of a never-before-seen rapidly spreading and mutating virus, what the hell do you think medical professionals and governments ought to do? Stand by idly and let people die?
You mean those centuries before we truly recognized individual rights? Not a compelling argument. Again, quarantine of people who had possibly had exposure is very different than the proactive lockdown approach taken during COVID.
> In the face of a never-before-seen rapidly spreading and mutating virus, what the hell do you think medical professionals and governments ought to do? Stand by idly and let people die?
Inform the public and let them personally assess the level of risk they're willing to accept. You know, like they do with literally every other health question. Expanding protections for people facing dangerous working conditions because of the virus to opt out of work, and mandatory sick leave, is perfectly reasonable as well.
I don't know why people act like this obvious answer is completely out of the question. Will it result in more death? Quite possibly. Giving governments moral authority to limit people's rights in such a fashion is never the right answer though. Would you support the draft too?
I'm not sure what this means. Individual rights have been recognized long before the founding of the United States, though.
> Inform the public and let them personally assess the level of risk they're willing to accept.
This is impossible and irresponsible when you cannot accurately assess the risk.
The question of a draft is so unrelated I'm intentionally ignoring it.
Yes, and? Is it not true that we have progressively recognized more rights over time, often at the cost of blood? That our "rulers" do not and should not have de facto power over our lives to impede our movements, that they should not have power over what we choose to believe or decide with whom we may associate?
Furthermore, in none of the examples cited in the link you provided do the quarantine measures impact whole cities, states or nations, so I fail to see the relevance. Where quarantine measures were broad, they were widely recognized as shameful and discriminatory in retrospect (like imprisoning 30,000 prostitutes to stem venereal disease).
> This is impossible and irresponsible when you cannot accurately assess the risk.
Irresponsible? Do you think you have some responsibility to manage other people's lives for them? This really gets to the crux of the issue doesn't it, you think some people should have the right to make such decisions for others because those "others" aren't intelligent or well-informed enough to make these decisions for themselves. It's patriarchal, condescending and anti-democratic.
As for whether it's impossible, that's literally untrue. Sweden is proof by counterexample: they did exactly this and it turned out just fine. By the time the first lockdowns happened, we already had a reasonable assessment of the risks.
Instead the heavy-handed, duplicitous and authoritarian measures made the whole issue partisan, and so the US had one of the worst outcomes of all developed countries.
> The question of a draft is so unrelated I'm intentionally ignoring it.
Except it's not unrelated, it's just another example of curtailing civil liberties in the name of some ill-defined "collective good". People advocating for these positions simply take it as a given that their vision of the collective good needs no justification.
I’m the one that supplied multiple citations. How about you go find some to support your assertions, instead of trying to snipe and mince mine?
It's interesting that you experience no cognitive dissonance between what I cited as a good example of what I'm talking about, Sweden, and this strawman of my position.
That must be why all the pandemic planning guides from various national health agencies specifically said do not do lockdowns, do no close schools and don't force masks...
It was never a "known tool" to anybody. It was an insane, unproven pharmaceutical intervention that somehow, suddenly, became something "we always knew about".
What we did for covid was absolutely insane.
Could you provide a citation? I’ve read the opposite from NIH, CDC, NHS, etc.
For example, this is from 2013: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3559034/
People came to their senses when the following level of urgency was reached: "if you don't lockdown NOW, in two doubling periods -- one week -- every hospital will have a parking lot full of people slowly dying for want of a respirator. Do you want that news story as your legacy?"
https://apnews.com/article/health-us-news-ap-top-news-intern...
Don't try to turn your personal beliefs into accepted reality.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/covid-coronavirus-pandemic-...
Daszak.
It was politicized.
At the same time, it was a "theory" based on little to no evidence early on. Rather than let scientists work through and figure things out, people were shouting it through the roof as if it was confirmed. Basically, it was an answer in search of evidence, rather than using the evidence to direct the answer.
There was a lot of pushback against that sort of talk, especially here.
Couple that with a divisive administration here in the US that caused confusion and chaos, there was little to no hope for it being anything other than taboo.
The tech companies are obviously, at the minimum, complicit. Because "pressure" is just that - pressure. When the 'Russian trolls' narrative was being built up in Congress, Twitter knew it was entirely fabricated, and even referred to the requests as coming from "Congressional Trolls", and then they gave those said trolls nearly everything they wanted, and remained absolutely silent about what was happening. That strongly reflects upon the character, or lack thereof, of former Twitter leadership - but the source is the government.
The large scale centralization of speech has created an angle shoot of the 1st amendment. Pressure a handful of companies into censoring whatever you want censored and you likely achieve even more than a law would have, since you end up censoring it on a far larger scale than just domestically. Expecting politicians of a country to actually care about the intent of the constitution of that country is clearly no longer a reasonable expectation to have.
https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/timeline-the-proximal-ori...
I think the story is pretty much documented in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EcoHealth_Alliance#COVID-19_pa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Daszak#COVID-19_pandemic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_(COVID-19)#Criti...
Unless you mean to ask, why was their PR stunt so very successful? For that I don't have an answer.
I still don’t know what the truth is but I’m certainly open to a full range of possibilities now.
>I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory
IMO part of it was a lot of self-preservation instinct of biomedical research scientists, operating in the context of a calcified monopsony of a national funding organization. In other words, any biomedical scientist's legitimizing LLH too stridently would not necesssrily have healthy to one's grant fundng prospects.
Caveating that 'none of the content of this comment necessarily reflects the opinion of BiosafetyNow', I also serve on BiosafetyNow's leadership team. BN was formed in the wake of the wagon-circling & gaslighting of the lab leak hyp. https://biosafetynow.org/ (Richard Ebright, mentioned elsewhere in the comments, is also on the leadership team. More familiar names are Colin Butler, & Milton Leitenberg).
We recently released a petition to ban ePPP research (i.e. 'GoF')
https://www.change.org/prohibit-ePPP.
It just passed 1000 signatures yesterday. I would love for concerned visitors to these comments to add their name. Despite that we advocate a simple ban today, our org has in its mission statement to see a moratorium on ePPP research until sufficent biosafety measures are put in place whereupon it becomes (highly) regulated ePPP researxh instead of out-and-out banned. The definition of 'sufficient' is not left to scientists alone to determine, and I contribute toward representing the non-scientist public to advocate for what should be considered sufficient biosafety measures.(Pro-tip: More representation of the non-scientist public remains needed here :) )
The nonprofit still operates on a shoestring budget, so if readers were inclined to help with that, it would be most appreciated. (Can also find origins censorship-themed merchandise which some folks might find fun :) )
If you'd like to volunteer your talents - software and otherwise - to BiosafetyNow's advocacy effort, it would be similarly most welcome.
This reads more like CYA piece
https://unherd.com/2022/03/is-the-media-still-stifling-the-l...
Ian Birrell
https://unherd.com/2021/06/beijings-useful-idiots/
and Ashley Rindsberg have all done a good job on reporting on this
https://unherd.com/2021/08/did-the-new-york-times-stifle-lab...
I would like exactly the same about anti-vaxxers but excluding those people who are against any other vax. Anti-covid-vaxxers in other words. Covid is not a pox and all the strict measures were happened just because our digital world just allows such a blatant declassification of freedom people. Compare the peak number of deaths from Covid with the average deaths from alcohol and you realize that this is just a normal year. BTW mass deaths from non-violent reasons is not something totally bad in obviously overpopulated world. And I do not see much discussions about who sets the borders to our government's behavior in such a situations.
I see the irony (gain of function)
Which people in this thread are somehow believing as truth instead of the bald-faced propaganda it is.
Do you actually think a virus research lab in the epicentre of an outbreak would not be put to use?
From Wikipedia:
> As the virus spread worldwide, the institute continued its investigation. In February 2020, a team led by Shi Zhengli at the institute were the first to identify, analyze and name the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), upload it to public databases for scientists around the world to understand,[28][29][30] and publish papers in Nature.[31] On 19 February 2020, the lab released a letter on its website describing how they successfully obtained the whole virus genome.[32]
That and the fact that the Chinese dicatorship blocking any inquiry into the matter are enough to put the blame on that lab until proven otherwise.
Your previous comment is clearly incorrect as shown by the parent, something is a lot more than nothing.
If that makes it "too expensive and slow" then so be it. Perhaps there are some things humans should not be doing.
If my information is correct, I believe that nearly all nuclear testing these days is 100% simulation on supercomputers, which is as safe as safe can be, as long as you can trust supercomputer simulations to render the correct answer to those trusting researchers.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/us-military-missing...
To add to your point, regardless of safeguards and protocols, accidents happen.
This guy who published a suspiciously early patent on a covid 19 vaccine fell off a roof three months later?
That’s kind of buried in the article a bit but was this claim been made anywhere else?
Also, the section on activity at the lab at the time of the outbreak does not mention analysis of private app data.
IIRC, one of the early discredited reports suggesting lab origin had relied, in-part, on commercially available app data. The kind of adware built into “free” apps that violate user privacy.
This data supposedly showed clear activity supporting a temporary shutdown of the Wuhan lab.
This information always seemed the easiest to latch on to. Not to prove origin but at least offer an important fact for a pattern.
US military bases have had their locations and perimeters out on the public web thanks to fitness apps.
Was the WIV associated app data not real? If it was, why isn’t it included in this article?
The article relates a study “by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid.”
How would this be more compelling than raw app data showing movement of employees or security workers in and around WIV?
>That’s kind of buried in the article a bit but was this claim been made anywhere else?
As someone who's followed the debate closely, (with the submission history to demostrate that), I can tell you that the parent article is the first time the assertion that Zhou fell from the roof has ever been made in tbe public-facing side of the debate.
This is consistent with David Martin's speech in Europe: https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1661698114917646336
I haven't checked the "publicly available references" but many who inssist on a natural cause read about the bat theory in the first few months and then haven't updated & aren't willing to update their models.
If you find any faults that can really change the results in the analysis Rootclaim made, I would be interested.
Meanwhile, it seems quite likely to have produced the correct results so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is an interesting way to analyze the problem but the set of criteria and weights applied at each step are made up.
The flaw is that you can use this form of analysis to reach any conclusion you want.
For example, the "Already well adapted" section -- a "2x" factor for lab escape. We wouldn't even be thinking about this virus if it wasn't well adapted to spread among humans. So that's baked into the ground and isn't a factor of anything.
Then take "Furin cleavage" -- a whopping 8x factor for lab escape relative to zoonotic. This is the same thing as already well adapted, so now we've got a combined 16x for something that should be 1x.
The weight for "Chimera" -- another whopping 8x for lab escape relative to zoonotic -- seems really high for something that is found both in nature and in labs that merely "seems less likely to combine in nature". We should probably be arguing about whether this is 1.5x or 2x.
The real conclusion is we don't know. The Chinese probably do, but it would be a very closely guarded secret and obviously they would never admit to a lab leak. I lot of people hate ambiguity and want an answer, but in this case it doesn't seem that we are going to get one.
A complicating factor is that some (much?) of the funding came from the US. Which means admitting to a leak is against the interest of not only Chinese but also the US government which would have a hell of a time explaining to taxpayers how pandemic was engineered on their money doing research banned in the US. (Though I don't think US government played any part in resisting the research tbh, CCP probably did all that at their accord.)
I think all in all we shouldn't give up, and even if we don't find the actual data I don't see the world can be okay without big fat follow up over not some lab making a mistake (humans make those) but all obstruction of research into the origins of what could have been an extinction level event if the virus was a bit better engineered, whether it came from Chinese communist party or US scientists scared for grant money.
Community / site for collective truth-seeking. Possibly integrated with Metaculus.
One can submit new pieces of evidene which would be commentable (in threads), votable, and programmable (to toggle / affect of other submitted evidence threads).
Users can adjust the weights, vote on them (to generate a certain consensus / prediction), and even toggle of pieces of evidence manually.
The site automatically gives the probabilities for different scearions. I don't have an instant vision on how "all" possible scenarios would be chosen.
It sounds a little like this RootClaim (I just learned about here) https://www.rootclaim.com/how-rootclaim-works but with the users adjusting & voting on weights?
This is a strawman demonstrator I'm wware of w r t origins probability surveying & calculation. https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/18631
It's intended for any one user to evaluate ther priors and see how they stack up all together. like that your idea woukd aggregate & have comments & a voting mechanism,
By the way, why do people weigh zoonotic spillover so high relatively to lab leak accident? There were lab leaks before even in Beijing, eg. of the original SARS when it was researched. That SARS kills faster so it didn't get to infect too many people... And that's only what's documented, considering it's China there could've been any number of other times.
Intentional leak chance is low but accidental leak is so likely it's surprising this pandemic didn't happen before considering security practies that were known and raised questions before the pandemic. But everyone magically forgets about it. All because some US scientists wanted grant money too much and so laughed everyone who disagrees out of the room.
>Thus, the ratio of zoonotic:bioweapon:zoonotic collection:modified lab escape is 2:5:100:50, or a reduction of a zoonotic origin by 50x, a bioweapon origin by 20x, and a lab escape by 0.5x.
Those aren't the same ratio.
>To account for the possibility that there is a yet unidentified reason why Wuhan is a more likely location for a zoonotic outbreak, these numbers are generously adjusted to a reduction of a zoonotic origin by 20x and a bioweapon origin by 15x, with lab escape remaining at 0.5x.
But what they actually apply is a reduction of a zoonotic origin by 20x and a bioweapon origin by 15x, with zoonotic collection at 2x. Which isn't the result of applying that adjustment to either of the original ratios, so apparently they've just applied the lab escape factor to wrong category
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-covid-vaccine/f...
Also consistent with:
https://public.substack.com/p/first-people-sickened-by-covid...
> You infect the mice, wait a week or so, and then recover the virus from the sickest mice. Then you repeat.
From The Hardware Hacker (2017) by "bunnie" Huang:
> So, a single base-pair change--simply flipping two bits--might be all you'd need to turn the H1N1 swine flu virus into a deadlier variant... for just over $1,000.
> [Influenza] packs a deadly punch in 3.2 KB... and we [still] haven't eradicated it. Could influenza do hacks like the one I just described on its own already? The short answer is yes.
> ... on average, every copy of an influenza virus has one random mutation.
> [H1N1] was probably just a couple of mutations away from being a bigger health problem.
> ... novel H1N1 acquired a mix of RNA snippets that gave it high transmission rates and made it something humans weren't innately immune to. That's the perfect storm for a pandemic.
> If there were a computer analogy to this RNA-shuffling model, [random relinking of virus "files" at runtime]... would also proliferate a diverse set of viruses in the wild...
Fortunately for swine flu at least,
> ... a patient [had] a novel antibody... to confer immunity to all 16 subtypes of influenza A.
Against Covid, research by Dr. Weismann and Dr. Karikó led to the development of the mRNA vaccine:
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/how-drew-weissman-and-katal...
But there's still a lot to cover:
- Lockdowns did little to prevent the spread of COVID and lead to increased deaths by other causes, egregious violation of people's fundamental rights, massively destruction of the economy, and many people's mental health.
- Cloth masks were pointless security theatre
- The vast majority of people except the very elderly and obese were in very little danger
- The vaccines never prevented transmission
- The vaccines only offered very limited protection for a brief period
- The rate of side effects (including serious side effects up to and including death) is a lot higher than anyone wants to admit.
- To most segments of the population, the danger of death by vaccine side effects is greater than the danger of death by COVID-19
I'm hoping in a decade or so, we'll get towards something approaching a "sorry, you were right", like we did with the Iraq war, but there's still a long way to go.
People just seem to blank out anything really bad done by "their team" (be it either orange man bad or clinton is a traitor).
I fear for the future of Human civilization
Studies cannot show if something was the right course of action. This isn't something that can be accounted for by some peer-reviewed research paper.
The fact of the matter is, the response to covid was a massive disaster that did far more harm than good. And that is an absolute fact and one that will take a long time for people to swallow. It's hard to realize you literally wasted several years of your life for absolutely nothing at all.
That vaccines never did anything to prevent transmission is a pretty ridiculous contention for the initial wave.
That vaccines posed more of a danger to most of the population compared to COVID-19 itself is also ridiculous. The US had the largest vaccination drive in its history in early 2021, peaking at 3.5 million jabs per day in April. Excess death dropped dramatically throughout the rollout and kept falling past mid-2021.
Depressing.
Personally I'm more worried about the people that went full retard about covid alternative views and conspiracies, I've lost a few friends to that. Sometime I wonder if you will be able to integrate into society ever again.
I can agree that the messaging I got was that the vaccine was meant to prevent serious illness. Regardless, the absurd policies, suppression of information and discussion on vaccine side effects was unforgivable.
People went full retard because the institutions meant to provide them with good information instead treated them like children and suppressed detailed debate. The only alternative was to go online and risk the lunacy that is internet research, so people did so.
Now more people are anti-vaxers than ever before, and not just for mRNA vaccines but old-school shots like measles.
At a minimum many institutions need change of leadership after this fiasco, and maybe complete reform of others.
We need to improve education, by A LOT. And it's everyone responsibility.
The debate will occur anyway, so if you try to suppress it, you just push it into the depths of the internet with all the associated downside.
The initial batch of vaccines were explicitly marketed as having a 95% effectiveness against transmission for the original strain. This was the entire basis of the herd immunity narrative and it was true for about 3 months until delta happened and the medical community did an egregiously bad job of communicating that.
Cloth masks are objectively useless for personal protection.
95% reduction of serious illness. The objective of the mass vaccination was having as much people as possible survive the pandemic. Herd immunity was just noise. There were a lot of noise and nonsense.
> Cloth masks are objectively useless for personal protection.
Proper masks are effective as measured multiple times, tons of statistics on it.
No. They said vaccines prevent transmission. Over and over.
You may have forgotten what was said at the time, but we won't:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1665770269418614784
It's the reason I was prevented from entering the US until just a couple of weeks ago. It's the reason why my mother-in-law lost her job as a nurse. People who refused this medical treatment, were treated as dangerous because officials claimed that we presented a transmission hazard.
This was a lie, which you are further compounding with more lies.
And don't link me some random idiot's tweet as proof, we are better than this.
Just stop now and accept reality, it's a good thing that they got rid of your mother in law, I wonder in how much more pseudo science she believes in.
Where I live, people that refused the vaccine were treated as utter idiots but still welcome in hospitals, most of the famous local covid denier died there too.
Watch the video clip in the tweet. It shows a montage of officials and talking heads claiming that the COVID vaccines would prevent you from getting COVID and transmitting it.
Here's another one if you prefer:
https://twitter.com/alliemarie777/status/1667561378398318592
> Just stop now and accept reality, it's a good thing that they got rid of your mother in law, I wonder in how much more pseudo science she believes in.
No it isn't. The NHS now has chronic shortage of nurses.
If there were a problem with pseudoscience, then they should have fired her for that, not some vague proxy.
You're rather proving my point. So many people are just not ready to have a rational conversation about these narratives. It's all just tribalism and dogma, and we will have to wait years for people like you to calm down to the point where you are able to have reasonably conversations on these topics again.
Why? Because it's not an attractive profession nowadays. Not for the few hundreds of deniers that were fired.
> You're rather proving my point. So many people are just not ready to have a rational conversation about these narratives. It's all just tribalism and dogma, and we will have to wait years for people like you to calm down to the point where you are able to have reasonably conversations on these topics again.
I haven't seen any rational or unique point in everything you have written, only spitting the usual covid deniers nonsense.
You know what my real fear is? The fear that people that have this kind of opinions regarding the pandemic will apply the same reasoning to the next one or to the next crisis. I have a different opinion of preppers now.
If so, please admit that you were wrong when you made this comment:
> I'm hoping that in a decade or so, people will stop using "vaccines never prevented transmission" as an argument since it has been said at least a billion of times since the beginning, VACCINES PREVENTED SERIOUS ILLNESS.
My montage showed you (if you had watched it), many talking heads and officials at the time accusing the unvaccinated of increasing transmission.
The rest of your remarks about "covid deniers" are irrelevant to the point.
So many of you people have become so emotionally invested in the false narratives that you have believed, that you can't cope with any evidence that threatens your narrative even slightly.
At least we can talk about the "lab leak theory" now. This was the original point I made: it will take years for people to climb down these positions they have taken, but at least we are making small steps in the right direction.
When asked for evidence you post the usual cherrypicked random stuff that aligns with what you believe (the only valid sources).
My recommendation is to just stop with this imaginary fight for the truth, when everyone is moving on and no one even cares anymore about these creative reinterpretations of reality. You lost any credibility with the first message of this chain, too much BS. Free yourself.
You've presented none whatsoever.
> - Lockdowns did little to prevent the spread of COVID...
<citation needed>
> - Cloth masks were pointless security theatre
<citation needed> - and most rational people (and countries) immediately switched to N95 masks as soon as supply chains could support the demand. That said, I'd bet that even less-proven masks would have some lesser but still positive impact.
> - The vast majority of people except the very elderly and obese were in very little danger
...except there are plenty of examples of fit, young people having life-altering acute and/or longer-term symptoms. On a population-level, you're right that the numbers are small(er), but I'd argue that each individual case to the contrary is a disaster for the indiviudal involved.
As Stalin said: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.”
You appear to be looking at the statistics; I was happy to accept changes to my lifestyle to diminish risk of harm to individuals.
> - The vaccines never prevented transmission
That's a straw-man argument - that's not the primary purpose of a vaccine.
> - The vaccines only offered very limited protection for a brief period
Nah. Vaccines offered significant protection against severe disease for a period of months (which itself is a factor of how the human body function). With widespread vaccination, the world was able to 'get on top of' the pandemic, and its effects of healthcare over-utilisation.
> - The rate of side effects (including serious side effects up to and including death) is a lot higher than anyone wants to admit.
<citation needed>
> - To most segments of the population, the danger of death by vaccine side effects is greater than the danger of death by COVID-19
<citation needed>
> <citation needed>
https://iea.org.uk/publications/did-lockdowns-work-the-verdi...
>> - Cloth masks were pointless security theatre
> <citation needed>
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
> I was happy to accept changes to my lifestyle to diminish risk of harm to individuals.
We now have a massive unexplained excess deaths crisis, but suddenly it's "see no evil, hear no evil".
>> - The vaccines never prevented transmission
> That's a straw-man argument - that's not the primary purpose of a vaccine.
That is not public officials and talking heads were saying at the start. See this montage:
https://twitter.com/XvirtueSignaler/status/16657702694186147...
> With widespread vaccination, the world was able to 'get on top of' the pandemic
The world never "got on top of" COVID. It never had any significant control over it. Omicron came along, and spread through the population with mild symptoms, leading to widespread natural immunity.
> its effects of healthcare over-utilisation.
That never happened anywhere in the world.
>> - The rate of side effects (including serious side effects up to and including death) is a lot higher than anyone wants to admit.
> <citation needed>
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36055877/
In randomized control trials of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines here in the UK, we now know that the risk of serious adverse effects from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated i.e. a ~1 in 800 chance of serious adverse effects.
>> - To most segments of the population, the danger of death by vaccine side effects is greater than the danger of death by COVID-19
> <citation needed>
The UK government has now published its estimate of the number of people needed to vaccinate to prevent a COVID-19 hospitalisation:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
In Table 3, notice how in every age group except 70+, the number-needed-to-vaccinate to prevent a hospital visit figure is higher than 1 in 800.
And in Table 4 notice not even 70+ are more in danger of severe hospitalisation than 1 in 800.
And given that we are at 7 days remaining before the 90-day WIV intel disclosure deadline, old journo hands expect that info leaks are more likely to happen.
Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any ill-intent. Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab. Further, genetic clocks show that RaTG13 and SARSCoV2 diverged almost 50 years ago.
The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab [0]. Furthermore, several different isolates were found in the market, indicating that SARSCoV2 had been circulating before the epidemic took off.
[0] The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
As of 2022, this is no longer true.
https://www.business-standard.com/amp/article/current-affair...
One of the things we know for sure is that that about 50 years of evolutionary changes separate RaTG13 and BANAL-52 from SARSCoV2, so they are not its direct ancestors.
Do you have a source for this?
Also, I'm no biologist, but is comparing the base rate of evolutionary changes still relevant if SARSCoV2 wasn't of natural origins? E.g. through creating chimeras or 'serial passaging' as described in this article? Wouldn't that create an environment where 50 years could pass in a way shorter timeframe?
>Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID- 19 pandemic
>Divergence dates between SARS-CoV-2 and the bat sarbecovirus reservoir were estimated as 1948 (95% highest posterior density (HPD): 1879–1999), 1969 (95% HPD: 1930–2000) and 1982 (95% HPD: 1948–2009), indicating that the lineage giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating unnoticed in bats for decades.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4
You should also know that SARSCoV2 1) is not a chimeric virus, and 2) that the present study includes viruses linked to RaTGP13 but more distant from SARSCoV2, i.e. it includes evidence from viruses unassociated with the pandemic.
There is no basis for this claim. Genomic evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a chimera of any two previously-known viruses. No possible genomic evidence could exclude a chimera of two previously-unknown viruses, and the WIV was the world's leading collector of such novel sarbecoviruses from nature. They proposed to make chimeras of them in DEFUSE. That proposal wasn't funded, but this article now reports explicit claims they did such work:
> They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
You're basically rehashing Andersen's "Proximal Origins" here, and even he has moved on to more sophisticated (though still unconvincing) arguments like Pekar. As David Relman wrote almost three years ago:
> This argument [that SARS-CoV-2 must be natural since it doesn't use a known backbone] fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.
Of course such a virus could also have evolved naturally by a similar path; lots of sarbecoviruses are just a single mutation away from that FCS, and perhaps there's some yet-unknown natural animal host where that gets selected for. The point is that no genomic evidence can distinguish between these two cases, though.
For emphasis, it seems like you're assuming that we know all the natural viruses that the WIV was working with. Sampling of novel coronaviruses from nature was a core part of the WIV's research, so that's not a reasonable assumption. RaTG13 was sampled in 2013, but not fully published until 2020. At least one novel coronavirus was identified in contamination of rice samples sequenced on the same equipment that the WIV used:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2
That's a merbecovirus, so it couldn't possibly have any relationship to SARS-CoV-2; but if they had one unpublished novel virus, then it's hard to reject the possibility that they had more.
We don't know as for unknown reasons the database of specimens collected by the Wuhan lab was taken down in September 2019.
The distance in years between two viral strains you mention makes no sense at all, as the mutation rate is extremely dependent on environment.
The article is not suggesting that Covid19 evolved from RaTG13; it is suggesting that Covid19 is a chimaera made with RaTG13.
Why would one do that? Well, two reasons. First, the spike more variable as it is subject to greater evolutionary pressure as the major component of the viral surface. Second, in coronavirus reverse genetics typically the virus is segmented into multiple pieces, most of which compose the non-spike backbone and a subset which compose the spike protein. This is intentional to enable the swapping of spike proteins. So, if SARS-CoV-2 is spike-swap or spike variant assembly, a RaTG13-like virus could be the "backbone" of SARS-CoV-2.
Moreover, a hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 backbone could exist in the viral sequences list the WIV took down in Sept. 2019. They sequenced RaTG13 a few years prior. The lab's raison d'etre is collecting and sequencing coronaviruses poised for spillover. And, with modern DNA synthesis technology, it's not difficult to print out arbitrary backbone contigs for a viral assembly.
That is completely untrue. Agricultural labs for instance research plant viruses which are _incompatible_ with humans completely. Still these plant virus would have to be researched under stringent isolation because of the damage they may pose to crops.
> Most importantly, the general reader should know
Speak on our level, don't baby us.
What exactly are you trying to say here anyway? If they were researching some other virus type it wouldn't be getting a look. But they were researching coronavirus.
Especially the fact that covid was not found in a single animal sample does make the evidence rather weak.
In addition it seems that the lack of sampling from outside the market and the fact that the market is a busy place in the center of the city where the virus would likely be once it's spreading from person to person , does not really lend support to the conclusions in the paper at all.
>More than half of the earliest Covid-19 cases were connected to the Huanan market, and epidemiologic mapping revealed that the concentration of cases was centered there. In January 2020, Chinese officials cleared the market without testing live animals, but positive environmental samples, including those from an animal cage and a hair-and-feather–removal machine, indicated the presence of both SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-susceptible animals.5 Recently released findings included raccoon dog DNA, pointing to a possible SARS-CoV-2 progenitor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/21/science/covid-raccoon-dog...
And the behavior of China behind that whole story looks very much like China tried to cover up the existence of susceptible animals at the market.
https://news.yahoo.com/raccoon-dogs-did-not-start-covid-19-n...
I'm not making the argument that the DNA samples indicate that the Raccoon Dogs that the samples were from had SARS-CoV-2. I'm just arguing that previously it had been stated that there were no Raccoon Dogs in the market at all and that has been proven wrong.
I’ve always thought it was a handling contamination that got into community spread. It’s a very parsimonious explanation.
A tourniquet won’t do anything for a needle stick injury. That’s pretty silly. A virus landing in a capillary bed takes 1 minute to reach the heart.
If the tourniquet somehow did stop fast enough, what will they do? Debride the entire area? Sounds like total bullsh.
There is no new direct evidence in the article, simply the weight of existing indirect evidence synthesized together. There does not seem to be another hypothosis for how the virus emerged that has as much indirect evidence pointing towards it?
The main gist of the article is:
* The institute applied for funding for a specific piece of research (inserting a furin cleavage site).
* The institute claims it did not perform the research.
* Covid is what we would expect if somebody did perform that research.
* The research would have been performed at the time and place where covid emerged.
It is not direct evidence, but under a weaker burden of proof (e.g. balance of probabilities) it is fairly convincing.
It is common for researchers to apply to grants/funding for work they are already doing. They tweak the research application to meet whatever the funding criteria is using knowledge they have from existing experiments.
https://twitter.com/BlockedVirology/status/16676623250907463...
• WIV added FCS's to coronavirus(es?) exactly as described in DEFUSE, according to a US lab collaborator.
• Zhou Yusen "fell" off the roof of the WIV in May 2020
• WIV was working on a 'closer [than published] unpublished variant'
• Of all caves/mines, only scholarly attempts to access the Mojiang mine made touched off access denial and confiscation of samples from other mines from the authorities. While alluded to in the past, (https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-coronavirus-pandem... ) this is the first time to my awareness that the Mojiang mine has been uniquely & unequivocally associated with the authorities' clamp-down efforts, that too with attribution to Alice C Hughes, PhD
I mean, this is a pretty significant and concerning new finding right? Someone associated with the lab researching COVID early on just mysteriously disappearing in China?
The WaPo journalist Josh Rogin who is known for maintainibg quality confidential sources in DC, had long ago tweeted the above. While some aspects may have been covered in intervening press, this is the first time to my knowledge all of tbese items are asserted explicitly with a quote attributed to one of the anonymous investigators.
--- my take fwiw: While intriguing, vis-a-vis a seasonal illness null hypothesis, it's never been discussed whether they were unique cases at that time with such symptoms (more likely covid), or if many others both in and out of the WIV had similar symtoms at the time (more likely seasonal illness)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9410163/US-State-De...
https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/9/6/402
if I understand correctly it concludes that the cluster correlates with population density and a concentration of elderly population in that area.
Unfortunately that wasn't mentioned in the senate report (nor in the news article)
- We have a bunch of evidence of WIV engineering SARS-1-like viruses because they talked about it before the pandemic.
- We have zero evidence of them ever doing experiments on live SARS-2-like virus
- We have zero evidence of the existence of a SARS-2-like progenitor virus
- Before the pandemic they had no reason to be more secretive of any SARS-2-like work than their SARS-1-like work
- The spread of SARS-CoV-2 looks exactly like it originated in the Seafood market.
- If it was transported to the seafood market by someone who worked at the lab that is highly coincidental that the place they infected first just happened to be the most likely place for zoonotic spillover
- The hypothetical infected labworker didn't spread it all over their residence or create any other superspreading incidents clustered elsewhere around Wuhan
On the balance of probabilities I'm going with zoonotic spillover. The coincidence that the lab happened to be in the city is much less of a coincidence than the lab causing a leak of a virus that there's zero evidence the lab ever had, causing a pandemic that looks exactly like it came from zoonotic spillover.
They refuse to share their records with WHO or the NIH. That's a crucial caveat when saying there is no evidence they held a precursor. We don't know as they have refused to share their database.
The Times article is interesting as it suggests the work in DEFUSE to add furin cleavage sites went ahead and they passaged the virus in humanized mice. This would explain the furin site not seen in other sarbecoviruses and why humans topped the list for binding affinity from the outset.
Note the cases near the market are based on what David Relman described as "hopelessly impoverished" early case data. There was also sampling bias in retrospectively counting cases as market link was often required. WHO hasn't accepted market origin in part as there were likely much earlier cases than those in December linked to the market where no animals tested positive.
This is an unbelievable coincidence that makes the zoonotic spillover hypothesis laughable. To a biologist, the likelihood of this happening by chance is clear: virtually 0. But explaining the size of the space of optimal solutions to a given binding problem versus the space of good solutions to the general public, well, that's really hard too. So an obvious and completely non-circumstantial piece of evidence is the last one in the public's mind. And we are still acting like there is a question of where the virus came from, and we will be for decades, or at least until the average level of biology education is raised by a few sharp degrees.
All viruses which have higher affinity for humans spilled over, didn't they?
If we're going with highly coincidental pairings, it seems like we can't ignore "the disease originated in the only city in China to have an institute that specializes in virology, viral pathology and virus technology."
I'm not convinced of any particular conclusion as to COVID's origin, but I don't down-weight the coincidence of the city of origin hosting WIV nearly as much as you appear to.
I always thought this was a good test for whether someone can apply Bayesian reasoning. It turns out not many can, including a lot of highly educated people.
Without hard evidence to contradict it, lab leak should have always been the default hypothesis. That it hasn’t is a case of political propaganda winning out over basic statistics.
The probability that a virus would crop up in Wuhan out of all cities in China is 1/70.
Feel free apply Bayes' formula.
But even if you were to accept that, the bayesian reasoning would be that you'd say that the probability it's from Wuhan it's a leak is 100%, and 0% for any other city. You could go further and look at the viruses that have caused zoonoses in China in the past (the evidence is that hundreds of SARS-like coronaviruses have) and compare it to what was being studied. Even then, if you apply Bayes' formula, you'd have overwhelming odds towards a natural origin.
As to which of the two hypotheses is more predicated on politics, I think there are more generally left-leaning people who are swayed by the lab leak (circumstantial) evidence, than there are right-leaning people who are swayed by the zoonotic origin (circumstantial) evidence. This perception may be mistaken, but assuming I’m correct, this would suggest that the zoonotic origin hypothesis is more likely to be predicated on politics.
Edit: typo
Huh? No it doesn’t. The discussion of a possible SARS outbreak started weeks before the seafood market incident. The lab leak theory started in China BEFORE the seafood market was pinned as the cause.
I would share family chats if they hadn’t been deleted. But we heard about it a few days before Xmas.
I don’t think ill-intent is the accusation, I think the argument is that the lab has poor safety protocols and made errors. I haven’t studied the “lab leak theory” extensively, but everything I read seems to be about lab failures resulting in a leak, not anything purposeful or ill-intentioned.
The military was also given positions of responsibility in the Wuhan institute, according to a US Senate report. A book published in 2015 by the military academy discusses how Sars viruses represent a “new era of genetic weapons” that can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed”.
The authors are PLA researchers, and one of the book’s editors has collaborated on numerous scientific papers with Wuhan scientists. They discuss how Sars can be weaponised by fusing it with other viruses and “serial passaging” the resulting mutant to make it more dangerous.
The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.
The evidence about what was happening is not only overwhelming but notice how not a single government is going to lift a finger about it. The NIH just refunded this work and the Biden admin doesn't give a shit. They're all deep in denial at this point and will never even admit to what has happened, let alone start WW3 over it.
It also states that Covid-19 is the only Coronavirus discovered with a furin cleavage site on the spike, and that the lab had applied for funding to research the insertion of such a site.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that the lab deliberately launched a pandemic by deliberately releasing the pathogen on its own doorstep.
"Never ascribe to conspiracy, what is adequately explained by incompetence".
I think the evidence is pretty clear that at least the Chinese government believes that the covid-19 virus came from their lab (they could, of course, be mistaken about that).
What evidence are you referring to?
The US does weapons research it does not mean ill intent. The Chinese does weapons research for the same reason the US does it.
No, it would not. First, dictatorships hide things all the time, whether there is something or nothing. It's just how they operate. (Many democratic governments do to btw. How often do we need freedom of information requests just to find out that it was totally benign, the government just stone-walled because they could).
Second, not saying anything is not evidence of guilt in any criminal case in the civilized world. Everyone has the right to silence.
Top notch defense right there.
https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/nih-to-terminate-ecohealth-a...
“Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
The rate of hospitalization among 18-49 year olds with flu in the US was 54.1 per 100K in 2019-20. It’s rare, sure, but that kind of absolute statement from an anonymous researcher doesn’t instill confidence.
> “Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
> It’s rare, sure
Then what makes an article terrible when you agree with the statement?
In 2018, WIV was part of a proposal with EcoHealth Alliance and UNC to add furin cleavage sites into novel SARS-related bat coronaviruses. DARPA declined to fund it. This investigation suggests the work went ahead. Something Nick Patterson suggested often occurs even when funding is declined. WIV had both NIAID and CAS grants to study spillover risk of SARS-related coronaviruses. They were also doing classified work with the PLA from 2017.
Regardless of whether or not there was a coverup, the Chinese government has certainly acted like it was covering something up.
The circumstantial evidence is sort of ridiculous here though. An institute with weak safety controls experimenting with creating novel pathogens has an outbreak of a novel pathogen next door? No no, it’s because of climate change (an actual argument I have seen).
It is certain that a new strain of some virus is emerging right now next to a lab that works with viruses, because that is a thing that happens continuously in nature, and labs exist within nature. It’s also likely that such a new strain will not cause human illness, as most viruses do not.
SARS-COV-2 only looks novel to humans because it made a lot of humans sick. There were tons of allegations that HIV was created in a lab too. This says more about our self-regard than about the virus itself.
As other comments have pointed out, while that lab was working with coronaviruses, none of the strains were genetically close to SARS-COV-2. Coronavirus is a broad category of viruses.
Scientists' best guess is that the precursor of the most common "M" virus jumped from the Cameroon chimps to humans sometime before 1931.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/virus/origins....
Yes, they covered up the existence of racoon dogs and other susceptible animals at the market.
It’s a fair point that if suppression of evidence is to be considered an indication of guilt, it has to work both ways.
Edit: typo
Is it possible? Sure! Is it likewise possible that some of the circumstantial claims about WIV are true? Sure! But if someone made this thing, someone else would have told us by now.
[1] This is science! There are notes and logs and backups and email and chat and whiteboard photos and conference attendees and visiting scholars, all spread around a population all trained to compete with each other.
Snowden revealed quite shocking information, and I think it is safe to say the secret of mass surveillance was going on for much longer than 4 years.
Im not aware of any way you could know that or the relative proportion of each.
Where do you get your certainty here?
You want the fact that I can't prove you wrong to be evidence that you're right, and that's not how logic works.
"The overwhelming majority of conspiracies likes this, especially ones in fundamentally civilian organizations like science labs, don't survive a year if that."
How do you know that the overwhelming majority of conspiracies don't survive a year if that? It's like sampling sick people and concluding that all people are sick. Without an estimate of the number of conspiracies that actually are kept hidden (which to me seems nearly impossible), how could you possibly know the proportion as you claimed?
This seems like a base rate fallacy to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
I'll put my money on bureaucrats being dumb over globalist nation state super autocracy every day.
I don't think it's very much a stretch to believe that pervasive observations of bureaucracies leaking and making mistakes serves as evidence that genuinely true Hidden Conspiracies are vanishingly rare. But you do you.
You're still missing the point: GGGP didn't argue in any “direction” at all; all they said was you can't know for sure what you claim.
> I don't think it's very much a stretch to believe that pervasive observations of bureaucracies leaking and making mistakes serves as evidence that genuinely true Hidden Conspiracies are vanishingly rare.
Sure. But don't then put your “hopefully not a stretch” guess in such cocksure terms.
> But you do you.
And you, obviously, you.
Part of any conspiracy theory is positing a great totalitarian enemy who is able to keep all these important truths from The People. The PRC is economically large and somewhat questionably ambitious. It's absolutely not the kind of super state people want to imagine.
When? There's a pretty short window where a WIV scientist might have known the subject they were studying had escaped the lab before the PRC did. Certainly by January 2020 the PRC could've clamped down on those scientists.
Spies caught outside the country don't tell me much about internal operations.
ETA: I think my thinking here is pretty colored by Tank Man, whose name is unknown. The CCP claims they don't know anything about him. Even if that's true, presumably he had friends, family, and fellow protestors who have decided it would be a very bad idea to even give his name.
Not after the top PLA vaccine researcher, Zhou Yusen died, allegedly "falling off the roof of the WIV" in May 2020. That sends a loud message.
Yours is a world where disproof rules, and conspiracies are assumed true until proven false. I'm sure it's entertaining, but it's not "true" any more than mine is.
In my world, Oswald probably shot JFK and covid was probably a natural virus, because those are the hypotheses that demand the least of the existing evidence. I'm willing to change my priors with more evidence, but not because of the lack of disproof of an entertaining counter-hypothesis.
I don't personally hold an opinion one way or another on JFK, but the fact is that the information on what happened still hasn't leaked out.
It took until 1992 for what appears to be the truth to be discovered, 3 decades with far more people involved in the process, and a much darker outcome than a man being assassinated.
See McNamara's recollection of that meeting in 1992.
http://web.archive.org/web/20210621032149/https://www.nytime...
Even closer to the SARS-CoV-2 case, the 1977 flu pandemic killed ~700k people and near-certainly arose from a research accident, probably a failed vaccine trial:
> The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event, as the genetic sequence of the virus was nearly identical to the sequences of decades-old strains.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/
That article argues that vaccine trial accident doesn't count as a "lab accident", which seems like legalistic wordplay to me; but I believe the historical context is good.
But in 1978, the WHO wrote:
> Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul...
It took decades for the consensus to change, and there's still been no official admission (though note the unverified personal communication from C. M. Chu via Peter Palese in Gronvall's paper, 27 years after the accident).
The USSR successfully manipulated many prominent Western civilian scientists (and subsequently Western newspapers) into buying the "bad meat" Soviet cover-up story, hook, line, and sinker: to the point that they publicly chided the American military for still believing in the "anthrax factory leak" theory:
> But Dr. Alexander Langmuir, a former director of epidemiology at the United States Centers for Disease Control, who presided at the session, said Tuesday that based on what he knew so far, "the current position of the U.S. military needs thorough re- examination; that is clear.'
> Dr. Philip Brachman of Emory University, a U.S. anthrax expert who has advised the Central Intelligence Agency on the incident, said the Soviet talk was a "landmark report" providing "a pretty good indication that this incident was an outbreak of gastrointestinal anthrax" from eating contaminated meat.
> Dr. Alexander Langmuir, a former chief epidemiologist for the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, agreed that the Soviet account was "very credible so far" but added that he hoped to obtain further details during the Soviets' weeklong stay.
The "bad meat" Soviet coverup story was fawningly parroted in _Science_ in 1988: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.3358121 (full text at https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.3358121) and also ended up in prominent American newspapers like the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/14/world/russians-explain-79...) and Wall Street Journal (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/04/13/s...), from which the above quotes are taken.
How did this happen? Why did this work so well? Because scientific methods designed for operation in adversary-free environments are catastrophically unfit for drawing dependable conclusions when intelligent motivated adversaries have tampered with the available data. The Western civilian scientists were thinking like...scientists, so they got easily manipulated into producing and disseminating literal Soviet disinformation while believing they were furthering the causes of science and of fighting anthrax. Oops:
> Three Soviet officials came to visit the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on 11 April: Pyotr Burgasov, retired deputy minister of health; Vladimir Nikiforov, infectious diseases chief at the Moscow Institute for the Advanced Training of Physicians; and Vladimir Sergiyev, director of the Institute of Parasitology and Tropical Medicine. They gave the same explanation as in 1980, but provided many more details, convincing some long-time doubters that the account was true. U.S. intelligence officials still maintain a military facility was involved.
Spoiler alert: Pyotr Burgasov was part of the response to the leak and part of the Soviet biowarfare program.
The argument for a natural origin of Sverdlovsk anthrax is tragically familiar: establishing a highly plausible way it could have been zoonosis, along with providing evidence consistent with a zoonosis. From the _Science_ article:
> The citizens of Sverdlovsk did not have to look so far to find the bacillus. It has been endemic to the region for centuries.
> The source of the outbreak was traced to a single 29-ton lot of bone meal (cattle feed) sold in March from a factory in Aramil, 15 kilometers to the southeast of Sverdlovsk. It must have taken in and ground up the bones of animals who died the previous year of anthrax. Its product clearly contained live anthrax. An official investigation found that the factory did not follow the prescribed heating and pressure treatment methods. The feed it produced went to a state farm, where veterinarians inoculate the animals, and to private owners, whom state veterinarians often do not bother to visit, according to Burgasov. On the approach of the May Day holiday, animals are slaughtered, generally the weakest (in this case, the sickest) first. The meat from the private butchers is thought to have triggered the outbreak, Burgasov said.
It's only collapse of the USSR that enabled the truth to come out in public. Two Soviet pathologists, against KGB orders, had kept some autopsy samples, which (along with a defector's testimony) annihilated the "bad meat" cover-up story. Turns out the outbreak of airbone anthrax that happened in the same city as the industrial-scale weaponized anthrax spore factory was indeed caused by the industrial-scale weaponized anthrax spore factory! https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/11/sverdlovs...
What is known is the nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. Both areas WIV sampled and they refuse to share their records with WHO or the NIH.
There was also no mention of the mouse deaths in the grant renewal application Daszak filed to the NIH later that year. In this account, he said the mice had experienced “mild Sars-like clinical signs” when they were infected with the mutant virus. It had actually killed six of the eight infected humanised mice. Daszak eventually provided details of the experiment’s deadly results to the US authorities in a report after the Covid-19 pandemic. He now says his 2018 statement about the “mild” illness was based on preliminary results — even though the experiment in which the mice died had taken place several months before he issued the statement
So these people are all known liars. The US Government banned GoF research, they got around it by claiming their work was urgent and safe, they ignored reporting requirements, when they finally did report what they said was a lie, and now they're still lying to try and cover previous lies.
So when these people say they want to insert furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses, a coronavirus appears right next door that has a FCS - the first one ever seen - and they say, oh well we changed our minds and never did it, well, with overwhelming probability they're lying again.
Is this a case of yet another heat map being a population density map? I assume the wet market is a popular local destination and gathering place, while the lab is not. You would expect there to be more cases where there are more people.
I speculate in ignorance of the actual social dynamics in the city of Wuhan.
Maybe I'm deeply confused, but the Wuhan lab was reported by NYMag to be the one that discovered RaTG13.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
> How Did It Get Out? 1. The Tongguan Mine Shaft in Mojiang, Yunnan, where, in 2013, fragments of RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARSCoV-2, were recovered and transported to the Wuhan Institute of Virology; 2. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Shi Zhengli’s team brought the RaTG13 sample, sequenced its genome, then took it out of the freezer several times in recent years;
The probability that a novel SARS-related CoV would emerge naturally in the city in China that was used as a seropositivity control -and the location of the worlds largest SARS-related related research lab, and which had very low wildlife consumption compared to Southern coastal cities is < 1/1000
There is no evidence for any infected animals at the Huanan market https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.25.538336v2
There was a known ascertainment bias towards reporting associated with the market https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23
The modelling by Pekar et al inferring multiple spillovers at the market was flawed https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1
Prior to the pandemic, the State department literally warned the US govt. a SARS-related accident was a real risk at the WIV https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
Was that even insinuated?
"no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab"
Wut?
"Between 1 July and 1 October 2012, we received 13 serum samples collected from 4 patients"
There should be more attention on this. We're busy worrying about AI that can troll at a college level, while scientists are still busy making frankenviruses after a pandemic plausibly caused by a lab leak.
But I should not that not all viral engineering is gain of function, and while it gets a lot of attention, even in laboratory virology is relatively rare.
The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming frankly. And it doesn't require any malice. No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.
Gain of function research is real, scientists intentionally make viruses which could start a pandemic. They do this for the purposes of knowledge and preparedness for the inevitable natural spillover events that will happen. It isn't nefarious.
But it is risky, and there many people now and before who thought it was a practice that should be curtailed because of the risk.
To add to this, most countries have turned away from infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control. The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself. It is like trying to cut off your enemy's leg by cutting off your own arm. It ends up kinda being like MAD except you're also the aggressor. The threat of a infectious weapon is not from other nations, but from a terrorist organization (which of course dramatically reduces risk). Not to say that this can't happen, but it is well known enough that were a contagious disease to get out, it would be more likely accidental. It would also be odd to release the disease into your own community first. I'm not saying it was or wasn't a lab leak or bioweapon, but if we're discussing weapon vs accident, there's good reason to believe a weapon is unlikely. Gain of research has significant value outside weapons and this also shows you why the weapon arguments against GoF aren't of high concern to those that are close to the work. Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances).
It is quite clear that they did amplification research as they’ve planned. And had inserted the furin site into the coronavirus . And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread. This had caused a lot of damage, in particular the deaths, economical damage, long-covid damages, mental illnesses and diminished IQ (covid brain fog). There’ve been some positive sides: diminished air travel, diminished carbon emissions, transition to work from home, more pedestrian zones in the cities, mRNA vaccine technology. But the negative side from the pandemic is still overwhelming.
Arguably this lab should be sued out of existence for damages.
A claim was made about that, but it’s far from settled. One could argue it has been debunked. See “SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was not engineered”: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119
> And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread.
That’s speculation. Irresponsible speculation, in fact, which has been pushed by people who should have known better. But they pushed it for jingoistic reasons.
> Arguably this lab should be sued out of existence for damages.
That’s an emotional reaction which you’re not examining rationally. If you remove the confirmation bias you’re applying to the evidence, there’s simply no substantial basis for the conclusions you’re reaching.
There is evidence that the Chinese authorities were suppressing information about the leak (information about that virus had leaked accidentally, by an ophthalmologist that saw cases spreading in his hospital).
Yes, it is not clear exactly, how the furin site got there. Was it a long series of mutations and a recombination with another virus in a lab animal? Was it spliced? We’ll never know, unless the scientists responsible would decide to tell how it had happened.
But I’m not particularly emotional about that virus. If you read the above, you’ll see that I see positive and negative after effects. Viruses and mistakes happen.
But it’d be a good idea to make a point and get rid of that lab. Failures like that should not be rewarded with continual existence.
It's in China, not America. Come on now.
The CCP might remove the lab from existence, but they're not gonna do it with a lawsuit.
"The drone's female voice also tells listeners, "Control your soul's thirst for freedom. Do not open your windows and sing.""
Most countries ( small to mid-tier ) lack the expertise, will or reason for it. But most major countries are working on biological weapons. If you think the US, Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, etc aren't running bio-weapons labs, then you are being too trusting at best or too naive at worst. Or maybe I'm just being too cynical.
> The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself.
Never prevented intentional disease warfare throughout history. What makes you think leaders aren't willing to hurt their own countries to hurt their enemies? More importantly, what makes you think these countries will develope bio-weapons, but not vaccines for them?
> The threat of a infectious weapon is not from other nations, but from a terrorist organization (which of course dramatically reduces risk).
Every major terrorist organization is or was created, funded and controlled by major nations.
> Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances).
And yet, all weapons labs in history were created by big/rich countries. You so desperately want a world without bio-weapons that you are blinded to the contradictions in your argument.
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch... covers this in some detail (it's geared towards chemical weapons, but biological weapons are the same boat). In short, chemical and biological weapons just aren't useful. For any platform you put it on, conventional explosives will do more damage. For major militaries, there's no point in using them, which is why the "big" military powers have all signed up to the anti-chemical weapons and anti-biological weapons treaties, but not the anti-nuclear or anti-cluster munitions or anti-landmines, etc.
If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them? Makes one wonder? Is there are treaty to ban feathers as weapons? The fact that there is an anti-biological weapons treaty is proof enough that countries are working on biological weapons, just like the anti-nuclear weapons treaty is proof that countries are working on nukes.
The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs. Take it from someone who has read too many silly blogs and watch too many silly youtube videos.
Also, pretty much every treaty ( international and intranational ) has been broken. Some even say treaties are meant or created to be broken.
Yes, countries can break treaties. But there is a real cost to doing so. The point of treaties (especially the anti-war treaties) is essentially to break a prisoner's dilemma: all parties can agree to do something that is mutually beneficial for everybody, but only when no one defects. The first arms control treaty was the Washington Naval Treaty, which was signed when most countries were literally unable to find the resources to keep up with the naval arms race and proposed by the one country that could.
If you read the post I linked (I suspect you did not, as you are only reacting to my comments and not other material within the post), you'll see that there are many other lines of evidence we can use to ascertain the inutility of chemical weapons, not least of which is the lack of its use in conflicts after WWI, even in existential state conflicts like WWII or the Arab-Israel wars.
> If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them?
The same reason why we have laws against murder. The existence of the treaty isn't to keep people from doing something useful (indeed, if you look at which treaties are acceded to, it's the treaties that keep people from doing something useful that don't get the signatories). Instead, it's to signal the unwillingness to use it and to pressure others not to consider its use. And if you know sufficiently few people are willing to use it, then you can avoid spending the money on countermeasures to chemical weapons.
It's not gotchas. It's just history and reasoning. Logic. It's persuasive to people who are willing to think. But no amount of reason will convince someone with an agenda.
> If the point of treaties is to be broken, why bother signing up to them in the first place?
As your buddy godelski pointed out, governments do things for optics, political grandstanding, etc. Why did germany and the soviet union sign the nonaggression treaty? Also to appease the naive masses who believe in fairy tales. So that naive people can say nobody is working on chemical or biological weapons since a treaty says so. See, this nonaggression treaty is proof germany and the soviet union will never attack each other. Genius logic.
> The first arms control treaty was the Washington Naval Treaty, which was signed when most countries were literally unable to find the resources to keep up with the naval arms race and proposed by the one country that could.
No. It was proposed by the one country that had isolationist political pressure against naval buildup due to our history and founding fathers warning against standing armies. It was proposed by the one country to kneecap british attempts to enforce navy limits. Also, the Washington Naval Treaty was a complete failure? It set the stage for japan to build more resentment which led to ww2.
> not least of which is the lack of its use in conflicts after WWI, even in existential state conflicts like WWII or the Arab-Israel wars.
Chemical weapons were used in iraq-iran war. In the syrian war just a few years ago.
> The same reason why we have laws against murder.
There are laws against murder because murder exists. People murder. So the treaty against chemical weapons must exist because chemical weapons exist?
It would be great if chemical, biological, etc weapons are never used. But you'd have to be absolutely naive to think that every major nation isn't working on chemical or biological weapons. It's like all the naive people who claimed that government agencies stopped collecting our data after getting caught in the 70s. Of course they didn't stop collecting data. They increased the gathering of data.
I live in a country where biological weapons wiped out a significant portion of the native population. Do you think such a country is working on biological weapons? If one major country is, then so is every major nation around the world.
The real world isn't an utopian fairy tale. No matter how much one wishes it were. But it's a free country. Believe whatever you want.
1. Attributing the whole of Japan's imperial ambition to the Washington Naval Treaty is farcical.
2. This chart of battleship displacement by date of construction plainly reveals that the Washington Navy Treaty was a massive success. Yes, treaty-breaking ships were constructed, but you cannot look at this graph and conclude that the treaty did not succeed in substantially disrupting the arms escalation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty#/media...
FWIW, I agree with you that the development and research into chemical and biological weapons never stopped. However it is likely that most countries no longer maintain up-to-date stockpiles of these weapons. Research continues for game theory reasons, but the treaties (and moreover the general public sentiment against such weapons, particularly the sentiment that use of those weapons would constitute the use of "WMDs" to which a nuclear response would be warranted) had the effect of greatly reducing the risk that such weapons would be used en masse. To this point; these sort of weapons have not yet been used in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, despite most late-cold war analysts believing that the Soviet Union would use chemical weapons during their anticipated war with NATO.
Serious question, are you surprised governments do things that aren't useful? That they'll focus more on signaling than utility? That's literally 80% of politics: show.
> The fact that there is an anti-biological weapons treaty is proof enough that countries are working on biological weapons, just like the anti-nuclear weapons treaty is proof that countries are working on nukes.
Now that we got the above out of the way, maybe notice that China, Russia, and the US have all signed the Biological Weapons Convention[0] (outlaw bio weapons). All signed during the cold war. Then maybe notice that China, Russia, and the US have NOT signed the ban on the use of nuclear weapons[1].
> The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs
I agree. I mean just the dichotomy of [0] and [1] really tells a lot. You make a good point that governments are difficult to discuss because you can't take anything they do at face value so you have to dig in and think about their actions and what signals they are making.
But most major countries are working on biological weapons.
No, they are. But that's a bit different. Though I understand the confusion. Gain of function research can be classified as weapons. You got to develop weapons to defend against them. And of course, momentum. Especially in politics, where once funding is given it is hard to take it away, though not hard to reduce. I'm more saying if they would seriously deploy such a weapon and how serious the research is.
> What makes you think leaders aren't willing to hurt their own countries to hurt their enemies?
Some yes, some no. I think most countries have learned that the Russian strategy doesn't lead to great outcomes. Then again, you think Russia would have learned it too. But most countries realize that you can't rule over the dead. But you're right, that I may be too trusting. As far as vaccines, it is hard to keep those secret. Especially if we're talking about a country like China with a billion people, where you have to distribute at least a few hundred million. You don't think a few are going to fall off the truck? There'd be a lot of money for such a situation. Or even just the recipe. I mean vaccines don't confer 100% immunity so it still comes with big costs to yourself. But you're right, Russia keeps doing the Russian strategy. Though this is more easily done in an authoritative country. This is a lot of what jcranmer is pointing to. One more thing to consider, it is hard to invade this region after. You might think the same thing about nuclear but there's a reason they've focused on increasing the explosion and decreasing the radiation. Same reasons.
> Every major terrorist organization is or was created, funded and controlled by major nations.
Not quite true, but if they were, then the above arguments would apply there so that no terrorist organization would get the bio weapons from the big countries. You might want to ask why there haven't been any dirty bombs, despite that this should be easier, especially after the collapse of the USSR where many nuclear materials went missing. They all went somewhere (smaller countries and probably bigger countries too, to keep away from smaller countries), but we'll probably never know the full extent.
> And yet, all weapons labs in history were created by big/rich countries.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. Not all weapons were created in big countries. But weapons like nuclear, bio, and others were from big countries because to have such a program is quite expensive. Currently bioweapons, of the kind we're discussing, are still fairly expensive. This may change as things become cheaper. But regardless, these types of weapons are more attractive to the crazy anarchist who wants to watch the world burn than the angry dictator. They just aren't practical in the modern globalized world.
But there's got to be a logical reason for well over a century of research in the area and not seeing it used in practice. If it were a good weapon, it would have been used.
Okay good, I'm glad we are agreed.
> Some yes, some no.
If some are, then "everyone" has to, especially major powers. Just think about it.
> This is a lot of what jcranmer is pointing to.
I debunked what he wrote.
> the Russian strategy
What's that?
> Though this is more easily done in an authoritative country.
No. It's done more easily in a democracy. An authoritative country never developed nuked and used it on innocent civilians. It was one of those wonderful democracies. Just like a wonderful democracy and our democratic friends overthrew the ukrainian democracy and now another wonderful democracy is invading ukraine. Most of the horror in this world has been done by democracies. Funny how all parties involved in ukraine are democracies...
> Not quite true
No. Absolutely true.
> I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here.
You wrote "Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances)."
And I was pointing out that all "contagion weapons" were created by big/rich countries. I was simply debunking your claim.
> But there's got to be a logical reason for well over a century of research in the area and not seeing it used in practice.
Has it not been used "in practice". Biological weapons have been used since ancient times. Biological weapons have been used more often than nuclear weapons.
The blind and naive were adamant our agencies don't collect data and spy on us. And were absolutely shocked when it was revealed they do. Of course they do. As I said, people who are too naive or too trusting believe otherwise. I guess the third option are state actors or those who brainwashed by the media. Or maybe I'm just too cynical.
Very clearly false dilemma.
> I debunked what he wrote.
That's a strong word for what you wrote.
> What's that?
I'd link it to you, but you said you don't want to read "silly blogs". So I'm not sure how I can communicate anything to you. I don't feel like it'd help. I think we're done here.
No. It's game theory. It's geopolitics. It's why russia, britain, france and china developed nukes. It's why india and pakistan developed it.
> That's a strong word for what you wrote.
Not strong or weak. Just reality.
> I'd link it to you, but you said you don't want to read "silly blogs".
No. What I actually wrote: "The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs. Take it from someone who has read too many silly blogs and watch too many silly youtube videos."
What do you think "take it from someone who has read too many silly blogs" means? You aren't going to link to anything I don't already know.
As I said, wishing there was no biological weapons is a noble thought. But believing nobody is working on biological weapons is naive. No serious rational intelligent person could believe it. But like I said, maybe life has made me too cynical.
Hey chief, these white men aren't going to take any more of our land. Here's the treaty we signed with them proving that. Hey stalin, germany isn't going to attack us. Look at this non-aggression pact we sign with them.
>> no amount of reason will convince someone with an agenda.
You're exactly right. You already know.
So do you. But you've got an agenda and a worldview that prevents you from accepting it. Imagine being naive enough to believe that there isn't chemical nor biological weapons in this world. Believe what you want. This discussion is getting pointless and I'll end it here.
You mean contagious, not infectious. Biological weapons which are infectious but not particularly contagious, such as anthrax, are much easier to control and have been the focus of most biological weapons research. Biological weapons are banned and aren't, used not because they don't work, but because other things work better and with less political fallout.
And FWIW, very contagious pathogens could be used as weapons for strategic effect if you had reason to believe they would hurt your economy less than your enemy's. For instance, if you believe your authoritarian government will allow you to flatten the curve but liberal governments will have a disordered response that precludes this. I'm not saying they did it, but the possibility isn't patently absurd.
See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...
In my opinion, gain of function is too dangerous with current security measures, and we should consider a moratorium. Lab biocontainment is exceptionally hard.
I don't agree about the point of virology being just about studying gain of function. There are tons of things you can study in virology without needing to create novel viruses.
https://www.criver.com/eureka/why-are-lentivirus-vector-safe...
The gain of function research of concern takes viruses already capable of sickening and killing humans (or their close relatives), and deliberately makes them deadlier and easier to spread among humans. This is a tiny fraction of virology, and has yet to deliver any practical benefit.
There's a legitimate concern that an overbroad ban on gain-of-function research could restrict safe and beneficial activities. The WIV's work was pretty far at the dangerous extreme, though--Ralph Baric's work was already controversial, and the WIV was working with a greater diversity of viruses, at lower BSL.
Either way my point was that we actively use a known highly transmissible virus, with some parts removed, under the general assumption that it's safe, and it's been demonstrated to not cause large issues (compared to other problems in gene therapy). I think people should be aware of that and in some sense I am surprised there isn't more attention placed on this practice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw-nR6-4kQQ&t=2466s
I said "gain of function research of concern", which is vague but seems to have become the standard phrase to convey that narrower sense. There's definitely some grey, but the WIV's work was pretty deep in the black.
I'm reading more about lentiviral vectors now, and not totally comforted to see all the ways the earlier generations could regain replication competence. That still seems much less frightening to me than GOFROC, which is deliberately just one containment failure away from a novel pandemic.
[edit] To be clear, I'm not saying this definitely did or did not happen, I don't know. I'm saying if it came out later that it did, I wouldn't be surprised.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7096887/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
It really makes me wonder how many lab leaks may have happened during this time period when we started collecting and storing samples but we didn't yet have the ability to track diseases like we do today.
But it's intellectually dishonest of you to pretend that was in fact the purpose of the anecdote, and not to serve as evidence of a lab leak.
Every one i know who did a science graduate degree has hairy stories.
Please don't "actually" something with an uncited statement without backing it up with any sort of detail. A news article? Anything, honestly.
> that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built to do right?
Really? It's "Wuhan institute of virology". Not "coronaviruses". Right?
I have no specific horse in this race but I feel like I'm losing my mind every time I read any discussion on this subject because there's always folks throwing around random statements as if they're established fact and I feel like at this point, on this specific subject, on this website, we should know better, geez.
> The institute has been an active premier research center for the study of coronaviruses.[6]
> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[17][21]
The evidence is pretty damning, and points to way too much to be coincidental. It's not solid evidence, but that would be impossible to get since China blocked anyone from visiting or doing independent investigations.
My major and Msc are related to microbiology (which is highly related to virology), and I'd estimate it's a 95% chance of having originated from the lab.
I'd both put my estimate at much lower than 95%, and I'd be substantially less confident in it, since my expertise kicks in about two weeks after an initial spillover event occurs.
For covid to be natural it would have had to mutate in the same way as planned in the grant proposal within 2 years of the grant proposal, and then travel hundreds of miles not infecting anyone on the way until it got to the city where this research was planned to be done.
Think about it.
Did you consider that maybe the reason this proposal was written was because this mutation was the most likely way this kind of virus could mutate to infect humans?
I don’t understand why people keep throwing around all kind of unsubstantiated facts like if they suddenly made things clearer.
The facts are not that complicated. Could the pandemic be linked to an accidental leak from a gain-of-function study at the Wuhan lab? Most certainly. Do we have evidence that it did? No, we don’t. Could it come from somewhere else? Sure, it can. Was there a properly done inquiry with full collaboration from the lab and the host country? Absolutely not, China was extremely uncooperative and did all it could to control the narrative surrounding the pandemic.
From that, I conclude that it’s highly unlikely we will ever learn anything definitive. Therefor, discussing this is pretty much pointless.
Who in a right mind (just leaving for a moment how) would do that? As: create a separate strain of coronavirus just to introduce one specific mutation.
Incorrect. We need to determine what happened based on all the evidence. We can't just make stuff up to fill in the blanks.
i.e. If what we know doesn't contain facts essential to the determination, we can't just "think about it" harder.
That's the hard-hitting evidence that was missing.
And that's why this topic is so taboo and annoying. People turn coincidence into proof.
Clearly, you have an agenda that encourages people to stop looking at facts and instead to make things up they don't have answers for.
Think about it. (This means I'm right, right? This means if you don't agree with me, you aren't thinking, right?)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-05/covid-lik...
There was some indirect and even some more direct evidence of Iraq doing nuclear weapons research in some capacity at some point too, this is incredibly dangerous line to go own without being 250% sure. Indirect evidence simply doesn't cut it.
> No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.
It may not be someone 'credible', but within the current context of the U.S. preparing for what increasingly looks like a direct confrontation with China, it sure suits a lot of neocons in Washington, who seem to always be failing upwards in the ranks despite having lost all credibility over a dozen times in the last decade alone.
Also because gain of function research is risky as hell with seemingly little benefit. The same lab had requested funds to do it on viruses that were much deadlier.
In fact COVID seems somewhat unique amongst modern maladies to not have a clear zoonotic origin.
But I'm sure nature evolving this exact mutation coincidentally in a relatively short period after scientist documented their plans to engineer it is an equally likely outcome.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...
"Farzan was “bothered by the furin site and has a hard time explaining that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely).” On the question of whether the virus had a natural origin or came from some sort of accidental lab release, Farrar reported that Farzan was “70:30” or “60:40” in favor of an “accidental-release” explanation and that “Bob” — an apparent reference to Robert Garry — was also surprised by the presence of a furin cleavage site in this virus. Farrar quoted Bob saying: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. … it’s stunning.” - https://theintercept.com/2023/01/19/covid-origin-nih-emails/
I'm not qualified to evaluate these arguments on their merit.
"Harrison and Sachs (1) allege that scientists at NIH and elsewhere, including myself and colleagues, conspired to suppress theories of a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. This is false. A possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 was discussed in our earlier publications"
But there absolutely was a conspiracy to suppress the lab leak theory. This conspiracy is why the infamous letter published in the lancet that admonished the lab leak theory as a 'conspiracy theory's was retracted by the lancet. Peter daszak was one of the signers of the letter, but it came out he attempted to avoid signing the letter even though he arranged the entire thing. The reason he didn't want to sign it? In his words:
“so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn't work in a counterproductive way.” - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/wuhan-lab-collaborat...
Why might he feel that way? Well for one his name was on the DARPA grant proposal from 2018 to engineer a coronavirus with the same mutation covid has.
COVID-19 is not "some previously known coronavirus strain with furin cleavage site".
Trying to use difference in details in this case to sow doubt isn't reasonable in my opinion because it's details that are realistically impossible to nail down.
It seems like the standards applied in this discussion by some are essentially that nothing short of irrefutable proof even qualifies as evidence.
There were serious attempts to completely shut the conversation down and prevent investigations into there being a lab leak.
To quote Doyle - "never theorize before you have data [...] you end up twisting facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts".
The latter is what the article above is suggesting, that the Wuhan lab was working for the Chinese military to develop a virus for biological warfare research. For example, if you look at the ridiculous hero image of the article, you'll see someone who looks like they might be a Chinese military officer holding a clipboard and wearing a mask, while the Chinese flag's star is surrounded by what look like little stylised coronaviruses.
Half this very thread. "you couldn't mention the lab without being called a racist" and then they proceed to talk about china bioengineering weapons instead of an accidental lab leak.
The constant "the news suppresed this because of trump" is also a pretty loud dogwhistle.
The idea that a lab could have a leak was studied, there were multiple papers on it. The evidence did not add up to much, other than the circumstancial. The zootropic evidence had a bit more weight but still came up with "we might not have enough data to come up with a conclusive answer".
Because scientists said they leaned on that evidence the popular science outlets explained it as "origin is a bat not a lab leak" which should have had more nuance in the headlines but popular science outlets try to summarise hard science into easy to understand articles and they are fairly guilty of clickbait (how many times have we cured cancer, or some physics experiment done something close to a black hole). And between that and a number of bad actors starting conspiracy theories about the lab being a hidden bioweapon lab and China releasing it intentionally the discourse got all sorts of distorted.
The problem is Bioweapon dudes hid behind lab leak concerns and the lack of evidence from a scientific prespeective gave the wet market Patient 0 more visibility. To this day, half this thread is people with conspiracy theories hidding behind the lab leak. Makes a conversation about it almost entirely useless when you engage with someone and a few messages in they say the media is jewish and wanted to destroy the economy with lockdowns to make trump lose (this is a comment on this very thread further up, although i think they have been shadowbanned already)
I was being slightly hyperbolic. A good chhunk outright said it, another good group was using plausible deniability, which means if pressed they might say thats not what they meant. Makes separating them quite hard
> Are you unable to distinguish that assertion from the assertion that the engineered weapon was intentionally deployed?
I am not. The issue is not that either. The issue is "The origin of COVID-19".
When it came out two main theories appeared. Either the wet market where it was first noticed, or a lab leak in a lab over an hour away that was studying coronaviruses.
The two were studied by the scientific community, china put a lot of hurdles and the best availeble evidence pointed towards the wetmarket.
While this was happening, a number of conspiracies started, many of which pointed towards China as a bioweapons manufacturer (something that is very illegal). Those theories included that china was not studying viruses but manufacturing them (that is a very key distinction) and the theoreis then spawn over if China leaked it to test it, or infected its own population etc. Theories adjacent to this were heavily repeated by a number of news outlets, mayorly OAN a far right news station. The great smoke screen was that when pressed they could always fall back on "the lab leak theory" which is way more sensible.
Essentially the problem is the lab leak theory meant two very different things. It should have been called the accident leak and the bio weapon theory, but both were called lab leak and people who mean bioweapon hide behind the larger, more defensible lab leak umbrella.
You can't read much into the early case data that David Relman described as "hopelessly impoverished". There were likely much earlier cases based on excess mortality data (a key reason WHO haven't accepted market origin). Also, there is a clear sampling bias in the cases in the article cited above. https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23
Why was the wet market on the other side of the city the only identified outbreak site if it came from the lab? There were/are many markets on the other side of the river that would be much more relevant to residents living and working on that side.
People looking up flu symptoms in the middle of winter is not evidence of anything abnormal.
I don’t understand the intellectual effort going into the lab leak theory… it feels like some kind of state run propaganda piece, I assume to just keep a negative view on China in people’s minds. It’s crazy given that whatever the truth there is no consequence… literally an inconsequential endeavour
It wasn't exclusively in the wet market, it was in lots of places.
America was involved with that lab, too. It should really be the rest of the world with a negative view of America and China.
China is a fantastic country filled with amazing people, culture, history and so on. It is quite possible to recognise a country's positive characteristics while questioning specific actions by some of the people within that country. This is as true of China as it is of any other country.
>They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
That procedure is pretty much exactly what you'd have to do to make covid in a lab. Assuming that's true, it's pretty much a smoking gun.
>The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. They said the Wuhan scientists...
So presumably The Times has the names of the researchers and someone like the FBI could investigate and see what correspondence if any they have with Wuhan about it.
As others have noted, this is mostly wrong. The WIV is the only lab in the world ever to publish a genome for RaTG13. They'd published a portion (under a different name, Ra4991) before the onset of the pandemic. The similarity to SARS-CoV-2 made it obvious they had something relevant, so they published the rest after. Perhaps you meant there's no evidence that the WIV ever had live RaTG13, and that's true--indeed, there's no evidence that anyone ever has, and some highly speculative claims that it might be an in silico fraud.
It's also not the closest relative anymore. From your other comments here, I believe your knowledge is about a year behind; you're repeating many old arguments that even those arguing most strongly against a possible research-related origin have long since abandoned.
> The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab [0].
The market was the first big cluster, but the earliest cases show much less structure. See the paragraph beginning "A later study by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid", which I believe is intended as explanation for that map (though that's not completely clear to me).
In any case, there's no reason to expect the first identified cluster in the same location as the first introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 must have been introduced into other continents at airports and seaports; but the first clusters were elsewhere, at nursing homes, choir practices, and other locations where the (a) the virus spread easily, and (b) the patients are likely to get sick enough for people to notice.
> Furthermore, several different isolates were found in the market, indicating that SARSCoV2 had been circulating before the epidemic took off.
I guess you're referring here to Pekar et. al? Their "different isolates" are literally just two SNPs apart. Roughly 1/10 of human-to-human transmissions result in two lineages at least that different, so this seems intuitively like it could easily evolve in cryptic human spread. Pekar did some complicated epidemiological modeling that claims otherwise, but I don't think it means much; see for example the criticism at
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1
I'm curious how you came up with this heuristic. It seems to me that there's plenty of incentives to study benign viruses: the primary one being to develop a deeper understanding of the biology of viruses in general.
The article says that the viruses from Mojiang were transported to the Wuhan lab and studied there.
May be a good idea to get acquainted with inference to best explanation, and to understand that 'direct evidence' should not automatically be awarded epistemological primacy over 'circumstantial evidence' (or what you're calling 'innuendo').
Prolly you'll have a hard time finding a metropolis which wasnt researching corona viruses.
Converting the distance in phylogenetic analysis to evolutionary distance is based on natural gene drafting rate, which does not consider passaging with human selections.
This is false
A closer relative was found like a year or so later, can't remember the name though.
However, this kind of writing should only happen after years or months of investigation. You can't do the lab leak panic 2 days into the pandemic. You can't even really do it half way through the pandemic.
I'm glad such investigations are being caried out. I only wish links to whatever is declassified from the investigations to be made public for such publications. Authors need to prove their research effort when it comes to such news.
Existing evidence points to another lab: BSL4 lab "Vector" in Novosibirsk, Russia. They worked on their "Sputnik" vaccine when blast in laboratory on September 16 2019[2] caused chain of incidents: broken windows, unprotected soldiers break in, which checked rooms for signs of fire, equipment stolen from BSL4 lab by those soldiers[0][1], epidemic of unknown virus in Siberia, Military World Games in Wuhan[3].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w7SAeNcXA8
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200407175030/https://www.youtu...
[2]: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/17/health/russia-lab-explosi...
The same document that turned out to have been paid for and produced despite having numerous errors and lies, simply to turn a narrative?
Let’s hold everyone to the same standard shall we?
In other words, censorship
This part doesn't make sense to me. Coronavirus is known to mutate constantly and rapidly. Having a vaccine against a strand might provide a temporary advantage, but that advantage would subside quickly. Coronaviruses would make poor bioweapons considering how impossible it would be to control them.
If an army wants to develop a virus-based weapon wouldn't there be better viruses to base it from than COVIDs?
Moreover, the first SARS-CoV-2 variant took a long time to start mutating and even then it was only minor mutations. If you release an extremely infectious very deadly virus and you have a vaccine for it, then at that moment it's a Deus Ex scenario and whoever can manufacture the vaccine can take over the world because your enemies are now collapsing and will do anything to obtain the vaccine including giving up their own autonomy. Guess that's the theory, at least.
As to why SARS-CoV-2: because it's airborne and can spread long distances via gas-like clouds (which is why lockdowns, masks, wiping surfaces etc didn't work). You can't really get better if you want to very rapidly infect a whole country.
The U.S. has done this, and indeed, most of our public health infrastructure is an outgrowth of it.
Also posted on HN 2 years ago with ... zero comments"
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nih.gov%2Fabout-...
Seems to me that from the point of view of public health and not having millions die unnecessarily it would be good to figure what went on. Then if it's a lab leak you could restrict that stuff and if natural you could up research on nature.
Burning people with flamethrowers is propaganda, plain and simple. I challenge you to source that.
Issues regarding funding, laboratory security, military involvement, country of origin, responsibility of scientists, institutions and leadership involved are all secondary.
Edit: Fixed typing error and wording.
IF it was a lab leak, that is the best case scenario. It means the virus was a part of peoples hubris and messing around with viruses. I potentially one time accident.
If it isn't the lab leak, that means it is because of our intrusion on the wild world via agriculture and eventually the conditions of factory farming. If that is what it is, Covid will be the first of many like it.
“Whether the virus emerged as a result of a leak from a laboratory or from nature has become one the most controversial problems in science.”
The words “in science” are my problem here: people thinking this is a “scientific” question.
It’s a history question, a political question, and could be made into a forensic question. But science does not ask this kind of question!
Is it possible for a lab to leak a virus? That’s a question science can ask, but it doesn’t answer this one.
So we end up with a belief that scientists can answer this question… but it isn’t a “scientific” question in the first place.
Subsequent scientific have disagreed.
But this isn’t purely historical.
Covid was worse than the flu, but the flu is also deadly and we should be paying more attention to vaccinating it. The deaths aren't evenly distributed, either, young healthy people have less to worry about, but "less" isn't "nothing." For masks, you really wanted N95 masks, not cloth, and you still have to avoid large indoor gatherings.
Nobody said that bleach in the lungs was good. Trump mentioned disinfectant presumably butchering a description of the HealLight which would use UV to destroy the virus, effectively "disinfecting" the lungs. There are always idiots poisoning themselves with bleach, though, but nobody pays much attention to the poison control stats most of the time. HCQ and Ivermectin had some promising studies but no real effectiveness for the things people wanted them for. There probably is some rise in myocarditis due to vaccines... but they're still a lot safer if you look at mortality rates. "Great Reset" was from an actual policy proposal someone put out, but doesn't really stand for the things the conspiracies say it does.
All of these things got pushed into extreme caricatures depending on what side you trust.
The problem being that treating someone with steroids also strengthens parasites, which burdens the immune system even more.
So in parts of the world where parasites are common, it makes sense to treat with an anti-parasite drug from the beginning (no need to test for actual parasites).
In parts of the world without widespread parasite infections (for example, the US), the costs outweigh the benefits.
This caused lots of confusion because there were quite a few papers promoting Ivermectin as part of treatment. The fine print said “in developing countries” but nobody reads the fine print.
... which is true of the pandemic response in general. "Science" doesn't tell society how to react to something. Science is a process to test hypothesizes--it isn't a book of facts or direct answers on the trade-offs of various mitigation techniques. It can only inform, not dictate.
It’s just sloppy work, but when you’re there for 12 hours a day for 5-6 days a week, you’re bound to get sloppy
The communist party is sensitive doesn't want it to be known that a Chinese lab leaked a dangerous virus (see also "how does RBMK reactor explode?")
The ecohealth alliance that Fauci and Dazack were involved in don't want it widely known that they had a hand in the WIV GoF (that Obama banned stateside) and worked early in the pandemic to obscure their own involvement in it.
Trump doesn't want it widely known that his administration contributed $100k to the Ecohealth alliance.
Lots of powerful people working to not take responsibility and obfuscate reality.
Their colleagues - the scientific community - cannot through science alone determine if this was true.
If it happened then they went to a nearby hospital. To investigate there is possibly a police matter, certainly a health matter, a political matter and many things - but is not answered by waving the magic science wand. And so on.
People who claim it’s a science question are shallow or deceitful.
I disagree, it is a scientific question. Whether we can answer it in isolation of politics and prejudice is the question for me.
But if you observe some gravitational waves in a single event, you can correlate it to optical or radio observations, you can try to analyse the signals to match them to existing hypotheses of gravitational waves origination etc. The singularity of the event doesn't make it not science. Same as the emergence of a novel virus.
It is just a shame that most of the evidence is subjective and non-scientific. But the question itself is well posed scientific endeavour.
In order to investigate it, many many many smaller questions may be asked, some of which are scientific.
That it is commingled with a million political questions, yes it's true. But to me that's a nuisance variable, not fundamentally changing the underlying question.
What do you mean? Ofc it's possible and has been done hundreds of times in the past with different viruses and lab security levels.
(1) The institute sought funding to research something (A), which Covid could result from. (Said later they didn't do the planned research), but funding from the military appears to have been given.
(1.1) They planned to do the research at the time and approximate place where Covid later emerged.
(2) Protections at the lab were not what they should have been.
(2.2) Lab scientists had previously created a highly infectious super-coronavirus (not Covid-19) with a very high kill-rate that in all probability would never have emerged in nature. Their tests showed no known (at that time) way to effectively limit its spread were it to leak.
(3) NO animal testing was reported in a wide vicinity around the the Hunan market. Samples of Covid found in the market were NOT from animals (B).
(3.1) The market is a busy place in the center of the city where the virus would almost certainly be once it's spreading between people.
(3.2) There is some evidence that researchers from the lab were hospitalized with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019, and one of their relatives died.
(4) The biggest hotspot of people reporting illness via social media (in the month before the province was locked down on January 23) was at the institute, though this was partly hidden in initial reports. The first case in Britain was recorded a week later.
(A) The Wuhan Institute of Virology sought funding for inserting a furin cleavage site. The institute is a 40-minute drive from the Huanan Seafood market.
(B) In January 2020, Chinese officials cleared the market without testing live animals. The presence of SARS-CoV-2 was from environmental samples (animal cage, hair-and-feather–removal machine, etc). Covid-susceptible animals were present but NOT tested. The study of those samples was criticized for not having any animal samples.
(C) Information above drawn from archive.ph/L2BSO and comments and links here in this HN thread.
---------------------------
"The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak. The closest relatives to Covid known were too far from Covid to have developed into Covid on their own in a short time. So bringing in dangerous viruses and accidentally leaking them is an unlikely cause." Earlier reporting by the Times: archive.ph/Mkqox
Genome statistical estimates indicate the "relatives" are decades away from Covid. In February 2020, RaTG13 was identified as the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, sharing 96.1% nucleotide identity. It was found near the town of Tongguan in Mojiang county in Yunnan, China. However, in 2022, scientists found three closer matches 530 km south, in Feuang, Laos, designated as BANAL-52 (96.8% identity), BANAL-103 and BANAL-236. However, it is alleged that one virus at the Wuhan institute was an even closer match to Covid-19 than RaTG13. Note that bat viruses had never been known to harm humans. Intermediate animals apparently catching a virus from bats and passing it to humans had been known to happen.
In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base.
"Scientists with close relationships with the Wuhan Institute of Virology said it was their belief that there was vaccine research going on in the fall of 2019, pertinent to Covid-19 vaccination"
"Investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power."
In May 2020, one of the key researchers died from unconfirmed causes at age 54.
"On November 19, the safety director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences made a visit, according to the institute’s website. He addressed a meeting of the institute’s leadership with important 'oral and written' instructions from China’s president, Xi Jinping, regarding 'a complex and grave situation'. "
"In the first months of the pandemic, many Chinese scientists visited bat caves in Yunnan to see whether they could find a place where Covid may have originated.... 7 scientists attempting to visit were told the Moijang mine (known source of at least one Covid-like coronavirus) was closed, so they sampled bats in another abandoned copper mine nearby. On the first day of their work, police arrived, seized the samples and took them to their station, where they were interrogated and detained for 48 hours. Officers also went to their hotel and seized the samples they had collected from elsewhere. Even though the team had approval to test in the area, they were ordered to leave. Searching for bat viruses was banned in Yunnan in early 2021"
</harumph>
John Ratcliffe, former Director of National Intelligence: “My informed assessment, as a person with as much or more access than anyone to our government’s intelligence during the initial year of the virus outbreak and pandemic onset, has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense. From a view inside the IC, if our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side-by-side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a naturally occurring “spillover” theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long and overwhelming while the “spillover” side would be nearly empty.”
https://oversight.house.gov/release/covid-origins-part-2-hea...
The Furin cleavage site is one of the more compelling pieces of evidence. 1.5 years before the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute applied for a grant from Darpa to explore mutating coronaviruses to make them more infectious to humans, particularly through the addition of a Furin cleavage site. (Darpa declined to fund the research).
The Covid-19 virus is notable for being the only coronavirus to have a Furin cleavage site. Not only that, but it appears to be basically a perfect mutation that specifically modifies the 12 nucleotides necessary for the Furin site, without modifying other base pairs.
Here's a quote from email excerpt included in the recent Congress hearing:
"Before I left the office for the ball, I aligned nCoV with the 96% bat CoV sequenced at WIV. Except for the RBD the S proteins are essentially identical at the amino acid level – well all but the perfect insertion of 12 nucleotides that adds the furin site. S2 is over its whole length essentially identical. I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function – that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level – its stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted."
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Lette...
We still have no strong evidence for lab leak from BSL4 lab in Wuhan, while we have some evidence (two early strains of SARS-CoV-2: A, then B; B was in Wuhan in December; where and when was parent of A and B?) that suggests start of epidemic outside of China in mid-September 2019. Russians start to delete videos about blast at their BSL4 lab "Vector" in Novosibirsk on Sep 16 2019[0], which suggests that this information may cause harm for them.
So, "Lab leak" theory may be right, while "lab leak from BSL4 lab in Wuhan" theory may be wrong.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200407175030/https://www.youtu...
What happened several years ago was a clown show of the highest order.
It's true with covid though and I always thought the allegation a bit unfair. I mean suggesting the origin of X is from the nearest source of X has never seemed much of a conspiracy to me.
I had long messages on the Wikipedia discussion before they allowed the idea to be mentioned without a this is conspiracy disinformation disclaimer, after many months of fighting.
The other one doesn't involve a conspiracy of raccoon dogs to sneak a sick member into the city to punish the humans for their consumption.
It can't really be symmetrical.
I'm pretty convinced that media departments are real though!