First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources | Hacker News Reader

First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

public.substack.com

685 pointslarsiusprime718 comments

I don't trust this article at all.

> Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus.

> It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the public.

At absolutely no point in this article are any new "sources" pointed out.

The authors make that statement early on so as to make the reader think something new in the article is going to be revealed.

Instead we get multiple paragraphs of links to various quotes and suppositions from various people, some of whom were involved in investigating the origins and some who work in the field.

You won't have to wait long for confirmation. The Director of National Intelligence will be required by law to declassify information about the infected researchers on June 18th, including their names, symptoms, date of onset and role at WIV.[1]

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619...

Hey that's a cool link. I'm kinda embarrassed to say I didn't know you could track bills like this going through Congress. Thanks for the lead.

I discounted the article, especially the below part because anyone can say they're "100%" certain about something while they're not.

> When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%”

...

That's until I saw that Act on Congress' website. It'll be interesting to see what information is declassified. If there's proof that the mentioned scientists were first to fall ill, I wonder what the consequences are.

Assuming DNI chooses to divulge that tidbit formally. Per Biden's published interpretation of that law, they can withhold anything on grounds of 'national security' (note not the narrower 'sources and methods' scope).

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

What could 'national security' be construed as? : https://twitter.com/gdemaneuf/status/1669165325722722306?t=M...

National Security being anything that can be deemed dangerous to the Executive Branch. A very broad stroke these days, that's even used to paint opposing politicians by both parties.

At the moment I’m skeptical of how revelatory the report and documents will be. The act specifically mentions the possibility of redactions to protect sources and methods. We’ll have to wait and see what size of bus the DNI attempts to drive through that hole.

This is not going to be revelatory.

This is just a stamp on various anonymous "sources" on what we have heard already.

>You won't have to wait long for confirmation.

Confirmation that they were sick. Not confirmation of what they were sick with.

Given the location, the timing, the symptoms, the severity of the illness (it's unusual for 'flu to put healthy young adults in hospital) I think we can be pretty confident in our guess.

Roll an N-sided die representing all possible locations for possible human/bat human/animal interactions.

What percentage of those facets are city centers near level 4 bio labs that research these types of viruses?

The characteristic of the early pandemic was "ground glass" lung X-rays.

If they have that, it's pretty clear cut.

If they don't ... meh.

Wow, that is an interesting take. Probably they were sick after eating bad texmex. Sounds like the most probable explanation.

How can you determine the June 18th date? I'm not finding a reference to it.

Section 3 paragraph 1 states

> Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act…

It looks like it was signed into law by the President on 3/20/23

90 days

<<NOTE: Deadline.>> Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Director of National Intelligence shall-- (1) declassify any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), including-- (A) activities performed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology with or on behalf of the People's Liberation Army; (B) coronavirus research or other related activities performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the outbreak of COVID-19; and (C) researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in autumn 2019, including for any such researcher-- (i) the researcher's name; (ii) the researcher's symptoms; (iii) the date of the onset of the researcher's symptoms;

[[Page 137 STAT. 5]]

                          (iv) the researcher's role at the Wuhan 
                      Institute of Virology;
                          (v) whether the researcher was involved with 
                      or exposed to coronavirus research at the Wuhan 
                      Institute of Virology;
                          (vi) whether the researcher visited a hospital 
                      while they were ill; and
                          (vii) a description of any other actions taken 
                      by the researcher that may suggest they were 
                      experiencing a serious illness at the time; and
            (2) <<NOTE: Reports.>>  submit to Congress an unclassified 
        report that contains--
                    (A) all of the information described under paragraph 
                (1); and
                    (B) only such redactions as the Director determines 
                necessary to protect sources and methods.

If any exists.

> on June 18th

which happens to be a Sunday...

Regardless of that, we already know they were doing related biological weapons research, as part of a cooperative program with the US.

Funny how congress isn’t focusing on the stuff they have direct jurisdiction over, like refusing to fund similar programs in the future unless there is additional oversight.

That's a bit misleading. The US via EcoHealth was funding virus research for disease prevention. The Wuhan lab may have been doing weapons research but that's a bit unproven.

People need to start thinking of politically-impactful truths in terms of probability distributions and outcome possibility spaces, rather than absolutely.

If it were a lab leak, there are probably a handful of eyewitnesses.

Any information (not leak; was leak) would have serious ramifications to the political systems of the two largest economies in the world (the US and China).

What are the chances that we'll ever hear the true story?

Which isn't a suggestion that "They're covering {specific thing} up." It's a suggestion that we will never hear evidence of any of the possible outcomes.

And beyond that, what would "the truth" in this case change?

>> Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”

Yes, the national and global conversations would have been substantially worse and less effective.

Once the cat's out of the bag with a global pandemic, any breath blaming its origin is wasted.

Can you imagine how many scarce resources would have been mispent if SARS-CoV-2 had begun with worldwide knowledge that China was responsible?

> If it were a lab leak, there are probably a handful of eyewitnesses.

Not at all. The chances are that if it was a lab leak the people involved had no idea the leak happened at all. That's how lab leaks work: people make mistakes and inadvertently leak stuff from the lab. eg: Karen Wetterhahn vs lead

What you're talking about is a deliberate release from a lab, which would have eyewitnesses because they know what is happening and see it happening and can corroborate the reports of other witnesses. eg: Thomas Midgley Jr vs lead

> Can you imagine how many scarce resources would have been mispent if SARS-CoV-2 had begun with worldwide knowledge that China was responsible?

OTOH if we knew that China was responsible, won't the future be better served by putting safeguards to prevent a worse thing happening again?

For me it isn't about the effectiveness or the blame it was that we spent 2 years where many fundamental and basic rights were suspended because of fear. For me it is not about blame it is about reminding people how fragile our rights are and that there are people all to willing and eager to take them.

Combined with the massive redistribution of wealth that happened as a direct result of government action that further widened wealth inequality.

> Can you imagine how many scarce resources would have been mispent if SARS-CoV-2 had begun with worldwide knowledge that China was responsible?

Well. Dr Fauci was the guy who gave the money to this institute for gain-of-function experiments which would not be tolerated in the US. (Get the dirty, dangerous work done somewhere else where people can ideally die without causing a fuss).

"Grant money for the controversial experiment came from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci. The award to EcoHealth Alliance, a research organization which studies the spread of viruses from animals to humans, included subawards to Wuhan Institute of Virology and East China Normal University."

We have samples that pre-date the wuhan outbreak, so they are not among the earliest. Wuhan was only the first identified super spreader location. Here's one such study from Italy that found infections from as early as Sept 2019. https://www.news-medical.net/news/20220830/Italian-study-fin... original journal https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512...

FTA:

Our findings should be complemented by high-throughput sequencing to obtain additional sequence information.

I don't see this having been done (and HTS isn't exactly a heavy lift these days, even in Italy). Seems likely they did it, didn't confirm these preliminary results, and didn't publish because it's not interesting.

I think, there were similar samples from Barcelona, as well.

> Just moments ago, an NGO called U.S. Right to Know released heavily-redacted U.S. State Department cables that it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. One July 2020 cable reads, “Initial Outbreak Could Have Been Contained in China if Beijing Had Not Covered It Up.”

From - https://substack.com/@shellenberger

> I don't trust this article at all.

That's my reaction every time I see `substack.com` in the URL.

I've come to the same conclusion. I wish HN would just ban the whole domain.

The signal to noise ratio on substack is abysmal, with these pundits cum journalists fuelling the confirmation biases of their patrons with clickbait.

All you need to do is take a quick look at one of the author's other stories[1] and your skepticism will grow further.

[1] https://substack.com/@shellenberger

Or it could do the opposite. Both Taibbi and Shellenberger are independent investigative journalists with no party loyalties. Their funding comes directly from readers rather than corporations or billionaire owned outlets. They can make a few mistakes from time to time but own up to them. Their opinions are their own, but they rarely report anything not factual.

> Why Politicians Are Trying To Take Your Children

> California legislation would punish parents who don't affirm gender dysphoria

wow yeah that's a take

A stellar example of adhominem in the wild.

Attack the argument not the person.

The Sunday Times, one of the oldest, most reliable newspapers in the world, says the same thing. It was probably a lab leak

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/inside-wuhan-lab-covid-pa...

> The Sunday Times, one of the oldest, most reliable newspapers in the world,

(cough cough bullshit cough) The Times is not quite as bad as the Torygraph, but it is a paper that has clearly been run directly to push the political views of Rupert Murdoch for the past three or four decades.

It never ceases to amaze me how conspiricists don’t believe anything the government says, but the instant something is congruent they’ll upvote it like wildfire.

It makes me question any aspect of “rationalism”

Yes. I've never seen anyone question the accuracy of the Church Committee's disclosures. People who talk about such things are normally eager to say that the US Congress and the CIA can't be trusted. It's just selective skepticism.

>eager to say that the US Congress and the CIA can't be trusted.

This is a truth universally accepted, no? I mean maybe not by some actual, genuine believers in totalitarianism but surely there aren't many of those? Surely?

You never trust people with power. You trust a system of checks and balances precisely because of this. You could even found a nation on that and expect continued support of it.

You could have skipped reading entirely; it's conspiracy clickbait. To the puzzle-solving mind, an anomalous clue is the unicorn you spend your whole life chasing. There is a well-known conspiracy community around covid. It follows that this is trying to harvest a couple thousand in revenue by baiting people who are playing with covid conspiracies, by enticing them with the false promise of an anomalous clue.

I hope the author is reading these comments and sees me calling him a piece of shit.

Grow up.

Elsewhere, there are many sources, 'Nancy Messonnier was an officer of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), the CDC’s elite team of “disease detectives,” patrolling the world to prevent epidemics from arriving on American soil.

“EIS officers serve on the front lines of public health, protecting Americans and the global community,” the CDC claims. When diseases and public health threats emerge, “EIS officers investigate, identify the cause, rapidly implement control measures, and collect evidence to recommend preventive actions.” https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/t0212-cdc-telebriefi... Transcript of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Response Telebriefing Print Press Briefing Transcript Friday, January 17, 2020 https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/t0117-coronavirus-sc...

Yeah, reading this to see what the evidence is, it all comes down to "anonymous State Department sources", and some informed speculation from people in the field. I don't actually think an accidental lab leak is all that unlikely, but I'm also not being presented with any evidence for it.

How would they actually know (unless there was very specific evidence of something like a lab accident associated with it) that these people were actually the first to fall ill and not just very early infections?

I also didn't trust the vaccines.

My sources on the planet Earth say that nowadays this is the way to write news, essays, blogs, podcast videos, and books in order to attract attentions.

Note that this is NOT the Wuhan CDC, which is the building across the river from the wet market. They did not do any research there. This building is ~10 miles south, well outside the main city.

https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Wuhan_Ins...

The fact that researchers were sick with flu-like symptoms has been openly stated by the US for a long time. This was put out in the state department Jan 2021, 2.5 years ago: https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan...

> The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.

Here's a good post that outlines the frankly huge amount of evidence against the WIV being involved: https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-...

> Based on number of visitors, Worobey estimated the odds at only 1 in 10,000 that the market would be the first superspreading event in Wuhan.

> Although it didn’t receive a lot of traffic, the market was one of only 4 places selling wild animals in Wuhan. It’s one of the most likely places for a wildlife spillover.

> As we’ll see later, there may actually have been two jumps from animals to people at the market. Now we’re talking about odds of 1 in 100 million, that the virus made it from the lab to the market twice but showed up nowhere else in Wuhan.

Slightly off topic, but thanks to your first link I was just doing some satellite image sightseeing of Wuhan and noticed that on Google maps the streets are offset about 3 blocks east of where they should be.

It's fairly obvious here [1] where the curved road extends out into a lake.

Not saying this means anything, just found it amusing.

1. https://maps.app.goo.gl/reVDkMAhfMRbv1uJ8

It's fairly well-known [0] that China messes with maps data and forces Google to do so.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...

I just want to add to this that when I first heard about this virus I searched the WIV on Google Maps. I believe that was 14 January 2020. When I searched it again a few weeks later, the location on Google Maps had changed.

I have no screenshots of this, but I did find it quite odd at the time.

Is this similar to how the US used to mandate that civilian use of GPS was off by a certain amount?

Huh, I guess I wasn't aware of this previously. Figured it was a bug or something.

Considering the satellite imagery exists this seems silly. Glad I didn't drive into a lake!

It's fine on Apple Maps.

That's Chinese map data obfuscation. The idea is to make it marginally harder for an adversary to target missiles using public map data.

Which is useless in this day. I was in China last week and Google Map’s street layer was aligned correctly to where I was, but the satellite imagery was not.

This demonstrates that Google already knows the correct coordinates of street in China, including those of an airport finished in 2021. For some reason they have spent no time manually aligning the imagery.

Coordinates on the globe are constant whether China likes it or not, my only guess is that Google doesn’t want to spend time fixing data in a country that blocks them entirely.

>became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses

I was in Thailand in february 2019 and came down with SARS-like symptoms that were very similar to Covid-19 once that became known.

SARS-like viruses have been going around for a while, meaning they affect the respiratory system. Doesn't mean it was covid-19, what even differentiates SARS from covid-19? I have no idea, I'm just a layman who happened to get sick.

Covid-19 is the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

From [0]:

> Through DivErsity pArtitioning by hieRarchical Clustering-based analyses,5 the newly emerged coronavirus was deemed not sufficiently novel but is a sister virus to SARS-CoV, the primary viral isolate defining the species. The SARS-CoV species includes viruses such as SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV_PC4-227, and SARSr-CoV-btKY72. SARS-CoV-2 is the newest member of this viral species. The use of SARS in naming SARS-CoV-2 does not derive from the name of the SARS disease but is a natural extension of the taxonomic practice for viruses in the SARS species. The use of SARS for viruses in this species mainly refers to their taxonomic relationship to the founding virus of this species, SARS-CoV. In other words, viruses in this species can be named SARS regardless of whether or not they cause SARS-like diseases.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7133598

> SARS-like symptoms

Aren’t SARS-like symptoms just flu-like? I heard the same exact thing from an European friend and again I think it’s Barnum effect-like.

Given the transmissibility of the virus, I doubt that it was in the wild unnoticed for 12+ months before suddenly affecting millions in weeks.

Sort of but what made me think I had SARS specifically was the fact that I had this weird cough that persisted for a month after I recovered from the worst of the flu symptoms. That was very unusual to me.

During the actual week or two I was sick I had all the symptoms of Covid, diarrhea, shortness of breath, and the rest of normal flu symptoms. And when I recovered I remember eating a protein shake just because I couldn't eat anything else and I needed energy, and I remember not tasting it.

I'm not saying it went unnoticed for a year, it's just an interesting thing that happened to me that I didn't pay attention to until after covid was detected.

I even know how I got sick, it was on the plane from Copenhagen to Doha. Two thai guys were sitting next to us and one of them was visibly sick. We felt pity on him and offered him a pillow or candy sometimes. Then 1 day after we landed in Udon Thani we both got sick.

I haven't looked at where Ben Hu's lab is, but epidemiological distance in urban areas doesn't necessarily follow map distance. In particular, proximity to a shared subway or bus line can be more important than physical proximity, since many commuters will put up with longer travel times if they can tune out, and a packed rush hour subway car is a great place for the spread of airborne infectious diseases. (In US cities one might consider two homes epidemiologically close despite a 10 mile separation if their children take the same school bus.)

The CDC is smack in the center of the city (on the other side of the river). The WIV is way outside the urban area, past a very large industrial park.

The distribution of cases also strongly contradicts you: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/...

Cases were roundly distributed, not along any particular artery. Note that the WIV is not even close to being in frame there- that's how much farther away it is.

AFAIK, there is a Biolab of a Wuhan University rather near the market. BSL3. Choose your odds.

>As we’ll see later, there may actually have been two jumps from animals to people at the market.

Mixing fact with speculation is never a great sign for an argument. Many people pushing the lab leak theory are doing this, but the people pushing against it don't need to start. If there were two spillovers, that needs a very good explanation, particularly because events like this tend to fall into the categories "one" and "many" — if there were two spillovers, why not three or four? Why not a whole gaggle of infected raccoon dogs?

> Based on number of visitors, Worobey estimated the odds at only 1 in 10,000 that the market would be the first superspreading event in Wuhan.

This is based on a location analysis of early cases around Wuhan. That doesn't imply that the first event was at the market, only near the market. In particular, the market is across the street from a railway station and one block away from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology Tongji Medical College Union Hospital. Huazhong University of Science and Technology is one of China's top ten universities and might have a pretty good hospital.

> Mixing fact with speculation is never a great sign for an argument.

You're the only one who's speculating, because in the page that sentence links to a scientific paper: https://zenodo.org/record/6342616#.Y_WrmnbMJD-

> In particular, the market is across the street from a railway station

Which can be trivially ruled out, because then the spread would have been all up and down the rail line. The first infection point would have been on the train, among all those people getting off at all different stops. It would not have suddenly become infectious just as that person stepped off the train.

> and one block away from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology Tongji Medical College Union Hospital.

The evidence for zoonotic origin is how people regularly found or contracted SARS-like coronaviruses from animals. The evidence there was any relevant research at that university is zero. It's not a government lab, those projects would have been public.

Have you read the brace of Science papers that analysed the market data

Neat, thanks for that last link. It could use a table of contents but it did contain more information related to the DEFUSE grant proposal which is what I have thought of as being indicative of a lab leak.

Sadly that article doesn't disprove that theory, but it does detail its weaknesses which is a good enough jumping off point for further reading.

Which still doesn’t really draw the line of how an outbreak occurred at the wet market. Also common seasonal illness isn’t exactly a smoking gun

not really typical for healthy researchers in their 30s to end up in the hospital with seasonal illness symptoms though.

Did they "end up in the hospital" or did they go to the hospital to get a diagnosis? I live in a city, and my PCP is in the local hospital. "seasonal illness symptoms" sounds FAR more like they were just sick and went to the doctor, like anyone else would. For medicine.

People go directly to hospitals for primary care in China. It's not the same as the US, where people go to a general practitioner first.

Perfectly normal for regular, healthy folks to occasionally come down with seasonal flu. Sometimes people get sick, it happens.

The issue was that a whole bunch of them did, rapidly, and in non-trivial numbers.

If a single staff person caught a virus, then anyone they interacted with and gave it to went to the market, then that's all it would take.

Incredibly unlikely. There are thousands of locations that are far more trafficked than the wet market: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/...

Outbreaks can only happen in places of high density/congregation, by the nature of the required proximity. It could have been dancing around the perimeter for some time.

Maybe my perspective is incorrect, but this seems trivially possible to me. This problem with proximity is why kids didn't go to school.

The wet market was one of the less densely trafficked areas of the city: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9348750/figure/...

Check out the other figures in that paper. The epicenter was the wet market itself.

The higher the r0, the less proximity is required.

The market is extremely close to the lab. Within walking distance

That's the CDC, a totally unrelated building which even then isn't very close to the wet market, which is not a very popular spot in the city. The WIV was many miles outside the city.

Supposedly there was a problem for a long time with researchers selling used lab animals on the street to make a bit of extra cash.

“Supposedly”? That kind of claim really needs a level of proof beyond “it would be politically convenient if this were true”.

That's ridiculous. The animals are transgenic mice.

just a guess, but mid august was the first outbreak and September 21st was when they realized it was out of control.

Unless someone has specimen samples from the sick WIV scientists, this doesn't really prove anything. Nasty respiratory viruses with Covid-like symptoms aren't actually that rare, and there's a lot of overlap between a bad respiratory infection and a mild Covid infection. I've talked to numerous people in the US who swore they had the full checklist of Covid symptoms well before the November 2019 date they're talking about in this article, but these claims are not borne out by the observed data in viral surveillance.

It's really unfortunate that there isn't some kind of rigorous global pathogen surveillance program that's regularly sampling the world's population and doing sequencing for novel pathogens. The only reason we discovered Covid in the US early on was because the Seattle Flu Study kinda broke the rules and went back through their samples to test for Covid when they weren't technically allowed to do it. Ideally we'd have global wastewater surveillance as well as individual anonymized sample gathering. It sounds expensive, which is why nobody wants to do it, but Covid really shows how badly it's needed.

Proof is not objective. There are levels of proof, different ones for civil and criminal in the US. So, maybe this doesn't prove it to you, but it will prove it to others. Argue for what level of proof you think is right here, but there is no absolute in proof for anything like this, ever.

You're not wrong. My take is this: the context of this debate is, for many, "China caused the Covid pandemic intentionally and conspired to hide their culpability." It's a big claim, literally a conspiracy theory, so I'd put it at the standards of a criminal trial. This is circumstantial evidence and, while it's certainly evidence that could be used to prosecute that claim, it isn't a case of China being caught in flagrante delicto. In particular, the screaming headline "First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV" is very weak. There are reports from someone that people at WIV were sick. Nothing firmly supporting that it was Covid, and nothing but anonymously-sourced evidence that people at WIV were even sick.

If it were a criminal case you could be right. But you cannot sue a nation state, you cannot imprison an institution and culpable people may be hard to come by.

But actually, civil liability is more relevant here, since worldwide damages were extreme and changes in how virus research is handled are obviously necessary. So if one were to sue relevant parties in a civil court for damages or to force their procedures to be changed, the standard of proof is just "more likely than the other explanations". And I think one may get there, at some point.

Also, for a civil case, intent isn't necessary, negligence would also suffice.

Nobody is saying that China caused the pandemic intentionally.

Yeah it seems that they could have been sick with anything. They could even have been sick because of what they were working on. There's no mention of how often people get sick in the lab. Like maybe people were sick in September and May and February with "covid like symptoms" because they do research on covid-like viruses.

It's a pretty specious line of reasoning to say that the fact some people were sick with "covid like symtpoms" (which are basically "flu like symptoms" for many) points to them being "patients zero".

Also the State Department release they link to is complaining about China's secrecy but leads by saying they don't know.

Totally agree. It's kind of annoying that we don't even have a system like this for the researchers at the labs!

a close family member swore they got covid at CES 2020. they went to vegas and came back real sick for a couple of days.

i remember in 2020 or so they were also talking about covid being in the sewage in some european city (i think in italy? and/or spain?) but my assumption was they were detecting things that were also common in other influenza strains.

If SARS-CoV-2 was all over CES 2020 on Jan 7-10 then people would have already been unmistakably dying. Once you've infected around 1,000 people in a geographic location it has already spilled over into an elder care facility and rips through there and kills about a third of them.

The first such incident in the US wasn't until a patient got sick on Feb 19th in Kirkland, WA.

The fact that the virus doubled every 3 days and slaughtered people in elder care facilities means that it isn't credible to think that it was floating around CES 2020.

The doubling rate of 3 days and the high level of mortality means that the virus doesn't really hide for that long, although due to exponential spread it is first very slow and then it quickly becomes very, very fast.

It is good at cryptic spread for 1-2 months, where it is very difficult to detect and the first several hundred people mostly just get colds and nobody notices and it actually spreads fairly poorly and cryptically, but then it reaches a critical mass and the superspreading events start popping off and someone gives to one of those elder care facilities and then it can't be ignored.

If it was all over CES or any other tight cluster in early Jan (the usual "everyone at work was sick in Jan I bet it was COVID" idea) then that would have marked a point where the virus was changing from cryptic spread to announcing itself. You once that happens, you can't avoid the virus slaughtering a care facility before the month is out. Since that didn't happen, then the infections at CES didn't happen.

> then people would have already been unmistakably dying.

Yeah, but the actual number of COVID dead has been a widely disputed topic and it's well established that excess deaths significantly increased during the pandemic, which indicates that a lot more people died overall that didn't go down as formal COVID cases[0]. It's very likely that early COVID deaths were not properly counted because we weren't in formal pandemic protocols yet.

Also anecdotally, I knew people in the Midwest that contracted severe flu in December 2019 and January 2020 who later tested positive once the ability to test became available. I don't think it's a stretch at all to think that it had widespread reach early in 2020 when the research indicates that the actual number of COVID dead in 2020 is more than double what was officially reported.

From the piece I've linked below:

> On 30 January 2020 COVID-19 was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) with an official death toll of 171. By 31 December 2020, this figure stood at 1 813 188. Yet preliminary estimates suggest the total number of global deaths attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 is at least 3 million, representing 1.2 million more deaths than officially reported.

0: https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covi...

I know a bunch of NYCers that swore they got covid in Jan 2020, but it's both mathematically impossible for all of them to have had it based on the circulating numbers at the time, and then when they actually got Covid in the coming months/years they changed their tune.

Oddly, I assumed I had it early in the waves. Never got a positive test, as folks weren't testing back then. Finally had our first positive test this year. And whatever I had at the start was way way worse than when I had covid. Such that I can understand a lot of folks being very confused on all of this.

There was a really bad flu that went around just before Covid. It was a bad enough flu for me that I actually had to take a Ventolin inhaler. When I finally got covid in late 2022, I would say the flu I picked up in 2020 was worse.

We can only guess, RSV also seems to have worse effect on people than covid and flu and it is not uncommon to encounter this monster. Unless we have the sample of the pathogen to analyse, it is all hearsay.

‘Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”’

Seems doubtful that Daszak (and possibly Fauci) had little idea what was going on in that lab..

Also... I mean, unless I've created a false memory, I specifically remember that the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon, and not actually the entirely plausible, accidental escape of a virus.

I've always had a completely open mind about it, even if experts have repeatedly suggested that it's plausible, but unlikely.

Those prattling on about how "people called us crazy" that it was a WIV lab leak seem to completely misremember what was actually being discussed in April-May of 2020, and also seem to be trying to score political points in American politics, when it seems very obvious that the CCP should take the lion's share of any blame regarding any lack of transparency.

I knew this would happen, so much so I'm pretty sure I even called it ahead of time. This happens so frequently that there ought to be a word for it.

Yes, some conservative personalities early on had pushed some dumb conspiracies about COVID-19 being a bioweapon. No, that was not the crux of the argument that the many scientists, journalists and internet commenters had when they argued in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. Now I personally was never very attached to the theory, but I absolutely believed that we should have researched whether or not COVID-19 was indeed leaked from a lab. An actual argument against my position was that we shouldn't as it would only further fuel racism, xenophobia and geopolitical tensions even if it were true. There was also a lot of backlash against researchers who wanted investigation into the lab leak theory, probably for similar reasons.

There's always amnesia about things like this, but I'm pretty sure COVID-19 has become a case study on how not to handle a pandemic. A lot of what happened gave people a legitimate reason to distrust authority, and if we pretend that never happened things will simply continue to get worse as it repeats indefinitely.

Again, I do agree that it was annoying seeing it become a political culture war issue about a conspiracy vs "trusting the science", but that is certainly not what I believe the majority of the lab leak hypothesis was angling for.

Wikipedia even helpfully separates the two ideas into separate articles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation#Bio-we...

> Yes, some conservative personalities early on had pushed some dumb conspiracies about COVID-19 being a bioweapon. No, that was not the crux of the argument that the many scientists, journalists and internet commenters had when they argued in favor of the lab leak hypothesis.

It's totally insane. GP is literally rewriting history and getting upvoted for it. I post a link to a Congress bill (linked from TFA), from 2023 under the Biden administration (so not Trump), saying "there's reason to believe COVID may have originated at the Wuhan lab" and I immediately get two downvotes.

It's as if the shills who tried to bury the lab leak posts back then (not the bioweapon ones, just the lab leak ones) were still actively trying to control the narrative. This time by explaining why it was normal to label everyone who talked about lab leak a "conspiracy theory cracknut" because they'd supposedly all be talking about bio-weapon (which they weren't).

> There's always amnesia about things like this, but I'm pretty sure COVID-19 has become a case study on how not to handle a pandemic. A lot of what happened gave people a legitimate reason to distrust authority, and if we pretend that never happened things will simply continue to get worse as it repeats indefinitely.

I totally agree.

It's not 'some conservative personalities' and it's amazing to see people here so blatantly try to gaslight others. It was the president of the United States pushing the lab leak hard before any evidence fell down and then republican officials following up with the argument that it was a bioweapon. The reason why they did it was because they wanted to give people a reason to distrust authority. That was part of the M.O even though the person pushing this stuff held the highest authority office in the land!

I'm skeptical of the lab leak theory regardless if it's Trump or Biden pushing it because ultimately the US government is going to use whatever it can as a political weapon against other countries. This doesn't mean it's not potentially true, nor does it make China right, but it means people should be inherently skeptical of any positions the US takes on stuff like this.

Good comment

> I mean, unless I've created a false memory

I'm pretty sure your memory is very faulty. Of all those saying it could be a lab leak, very few were talking it being a bio-weapon.

> Those prattling on about how "people called us crazy" that it was a WIV lab leak seem to completely misremember what was actually being discussed in April-May of 2020

Not at all. You are trying to rewrite history.

Here's the bill from Congress, march 2023:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619...

    It is the sense of Congress that--
    
    (2) there is reason to believe the COVID-19 pandemic may 
     have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology;

People saying "people called us crazy" do deserve apologies, not downvotes.

EDIT: just to be clear... I'm not saying it was or it wasn't a lab leak. I'm saying that there's a Congress bill from march 2023 saying there's reason to believe it was a lab-leak. And hence all those who said it was a lab-leak and who were called "conspiracy theorists" do deserve apologies.

Not disagreeing with the overall premise, but:

> I'm saying that there's a Congress bill from march 2023 saying there's reason to believe it was a lab-leak.

Congress writing up a bill asserting stuff like this isn't exactly something I consider persuasive either way.

Until a cause is completely identified, there will always be "reason to believe". That doesn't mean that it's the most likely source or the most reasonable hypothesis.

The President was also claiming the virus came from WIV back in May 2020. It was a common theory in some media circles

Isn’t it equally truthful to say there is reason to believe the COVID-19 pandemic may have originated elsewhere? Josh Hawley writing this into the bill does not make it anymore valid than the counter point to that statement.

This.

I have a few family members very deep in the weeds (QAnon, Cabal, One World Order type of crap) and they love to play this narrative. In reality it seemed like it was rather obvious to anybody who looked at the facts that this pandemic had dubious origins. Just a few of these were the close proximity, same family of viruses being researched, mysterious personnel changes around the time of the initial spread, etc., yet those same family members have turned any reluctance on my part to flat out declare this pandemic as a manufactured Chinese bioweapon into flat out denial of any chance of it being anything more than a big coincidence.

I guess it boils down to conspiracy theorists believing that you're either all in, or not in at all, and there exists no middle ground to wait for more facts before coming to a conclusion one way or the other.

I also feel like noting that I didn't engage in discussion on the topic with many other people outside of aforementioned family members on the topic, so who knows, maybe I would've been ridiculed for sitting on the fence, but anecdotally I definitely remember people seeing either source as a possibility (minus the Cabal manufactured pandemic to sterilize the human race one, of course).

I can never understand if someone actually believes this or is just actively gaslighting.

Anyone trying to discuss even the possibility of a lab leak was called xenophobic, a conspiracy theorist, banned from socials…

Funny thing when the “conspiracy theorists” keep turning out to be right.

You've created a false memory.

Even back then, there weren't any good counter-arguments against the "lab leak" theory (except "it's racist" because somehow "the Chinese are so filthy their food markets cause pandemics" isn't racist?!), so to censor it, the powers that be (Big Tech, Mainstream Media) instead attacked the adjacent, but very different "bioweapon" theory.

The most popular human origin theory was a lab leak. It was easier to argue against the crazies claiming a bioweapon so that's what most did and that's what got the most press. But the primary human origin story was an accidental release.

Accidental release and bioweapons research are not incompatible.

People were being banned from twitter, youtube, facebook ext for mentioning lab leak... Now you want to gas light everyone saying "it was perfectly ok to talk about in 2020

That is not accurate at all...

> Facebook made a quiet but dramatic reversal last week: It no longer forbids users from touting the theory that COVID-19 came from a laboratory.

> "In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps," the social media platform declared in a statement.

> [...]

> Consider that Facebook's new declaration sits atop its About page, just above the site's previous policy on coronavirus-related misinformation—dated February 8, 2021—which was to vigorously purge so-called "false claims," including the notion that the disease "is man-made or manufactured." The mainstream media had deemed this notion not merely wrong but dangerously absurd, and tech companies followed suit, suppressing it to the best of their abilities.

https://reason.com/2021/06/04/lab-leak-misinformation-media-...

I remember learning a lot of the reasoning behind why I thought it was most likely a lab leak from a video I got as a top recommendation on youtube from a rather large channel that had near or over a million views at the time, so anecdotally I think perhaps a lot of the people who got banned for their discussion on the topic were either grouped up with people positing more extreme possibilities, or just an example of over reach. Either way, I personally don't remember people presenting the possibility of a lab leak being shredded (at least on youtube, I can't speak for the other platforms as I use them very infrequently).

Do you have any examples of someone who was banned simply for saying it could have leaked, as opposed to lying about it being a man-made bio weapon? The latter was common in right-wing circles because it excused their leaders’ incompetent handling of the pandemic and scientists pretty quickly established there weren’t signs of genetic modification, but throughout the process there were people discussing the possibility of a sample leaking through a lab safety failure.

Not everyone is terminally online mate. My experience mirrors theirs, lots of speculation and jokingly considering the various conspiracies at the time.

Bioweapon was definitely one of the options that was boosted by china's outlandishly overreacting at the start, welding people into their home etc

No you misremember.

Here I was ridiculed.

Specifically remember a columnist at Parool, a Dutch local newspaper, talking about it how he was pressured by colleagues days after just mentioning a column it might be from the Lab.

There was a consensus in the West it didn't came from the Lab, and those who suggested otherwise were non-scientific lunatics.

Shit, I remember arguing with people like him back when the whole pandemic started that it was a distinct possibility, one of several, that should be fairly evaluated like every other. And people like him just waved it off as conspiracy theory garbage like we're seeing here. Same shit, different day, except now with the flavour of gaslighting along with it.

You fell for the straw man.

The media argued against the most outrageous and conspiratorial version of the lab leak theory to discredit it. They successfully made you associate lab leak with racist conspiracy

> the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon,

This was the part that media outlets and government seized upon to call any discussion of the lab leak theory racist. There was no "discussion" about covid being a "bio-weapon," it was a bunch of anti-China hawks repeating it over and over again based on absolutely nothing. They were so obviously nationalist anti-Chinese that the theory that covid happened because Chinese people are dirty and eat weird diseased things was able to be sold as the not-racist theory.

I definitely remember it being discussed as a lab leak on HN sometime from December 2019 to March 2020

> Also... I mean, unless I've created a false memory, I specifically remember that the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon, and not actually the entirely plausible, accidental escape of a virus.

If you've created a false memory, then I've created a similar one.

I remember very early some member of Congress saying it was a Chinese engineered bio-weapon deliberately released to cripple the US economy.

There were lots of narratives. The main one that was coming out was that it did NOT come from the WIV. That gain of function was NOT happening at the WIV. That it likely came from people outside Wuhan who brought it to Wuhan and that the the Wet market was not the source either (though the CCP was pushing that narrative, others were making it more vague saying it came from the hinterlands). A second narrative by skeptics/conspiracists was that it had escape the WIV and that the WIV was conducting gain of function research. A third fringe theory was that it was a bio-weapon (this idea is idiotic given the guaranteed blowback/footgun you would get)

Also people were being banned, shadowbanned, demonetized, etc. for proposing a lab-leak theory. But, I guess that's par for the course. Remember when politicians (I mean Nancy) said, unmasked, don't worry, go back to Chinatown and do business (slightly before they then imposed restrictions)

Also, don't forget, people who saw strange unexpected repetitions (filler) in the sequencing were scoffed at.

In Daszak own words https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AksKoMZon6Y. At around 1h15m he answers a question about how they were doing gain of function research on SARS and SARS related virus with his colleagues in China (WIV).

This guy then lead the sham "WHO" inspection of WIV. And Fauci funded him to work around the Obama prohibition on gain of function research.

Trump was trying to play that “blame China” card. And was disclosing classified reports left and right. Fauci was not exactly on Trump’s side. And not playing the blame game was a good option back then.

But, it’s not a good idea to reward Wuhan’s Institute type of research. And there should be some accountability in the end.

Why?

It would take a long-form article to clearly enumerate all of the reasons with citations, but long story short, the pair of them were caught lying over and over again the past few years.

For example, Daszak's paper in the Lancet claiming the virus was almost certainly of natural origin was used as the basis for justifying the censorship of tens or hundreds of millions of posts. He failed to declare his conflict of interest, as did something like 25 out of the 26 other authors. This was a broad failure among academia and news, as his reasoning in the paper was specious.

Fauci was caught telling fibs about his beliefs on natural origin as well, with a private position that it was quite likely. He also lied about funds sent to Wuhan, and the type of research they were doing.

Re Daszak knowing what was going on, he was a main funder of the lab and a drinking buddy with Shi the head researcher there. He also wrote a proposal on inserting a cleavage site into a coronavirus in pretty much the way you would have to to make covid (defuse grant proposal which was leaked, not revealed voluntarily). Asked what was going on at WIV he's said stuff more like sorry I can't say as we have a confidentiality agreement rather than no idea.

> "If you knew that this was likely a lab-enhanced pathogen, there are so many things you could have done differently"

I'm curious - if we knew in March 2020 that covid came from a lab, what _would_ we have done differently?

I had personally decided by April 2020 that there was sufficient information for me to believe that Covid was a lab-enhanced pathogen that was accidentally released by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. My "source" was mainly common sense (the simplest solution is usually the right one, and guilty people doth protest too much), an understanding of probability (there is a lab studying the pathogen right next to the wet market which an authoritarian regime claims was the source), and an unbiased reading of history (like looking at 2001 articles on CNN about the last time SARS leaked from a lab).

For better or worse, I'm not a policymaker, so my opinion is meaningless and would have had no outcome on what "we" could have done differently (aside: I dislike this kind of rhetoric that shifts the blame to the amorphous "we" rather than the specific policymakers with names and titles who "we" should be blaming and holding responsible for their failures). But I've at least saved some sanity by listening to my gut instincts instead of subjecting myself to the whiplash that would have come with a world view determined by appeals to authority.

It seems this is more and more necessary these days - if you rely on authority as a heuristic for truth, your reality can shift under you at the whims of politicians who manipulate it for their own selfish reasons. It's best to stay above the fray. Sure, gut instinct can be wrong, but when I'm not a policymaker and only need to be concerned with my own health and well-being, the consequences of incorrect critical thinking are usually less bad than the consequences of trusting the wrong authority. I will continue to prioritize my "gut feeling" - informed by critical reading of publicly available data, and careful triangulation of the motives and biases of stakeholders in the current political reality - over any blessed truth that "we" have anointed as "consensus."

> My "source" was mainly common sense (the simplest solution is usually the right one

https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html

75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. Isn't the simplest solution that COVID also came from animals? Just because it was a bad one doesn't make it less likely. Where did smallpox come from? Polio? Spanish flu?

Is it strange that the lab was near the wet market where it supposedly started? There are about 40,000 wet markets in China as of 2019. It might be more strange if it was nowhere near a wet market. It's a little bit like a psychic helping the police saying "the body will be found near water." Fantastic, most humans live near water.

I'm "agnostic" whether it's lab leak or natural/from the market, but I'd like to ask how you can be certain that your gut feeling is right? I think to be certain is to be ignorant/dismiss other possibilites, and confirmation bias doesn't help in that regard, you start dismissing evidence that don't conform to your "gut feeling". I also shook my head at all the scientists that loudly proclaimed that "I'm certain it can't be from a lab, it's natural!" (A scientist should be aware, that like in a math exam, if they can be certain of something, they need to show proof/show the work!), but I'm not going to prescribe motives like a Bill Gates + Rotschild + pharma industry conspiracies behind these scientists proclaiming this. Although I am curious what did motivate them to make these very non-scientific proclamations.

If you ask me why the Chinese authorities were secretive, I can come up with many theories, it could've been a lab leak, yes, but it could also be them wanting to save face rather than face the embarassment of admitting the virus started there (is there anything to be embarassed about, or is the CCP, like many political bodies, full of men with grade-school level emotions?), heck their internal propaganda blames the US, saying they brought in the virus through the Wuhan 2019 Military World Games. Or the Chinese refusals could be them not wanting foreign organizations looking around their labs. Heck, if a virus started in Atlanta and the WHO said some their investigators from many countries, including China and Russia, would like to inspect the CDC lab there, Americans would probably scream the same amount...

Ok, given your prescience about the origin of COVID, how did that influence the actions you took to mitigate its effects?

Common sense says that these pandemics happen cyclically, and are of natural origin. Just like all the other ones that happen every 20-100 years.

So, what you're saying is that we indeed would have done nothing differently?

In 2020 Luc Montagnier identified Covid-19 as a lab creation and predicted that, because the original strain was unnatural, later strains would be less problematic as the virus reverted to its true (less problematic) nature. In contrast, the public health conversation was about a permanent threat and how much worse can it get and generally government running around hair-on-fire.

Maybe the initial quarantine recommendation would have been the same--or even stronger-- but the pandemic impacted all aspects of life everywhere, and elements of that would have been different. EcoHealth would be a bad dream, no one would be running interference for Fauci. Vaccinations would have been a different conversation, because this would have been recognized as a temporary threat.

How does the virus have a "true nature", and why would it revert to it?

My understanding is that that viruses are well known to become more infectious and less symptomatic as they mutate over time. The reason for this is that causing the host to quickly hole up reduces the chance of replication.

Well, that logic fell down with the Delta variant.

> because the original strain was unnatural, later strains would be less problematic as the virus reverted to its true (less problematic) nature

Is it possible for someone to speed up this process in a lab somewhere, like South Africa, and release the less problematic version to the public to achieve the herd immunity quicker?

If it was developed in lab, presumably there would be a substantial amount of information available on it. Lab notes, testing results, transmission rates, all sorts of things we had to discover in the wild.

We could have used that data to make progress on a vaccine (and adjust our overall response) much, much faster.

How and why would they have that kind of data available if the virus only existed in the lab? At most they could have had computer simulations, but no real data.

The only information they would have had is the DNA sequence, but that was rapidly sequenced anyway, and design of the original vaccines followed in short order. What took time was testing and manufacturing the vaccines, but none of this would have been accelerated even if the lab theory were true and if they had any data on the details of the virus.

This whole discussion is ultimately useless, and the people pushing for it were never interested in finding solution, but only in finding someone to blame, which has no impact on the outcome.

Closing the borders wouldn't have been seen as racist, it would have identified as a valid tool to stop the spread, and we would have had an extra 2 months early on in the pandemic preventing the spread in a major way.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/covid-coronavirus-pandemic-...

The first thing we would have done would have been to put an immediate halt to all "gain of function" research - including all of the "gain of function" research that is currently ongoing (that Fauci and his ilk insist isn't really "gain of function" research). This would include severe penalties for those who funneled money to third party researchers. Instead, the global health authorities peddled the absurd "wet market" hypothesis and continue(d) to pour money into "gain of function" research that makes another lab leak inevitable (at some point).

If the lab leak story is correct, the WIV people knew somewhere inbetween September...November 2019 that the virus leaked.

Why is that true? I would think you could have an undetected leak.

That’s not true, a leak could occur without them realising. Getting cold and flu symptoms in winter wouldn’t raise too many suspicions.

Given they didn’t start any containment procedures either they didn’t know or that’s not how it happened

Not deplatforming people for discussing it would be the most visible difference.

Not censored millions upon millions of posts discussing the idea, for one thing. The conversation and narrative was warped, and a lot of people are now rather extremely divorced from the reality around this issue.

Gain of function research would have been examined much more closely, and with the origins known we may have had much less fumbling around protocols for containment, such as knowing much sooner that it was airborne.

I believe many people likely died as a consequence of this mass deception, and its ripple effects. And many more might die yet, if we don't reign in irresponsible bio research.

Please explain the connection you see to extra deaths. Because as I see it, nothing about how governments responded to this was conditional on COVID having occurred naturally; social distancing and mask use would still have been the correct response even if we knew with certainty that it leaked from a lab, and I see no reason why the early blunders like recommending against masking or over-emphasizing hand sanitizer would've been any different.

Why, for example, would we have known much sooner that it was airborne?

You are correct. I guess people can't handle that. This is from the article, it tracks with your sentiment:

Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”

Dangerous virus research has continued in the interim.

The real question is if there is little to no regulation or even acknowledgement of failures, it's only a matter of time before this happens again.

If we knew it was from a lab much of the confusion over H2H transmission, Airborne transmission, asymptomatic infections would have been known much earlier. We would have take the correct measure earlier and saved lives.

Presumably the people there would have knowledge of the virus's characteristics, behavior and better prepare us for dealing with it.

If it came from a lab, then we need to seriously re-evaluate the risk-reward ratio for such research.

This is what I've always wondered - would those who downplayed the virus and eschewed masks and vaccines have changed their tune?

Almost certainty, the population already had a sense about the spread of natural viruses and their dangers—whether valid or not. Launched from a lab is a different ballgame altogether and not having experienced the problem before people would have been much more wary.

Literally nothing.

It's pretty incredible to see the US Government shift around these conflicting narratives, moving toward (apparently 3 letter agency by agency) this lab leak origin. Especially considering the vilification of anyone (including the president at the time) for saying things that were in this vein. I think they owe us a complete release of the data they have and an actual assessment, from the government, explained by the head of the government... millions of people were directly effected by this. I think we're owed the truth. This method, where there are leaks or unsourced articles, but the 3 letter agencies disagree with the probable origin, it's impossible for a regular person to decipher. Maybe that is the point, but it's a really shit situation.

Remember when insinuating the Chinese lab leak theory meant you were a racist? Good times, really united the country during a time of crisis.

Country has become so divided that if the other side says the sky is blue, then you have to believe it's red.

Orange man bad though right...

I voted for Biden before everyone piles on.

> considering the vilification of anyone (including the president at the time) for saying things that were in this vein

It's very weird that you frame this as if the vilification including the President was an indicator of it being unreasonable, when the actual situation was that the President himself was one of the main drivers of why this topic couldn't be discussed rationally. Once the conversation is hijacked by a hollow suit blowhard, the only way to get back to rationality is to soundly reject the broken clock, disregarding that it might coincidentally be correct.

I don't understand how long it got for humanity as a whole to see the elephant. New virus, research center close by, Chinese denying but not letting investigation. It's like seeing your your husband exiting a brothel but still need proof he cheated.

> It's like seeing your your husband exiting a brothel but still need proof he cheated.

But it happened to be a Chinese brothel, so if you accuse him of cheating, you'll be called an ignorant, xenophonic, scapegoat-seeking racist.

There were stranger coincidences in the past, and China always denies an investigation, so it's nothing special in this case.

Especially with Trump as president and we all remember the proofs of the WMDs in Iraq.

BTW there are multiple reasons to enter a brothel without cheating, they need electricians and plumbers too. According to you they all are proven cheaters.

>Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.

>When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%”

That isn't the same as saying one of the three was Patient Zero.

"they need electricians and plumbers too. According to you they all are proven cheaters"

Humanity acted like its stupid and a conspiracy to ask if this man is anything else than a plumber. I mean if you see someone exiting a brothel and the first thing you think is that he is an electrician, there is some problem with logical thinking there. It's not that there is 0% chance. It's not not the default. Our default was that he is a plumber which should have been immensely less probable.

I am really interested in the social-political dimension of this. Was the initial hypothesis of a lab leak suppressed during the initial part of the pandemic primarily due to Western government's fear of a diplomatic breakdown (like Russia) with China? The economies are far more interdependent than compared to Russia and there is a far more economically important Chinese diaspora in the West.

What would it take to get a honest investigation within China? Presumably not under the current regime - if it were true, the magnitude of the disaster would be 100x what Chernobyl was for the Soviet Union, it wouldn't just be an accident at that point.

Would it totally legitimize the Chinese state in the eyes of its people and the world? And for that reason, could we ever expect a honest accounting? Too much blood (literal and metaphorical) has been spilled and with the lockdowns, vaccine mandates, passports, school closures, etc and everything else that has happened, most elite institutions, state actors, businesses, media, corporations have become complicit in some way in abuses, lies, deliberate obfuscation of one type or another.

It feels like a breakpoint in history to me.

> I am really interested in the social-political dimension of this. Was the initial hypothesis of a lab leak suppressed during the initial part of the pandemic primarily due to Western government's fear of a diplomatic breakdown (like Russia) with China? The economies are far more interdependent than compared to Russia and there is a far more economically important Chinese diaspora in the West.

I wonder to what extent the hypothesis has been shutdown because the people who were considered to be qualified to make that assessment are interested in the continuation of gain-of-function research.

> What would it take to get a honest investigation within China? Presumably not under the current regime

You answered it yourself, impossible under the CCP. It seems that they convinced their population that the virus has actually emerged somewhere in the west, and that was the end of it for them.

What would it take to get a honest investgation within US? The fundemental issue is why would PRC entertain US lab leak propaganda narrative? Let alone submit to basically weapons inspection tier scrutiny that no sane sovereign would permit. Keep in mind "lab leak" hypothesis was conjectured by PRC netizens along with US Fort Detrick lab influenza and Wuhan military games conspiracy theories. Obviously US politicians and "intelligence" would conveniently converge on the theory that looks bad for PRC. Is US going to cooperate to address the other PRC conspiracy theories and let WHO investigate USAMRIID? The realistic answer is covid will become distant memory and origin will be relegated to conjecture based on domestic politics.

Here are two good articles as well that document the lab leak(for further reading):

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...

and

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...

https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-...

The title says "sickened by Covid-19", but the text says "developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019".

Yes. We don't have swabs that we can perform PCR on.

On the other hand, this report, if true:

- Sickened about a month before COVID-19 was formally detected

- In close proximity to where COVID-19 was formally detected

- While doing research on gain of function in coronaviruses.

This is strongly suggestive circumstantial evidence.

It's much less impressive when you add:

- with symptoms associated with common seasonal illness

Not saying it wasn't COVID-19. Just saying that claiming it was is a bit of a stretch.

The symptoms reportedly included loss of smell and "ground glass opacities" in the lungs.[1] That's not necessarily COVID, either, but a few too many coincidences for me.

[1] https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2021/08/23/josh-rogin-the-sick-r...

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36332373

Would love to have the denominator.

Close proximity is a bit of a stretch. This shows people catching colds in winter. The rest is speculation

> This shows people catching colds in winter.

And hospitalized? That's a bit more uncommon than catching a cold.

> ..."developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019".

My partner and her siblings developed a COVID-19-like illness in November 2019. It was far worse than any flu they'd ever had and even put one of them, an otherwise healthy 30 year old, in the hospital for several weeks.

I wouldn't be surprised if COVID-19 was spreading as early as October.

I have a friend that has had COVID-19 at least one, and he swears he also got it in 2019 along with the friends he was hanging out with that weekend. There are probably lots of instances like this and we may never know for sure.

From the top comment of the article: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not today.” Apoorva Mandavilli, "science" reporter for the New York Times.

Instead of replying in spirit the same message to various comments here, I generalized the skepticism in one. To people commenting that "experts had repeatedly suggested that it is unlikely to be a leak."

Experts, that is people studying in biochemistry/biology/virology labs were and will always be saying that it is likely. Working in such a lab without accidents would be a historical miracle.

That is one of the reasons working actively with and producing bioweapons was "ditched" effectively by a lot of countries including the U.S. (Or at least I hope.)

I suggest starting with the wikipedia rabbithole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_warfare

Let us be clear: Political announcers were saying it is unlikely for diplomatic/cover-our/their-asses reasons.

Recall/research the USSR/Russian anthrax in Yekaterinburg of 1979. To this day it is a closed off area.

No person that has worked in a lab would say "unlikely..."

And to top it off in a summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

Check the 2004-04 event.

P.S. Literally, we had a known leak in Taiwan in 2021 while they were trying to study the SARS-COV-2 virus.

And SARS 1 itself was leaked from a lab four times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS#Laboratory_accidents

It is hard to tell from the writing - are the sources claiming that they know the researchers were sick with Covid-19 specifically, or are they saying they know the researchers with sick with something, and that they had symptoms consistent with covid-19?

We go from:

>Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.

To:

>not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019,

Is it Covid, or Covid-like?

I can't make sense of this article. It is a bit rambling and seems to mix quotes from different times.

"Politicians, scientists, journalists, and amateur researchers for years now have zeroed in on the possibility that Covid-19 may have resulted from U.S.-funded gain-of-function research conducted in China."

And the authors leave it at that. Maybe some references to articles would be nice? Or should I just trust their meta-analysis or what.

At that point there were not good diagnostics for covid as it was probably brand new. The supposition that it was covid is based on other evidence like them doing research on coronaviruses.

There seems to have been covid cases in Europe in last-quarter 2019, which suggests it was there or brought there before the outbreak that made the news in 2020. Doesn’t rule out leaks and crossovers, just moves them elsewhere or else when. Viral pneumonia was occurring, symptoms turned out to match covid and nobody was saving or testing blood samples. Outside of a few places in Dec. But people had aggressive, surprising lung problems that didn’t present flu symptoms. Maybe that was a pre-covid leak or they’re incorrect when the leak occurred.

It also hit the initial sites very quickly, which suggests very contagious or already present in some form. To put my tin foil hat on, was omicron the “antidote” virus that was deliberately released to put the fire out? It was very different genetically and even more contagious.

I heard from a friend from Taiwan that there were rumors of some kinda of virus spreading around by mid 2019 in China. The thing is if there were blood samples showing a much earlier date of covid spreading in China there is zero chance we would ever hear about it. It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population.

> It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population.

If you're talking about Prato, your information is completely wrong.

> It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on

There was a paper released early/mid 2020 that was attempting to group the virus into various strains (this was before the "variant" terminology emerged), that attempted to identify changes in the virus's behavior and classified different mutations with things like L, LL, and M. For the most part it was either ignored or ridiculed as being too early, that there hasn't been enough time for mutations that change its behavior to have accumulated.

Thing is, I distinctly remember it identified one mutation that seemed to originate in Italy, was trackable as it reached the US East coast, and every place it spread to had a spike in deaths that coincided with when it overtook the previous variants in prevalence for that location.

The Wuhan Games, at which 10,000 athletes from the worlds' armies participated, wrapped October 27, 2019, after which people left Wuhan to return to their homes all over the world, including to Italy where many of the first cases outside of Wuhan occured

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games

WIV took down their database and upgraded their ventilation circa September 2019. [0]

Event 201 wargame about just such a disease was held in October 2019 — where people “role played” many of the policies we saw enacted. [1]

Trump signed for flu vaccine research in September 2019, developing new technologies and an influenza task force. [2]

I’m sure that’s all just coincidence.

[0] - https://news.yahoo.com/wuhan-lab-air-circulation-systems-135...

[1] - https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-exerci...

[2] - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-09-24/pdf/2019-2...

So the plot of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six comes true, release a virus at the Olympics closing ceremonies and it will spread globally almost immediately.

I got ill in a way I'd never really gotten ill before, in November/December 2019 -- after having travelled from Mexico to Norway. I was barely out of bed for the month I was in the country. I thought it might be dengue, but one of the first days there I got checked out in the hospital -- and they said I had an unidentified viral infection, but not dengue. After being released I got incredibly ill, but not much you can do with viral infections anyways so I just rode it out.

Having had Covid 3 times since it was named, I've got a pretty good grip on what it feels like -- and I've many times wondered if I didn't have it back then in 2019 as well, as the symptoms lined up too well.

I got a worse-than-ever-experienced respiratory infection after a trip to Europe arounds Thanksgiving 2019 as well: I wasn't well enough to ski even a month later and had mysterious lung-scarring on my X-rays which in retrospect looks very much like an early Covid infection too.

I had a really bad cold-like illness in late November 2019, which left behind a severe sore throat which lasted about three weeks. It was notable because it wouldn't go away, to the point where I went to both urgent care and my primary doctor on separate occasions (I'm not one to go to the doctor unless I really need to.) Both times they took a look at my throat, proclaimed it to be a viral infection, and sent me on my way.

I too have wondered if I actually had Covid, but nobody knew how to diagnose it at that time.

That theory is total nonsense. Covid was extremely infectious, and had severe symptoms. It could not have stayed under the radar for that long. It was also unlikely to fizzle out: once a country had one case, it would turn into thousands of cases within a month.

If Covid had been circulating that widely that early, the trajectory of the disase in December 2019-March 2020 would have been totally different. There would not have been an initial outbreak in Wuhan followed by individual cases popping up in various other countries, followed by a gradual buildup of cases in those countries. By the time we got a test, there would have been hundreds of thousands ill all over the world, all being detected as cases simultaneously. It would have been impossible to e.g. trace cases to specific super spreader events, because there would have been so many sources of infections. Basically none of what happened would have been the expected outcome if Covid actually was spreading in the wild that early.

All the reports of early Covid cases outside of China are just the expected false positives from tests that don't have 100% specificity (which is pretty much anything other than full sequencing).

There were no tests except for blood samples preserved by hospitals. People are referring to symptoms that were different than flu, viral pneumonia and (looking back) showed similarity to covid. Might have been a different viral pneumonia as it didn’t respond to antibiotics.

Recall exponential growth starts slowly and it was flu season.

https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-rele...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03008916209747...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2

I suddenly developed “exercise asthma” in March 2020 and was told it was too early to have been COVID.

But I had been pretty sick in January and had lots of contact with the public at work.

I always wonder. Maybe it did just suddenly develop, I was 30 that year. And sure, I’m kinda fatass, though I was working out hard at that point.

But my tin foil hat still fits me and sometimes I consider it might have a point.

I remember the sudden freak out in the media about vaping in late 2019 because young people were being hospitalized with lung damage. Have to wonder if that was actually covid and the vapes were just coincidence, they'd been around for years at that point so them all of the sudden having media hysteria around them was weird to me at the time

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/10/health/vaping-outbreak-2019-e...

That was found to be black market vape cartridges using vitamin E acetate, which you don't want in your lungs.

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/s...

there was a new chemical introduced into the black market supply chain in 2019 causing lung injury

Why name the researchers that got sick? Even if one of them is the source for COVID, which really isn't clear from this, I don't think they deserve the harassment articles like this are bound to cause.

Because that's really all the information the article has.

You boil it all down and the article is just rehashing everything for the hundredth time, along with claiming "US government sources say" and dropping the three names to make it appear to be credible.

There's no details about how these government sources know this.

It also seems to be a rehashing of a New York Times story from a year or so ago which also claimed that there were three workers that were sick (without having any details) and was written by the same journalist that wrote the Iraq/Niger Yellow cake Uranium story back around 2002 that led us into the War in Iraq (and the same plot line that led to the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson/Dick Cheney affair).

You don't think causing a global pandemic and millions of death from dangerously careless research deserves criticism?

Criticism? Maybe. Harassment from billions? No.

These articles go on a bit. There is a good summary of the science evidence for a lab leak from on twitter from Richard H. Ebright (Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers):

https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1567569810745356289

that was from Sept 22. Since then we've had

>They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.

in the recent Times article https://archive.is/zRoAn

and the names of the researchers, Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu, in this article.

It's all looking quite likely that this is the source, though further information will probably come out.

> Next week, the Directorate of National Intelligence is expected to release previously classified material, which may include the names of the three WIV scientists who were the likely among the first to be sickened by SARS-CoV-2.

Why publish speculation now, instead of publishing when there is actually something to report?

Can someone please explain to me what difference it makes. AFAIK, no one is claiming this was a bioweapon or intentional assault. So what difference could it possibly make where COVID originated from.

I think the lab leak theory is wrong, but even if it was true I no idea how that should change anything.

Well, there's the reinforcement of the decreasing trust in media for framing anyone talking about the lab leak as an anti-science bigot.

Then, more practically, if it was an accidental leak, it would mean that a much more detailed assessment needs to be performed of if what they were doing should be allowed elsewhere, if handling and disinfection methods need updating etc.

Might also lead to legislation regarding the responsibilities of people hiring these sorts of labs (eg even if China refuses to take responsibility and update its own laws on the matter, other countries could ban their own researchers from contracting work out to labs which don't meet certain standards).

I’m a lot more interested in how we weren’t allowed to talk about it for a couple years than whether or not it’s ultimately true.

Obviously, we should try to figure it out and learn from our mistakes, increase security, etc., but what accountability can we really expect from knowing that the pandemic started due to a lab leak? Accountability is almost meaningless compared to the scale of the total global loss.

I'm reminded of a line from an episode of Star Trek TNG where a very powerful alien destroys an entire race by thinking them out of existence in a momentary lapse of judgement, and Picard simply says "We're not qualified to be your judges -- we have no law to fit your crime."

In an interview with biologist Richard Lenski (of the famous experiment), the latter discusses controversial research on selecting H5N1 viruses for greater transmissibility and their potential to be airborne viruses that are of public health concern [1]. That was in 2017...

I have no definitive opinion on the origin of Sars-Cov-2 (will we know the truth one day?), but I don't think the lab leak theory is crazy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQr8ldEeO04

I admit when stuff like this comes up I think of the world analogically, the analogy being a big company with lots of divisions (countries, international orgs) working on a big important project "keeping the world on track"

Sometimes people make mistakes in the company and you realize this big mistake these people made make our "keeping the world on track" project go over budget this year etc. but hey, mistakes happen (sure we've made mistakes too, but really those idiots over on the AI department really screwed up though, huh right guys hah hah) so we're just going to keep going through it, try to iron over the mistakes, write some documents that hide the mistakes from shareholders etc. and keep working on the project "keeping the world on track" because we've got metrics to hit!

In short I think probably people realized early on in various other divisions of the big world organization that this was probably the China divisions fault - that is to say an actual 'fuck-up' and not just an accident of nature - and it was just useful to pretend it wasn't their fault until at such a point that things were reasonably back on track and then some reports can be filed indicating which divisions in the company suck and which are super cool divisions to be working at.

I'm probably a cynical type of guy.

I keep asking myself, "who gives a shit?".

When the virus was first discovered, it was important to pin down who and where Patient zero was.

Now? Pure politicking. It isn't even a slow news day!

10 million people are dead. I find it hard to believe how anyone could not be at least mildly interested in obtaining more details about the origin of Covid-19, whether it's from the market or the lab or somewhere else.

Politicking was spending 2 years calling anyone racist who talked about the lab leak theory. This is just a reaction.

Absolutely. That was politicking too. Almost every PR response from both parties was terribly executed for the entire period.

Figuring out what we did wrong and what we can do better is important. This isn't going to be the last global pandemic.

What are the odds that exactly three years ago, your response to the same question was "The experts told us that this was definitely, positively not a lab leak, and anyone who says otherwise is a racist"?

So… finally what lots of people were claiming but got censored on social media as well as mainstream media during the pandemic is being acknowledged and verified by the government.

Follow up. Given statements to congress by government officials to Congress, under oath, that would contradict this conclusion, will there be repercussions for misleading the public, lawmakers and the scientific community?

PS: It was never a credible bio-weapon attack (people are now trying to conflate this to instill FUD in people's memories --go do a google search with date ranges). Bio-weapons are terrible weapons of war. They are likely to affect the target as well as the deployer.

For the nonbelievers of Censorship, read up on Matt Taibbi's reporting or read some other media than usual: https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-covid-censorship-ma...

The fact that a broken clock is right once a day doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a broken clock, and after being identified as such doesn’t get to claim oppression after rightfully being relegated to the garbage bin.

The same people who asserted things about the origins of covid were the same as those peddling quack “cures” to church groups and reposting Q anon memes.

With respect to your follow up, as much as I would like to see the former president punished for his lies, misleading statements, and general scientific incompetence, I don’t think that’s in the spirit of the First Amendment.

"finally"? This was put out in the state department Jan 2021, 2.5 years ago: https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan...

I recall reading credible scientists talking about a lab leak from day one, and I always considered it a possibility. Yet many of the people pushing it on social media were pushing it as a 100% certainty and even that it was some kind of intentional bio-weapon attack. The people getting banned for this were conspiritainment grifters and people pushing fascist politics.

The most effective way to cover something up is to have Alex Jones and Steve Bannon talk about it. If Fauci really is running some horrible conspiracy maybe he's paying these people to talk about it to make sure nobody takes the idea seriously.

Then there were the people pushing the Ukraine bioweapons nonsense, which is a transparent Russian attempt to copy Bush II's "WMDs in Iraq" bullshit.

You see... a grain of truth. Yes, in the very beginning is was allowed, but come May and June, it was verboten.

>Given statements to congress by government officials that would contradict this conclusion, will there be repercussions for misleading the public, lawmakers and the scientific community?

Laws are created to control the poor, else mostly will find a way to twist it. https://files.catbox.moe/pkkzal.jpeg

Huh? What got censored on social media was the idea that this was an engineered bioweapon. This isn't even the same lab people were pointing fingers at.

This information slipped over 2 years ago (probably right at the beginning). Wiesendanger did a study and referenced that a lab worker was suspected as patient zero¹ as a hint.

¹:https://www.uni-hamburg.de/newsroom/presse/2021/pm8.html (German, sorry)

> “Ever since I put out my [May 2020] preprint [research paper] saying that an accidental lab origin was possible, I was criticized as a conspiracy theorist,” said Chan. “If this info had been made public in May of 2020, I doubt that many in the scientific community and the media would have spent the last three years raving about a raccoon dog or pangolin in a wet market.”

That was so bizarre and strange. Both the shadiness of Chinese government and the complete confidence of many US scientists that the origin was definitely not related to the lab.

Anyone who suspected anything was just a conspiracy theorist. I can understand skepticism one way or another, and a desire to learn. I thought, well these scientists who spend years researching and conducting lengthy studies, somehow immediately new with 100% confidence it definitely had nothing to do with the bio-lab. It's like someone waving their hands in front of a building with smoke coming out and saying "nothing to see here, look the other way, please".

No one was hand waving anything. There were studies looking at several attributes of the virus’s genome that concluded (not definitively, nothing ever is) that the virus was probably naturally occurring.

Some looked at base pair distributions (some GC to AT ratios are required for stability), others looked for sites where enzymes could splice and whether they were commonly found in this species while others looked for any obviously transplanted.

Of all the studies I’m aware of, which isn’t all of them, there is no smoking gun. This isn’t a burning building and that analogy is incorrect. No weird GFP producing genes or any common genetic markers commonly found in lab made species were found anywhere. This isn’t to say it wasn’t a lab leak or that there aren’t opposing theories as to whether such and such base pair distribution is considered normal…but the evidence just isn’t there.

So here's the thing, whether covid came from an accident in gain of function research in Wuhan, or whether it's just totally plausible that it did, the correct response is basically the same:

Banning gain of function research everywhere. Yeah, including here. It's too dangerous, whatever scientific benefits to any positive thing that improves lives is not worth it, just stop doing it and demand that everyone else stop doing it.

So we pretty much already know enough to know that's what we should do, I wish more people could get interested in demanding it instead of talking about whether or not there's what kind of proof that it did come from that, and trying to sift through the multi-source competing disinformation. Plausible is enough, let's try to keep it from happening in the future whether it's for the first or second time who cares?

There's a problem, covid was in Italy as early as September 2019. (see Dr John Campbell's video on this) Cases in November 2019 aren't early, it started probably six months earlier.

"John Lorimer Campbell is an English YouTuber and retired nurse educator known for his videos about the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, the videos received praise, but they later veered into misinformation. He has been criticised for suggesting COVID-19 deaths have been over-counted, repeating false claims about the use of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment, and providing misleading commentary about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.

...

He holds a diploma in nursing from the University of London, a BSc in biology from the Open University, an MSc in health science from the University of Lancaster, and a Ph.D. in nursing from the University of Bolton. He received the Ph.D. for his work on developing methods of teaching via digital media such as online videos."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Campbell_(YouTuber)

For anyone wondering who this is and if he is a reliable source.

agreed that that is absolutely not a legit source. I was curious so I googled, and found something more legit-sounding:

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

> ROME (Reuters) - The new coronavirus was circulating in Italy in September 2019, a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) of the Italian city of Milan shows, signaling that it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought.

Sounds like a guy with some pretty relevant credentials. Accusations of misinformation are a dime a dozen, and probably made oddly enough by people with fewer relevant credentials.

Tricks Dr John Campbell uses to spread DISINFORMATION on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQC0tTECvQ

I was at Madrid airport in June 2019 and waiting in the long line for border control to leave there was a man who was displaying extreme flu-like symptoms. Coughing, sweating, pale as a ghost. Mind you, this is the height of summer. Even back then, prior to the pandemic, I actively avoided him because he looked really unwell.

I know there is no way of knowing and at best it is a fanciful mental exercise, but I think to myself 'what if'?

It has always seemed to me far too coincidental that a lab studying coronaviruses was located at the epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak. Sometimes there are coincidences, but if you are looking for the most obvious answer it has always been right there and I never understood why it was dismissed so easily.

With that being said, I don’t buy into any conspiracy theories about this being intentional or anything else. There were poor controls and a virus mutated.

I'm still a little baffled at what people believe will change if anything is proven about the origin of covid-19.

It's indisputable that many governments went well beyond their legal remit in response to the virus, and yet many have silently or openly accepted it.

Powerful people will do horrible things and we have little to no way to stop them because the majority of us are weak and passive. We do what we're told and applaud that we were told to do it.

I wonder what the long-term consequences are of western forums being flooded with people advocating CCP talking points whilst all counter-CCP arguments are blocked within China for everyone.

What is going to be the impact over time?

Interesting that the virus the rest of us contracted subsequently had the property that 80% of those infected didn't know they had it. But that wasn't true for the first few cases?

Here is an interview with the author today on this topic. https://youtu.be/moVBjWk-Nww

So the US is going to do a new bioweapon propaganda round...??

Somewhere, the gods of propaganda and susceptibility are chortling with delight at how easily even ostensibly smart people can believe things based on very limited data.

Ppl really need to look at the HM history and use the search function to look at disease stories from late '19 early '20.

The story was already leaking in December, January

Why aren't countries/people suing China in civil court for money? Isn't this going to happen? Has anyone tried?

> When a source was asked how certain they were… we were told, “100%”

That’s not good enough for you? /s

Isn’t the gist of this fairly old news? Or did they just not have the names before?

Being able to tie it specifically to the lab this concretely, by identifying the first patients by name, and having that (allegedly) from US government officials, is all new information, AFAIK.

Very. This was put out in the state department Jan 2021, 2.5 years ago: https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan...

ooh, this goes against hacker news hivemind about virus origins being of a natural causes, watch their mental gymnastics as they try to burry everything that contradicts their idea.

Here another plausible scenario how it went down, which follows the same plot: https://youtu.be/mfLycFHBsro

Erg, more bullshit nonsense that takes 3 minutes to produce and 3h to refute.

Ockhams razor.

Kinda moot tbh. Virology lab? Wet market? China is responsible either way.

Yes, and? This was obvious to anyone with a brain since early 2020.

Are we going to ask China for reparations?

WIV doesn't work on its own, and the GoF research was mostly funded by Fauci & NIH

I don't know who the other two are, but I sure as hell don't believe a word Matt Taibbi writes after his farcical lack of fact checking in "the twitter files".

This is the sort of thing that should bankrupt a country, and they should be required to make up for the damage their negligence inflicted on the world population.

The Chinese cannot be trusted with power.

Uhh, what does a random Chinese citizen have to do with the lab leak? Bankrupting a country would mainly punish a bunch of innocent peasants.

This analysis but for the invasion of Iraq

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