Tech companies too had a role to play here. For the sake of free speech, what happened here is worth discussing.
Tech companies too had a role to play here. For the sake of free speech, what happened here is worth discussing.
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.
Daszak.
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".
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
>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.
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"
Why did, an educated RN, believe this? And why was she trying to spread the idea? Is this RN also (generally) an anti-vaxxer? I'm not sure if it is the location of so many media outlets, but Los Angeles County (and Orange County) does seem to be the epicenter of anti-vaxxer culture in the US.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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
This reads more like CYA piece
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.